Ooooh! Look! I'm Not at Work.
Ok, y'all, I need some help here.
I've got some new readers coming in from a site which links to me, saying something about me, and I don't know what it is. And I'm curious.
Here's the site; I don't give you its name because I don't know how, upon my keyboard, to reproduce its alphabet. Anybody here read Turkish? Cause I think that's what this is. (Well, yeah, now that I think of it, SEVERAL of you read Turkish, don't you! Ha! Silly me. Please, will one of you tell me what it is that this site says? And what's its name? Google, running dog lackey of the capitalist patriarchy that it is, can't translate it for me. I, having focused on Dead and Living Languages of Western Europe, can't either.)
Classes are over now, in my case having ended yesterday. I nearly wept, leaving my freshmen. I won't be teaching their 102 class in the spring, so they've got no more classes with me unless they take it into their heads to learn any of the odd things I teach in my literature and drama classes. And I loved them to bits, as they were funny, and intelligent and caring and exuberant and worked their butts off. You remember the Black Popcorn incident? That was reported by one of them. That story's indicative of the level of energy they brought to the semester. I had fun.
(I think it was just sheer luck that I had such a wonderful class; it's true that, because they were in one of our new Learning Communities, they were all Liberal Arts students, whereas my freshmen are usually NOT liberal arts students, and one might think that maybe freshmen going into the liberal arts are more interested in their composition classes than freshmen going into pharmacy and business, though I'm wary of making that assumption -- but there were other 101 classes within the Learning Communities which were Notoriously Dreadful, including one which will long be legendary in the department, having consisted of students who apparently had No Idea At All about how to behave as college students; the instructor for that class basically had to spend the entire semester saying things like "Stop throwing spitballs," and "Let go of his head," and "Please sit back down in your chair." This does not make for an atmosphere wherein one can intelligently discuss The Rhetoric of BioEngineering and America as Superpower. No, I was just lucky. Although, to be honest, I always adore my freshmen, and Lord knows, have never had trouble with headbutting and wrassling on the floor. Nevertheless. I loved this class best. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)
So I've now got papers to grade, and doctoral exams to administer, and professorial job applicant files to read, and, naturally, cookies to bake.
And right at this moment, maybe I'll go eat my breakfast, and hit the treadmill, and start off the next phase of Seasonal Academic Existence: Grading Papers and Performing Christmas Errands.
And, of course, waiting for somebody to translate the net.
*****************************
Postscript: Damien has a powerful and interesting post up, which ultimately is about the recent discussions about gay priests, though it doesn't, at the beginning, look like that's where it's going. Worth reading.
I've got some new readers coming in from a site which links to me, saying something about me, and I don't know what it is. And I'm curious.
Here's the site; I don't give you its name because I don't know how, upon my keyboard, to reproduce its alphabet. Anybody here read Turkish? Cause I think that's what this is. (Well, yeah, now that I think of it, SEVERAL of you read Turkish, don't you! Ha! Silly me. Please, will one of you tell me what it is that this site says? And what's its name? Google, running dog lackey of the capitalist patriarchy that it is, can't translate it for me. I, having focused on Dead and Living Languages of Western Europe, can't either.)
Classes are over now, in my case having ended yesterday. I nearly wept, leaving my freshmen. I won't be teaching their 102 class in the spring, so they've got no more classes with me unless they take it into their heads to learn any of the odd things I teach in my literature and drama classes. And I loved them to bits, as they were funny, and intelligent and caring and exuberant and worked their butts off. You remember the Black Popcorn incident? That was reported by one of them. That story's indicative of the level of energy they brought to the semester. I had fun.
(I think it was just sheer luck that I had such a wonderful class; it's true that, because they were in one of our new Learning Communities, they were all Liberal Arts students, whereas my freshmen are usually NOT liberal arts students, and one might think that maybe freshmen going into the liberal arts are more interested in their composition classes than freshmen going into pharmacy and business, though I'm wary of making that assumption -- but there were other 101 classes within the Learning Communities which were Notoriously Dreadful, including one which will long be legendary in the department, having consisted of students who apparently had No Idea At All about how to behave as college students; the instructor for that class basically had to spend the entire semester saying things like "Stop throwing spitballs," and "Let go of his head," and "Please sit back down in your chair." This does not make for an atmosphere wherein one can intelligently discuss The Rhetoric of BioEngineering and America as Superpower. No, I was just lucky. Although, to be honest, I always adore my freshmen, and Lord knows, have never had trouble with headbutting and wrassling on the floor. Nevertheless. I loved this class best. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)
So I've now got papers to grade, and doctoral exams to administer, and professorial job applicant files to read, and, naturally, cookies to bake.
And right at this moment, maybe I'll go eat my breakfast, and hit the treadmill, and start off the next phase of Seasonal Academic Existence: Grading Papers and Performing Christmas Errands.
And, of course, waiting for somebody to translate the net.
*****************************
Postscript: Damien has a powerful and interesting post up, which ultimately is about the recent discussions about gay priests, though it doesn't, at the beginning, look like that's where it's going. Worth reading.
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