I am trying to remember all the little projects I'd like to do over Xmas break.
Also, a quick update on life generally, since UThink is going down tomorrow.
I am in the middle of my last written prelim, and still hoping that I will pass the second one AND can schedule my oral prelim before Christmas. I don't know what I need to do to prepare, so that's something to start thinking about this week.
We have been watching bunches of movies lately - Shrek 1 and 2; the Red Sox one (ah, nostalgia for the old town!), snippets of various godfathers that I overhear when B watches them at his desk.
This week is doable - quiz on Tuesday night; need to prep lecture notes, do some grading, and write some clever exercises for Wednesday night; light reading for Friday's class.
We may - cross fingers, all - have new tenants. A deal is brewing but hasn't been inked.
OK, things to do in January:
1. reorganize the tools area. I am so tired of digging through boxes of stuff everytime I need a simple screwdriver.
2. sort through all the stuff from the class I teach (which I may or may not teach next fall) and get rid of all the old lecture notes. Make one new set of folders by topic that contain all possible materials for each week, with the current (or updated as necessary from handwritten notes) lecture notes. The main thing is to get rid of the extra paper, though; if I don't teach it next year any more effort than that is just wasted time.
3. finish painting the trim in the kitchen.
4.organize my dissertation workplan for the spring (IF I pass and am ready to go, otherwise I'll be working on rewrites and prep for the oral).
5. read the book for the course I'll be TA'ing in the spring (IF I get word that I definitely get the job - rumor is that assignments will be hashed out on Dec 2, but enrollments look low to me so I don't know how far they'll get).
6. Begin to work on my presentation (and accompanying journal article) for the conference in early March. This is my first appearance on the national convention scene, so I want to do a credible job. Actually, it's easier to write the "real" article first and then abstract it and simplify it for presentation, so that'll be my approach.
7.Organize my Poland photos from the summer, so that I can use them and share them with my friends.
8. Document my summer project and turn over all the materials to my supervisor.
MT is not letting me make new categories right now, so I'll have to try to recategorize in the new system. (Or move my operation over to whatever commercial blogger I have an account at, I forget the name.)
ttfn, til Tuesday.
Well, it's a Winter Wonderland out there - really beautiful falling snow - and if it really rains on Sunday, perhaps we won't have to deal with it permanently. I like the Denver way: it snows at night and melts by noon.
For you out-of-towners: this is our second snowfall, but the first was less than an inch and melted in a day or so. I think we need at least 1 inch, maybe 2, to count it for the grad studentl first-snow pool. (Which last year was something like January 21.)
Thanksgiving was fun but hectic - dinner for 17 people (ourselves included). We do not have 17 dinner plates. An abundance of food and conversation. I didn't do any dishes at all, but B never left the kitchen that I noticed. He says he didn't mind, though.
There is a UThink blog about writing at the U and I have thought about posting there, but my ideas about writing need some sorting out.
I think I'm flexible enough (barely) to see that there might be something else going on than the perpetual curmudgeonly complaint that "students these days can't write Standard English." I don't want to be on that pathetic bandwagon.
Yet grading student papers and dealing with unbelievably sucky writing just makes me despair. If these students don't learn to manage standard English now, will we have a whole future world in which the written word looks like something tapped out by wasted 4th graders? Or is it just that writing papers doesn't matter: undergrads type out whatever and turn it in for classes, but when they actually need to produce flawless writing they can?
So what else IS going on?
1. Students today may be more attuned to the spoken word (radio, TV, ear buds, cell phones) and not used to seeing as much standard written English.
2. They may read less. I think the page count standard has dropped off for college courses (at least at this University) and they are quite instrumental about figuring out what texts actually HAVE to be read for the course. I'd be quite surprised to learn that very many of my students have done the reading; they don't even take notes in lecture.
3. Writing takes different forms - what with text messaging, emails etc.
Maybe the form doesn't matter - are students really thinking and having creative ideas? I was pleased to walk by a poetry reading outside of Coffman the other week and hear some passion, expressed in a fresh style. If I don't see it in my own classes, perhaps it's because I don't demand it.
Still, I'm leery of the blame-the-teacher thing. More about that in a future entry; some very interesting points about assessment were raised in our pedagogy class last week.
This is all disjointed, yeah. I need a bigger space than this little editing box to think it through...
B. and I went to see/hear the U Opera's performance of Britten's "Turn of the Screw" this afernoon. It was puzzling: slavish adherence to James's text in quotidian language on the one hand, but then insertion of whole new scenes for the "ghosts" in which their motivations are outlined in ways probably never contemplated by James on the other. We thought, also, that if you were unfamiliar with James's text, you might have trouble just following the opera's narrative.
I don't want to make it into a "loved the book, hated the movie" thing, but I just have to say that the wonderful ambiguity of the novella is lost in the opera, and not replaced with anything equally wonderful. B said he thought opera required "big" emotions - and they just don't come through in this opera; good versus evil doesn't constitute an emotion unless you make the characters FEEL it.
I wasn't loving the music either - my primary exposure to Britten was in "Ode to St. Cecilia," which I learned for a concert, and eventually appreciated. I don't find the melodies tuneful - until you've sung them and internalized them - and the casual opera listener hasn't. (If there is such a thing as the casual opera listener.)
Otherwise today, I've been working on a fellowship app that has to be mailed tomorrow and trying to get my reading list squared away for next Monday's exam, which may or may not happen.
One of my classes has students from disciplines all across the U. Quite a bit of the in-class work is peer reviewing - always an interesting dynamic to watch.
I'm used to being evaluated often (and harshly) because of my design school background, but I think that in a more academic setting, people are not used to it (they've always been A students and "good at school" else they wouldn't be here) and they are amazingly defensive.
As a reviewer, I get lots of responses like "oh, but the way I did it is the way it's done in MY field" even if I am suggesting something non-discipline-related, like better use of white space on the page. As a reviewee, I hear "I like your work, but my discipline is totally different than yours and I would never approach this assignment the way you have, so I don't really have anything to say about your work." Um, thanks?
Then, in conversations with the students I grade for, there is a lot of defensive explaining of "but I meant this..." with no realization that if you didn't WRITE it, the reader has no hope of getting that meaning. I like the way we did reviews in my creative writing class: the writer has to sit there and be totally quiet while the rest of the class critiques the work as if he/she were not even there.
In my field, which is supposed to thrive on intelligent questioning and the free exchange of ideas and critiques, people ask for peer review, and then they get pissed off when you actually suggest how they could improve their work. I have met very few people who are open to critiques with the possibility that someone else might have something useful or perceptive to say about their work.
Faculty, too, say they want open and informed disagreement in class - but they really just want you to confirm their own ideologies in your own words.
Funny, isn't it? - the place that should have the most dissent or critique just isn't producing it.
Some things I've done in the last week or so:
1. Graded 100 15-page essays;
2. Wrote two fellowship applications;
3. Made up a "zoning game" for a class exercise;
4. Hosted a costume party for Halloween.
More fun to come. This is possibly the busiest semester I've had at this school. But today, I've been slacking a bit. I read some newspapers, went grocery shopping (new Rainbow! Very exciting!) and we tried (and failed) to catch the kitty who lives under the garage next door. It is slightly more tolerant of our presence than a week ago but smart enough to avoid the have-a-heart trap.
I fear that the kitty is imprinting itself on the squirrels. It sort of bounds about in squirrel-like bounces, and it leaps onto trees in the same way. It seems to want to play with the squirrels, which seem to ignore it altogether. Poor thing must be lonely - why doesn't it want to play with US??