I've succumbed to a bit of image-consumerism. Since I had a 25% discount coupon, I bought myself a pocket-sized Moleskine notebook at Borders today. Now I have the groovy little notebook that wannabe poets and intellectuals like so much to carry around.
The bottom of the ad page says something about contemporary nomadism... I have to chuckle at that. I'm about as far from nomadic as one might get.
23 March 2007
Job
It's been a while since I posted anything substantial, and I have to point to microbes as the culprits. About two weeks ago Micah got the flu. Then Mary got a virus that wasn't the flu. Then I got a bacterial something-or-other (perhaps strep?) that was unrelated to the previous two. Then Micah got strep. Then it was Wednesday of this week before I finally had a full day to work.
So unfortunately, I've been coasting to some extent through Job. I have done some real intellectual work on this unit, retooling the way I teach the text to focus on Job as a character and an intellectual (a la Hamlet, really), but I still feel like I'm cheating the book. Fortunately, J.B. is a strong enough play that it pretty much teaches itself; the fast-moving scenes are packed with philosophical land mines, and such land mines make for good class discussions.
In the world of Beowulf, we're about to translate our way into Grendel's lair, and Dr. Evans laid out a plan today to catch us back up from his sickness. I translated for three solid hours yesterday, translating over a hundred lines and pushing my brain past translation into reading for one of the first times in my Old English career. My hope is that I'll be able to reach that once or twice more before the semester's out. There's really nothing like thinking in another language as far as intellectual thrills go. I've had it happen to me a couple times each in Greek and Hebrew, and such experiences make me hope that wherever I land professionally, I'll be able to teach some sort of language classes as I go.
Hopefully I'll have some hours really to plan this week's Job lessons. I'm realizing on this read just how interesting Job is as a character, what he sees that his interlocutors don't. For the first time I'm realizing that the shape of the story might be secondary to Job's own intellectual flights. I had been so focused before on Job's speeches as apologiae that I hadn't paid attention to their particulars, to the ways that he sees.
For instance, in today's readings (chapters 8-10), Job does not simply participate in Bildad's game of blame-and-respond but deconstructs (I couldn't come up with a less trendy word) the very categories in which Bildad's game happens, noting that the same judge that Bildad would have the innocent man convince is also the blaming prosecutor. (Job isn't aware of chapter one's divine bet, I don't think.) With one character playing so many roles, Job protests, there's no chance of his winning that game. And even as he waxes theological, another level of meaning critiques Eliphaz and Bildad themselves. (At this point in the book, Zophar and Elihu haven't yet chimed in.)
In another for instance, chapter 9 ends with Job saying that he would speak his mind if he weren't afraid of spurring the wrath of God. Then the form of chapter ten is a series of indirect statements that go something like, "But if I could speak freely and without fear to God, I'd say..." The arm's-length distancing of himself from his words is brilliant, and the things he hypothetically might say but won't be blamed for saying are positively acidic.
Ah, I have a great job...
So unfortunately, I've been coasting to some extent through Job. I have done some real intellectual work on this unit, retooling the way I teach the text to focus on Job as a character and an intellectual (a la Hamlet, really), but I still feel like I'm cheating the book. Fortunately, J.B. is a strong enough play that it pretty much teaches itself; the fast-moving scenes are packed with philosophical land mines, and such land mines make for good class discussions.
In the world of Beowulf, we're about to translate our way into Grendel's lair, and Dr. Evans laid out a plan today to catch us back up from his sickness. I translated for three solid hours yesterday, translating over a hundred lines and pushing my brain past translation into reading for one of the first times in my Old English career. My hope is that I'll be able to reach that once or twice more before the semester's out. There's really nothing like thinking in another language as far as intellectual thrills go. I've had it happen to me a couple times each in Greek and Hebrew, and such experiences make me hope that wherever I land professionally, I'll be able to teach some sort of language classes as I go.
Hopefully I'll have some hours really to plan this week's Job lessons. I'm realizing on this read just how interesting Job is as a character, what he sees that his interlocutors don't. For the first time I'm realizing that the shape of the story might be secondary to Job's own intellectual flights. I had been so focused before on Job's speeches as apologiae that I hadn't paid attention to their particulars, to the ways that he sees.
For instance, in today's readings (chapters 8-10), Job does not simply participate in Bildad's game of blame-and-respond but deconstructs (I couldn't come up with a less trendy word) the very categories in which Bildad's game happens, noting that the same judge that Bildad would have the innocent man convince is also the blaming prosecutor. (Job isn't aware of chapter one's divine bet, I don't think.) With one character playing so many roles, Job protests, there's no chance of his winning that game. And even as he waxes theological, another level of meaning critiques Eliphaz and Bildad themselves. (At this point in the book, Zophar and Elihu haven't yet chimed in.)
In another for instance, chapter 9 ends with Job saying that he would speak his mind if he weren't afraid of spurring the wrath of God. Then the form of chapter ten is a series of indirect statements that go something like, "But if I could speak freely and without fear to God, I'd say..." The arm's-length distancing of himself from his words is brilliant, and the things he hypothetically might say but won't be blamed for saying are positively acidic.
Ah, I have a great job...
12 March 2007
Link request
To my readers with blogs of your own:
At the prompting of my department, I've created a more formal academic web site. I've put a link to it in the links section in the right column.
As a favor to me, I'd like to ask each of you to put my name, Nathan Gilmour, in a post with a link to that site. Its address is thus:
http://ngilmour.myweb.uga.edu/index.html
From what folks tell me, schools to which I'll be applying for teaching gigs will be Googling me, and according to what they say, it's better for one's professional web site to land high on the search list. Since I'm competing with a writer in Washington state for the "Nathan Gilmour" hits anyway, I could use some help.
So I appreciate any links you can provide. Yes, the site is still lame, but I'm working on it.
At the prompting of my department, I've created a more formal academic web site. I've put a link to it in the links section in the right column.
As a favor to me, I'd like to ask each of you to put my name, Nathan Gilmour, in a post with a link to that site. Its address is thus:
http://ngilmour.myweb.uga.edu/index.html
From what folks tell me, schools to which I'll be applying for teaching gigs will be Googling me, and according to what they say, it's better for one's professional web site to land high on the search list. Since I'm competing with a writer in Washington state for the "Nathan Gilmour" hits anyway, I could use some help.
So I appreciate any links you can provide. Yes, the site is still lame, but I'm working on it.
10 March 2007
08 March 2007
Ending David, Beginning a Break
Monday we wrapped up the David unit with the rise of Solomon. I think that, by the end, my students had a real, literary familiarity with David, the kind that one gets by the end of Hamlet or the gospel of Luke. I asserted over and over during the course of the unit that the genius of the books of Samuel, the reason why 1 Timothy can say that it's good for instruction and why Rabbinic Judaisms and various Christian traditions can claim it as good for moral formation, is the texts' insistence upon the larger-than-life goodness of David and the larger-than-life wickedness of David. This is no watered-down "realism" where David is "just like one of us"; he's more rotten than any of us could conceive being one chapter, and he's more heroic and magnanimous than we're capable of the next. I think that, as David faded into his three-line obituary and Solomon rose, Michael Corleone-style, to seize rule of Jerusalem, just about everyone who had been on that ride got it.
And now I get to grade papers.
I'm picking up my brother from the airport tonight and taking a Beowulf exam tomorrow; then it's two and a half days with little brother followed by five days of paper-writing and paper-grading and cantata-narration-writing and perhaps a couple hours of sleep here and there. And then, next Monday, it's back to teaching, this time Job.
Rock and roll.
And now I get to grade papers.
I'm picking up my brother from the airport tonight and taking a Beowulf exam tomorrow; then it's two and a half days with little brother followed by five days of paper-writing and paper-grading and cantata-narration-writing and perhaps a couple hours of sleep here and there. And then, next Monday, it's back to teaching, this time Job.
Rock and roll.
03 March 2007
A Big ol' Hunk of Beowulf, that's Hwaet.
Yikes. I just finished the first part of the weekend's homework in Beowulf class. Fifty-four lines. Yeesh.
Now on to the next bit...
Now on to the next bit...
01 March 2007
Back to the Grind
I just spent forty-five minutes plowing through the first 12 pages of Adorno for next week. Welcome back, Cole's class.
Yesterday I taught one of the most fun lessons in my Hebrew Bible and/as Literature class, the David and Bathsheba lesson. Tomorrow is another one, the Absalom lesson. David's cool-headed maneuvering in 2 Samuel 11 brought just the reactions that it brought last year--the loyalists called it a "mistake," and the rest thought him monstrous. I did take more care this year to keep David's heroic attractiveness in the picture, letting students do a "moral seismograph" of David's career. I had them chart a line above and below the line of moral indifference, and almost all of them had David at his highest when he achieved his military victories and lowest when he murdered Uriah. The aftermath of Bathsheba's unnamed child's death was the place where folks started to fight.
It's the genius of 2 Samuel, really. I could read David's reaction to six different people and get six different reactions, based on their loyalty to the picture that David painted of himself, the golden boy of Israel. (I, for one, am not fooled.) And tomorrow, when David mourns over Absalom and Joab kicks his butt for it, I imagine I'll get six more different reactions, the pragmatists and the family-sentimentalists and the bloodline-covanenters disagreeing on whether David's treatment of his men after Absalom's revolt was, in fact, as bad as Joab makes it. (It is.)
I graded the last of the second paper this morning, and the third doesn't come in until next Friday. Until then, I crank away on papers and try to sleep a bit.
On second thought, I'd better crank away on those papers.
Yesterday I taught one of the most fun lessons in my Hebrew Bible and/as Literature class, the David and Bathsheba lesson. Tomorrow is another one, the Absalom lesson. David's cool-headed maneuvering in 2 Samuel 11 brought just the reactions that it brought last year--the loyalists called it a "mistake," and the rest thought him monstrous. I did take more care this year to keep David's heroic attractiveness in the picture, letting students do a "moral seismograph" of David's career. I had them chart a line above and below the line of moral indifference, and almost all of them had David at his highest when he achieved his military victories and lowest when he murdered Uriah. The aftermath of Bathsheba's unnamed child's death was the place where folks started to fight.
It's the genius of 2 Samuel, really. I could read David's reaction to six different people and get six different reactions, based on their loyalty to the picture that David painted of himself, the golden boy of Israel. (I, for one, am not fooled.) And tomorrow, when David mourns over Absalom and Joab kicks his butt for it, I imagine I'll get six more different reactions, the pragmatists and the family-sentimentalists and the bloodline-covanenters disagreeing on whether David's treatment of his men after Absalom's revolt was, in fact, as bad as Joab makes it. (It is.)
I graded the last of the second paper this morning, and the third doesn't come in until next Friday. Until then, I crank away on papers and try to sleep a bit.
On second thought, I'd better crank away on those papers.
24 February 2007
My Marcuse Break
I find myself blessing Herbert Marcuse. After five weeks of Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Lukacs, we're finally reading a book whose Germanic style doesn't require minutes per page and whose words mean, for the most part, what they mean in other books. I'm flying through this stuff.
Beowulf is never going to cruise along, but the translation is getting less tedious by the week as I internalize more vocabulary. Besides that, reading about flesh-eating man-monsters makes just about any translation worth the time.
I've decided that when I find some time cleared out, I'm going to write a Saul book. Samson has his famous Miltonic tragedy, and Jesus has Milton and Kazantzakis, and Moses has movies, and David has sculptures. What of Saul? (No, not the one who later goes by Paul.) Certainly he's as much a tragic thug as Samson, and certainly his stories would translate to the big screen as well as Moses's. This might not happen in any real way before I finish grad school, and it might never see the fluorescent light of a bookstore, but I'm still going to write a Saul book. I don't know whether it'll be a play or a novel or a poem (I've never written a play or a novel, and all my poetry has been brief and lyric), and it might not be any good, but one of these days, I'm going to write me a Saul book.
(BTW, if any of my readers know of any Saul book that's already been done, let me know in the comments section.)
Classes went well this week. As with last spring's classes, this group hit its stride with the David narratives. 1 and 2 Samuel are the perfect places, IMO, to bring agnostics and Jews and Christians together for good conversations. The stories resist theological reduction, so the Christians have to stay on their toes, yet YHWH comes in not as a boring philosophical concept but as a fiery and unpredictable and genuinely good character, so the agnostics don't have much impetus to back away. This week we spent one lesson on the rise of David's fame in Israel, one on the witch of Endor scene, and one on David's coronation and royal career. Monday we'll take on David and Bathsheba, the second-most-familiar David story and also the one whose conclusion, which features what either comes across as David's unflappable piety or inexcusable callousness. Then we'll get to Absalom, where the real fun happens.
I love teaching David.
Grading paper 2 has come along smoothly. For the most part the papers have been good, competent college papers, and I'm looking forward to teaching fine-tuning rather than basic organizational skills.
The cantata approaches, and semester papers loom, and Micah turns two in less than two weeks. Hwaet!
Beowulf is never going to cruise along, but the translation is getting less tedious by the week as I internalize more vocabulary. Besides that, reading about flesh-eating man-monsters makes just about any translation worth the time.
I've decided that when I find some time cleared out, I'm going to write a Saul book. Samson has his famous Miltonic tragedy, and Jesus has Milton and Kazantzakis, and Moses has movies, and David has sculptures. What of Saul? (No, not the one who later goes by Paul.) Certainly he's as much a tragic thug as Samson, and certainly his stories would translate to the big screen as well as Moses's. This might not happen in any real way before I finish grad school, and it might never see the fluorescent light of a bookstore, but I'm still going to write a Saul book. I don't know whether it'll be a play or a novel or a poem (I've never written a play or a novel, and all my poetry has been brief and lyric), and it might not be any good, but one of these days, I'm going to write me a Saul book.
(BTW, if any of my readers know of any Saul book that's already been done, let me know in the comments section.)
Classes went well this week. As with last spring's classes, this group hit its stride with the David narratives. 1 and 2 Samuel are the perfect places, IMO, to bring agnostics and Jews and Christians together for good conversations. The stories resist theological reduction, so the Christians have to stay on their toes, yet YHWH comes in not as a boring philosophical concept but as a fiery and unpredictable and genuinely good character, so the agnostics don't have much impetus to back away. This week we spent one lesson on the rise of David's fame in Israel, one on the witch of Endor scene, and one on David's coronation and royal career. Monday we'll take on David and Bathsheba, the second-most-familiar David story and also the one whose conclusion, which features what either comes across as David's unflappable piety or inexcusable callousness. Then we'll get to Absalom, where the real fun happens.
I love teaching David.
Grading paper 2 has come along smoothly. For the most part the papers have been good, competent college papers, and I'm looking forward to teaching fine-tuning rather than basic organizational skills.
The cantata approaches, and semester papers loom, and Micah turns two in less than two weeks. Hwaet!
19 February 2007
17 February 2007
My current draft of my teaching philosophy
At UGA this semester I'm in the process of putting together a university-approved teaching portfolio, and one element of that portfolio is a teaching philosophy. Here's my current workup of that philosophy, and I hope my faithful readers can give me some feedback.
Teaching Philosophy
An unstated conception of teaching and learning is one beyond critique; thus for the sake of humility, I begin by agreeing with Wittgenstein when he writes, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus 5.6). Before one goes about changing one’s world, one ought to understand the shape and character of that world, and every subject’s interaction with objects happens through and with and in response to words and ideas and debates and traditions. Whatever else happens when a college professor teaches college students, the class’s vocabulary should grow, not only in words but also in concepts and categories. As an apprentice chemist learns the notations and categories that make up the chemist’s discourse through study and experiment, so a student of literature learns both the terminology with which the scholarly community converses and studies with a more experienced practitioner texts and other artifacts that the teacher decides might be worth studying. Both practices expand and refine vocabularies, hopefully to the end of shaping human beings as self-conscious and world-conscious intellectuals.
As vocabularies expand, practical disciplines anchor intellectual pursuits in embodied communities, a key for the humble appreciation of the discipline. My classroom is not a time and a space simply for lecturing and note-taking but also for moral formation, the kind of thing that happens when a coach teaches a player how to excel within the rules of basketball or when a practicing scientist mentors a laboratory assistant in the ways that the scientific community lives a scientific life. With English in particular moral learning must necessarily involve honesty at the level of research and composition but also extends to the ways in which a community asks difficult questions together, the practice of kindness as well as suspicion in reading texts, and diligence in adjusting one’s self and one’s vocabularies to the inquiry at hand. When I evaluate and grade a paper, my purpose is not primarily to communicate to graduate schools a student’s talent abstracted from the aims of the class but to let the student know where the next step towards competence lies. When we read texts together my aim is not merely to “problematize” conventional wisdom but to model and to develop those aptitudes that allow one to live well alongside and within complex situations (including those most complex of entities, human communities). Every incoming college class is in some sense a chosen class, those young people with the drive and ability to effect change for good. My classes always attempt to make small steps towards developing that class.
When a student leaves my classroom, I have contributed three months’ instruction to a life that spans at least seventeen years and often longer. Thus humility ought to inform my goals for students. In one semester a student in my English class ought to have a stronger grasp of critical and conceptual vocabularies relevant to the texts at hand. She should have practiced, at least for the span of one major project, those virtues proper to a truthful and diligent researcher and synthesizer of the scholarship available. Depending on the sort of class, he also should have at least a working familiarity with the spectrum of approaches that might lead to a good life in a world made more complex and some apparatus for evaluating those approaches. If the student reaches those things, then the person leaving my class will have partaken in the humanities, those disciplines that bring consciousness and ethics and imagination together for the good of a larger community.
16 February 2007
Into David
A busy week it's been.
I presented on Georg Lukacs in our literary theory class and by all accounts did well.
I translated another 150 lines of Beowulf.
I read another book-and-a-half of Milton criticism.
I took Micah to a doctor's appointment and our Matrix for its 15K mile service.
And I started grading another batch of freshman papers.
And that's outside of teaching my class. The last two days we started tackling biblical narratives in some more detail, doing Ruth on Wednesday and David and Goliath today. On both days I relied too heavily on the students' agendas. I think for the next week I'm going to set (for the most part) each discussion's subject matter and try to be open to the students' taking the class away from me. I really ought to spend more time helping them close-read and showing them where paper topics naturally arise out of each narrative, but the last couple days I've been improvising with poor results. I'm not sure it's apathy so much as shell-shock; they seem to be looking for the "right" things to talk about, whereas I just want to talk intellectually about something.
Monday I've got the post-Goliath, pre-Philistine-mercenary stories, so there ought to be plenty of material there. Besides that I've got to work in some writing instruction. There's just not enough time in a semester...
I presented on Georg Lukacs in our literary theory class and by all accounts did well.
I translated another 150 lines of Beowulf.
I read another book-and-a-half of Milton criticism.
I took Micah to a doctor's appointment and our Matrix for its 15K mile service.
And I started grading another batch of freshman papers.
And that's outside of teaching my class. The last two days we started tackling biblical narratives in some more detail, doing Ruth on Wednesday and David and Goliath today. On both days I relied too heavily on the students' agendas. I think for the next week I'm going to set (for the most part) each discussion's subject matter and try to be open to the students' taking the class away from me. I really ought to spend more time helping them close-read and showing them where paper topics naturally arise out of each narrative, but the last couple days I've been improvising with poor results. I'm not sure it's apathy so much as shell-shock; they seem to be looking for the "right" things to talk about, whereas I just want to talk intellectually about something.
Monday I've got the post-Goliath, pre-Philistine-mercenary stories, so there ought to be plenty of material there. Besides that I've got to work in some writing instruction. There's just not enough time in a semester...
08 February 2007
Sorry
I realize the chart below is hard to read, but it also gets mad and crashes my browser when I try to edit it, so I'm going to learn my lesson about grumpy html and leave it alone.
Last Ten Posters
I saw it on Slim's blog, and it looked cool, so here are the locations of my blog's last ten visitors:
|  | United States | Kalamazoo, Michigan | |
| | United States | Orange, California | |
| | United States | Amf Ohare, Illinois | |
| | United States | Conyers, Georgia | |
|  | Germany | Berlin | |
| | United States | Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania | |
| | United States | Kingsport, Tennessee | |
| | United States | Somerville, Massachusetts | |
| | United States | Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania | |
| | United States | Orange, California |
07 February 2007
06 February 2007
More Revisions
So here I am, between revision meetings, scrambling to say something to each paper as it comes to me. I've got six more groups to go (I think), and each one wears me down a bit more. As I say every semester, the value of these meetings, both as exemplary for the practice of group revision and as feedback into my students' writing, is valuable enough that I'm willing to kill myself once a semester to do it. But I can't even fathom how some of my colleagues read preliminary drafts of every paper.
We've moved on from Hegel to Marx in Cole's class, and the readability difference is massive. I'm cooking through The German Ideology where I crawled through Phenomenology of Spirit and even Philosophy of History. I know that once we get into twentieth-century literary theory the readability is likely to depart again, so I'm not going to get used to it.
The David unit is coming up, and I still haven't written any quizzes. Perhaps this afternoon.
We've moved on from Hegel to Marx in Cole's class, and the readability difference is massive. I'm cooking through The German Ideology where I crawled through Phenomenology of Spirit and even Philosophy of History. I know that once we get into twentieth-century literary theory the readability is likely to depart again, so I'm not going to get used to it.
The David unit is coming up, and I still haven't written any quizzes. Perhaps this afternoon.
02 February 2007
Revision Meetings, Day One
So far none of my students has fought me when I suggested rewriting.
Audrey Guenther, are you reading this? :)
Monday groups pick up a bit, and the whole shebang culminates on Wednesday, when I meet with four groups, then finishes out with two meetings on Friday.
I need to write some David quizzes before that unit starts up--that's when and where a goodly (badly, really) number of students will stop reading the daily assignments. It's a long semester; it happens.
Audrey Guenther, are you reading this? :)
Monday groups pick up a bit, and the whole shebang culminates on Wednesday, when I meet with four groups, then finishes out with two meetings on Friday.
I need to write some David quizzes before that unit starts up--that's when and where a goodly (badly, really) number of students will stop reading the daily assignments. It's a long semester; it happens.
01 February 2007
Not much time for bloggery lately
This semester really is turning out to be a grinder. But if I make it through this one, I'm done with major coursework operations. Mission Accomplished, one might say.
Well, one might.
The Psalms unit just plain went too fast. I'm glad that I spread out the revision days over more than a week (I tried doing them all in a week before and nearly killed myself), but three class periods just wasn't enough time really to talk about more than a couple poems a day. I hope that the paper-writing itself proves to be helpful to my students.
I'm about a third of the way through grading paper 1, and the quality of the prose on the whole is pretty good. They're muddling their conceptual agents and their grammatical subjects, and their conceptual actions and relationships often don't land where the grammatical main verb is, but that's why we teach writing, and I'm confident I can help them do that bit better.
We finished our discussions of Hegel texts last night and move on to Marx next week. Three hours make a long class. Three hours of literary theory make one tired. Three hours of Hegel at night makes one quite tired indeed.
And I've got Beowulf done for the week and have next week's text printed out and ready to translate. Hwaet!
Well, one might.
The Psalms unit just plain went too fast. I'm glad that I spread out the revision days over more than a week (I tried doing them all in a week before and nearly killed myself), but three class periods just wasn't enough time really to talk about more than a couple poems a day. I hope that the paper-writing itself proves to be helpful to my students.
I'm about a third of the way through grading paper 1, and the quality of the prose on the whole is pretty good. They're muddling their conceptual agents and their grammatical subjects, and their conceptual actions and relationships often don't land where the grammatical main verb is, but that's why we teach writing, and I'm confident I can help them do that bit better.
We finished our discussions of Hegel texts last night and move on to Marx next week. Three hours make a long class. Three hours of literary theory make one tired. Three hours of Hegel at night makes one quite tired indeed.
And I've got Beowulf done for the week and have next week's text printed out and ready to translate. Hwaet!
27 January 2007
Hwaet!
400 posts! Woo hoo!
Also, I've now translated 319 lines of Beowulf, or 10% of the thing! Hwaet!
Also, I've now translated 319 lines of Beowulf, or 10% of the thing! Hwaet!
26 January 2007
Psalms and Pedagogy
We're two days into the Psalms unit now, and classes are picking up fast. I don't know whether I've just packed the first two papers too closely towards the semester's beginning or whether my own classes are hindering my ability to expend energy on my teaching, but paper two's revision meetings start next Friday, and I still don't feel like I know my classes.
We've been close-reading thus far for parallelism (taught them some Lowth the first day) and sub-generic structure (lament, praise, didactic, etc.), then comparing them to 17th-century poems (Donne today). I'm hoping that writing this paper will give them enough poetry that they feel like they've been in a lit class, but frankly, I'm ready to get into David and Job. That's where the really good conversations and the really fun classes get rolling.
My three classes really are going to put me under if I get behind at all; I've been proactive and early-starting thus far; I've just got to make sure that I don't make it out of spring break without some pages written on my final papers. I'm almost certain at this point that I'm going to stop attending Latin in April to focus solely on term papers. I can pick up those Wheelock chapters and get ready to roll on LATN 2001 in the summer.
We've been close-reading thus far for parallelism (taught them some Lowth the first day) and sub-generic structure (lament, praise, didactic, etc.), then comparing them to 17th-century poems (Donne today). I'm hoping that writing this paper will give them enough poetry that they feel like they've been in a lit class, but frankly, I'm ready to get into David and Job. That's where the really good conversations and the really fun classes get rolling.
My three classes really are going to put me under if I get behind at all; I've been proactive and early-starting thus far; I've just got to make sure that I don't make it out of spring break without some pages written on my final papers. I'm almost certain at this point that I'm going to stop attending Latin in April to focus solely on term papers. I can pick up those Wheelock chapters and get ready to roll on LATN 2001 in the summer.
20 January 2007
I take it back
Okay, you know that last post in which I said my students were overly compliant?
Forget it.
On the class's online discussion board, the pro-Joseph brigade has made a charge. Let the games begin!
Forget it.
On the class's online discussion board, the pro-Joseph brigade has made a charge. Let the games begin!
Ambiguous Joseph
I spent a fair bit of time in my classes on Friday laying out my theories about agency and grammar and why excessive passive and expletive constructions hinder good academic writing, so we had too little time, as usual, to talk about Joseph.
This group of students, I think, tends too far towards malleability (or at least shows of malleability), and I'm going to have to watch it. When I focused our attention on Joseph's dark side, last year's classes fought me, clinging tenaciously to Joseph as a positive exemplar. I'm used to that; I can always get Socratic on them and make them think harder about it. This year's group almost immediately turned on Joseph, finding nothing but fault in him. I'm not sure whether they're doing this out of a genuinely shaky grasp on the story or to say what they think I want to hear, but either way, I had to give a talk to each class about Joseph's complexity and ambiguity so that they wouldn't leave this (very brief) unit thinking him an utter scumbag.
I collect the first brief paper Wednesday and get started on our Psalms and 17th-century poetry unit. I've got the skeleton of a lecture about English and Hebrew poetic conventions ready, but I need to spend some more time on it between now and Wednesday.
This group of students, I think, tends too far towards malleability (or at least shows of malleability), and I'm going to have to watch it. When I focused our attention on Joseph's dark side, last year's classes fought me, clinging tenaciously to Joseph as a positive exemplar. I'm used to that; I can always get Socratic on them and make them think harder about it. This year's group almost immediately turned on Joseph, finding nothing but fault in him. I'm not sure whether they're doing this out of a genuinely shaky grasp on the story or to say what they think I want to hear, but either way, I had to give a talk to each class about Joseph's complexity and ambiguity so that they wouldn't leave this (very brief) unit thinking him an utter scumbag.
I collect the first brief paper Wednesday and get started on our Psalms and 17th-century poetry unit. I've got the skeleton of a lecture about English and Hebrew poetic conventions ready, but I need to spend some more time on it between now and Wednesday.
18 January 2007
Fifteen bucks
I found a small, 128MB mp3 player at Toys R Us for fifteen bucks. Since I only use such devices when I run, and since an hour and twenty minutes' music covers more time than my out-of-shape legs can, it's a great purchase.
In Hebrew Bible teaching news, the first day of Joseph went entirely too quicly, so quickly that I ran out of time in both sections before I could get to writing instruction. I'll have to start next class with writing and then launch into discussions of the narrative and the Robert Alter chapter I'm having them read.
I'm looking forward already to teaching the Psalms again, and I think that the revision groups for that paper will once again prove most helpful.
In Hebrew Bible teaching news, the first day of Joseph went entirely too quicly, so quickly that I ran out of time in both sections before I could get to writing instruction. I'll have to start next class with writing and then launch into discussions of the narrative and the Robert Alter chapter I'm having them read.
I'm looking forward already to teaching the Psalms again, and I think that the revision groups for that paper will once again prove most helpful.
13 January 2007
How 'bout them Colts
Well, two playoff games and zero touchdowns given up...
And half a dozen (I think) Manning interceptions with one touchdown thrown.
I suppose the playoff season is a strange place to live.
Lord help our Colts!
And half a dozen (I think) Manning interceptions with one touchdown thrown.
I suppose the playoff season is a strange place to live.
Lord help our Colts!
12 January 2007
Let 'er Rip
Drop/Add period ended at midnight last night, and the semester proper is under way.
We did get-to-know-each-other stuff today, mainly so we could get into the texts with a little less tension in the air. Monday we begin Joseph, and I've already forgotten my Harper-Collins Study Bible in my office for the first time this semester. For this text that's no big deal; I can plan my lesson with just the text in front of me, and the narrative is long enough that we'll only be able to discuss a couple episodes in depth anyway.
In the final hours of drop/add, my class numbers dropped to 20 for 8:00 and remained at 22 for 9:00. I imagine I'll lose some to brown-bottle flu (those early Friday mornings will do that), but at least I begin with fewer than the maximum 44-paper sets to grade. Once again I've got a preponderance of sophomores in my classes; I never got that many for "regular" ENGL 1102, but both times I've tried special sections, the sophomores (and juniors) have showed up. I just hope that they can remember that the class is for freshmen and not infect my younger students with boredom (as my juniors last spring did).
Beowulf is going to be interesting; in our first week, we translated ten of the fifty-two assigned lines of poetry as a class. Next week we have another sixty to take on; I wonder whether we'll dip into the first week or start where the syllabus starts on Wednesday or just do the good episodes. Dr. Evans also assigned critical articles that we're to present to the class, and I drew the one on medieval poetry and patristics, so that part should be fun.
Now I must settle in to the task of reading two hundred pages of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for Wednesday night. The first chunk (that is to say, seven pages) hasn't been nearly as painful as I remember Hegel being when I was a senior in college. I suppose I've grown in my reading ability since then.
We did get-to-know-each-other stuff today, mainly so we could get into the texts with a little less tension in the air. Monday we begin Joseph, and I've already forgotten my Harper-Collins Study Bible in my office for the first time this semester. For this text that's no big deal; I can plan my lesson with just the text in front of me, and the narrative is long enough that we'll only be able to discuss a couple episodes in depth anyway.
In the final hours of drop/add, my class numbers dropped to 20 for 8:00 and remained at 22 for 9:00. I imagine I'll lose some to brown-bottle flu (those early Friday mornings will do that), but at least I begin with fewer than the maximum 44-paper sets to grade. Once again I've got a preponderance of sophomores in my classes; I never got that many for "regular" ENGL 1102, but both times I've tried special sections, the sophomores (and juniors) have showed up. I just hope that they can remember that the class is for freshmen and not infect my younger students with boredom (as my juniors last spring did).
Beowulf is going to be interesting; in our first week, we translated ten of the fifty-two assigned lines of poetry as a class. Next week we have another sixty to take on; I wonder whether we'll dip into the first week or start where the syllabus starts on Wednesday or just do the good episodes. Dr. Evans also assigned critical articles that we're to present to the class, and I drew the one on medieval poetry and patristics, so that part should be fun.
Now I must settle in to the task of reading two hundred pages of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for Wednesday night. The first chunk (that is to say, seven pages) hasn't been nearly as painful as I remember Hegel being when I was a senior in college. I suppose I've grown in my reading ability since then.
11 January 2007
Back to the Grind
All of my spring classes have now met, and the semester's going to be a rough one. I'm already feeling tired thinking of all the hours I'm going to spend reading Hegel and translating Beowulf. But when I make it through, I'll nearly be a Jedi.
My Hebrew Bible and/as Literature classes have met twice, and at midnight tonight the rosters get finalized so that I can start the genuine class on Friday. We spent yesterday's class period close-reading Genesis 12 and giving the students a taste of what is to come over the course of the semester.
I'm going to try to make the focus of this semester's instruction the concept of intellectual traditions, those practices within which people have lived and live that make sense of things like texts and life and God. We discussed them briefly in the first class and really dug into what sort of tradition that Genesis 12 (the beginning of the Abram/Abraham narratives) constitutes as opposed to the opening chapters of the gospel of Mark or the opening lectures in a political science-type course.
I really hit a stride and connected with the students while teaching Plato last semester; I hope that I can do likewise this spring.
My Hebrew Bible and/as Literature classes have met twice, and at midnight tonight the rosters get finalized so that I can start the genuine class on Friday. We spent yesterday's class period close-reading Genesis 12 and giving the students a taste of what is to come over the course of the semester.
I'm going to try to make the focus of this semester's instruction the concept of intellectual traditions, those practices within which people have lived and live that make sense of things like texts and life and God. We discussed them briefly in the first class and really dug into what sort of tradition that Genesis 12 (the beginning of the Abram/Abraham narratives) constitutes as opposed to the opening chapters of the gospel of Mark or the opening lectures in a political science-type course.
I really hit a stride and connected with the students while teaching Plato last semester; I hope that I can do likewise this spring.
09 January 2007
Post-Christmas Revisited
First, I'd like to thank the folks who commented on my first, haphazard post-Christmas post for reading and thinking with me. The following (still haphazard) reflections will attempt to respond to some of those comments.
When I talk about a group's appropriating a common symbol and making it a shibboleth for one faction, I don't necessarily need to assert an all-encompassing conspiracy or even to attribute agency to any one strategist. For instance, when the Qumran community (the Dead Sea Scrolls folks) appropriated the biblical prophets and made them weapons in polemics against the Jerusalem hierarchy, I don't necessarily think that the council got together in some sort of "strategy meeting" to vote on using the prophets, and I don't think that the intellectual architects of the War Scroll or the Temple Scroll had some cynical plan in mind to win political points. In that case I think that the folks who claimed the prophets genuinely believed the prophets to be on their side, and the Sadduccee rejection of the prophets as Scripture must have had at least something to do with an analogous rejection of Pharisaical and Qumranish politics.
In the case of the so-called "War on Christmas," I imagine that, were one to trace its origins, one would find not a Washington think-tank but nostalgic old-timers who remember when "Merry Christmas," a bit of benign cultural carry-over from the old English ways (where John Lennon and Harry Potter alike can muse about Christmas) that seemed to be fading into the past as retailers (who, after all, are all about making money) began to forge a more specifically American neutrality. (Christmas has been around for hundreds of years in England, whereas in America nothing has been around for hundreds of years.)
I do think that when mass-media personalities grab hold of those old-timers' nostalgia and turn it into something akin to the "Freedom Fries" embarrassment, one can assert more strongly that something cynical is going but still need not posit a global conspiracy.
On the other hand, I think that most calls of "Merry Christmas" are in fact friendly or at worst benign. I don't think that the "enemies" in the so-called "War on Christmas" are Muslims and Hindus so much as Democrats. (I'm fairly certain that the same was the case with "Freedom Fries.") The political logic there is, I think, cynical and cyclical: One dares those who don't celebrate Christmas to take offense by means of more and more public assertions about "Judeo-Christian traditions" and such, taking the traditions away from an inherited Britishness and recasting them as vestiges of a former, more pristine "Christian America" that may or may not have at some point existed. The polarizing effect of such appropriation forces elected officials, who in fact have to live with both camps of culture warriors, to take safeguards against litigation (more often at the hands of Democrats than Hindus). Then one points to the safeguards, says something about "political correctness" (which nobody, in my experience, can define well), and increases the air of paranoia, playing to the fears of those who remember fondly the "old days" before the instigation began. In the meantime, those of us who don't have a horse in the culture wars race are forced to live in a world in which "Merry Christmas" is no longer something from a Dickens story, friendly enough and contentless enough not to threaten, but now the code word of a certain faction, something akin to a self-apellation as "pro-family" (who isn't?) or "values voter."
So to cut off this rambling (and still haphazard) reflection, I'd say that ninety-nine out of a hundred wishes of "Merry Christmas" have nothing to do with rendering Hindus "other," and ninety-nine out of a hundred wishes of "Happy Holidays" are not trying to obliterate American Christianity. The sadness that inspired the first post has less to do with most folks and more to do with the poisonous appropriation and negation that some folks are willing to undertake for the sake of controlling Congress.
When I talk about a group's appropriating a common symbol and making it a shibboleth for one faction, I don't necessarily need to assert an all-encompassing conspiracy or even to attribute agency to any one strategist. For instance, when the Qumran community (the Dead Sea Scrolls folks) appropriated the biblical prophets and made them weapons in polemics against the Jerusalem hierarchy, I don't necessarily think that the council got together in some sort of "strategy meeting" to vote on using the prophets, and I don't think that the intellectual architects of the War Scroll or the Temple Scroll had some cynical plan in mind to win political points. In that case I think that the folks who claimed the prophets genuinely believed the prophets to be on their side, and the Sadduccee rejection of the prophets as Scripture must have had at least something to do with an analogous rejection of Pharisaical and Qumranish politics.
In the case of the so-called "War on Christmas," I imagine that, were one to trace its origins, one would find not a Washington think-tank but nostalgic old-timers who remember when "Merry Christmas," a bit of benign cultural carry-over from the old English ways (where John Lennon and Harry Potter alike can muse about Christmas) that seemed to be fading into the past as retailers (who, after all, are all about making money) began to forge a more specifically American neutrality. (Christmas has been around for hundreds of years in England, whereas in America nothing has been around for hundreds of years.)
I do think that when mass-media personalities grab hold of those old-timers' nostalgia and turn it into something akin to the "Freedom Fries" embarrassment, one can assert more strongly that something cynical is going but still need not posit a global conspiracy.
On the other hand, I think that most calls of "Merry Christmas" are in fact friendly or at worst benign. I don't think that the "enemies" in the so-called "War on Christmas" are Muslims and Hindus so much as Democrats. (I'm fairly certain that the same was the case with "Freedom Fries.") The political logic there is, I think, cynical and cyclical: One dares those who don't celebrate Christmas to take offense by means of more and more public assertions about "Judeo-Christian traditions" and such, taking the traditions away from an inherited Britishness and recasting them as vestiges of a former, more pristine "Christian America" that may or may not have at some point existed. The polarizing effect of such appropriation forces elected officials, who in fact have to live with both camps of culture warriors, to take safeguards against litigation (more often at the hands of Democrats than Hindus). Then one points to the safeguards, says something about "political correctness" (which nobody, in my experience, can define well), and increases the air of paranoia, playing to the fears of those who remember fondly the "old days" before the instigation began. In the meantime, those of us who don't have a horse in the culture wars race are forced to live in a world in which "Merry Christmas" is no longer something from a Dickens story, friendly enough and contentless enough not to threaten, but now the code word of a certain faction, something akin to a self-apellation as "pro-family" (who isn't?) or "values voter."
So to cut off this rambling (and still haphazard) reflection, I'd say that ninety-nine out of a hundred wishes of "Merry Christmas" have nothing to do with rendering Hindus "other," and ninety-nine out of a hundred wishes of "Happy Holidays" are not trying to obliterate American Christianity. The sadness that inspired the first post has less to do with most folks and more to do with the poisonous appropriation and negation that some folks are willing to undertake for the sake of controlling Congress.
08 January 2007
04 January 2007
A Haphazard Post-Christmas Thought
If ever anyone actually fought a War on Christmas, I think they won this year. For the first time in my 29 years, I started feeling uneasy when people wished me a Merry Christmas. The greeting, friendly or at worst benign throughout my years, started in 2006 to sound like a Republican code word.
I never called myself "pro-life" for very long, and I thought that "family values" sounded a bit squirrelly even back in high school. But in the moment when I realized that "Christmas" had been tainted, claimed as property by a political party, I got mad. And when I get mad, it tends to last only a couple minutes, and then I start to think.
The booger about Christmas is that every stage of its development is contested territory. Its origins might or might not have something to do with Saturnalia, and the historical tradition that links it with Saturnalia might or might not have its own agenda. The consumer orgy might or might not be a deviation from a pristine ur-Christmas with all the Advent fasts and proper piety, and the urge to return to that pristine Christmas might or might not be a quasi-liturgical neo-Puritan impulse. Of course, I tend to see complexity where others don't. (Hate the phrase "over-think.")
The lazy but literate part of my self wants simply to fall back on Dickens and Irving, to claim some easy "middle ground" in which Christmas is at once sacred and secular and in which the archaeology of genetic moments is an unnecessary trifle and for which the proper response is not thought but revelry in whatever happens to be there. (BTW, "A Christmas Carol" is the obvious Dickens reference; Irving's Sketch-Book has a number of Christmas chapters.)
And then I realize that I've wandered far afield from the suspiciously-partisan-sounding insistences that in fact it's time for Merry Christmas and not for a Happy Holiday.
And then I realize that the spring semester begins in four days. Thank the heavens I can think about something simple then, like Old English participles or Heidegger.
I never called myself "pro-life" for very long, and I thought that "family values" sounded a bit squirrelly even back in high school. But in the moment when I realized that "Christmas" had been tainted, claimed as property by a political party, I got mad. And when I get mad, it tends to last only a couple minutes, and then I start to think.
The booger about Christmas is that every stage of its development is contested territory. Its origins might or might not have something to do with Saturnalia, and the historical tradition that links it with Saturnalia might or might not have its own agenda. The consumer orgy might or might not be a deviation from a pristine ur-Christmas with all the Advent fasts and proper piety, and the urge to return to that pristine Christmas might or might not be a quasi-liturgical neo-Puritan impulse. Of course, I tend to see complexity where others don't. (Hate the phrase "over-think.")
The lazy but literate part of my self wants simply to fall back on Dickens and Irving, to claim some easy "middle ground" in which Christmas is at once sacred and secular and in which the archaeology of genetic moments is an unnecessary trifle and for which the proper response is not thought but revelry in whatever happens to be there. (BTW, "A Christmas Carol" is the obvious Dickens reference; Irving's Sketch-Book has a number of Christmas chapters.)
And then I realize that I've wandered far afield from the suspiciously-partisan-sounding insistences that in fact it's time for Merry Christmas and not for a Happy Holiday.
And then I realize that the spring semester begins in four days. Thank the heavens I can think about something simple then, like Old English participles or Heidegger.
02 January 2007
Back from the North
11 days, 2200 miles, four family get-togethers, one stomach virus, and a case of strep later, and we're back!
Christmas pictures will be coming soon, but since Micah's contagious for one more day (he's doing quite well on an antibiotic and never, as far as I can tell, realized that he was sick), I'm not going to have any little-hands-free computer time tomorrow, so the impatient will simply have to learn patience.
Christmas pictures will be coming soon, but since Micah's contagious for one more day (he's doing quite well on an antibiotic and never, as far as I can tell, realized that he was sick), I'm not going to have any little-hands-free computer time tomorrow, so the impatient will simply have to learn patience.
19 December 2006
Hoppin' Hegel, Batman!
I knew that next semester was going to be rough, but my professor for Hegelian and post-Hegelian literary theory just posted his reading list along with a Darth Vaderesque warning about the reading load. Yeesh!
I just ordered Eagleton's book for an early January brush-up (hopefully it'll show up while I'm out of town) and the Hegel tome to get cookin' over that. Fitzner told me this professor is a good one; I just hope my tail holds out.
All of a sudden translating two hundred lines of Beowulf a week started looking like the easy part of my semester...
I just ordered Eagleton's book for an early January brush-up (hopefully it'll show up while I'm out of town) and the Hegel tome to get cookin' over that. Fitzner told me this professor is a good one; I just hope my tail holds out.
All of a sudden translating two hundred lines of Beowulf a week started looking like the easy part of my semester...
18 December 2006
Weekly Standard's Damage Control
"Don't Cry for Pinochet"
His embrace of economic reform seems unlikely to have sprung from a commitment to freedom, given the overarching contempt for liberty that characterized the rest of his government. Rather, in order to insulate himself from the consequences of his murderous seizure of power, Pinochet sought out political allies, and his free market reforms helped him to garner support domestically on the right, and also among members of the international community. One must be careful not to fall into Pinochet's trap--accepting his brutal seizure of power and tyrannical rule as a natural accompaniment of free market reforms. Propagandists on the left lost no time in seeking to discredit economic freedom by associating it with Pinochet. To this day, we hear from Moscow that it takes a Pinochet to implement economic reforms successfully; Vladimir Putin seems all too willing to have Pinochet's uniform taken in a few sizes so he can try it on.Stalin does in fact discredit Leninism, and the Cultural Revolution does in fact discredit Maoism. Fascism was not corrupted by Hitler, and Milton Friedman's neoliberalism is not warped but embodied by Pinochet. Don't let any of the twentieth century ideologues try to bury their monsters in unmarked graves, especially not those who wound up on the winning sides of the world wars.
Back to the Classics
After a frenzy of post-Marxist theory and post-Freudian analysis--that is to say, after reading up on the last decade's scholarship for my end-of-semester papers--I've dug into Robert Fagles's translation of Homer's Iliad. To say that such a shift is a relief simply does no justice to the joy of reading old books without the nattering critics and their little academic careers. (I'm harboring no illusions--I'm certain that during my comps year I'll be sending off my own forgettable little articles to attempt to shore up my own little academic career.) I dusted off a reread of Virgil's Aeneid last Christmas, and if I have a few quiet hours this year, I'm probably going to consume another ancient epic.
Speaking of old books, my Plato course's evaluations came in today, and they were even better than the ones I got for last Spring's Hebrew Bible and/as Literature class. (Not sure if the latter link will work; I'll update it when I get access to the department page to post spring syllabi.) I could claim some sort of grand skill in teaching freshmen, but a year ago, I got some of the most wretched reviews I'd ever gotten. (That was my fourth year teaching college.) The change is not in my ability but in the texts at hand; college students know good books from mediocre ones, and when I started teaching Job and Republic instead of "Divinity and Pornography," they started reacting better to my classes. Now, as I gear up to teach Joseph in January and the Psalms in February, I know that I don't have to be a fabulous teacher to make this work, and I also know that if I do perform fabulously, I'll be leaping forth from the shoulders of great texts.
It makes one want to get back to school, no? :)
Speaking of old books, my Plato course's evaluations came in today, and they were even better than the ones I got for last Spring's Hebrew Bible and/as Literature class. (Not sure if the latter link will work; I'll update it when I get access to the department page to post spring syllabi.) I could claim some sort of grand skill in teaching freshmen, but a year ago, I got some of the most wretched reviews I'd ever gotten. (That was my fourth year teaching college.) The change is not in my ability but in the texts at hand; college students know good books from mediocre ones, and when I started teaching Job and Republic instead of "Divinity and Pornography," they started reacting better to my classes. Now, as I gear up to teach Joseph in January and the Psalms in February, I know that I don't have to be a fabulous teacher to make this work, and I also know that if I do perform fabulously, I'll be leaping forth from the shoulders of great texts.
It makes one want to get back to school, no? :)
14 December 2006
The Feminisation of Chile
The strong women of a generation ago were not the product of an evolving society, but created by events – and I don’t mean Allende’s experiment, in which women were mostly helpmeets. Mónica González, the country’s top investigative journalist, who was jailed for her human rights stories in the 1980s, credits the dictatorship for that brief awakening. ‘Since the people killed, imprisoned and disappeared were mostly men, women had to confront authority as never before. Facing up to the army and the police in search of husbands or sons, joining forces and speaking out politically, going to work for the first time.’In the wake of Pinochet's death, this article about the years since his regime lost power was pretty interesting. That feminism arose out of the ashes of neoliberalism is quite interesting; I don't spend a great deal of time thinking about gender issues (sorry to my feminist theorist and gender theorist colleagues), but this is one of those moments in which power and (bad) government and gender come together in ways that deserve some thought.
11 December 2006
Pinochet Dead
Mixed Reaction to Pinochet's Death
Another of the Cold War's monsters now faces divine judgment. May his years as dictator of Chile serve as a warning to empires--God knows with whom you ally.
School of the Americas Watch
Another of the Cold War's monsters now faces divine judgment. May his years as dictator of Chile serve as a warning to empires--God knows with whom you ally.
School of the Americas Watch
09 December 2006
Oh Dear
It seems that I've accidentally wiped out a fair bit of my blog's goodies while fiddling with BetaBlogger. I suppose I should treat this as an opportunity rather than a curse, so check back frequently for the new look of Hardly the Last Word!
We're doomed!
We're doomed!
Casting for Nativity Plays
I'm thanking the heavens as I type that I've never had to cast one of these legendary affairs, but the article is just too funny:
Come Christmas, there are always those cynics who dismiss infant nativity plays as pointless charades. What lessons, they ask, are to be learnt in the modern age from watching kids trying to work out what a "virgin's womb" is and how not to "abhor" it? The answer is many, for all concerned – not in the tale itself, but in the telling."Anyone can be a Shepherd, but there's only One Mary"
Hit Counter
I have to republish to get the hit counter to show up, so here goes...
(It's right below the "my library" bit.)
(It's right below the "my library" bit.)
05 December 2006
04 December 2006
Crapula
The sermon went well yesterday, and in the process of researching for it, I ran into one of the most fun vice-words I've ever seen, the Latin crapula.
My Latin class ends tomorrow (exempt from the final), and my students upload their portfolios tomorrow evening. Friday is the Old English exam, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem since I've got Thursday completely off. I've got a genuinely good head of steam on my Spenser paper, and if I play my cards right I might just get it turned in this weekend.
I know the last few entries have been grocery lists, most containing the same items, but my grad student readers know that such lists, and the gradual deterioration of such lists, keep us going in these closing days of the semester.
My Latin class ends tomorrow (exempt from the final), and my students upload their portfolios tomorrow evening. Friday is the Old English exam, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem since I've got Thursday completely off. I've got a genuinely good head of steam on my Spenser paper, and if I play my cards right I might just get it turned in this weekend.
I know the last few entries have been grocery lists, most containing the same items, but my grad student readers know that such lists, and the gradual deterioration of such lists, keep us going in these closing days of the semester.
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