No one’s students are sadder than mine right now. Around the middle of the semester, everyone is getting back grades for their first really major assignments, and no one’s particularly joyful about them. College is hard! And we should be challenging them to raise the stakes; that’s our job. I take that task seriously, in [...]
Archive for the ‘Work’ category
No crying inside baseball
The conference date was approaching, and my paper wasn’t finished. To be honest, it wasn’t exactly started. Months before, I had drafted an irresistible abstract. I reread the two major texts I promised to discuss. As the weeks ticked by, some critical articles arrived via interlibrary loan. Some online research got done in the wee [...]
Small-town time
So, two weeks ago, I posted while completely blacked out about how I called my mother while blacked out, because that seemed like a thing to post here. I’ve moved to a small town to teach literature for a year, and I’m not sure how time passes at all anymore. Since then, I’ve made very [...]
Unexpected love
Grad school, they tell you, is the wire mesh mother. At best, they say, it’s the wire mesh mother. In Harry Harlow‘s experiments on baby rhesus monkeys, you recall, that was the one that never promised love. The little baby monkeys preferred the cloth mother doll, even if she was cold, or offered no food. [...]
Night owl
As I write these words, it’s 4:37 am. Again. Sure, 4:37 comes twice a day every day, but I’ve been making quite a chum out of this particular time of day lately. We’ve been having a lot of dates recently, going hot and heavy. Sometimes I think maybe I’m not going to see 4:37, but [...]
On female power
I just graded about twenty exams in a row from students who, when asked an essay question about masculine desires and feminine gender performance in American women authors of the 17th-19th centuries, responded with sentence after sentence about how this or that character shows “female power.” And I’m going to barf if I ever see [...]
Extra credit?
One more week of class (not counting today), and between now and then, about fifty million research papers, essay revisions, final essay exams, quizzes, crying students, university transfer acceptance stories, awards nights, frantic stories about broken printers, group presentations, indignant stories about how someone didn’t do any work in the group presentation, tearful honors ceremonies, [...]
Pausing to reflect, and a time for getting on with it
Student life here at VPULS is a peculiar mix of slow and fast. Slow is when you have to read an 80-page law review article for one class meeting (and that’s setting aside the two other articles the professor said weren’t as essential). Fast is when you have to read it all by 10 a.m. [...]
Un Poème pour des Travaux…
“Que mes murs sont tristes et trop fades mes rideaux, Mais bien seule je suis pour y faire des travaux! Où trouver l’artisan qui saurait apporter La lumière et le style à ma demeure aimée? Ma requête est soumise à budget resserré… Mais que vois-je sur ce site? Un espoir à mes souhaits? De ma [...]
The black tie blues
I know this sounds like a high class problem, but black tie is a bore. Unless of course it’s an event I’m organizing and I want everyone to dress up. I won’t pretend I don’t like walking into a room of admiring looks, so yes, I do like the performance aspect of black tie. But [...]
