Hilarious

It's probably just my slowly setting in paper-grading hysteria, but this is my favorite quote extracted from an evening of freshman writing:

"The troops on the battlefield also want to walk away as Victorians."

It has a quiet sublimity to it, no? A close second would be a description of Rambo, refusing to settle down, "budding heads" with the authorities.

Ahhhhhhhh.

Heirlooms!

Things That Make Me Want to Die

In no particular order:

1) Going on the job market, but not having finished any applications, and with no end in sight.

2) The idea of not going on the job market.

3) Sarah Palin

Teaching Antics, 2.0

It's been many years since I've taught two classes simultaneously. It seems ridiculous to complain about the work, as actual professors, particularly in the early stages of their careers, have MUCH heavier teaching load. So I'm not going to complain. No promises for how I'll feel after grading my first batch of 48 papers, though. But, really, the whole experience is throwing me for a bit of a loop. I'm trying to get my head around how weird it feels some days. In previous years, whenever I had a bad classroom experience, I alternated between feeling like it was just me sucking and suspecting that actually the students played a large hand as well. While I remain completely aware of my own tendencies toward suck-titude, I'm now laying much more responsibility at the door of simple classroom chemistry. I can now go from my first class--where one of my students is likely to yell at me, one is going to perform his abject dissaffected ennui, and one, I've recently realized, is a white power kid--to my shy but engaged and respectful second class--where even the dude leaning his head against the far corner of the room is nice and speaks in discussions. Oddly, the white power kid is perfectly fine in class, while the disaffected kid made a point of coming up to me after class yesterday and saying: "Yeah, your comments were really vague, and generic, and totally unhelpful." Blech. I'm resisting the urge to generate a taxonomy to explain the different types.

Bottom line, I kind of like it and hate it at the same time.

No Comment

Via Slog, of course.

A Little Whining, A Lot of Procrastination

One week into school and already everything is in full swing. I, of course, am still struggling to get my head around it. This is my first day off in seven days between teaching the things blowing up at the coop. I know everyone can relate to the overworking so I won't over-whine.

I should be revising my fourth chapter, but I really just want to take this day--JUST this day--to read, go on a bike ride (see how naughty? I'm not even planning to go to the gym! This could change, though, if I get caught in an unexpected but overwhelming wave of self-hating nausea. Wish me luck), cook, watch tv on the internets. We still have a bunch of beets from Mama and Papa BEM's incredibly generous bounty. Even after Q and I ate about a gallon of Gazborscht (don't ask. It's an Isa thing). Now I really want to make this beet and fennel salad. The coop used to make on that I adored and would eat until I thought I was going to die. The latter mostly because beets are so perniciously red that they retain the vibrant scarlet hue all the way through the intestines. I'm thinking about this recipe. Looks good, right? We also have a bag of pears and apples that Q's friend dropped off, and no bloody room in our refrigerator (because of before mentioned bounty), so a crisp seems in order. I made a peach crisp earlier in the summer only to be forced to recognize that I don't dig so much on soft fruit crisps. Give me an apple or a pear, any day.

What else? I have to meet with a student on Wednesday to ask him to control his emotional performance. He was extremely hostile (to the point of almost berating me in class for having him read this essay) to the suggestion that perhaps Batman/Joker dynamic has homophobic undertones. I think, really, that there could be any homoeroticism in this narrative was so offensive to him that he almost couldn't speak rationally at all. So, I, paragon of impartiality and objectivity, am going to sit down with him and make some things very clear. I hope it goes well. Wish me luck, again. I was kind of panicking about this on Saturday, having flashbacks to that most horrible of classes, dreading a repeat experience. Thus the early meeting. I'm hoping to nip this in the bud before it ruins the class.