Hoo-Haw Monologue

So maybe I know what you're thinking...long time, no blogging? Indeed. I've been trying to spare you all from my utter lack of inspiration that otherwise might drive me to blog about really annoying, petty quirkiness. Today, though, after unwisely and sort of accidentally drinking too much whiskey last night and keeping my poor sick girlfriend up longer than necessary by yammering at her about something or another, I'm feeling properly inspired.

It was conference week with my students. I decided, in direct contradiction to my usual way of handling graded papers (I throw them at my students while they're filing out the door) to give them back during the conference itself. This provided my students with the opportunity to emote and directly vent any grievances immediately and to my face. I was a bit worried about how this might go, having once (and ONLY once) given a papers back at the beginning of class and had to face an hour's worth of stony silence--an experience I will never repeat. Lesson learned. I'm happy to say that it went quite well, with the exception of one student who laughed at his A, claiming that he wrote the essay right before class, and who complained that we only read essays about racism--patently untrue, by the way. The rest of my students were remarkably positive and it ended up being a good experience. I think I'll repeat it in the future, unless I have a recurrence of the horror comp class. If you know me well, you know what I'm referring to here.

In other news, I saw a segment on the Today show about some students who were facing suspension at their high school for saying the word "vagina" at a school sponsored public event. Apparently, the three girls were doing some sort of performance that involved reading a passage from, you guessed it, the Vagina Monologues. They were directly told that they must either not perform or expunge the stanza from Ensler's book containing the offensive word. Of course, they did it anyway. The Today show hosted the three girls, the school's superintendent, and Eve Ensler to talk--quite briefly--about what happened. They claimed that an other performance had included the word "fuck" and had received no such prohibition of punishment (they are facing a one day suspension for "insubordination"). The reason for objecting to the word, which Katie Couric kindly reminded Ensler that some people do indeed find objectionable, was that there would be families and children present. SAVE the Child-wen! Protect innocence! This is almost as good as the theater that put on a performance of the Vagina Monologues, but who opted to advertise them, rather, as the "Hoo-Haw Monologues." For reals.