is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Various Forces of Good. TYPO. And Bonus: Hackysack Attack Deflected, Moral Victory Won.
Various Forces of Good. TYPO. And Bonus: Hackysack Attack Deflected, Moral Victory Won.
It�s been a busy couple of weeks. The good news (for me) is that I taught my last class (here at Amherst) yesterday. The only work I have left to do this semester is grade 37 eight-to-twelve page papers, compute grades, and pack my things. In fact I�ve been packing today, and now everytime I want to find something I find that I cannot find anything.
Semester�s wrap-up: After a few weeks of feeling slightly aggravated with a number of my students, I have moved back to loving them all. The last few meetings of the class went very well, and on the last day as we went around the room either commenting on what the course had accomplished, or asking random questions (I declared the day �ask anything� day, and questions included �how old are you?�. �do you think there will ever be a way to prevent genocide from happening?�, �which mountain will you be climbing on May 22?�, and �did you really make all those cakes yourself?�), I was filled with a sense of having accomplished something worthwhile, and also with the feeling that the students realized that they had done something worthwhile as well. (Aw, shucks.) A bunch of them even showed up to an optional meeting wherein we went over their planned paper thesis statements and the students critiqued each other�s ideas and helped each other refine their writing goals. Papers are due tomorrow, so we will see what good this has all wrought in due time.
I also baked two cakes for the last day of class. One was a marbled chocolate and almond cake with a chocolate ganache�yummy. The other was a new cake, a caramel-coffee flavored thing with coffee icing. And MAN was it good. During the comments session one of the students declared that he was in love with it.
Teaching, in general, is full of highs and lows. The lows come when you�ve had a bad day and it seems as if the whole world is trying to tell you that you suck, and are ineffective, or possibly even responsible for making the world a worse place than it already is. But the good days are all the opposite of that, and I�ve had more of those, luckily. It is also probably true that no matter what you do with your life you�ll end up having both of those kinds of days.
Also on the last day of class I had a TYPO dinner with three of my students. TYPO stands for Take Your Professor Out. The dinner was fun, and it was interesting to get to know a bit about the lives of a few of my students, especially because all three of them are athletes, so their college experience is very much NOT like mine was.
TYPO, however, is such a terrible name for what is a nice program. I mean, first of all, a typo is a MISTAKE, so it�s like saying that it is a mistake for these meal-meetings to happen. Also, a typo is a kind of mistake that remains in effect because of student carelessness. And then there�s the phrase for which it is an acronym: Take Your Professor Out. Isn�t that a vernacular way of stating that you want to have a hit man kill your professor? I brought up all these possibilities during one of the silent moments at dinner. I am HILARIOUS (argh). After food they persuaded me to have a drink with them at a nearby bar where one of them works. At some point I mentioned that most of my sense of humor has to be reserved for people who aren�t my students, at which point they tried to buy another round, and I said professor goes home now. As I left I said, �Thank you for a lovely evening, and thank you for taking me out in the eating-dinner way and not in the hiring-a-hit-man way.� I wish I could have heard what they said after I left. Or maybe I�m glad I could not. In any case, as I said, this week I love all my students. They are all promising young adults filled with wonderful intentions and the possibility of being forces of good in the world. I mean that.
Last week was TIRING. Not only because we were discussing affirmative action in class, which is always exhausting. I also had to grade 37 short essays and read four student theses. One of those theses was 200 pages long, the other three were around 90 pages. At the same time I was trying to finish an article of my own for a journal. Then I had to participate in three thesis defenses. Then I was supposed to attend a weekend-long conference on campus, but the margarita I drank with Nasser on Thursday night (or maybe it was the blackened sea scallops with jalapeno cheddar risotto) did something crazy to my intestinal integrity so I was stuck at home all day Friday, and then on Saturday I just decided I didn�t want to go. I went to Boston to see Marilyn instead!
However, on that Friday when I should have been dutifully watching people talk about the constitution and judicial activism, I did recover enough from my intestinal inflagration to walk over to a wine and cheese party at the co-op where my thesis student lives. I had promised him I would do so, and didn�t want to flake because I had promised I would stop by last time they had a shindig, and last time I did not stop by. Anyway, as I was sitting on a couch talking to my thesis student and his girlfriend, an older man came and grabbed my thesis student and began conversing with him. As I suddenly found myself alone on the couch, I decided to get up and walk over to a friend I spotted across the room. As I tried to make my way away from the couch, the older man grabbed me (GRABBED me) and put his arm around me and said something like I DIDN�T MEAN TO DRIVE YOU AWAY (he=drunk) WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR?! I laughed and said that I�m a professor, at which point he very quickly stopped manhandling me. The moral of that story, I suppose, is that it�s OK to manhandle students, but once you find out that you're manhandling a professor, things get less exciting. The best part of the whole experience was watching the changing looks on my thesis student�s face as all of this transpired.
In other news, I recently won a considerable psychic battle. After yet another post-academic-talk academic dinner, I was walking down the street with some academics, back toward my car for going home, when I saw that we were about to walk by a bunch of local kids playing hackysack on the sidewalk. I began to get ready to get hit by the hackysack, because hackysacks are for some reason attracted to my head. As I walked by, wouldn�t you know it but the dumbass thing came flying at my head, at which point I willed it to whiz past my head and straight into the sewer! BEHOLD MY MAGICAL POWER. IT IS A FORCE OF GOOD IN THE WORLD.
12:29 a.m. - May 06, 2005
js - 2012-05-06 17:40:41
I am disappointed that I used "it's" to mean "it has" in this blog post.
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