ifeelbetter

I just got back the evaluations from the students. There were some lovely comments--one student said they looked forward to coming to class each week, another said they pay more attention to details now--but there were a couple of really nasty ones.

One in particular...said I was "to cryptic in explaining college writing" which--so you can't spell "too." My feelings are not so hurt that you were lost. If you had felt all warm and swaddled by my class, I would be doing it wrong. So.

Ha. I talk the big talk and all...but I still am feeling a bit deflated by the whole deal. I mean, it's not surprising. I knew for ages that I had a couple of ornery students. And I tried to stem the tide of them believing me commenting on their rough drafts would be a magical cure-all--it wouldn't be. It would just mean ten times the work for me. So I could have told you every negative thing that turned up beforehand...it still smarts.

So I'll just be over here. In my corner. Licking my wounds.

So I am a dutiful sister or whatnot so I will actually be doing what mine told me to (sleep) soon (no really, I so totally am gonna sleep)....

....


BUT FIRST.

HI.

I have been working non-stop ALL DAY--that's, like, a gaZILLION hours of serious!face bizniss and my brain has MAXED OUT. No joke. And I tend to make weird internet choices in the middle of the night (it's 2:30 AM) ...


....


BUT. I now have sufficient material for my presentation tomorrow. And I will only have to say, "Oh, wait, that's not written yet" .... a couple dozen times. BUT IT'S OK.

BECAUSE I WILL HAVE EXCITING PICTURES. AND AN MP3 OF A WALTZ WRITTEN IN HONOR OF A TEENAGER WHO WAS PART OF THE DELEGATION TO JAPAN IN 1860 THAT IS CRAZY!PANTS.

It is a three minute mp3. WHAT.

I WIN.


NOW SLEEP.

Still working on the same paper...I just read the six billionth (fourth, my god, B, you are so very hyperbolic) newspaper article by Edward H. House about Japan. I have to make a paper about them fast because I accidentally volunteered to go first on Monday in our presentations.

It was an accident like this:
( I have a tag for my weird life choices because they are so weird )

BUT YES. Back to my point. The PAPER I am writing for this Transatlantic Print Culture and Race in the Nineteenth Century course is about...almost all of the things in the title. Just a different ocean. So it's about House's articles about Japan for American readers back in New York and Boston. See how I did that?

Race? Check.
Print Culture? Check.
Transatlanticpacific? CHECK.

House's articles turn out to be pretty fervently anti-British and anti-Catholic. I called my sister--a medieval and Renaissance grad student--and asked her WTF.

"I get the anti-Catholic stuff in Britain," quoth I. "What's it doing here when the guy is also anti-British?"*

* I was raised atheist--stringently atheist-- and quasi-hippie so I say shit like this out loud and then people give me weird looks. I just. I don't get most religious stuff. It is ALL foreign to me. Also. I once had a history teacher in high school who taught the same two pages of the text book every single day for a year and then skipped to WWII. I am missing CHUNKS of history.

"You're stupid," she said (but nicer) and then explained the Puritans. In the five minutes she had to spare before she continued to fete her hubby for passing his prelims. (She has been feting him for about a week now. I called the other night and they were drinking champagne and eating burgers. Even I would not do that. They were, unsurprisingly, sick afterward.)

I'm still mostly confused and very much unsure of how this all relates back to the Reformation. She assures me it does. So I guess I'm writing my paper about re-staging the Reformation in Japan via America?

...that is so stupid. Now my head hurts.

So this friend of mine quit our English PhD program last year and was accepted to all law schools everywhere and--draaaamaaaa--ended up staying here and going to ours. Which was awesome for everyone but nail-biting-craziness for like nine months.

I was having lunch with this friend on Thursday and she was like, "so how are you ending your semester?" I assumed she was talking about next Tuesday, the day I thought would be the end of the semester. And I was--not gonna lie--more than slightly freaked out by the fact that I hadn't thought of anything sufficiently hear-swelling. And she had just finished telling me about the soaring-rhetoric of all of her end of terms classes (because you can send your students out into the world to save bunny rabbits and starving salmon when you're sending them into LAW) and I love me some soaring rhetoric. I watch old West Wing clips. I have them favorited on Youtube. My brother knows that he can never piss me off enough that a West Wing clip on my facebook wall won't make it all better.

But, no, my friend's like, "No, silly rabbit, I meant today."

And I made this face:


Because that meant I had an hour to come up with Serious Business Lesson Plan instead of the Happy Funtimes Lesson Plan I was planning to use that day.

I ended up doing a Frankenstein's Monster (yes, people, Frankenstein is the doctor) Lesson Plan in which we (a) finished the presentations I had not allotted enough time for before, (b) workshopped all their projects despite how very much they didn't need it, and (c) had a nice little Henry V inspired moment of rhetorical whatnot from yours truly.

Yeah, you heard me. I use Henry V as my rhetorical model in all things.

"We few, we happy few who learned how to write basic essays in this course, we band of brothers..."

It is good stuff.

Only--unlike training people to save all the under-represented cactii of the world or whatever you learn in law school--I only had that one trick in the bag. So it was like a fast-forwarded version of Hal but with the volume turned waaaay down. He's all like "once more into the breach, my friends!" and I'm like, "you're going to end up writing maaaaaany more essays before we let you leave this college."

Not so soaring.

That is my story. I ended class like that. And then I said "Merry Christmas." pause. "And Happy Hanukkah." pause. "And Kwanzaa. And SOLSTICE AND ALL THE HOLIDAYS I LOVE THEM BWAHAHAHA."

So there. YOU'RE WELCOME, WORLD.

I know a lot of people who routinely take two weeks to get a batch of papers back to students. Usually I do it in four days. It's the first time I've taken so long with a batch...and it's not like they need them back soon, anyway. That was their last academic assignment of the semester for me. They only have creative final projects left.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

PS - Students can sometimes be so adorable I want to bottle them up and snuggle them on dreary days. These creative final projects? I set no limitations, made no restrictions--they have to pitch their idea of what is reasonable to me and whether I agree or not is determined by their ability to convince. Life skills all around, right? And this one boy--who makes "duuuuuuh"-face all the time--just pitched the 36 page spy thriller he's been writing all semester and wanted to know whether he should make it longer. I would have taken 5 pages. No joke. And another kid is writing a score to a silent film version of Sherlock Holmes from 1924. And another kid is doing a fashion shoot...and another is doing performance art. I love students today.

PPS - I will keep you appraised buuuuut....one of the students is writing a kids book about the contents of the fridge trying to figure out who will be eaten for dinner. And the ketchup bottle is the detective. I bet you love my students now, too, don't you?

[edit/PPPS - I have a rule that I can only have one burger a week. You might think that's crazy--why, you might ask, do you need to have a rule like that? Do you find it that hard not to eat more than one burger in a week? Yes, internetters, I do. I find it that hard. And the one-burger-a-week rule is a vast improvement over what the rule was when it started back in first year during the first paper/finals season...then it was no-more-than-one-burger-a-day. And that was hard at first. But YES so I have this rule. And I wasted my one burger this week on bad delivery burger because grading papers sucks my brain out through my nose--that's what it feels like, OK--and I needed comfort food STAT. But it wasn't nice. And now I am burgerless until next week. Here endeth my tale of woe.]

I made the new rule for myself--(this is a thing I do, bee-tee-dubs, this making absurd rules for myself. I was raised by hippies and I tend to get all angry-teen when other people make rules for me but I seem to adore doing it to myself)--that I wouldn't grade more than three papers in a day. It seems best for everyone. This way, I don't ever work up the anger to fail someone for stupid shit (I was this close to failing someone for douchiness which, let's face it, is not an exact science) and they don't make my eyeballs melt out of my skull. Everyone leaves...undead. So that's nice.

Except, of course, it means the whole process has dragged out for a week now. That, and there's been this scholar visiting my department who is so cool and smart and I already have a bad habit of saying and doing absurd things around people I admire (I once told a professor that the incoming class was "large and doesn't drink coffee" which...dubiously true and sooo weird) .... so I have been one awkward comment shy of absurd for days.

So. This means--now that the lady has gone and I managed to maintain a veneer of adulthood for the duration of her visit and the papers are nearly graded--I can breathe.

Oh wait. There's still my orals to think of.

It's time for some Firefly and no mistake.



There's going to have to be a tangent soon about why Bones and Glee are shows that have broken my heart and pushed me to the brink of swearing off Fox as a network. I have thoughts and someone started me on the topic over lunch today.

I am SO two seconds away from buying this dress.

It used to be that "dry clean only" tags would stop me from buying clothes. Since I had to man up and buy business/work appropriate clothing (for conferences, teaching, and similar), that has no longer been an impediment to me. I mean...I go to a dry-cleaner anyway, I might as well own more clothes that make the two second walk necessary.

In other news, I had a bad week with students. They're getting a bit grouchy now that the going has gotten tough and it's draining to pretend I don't know they're being bitchy at me. I think it's the only way to deal with them when they're like this, though...they say things like, "The prompt you wrote was too vague, that's why my paper's bad" and I pretend I don't know what they're saying and respond, "You're right, fitting your writing to a prompt IS difficult and frustrating." And then I smile helpfully. Ugh.

Plus...I'm pretty sure I need to (finally) get my wisdom teeth out. Ugh-squared.

So I have been planning my Bromance course for next semester instead of wallowing in grief or (what I should have been doing), reading Uncle Tom's Cabin. My Bromance course is going to RAWK.

Also, people? On the Road with Austin and Santino exists. I tell you because none of the people I call friends told ME and then I ran into it accidentally in the middle of the night and LIFE WAS GOOD again. If you are blue, if mankind has been letting you down lately, THEIR LOVE WILL CURE YOU.

I don't know how many other English grad students are out there but GUYS. There's going to be a CONFERENCE ON ADAPTATIONS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. I think my little Victorianist heart just exploded. Now I just need to figure out a paper that would get me in...I only have one paper on detective fiction right now and it's more about physiognomy/Darwin and the genre as a whole than Sherlock. And I SO want to go a conference on Sherlock.

PS -- Still at the conference but am now grading papers in a coffee shop. I make unhappy faces at my undergrads.

I am leaving at the ass-crack of dawn (read: "7:00 AM" for hyperbolic-free version) for the LONGEST train trip to get to a conference. There will be a four hour layover in Chicago just cuz Amtrak loves me like that.

Then...on Friday...I am doing my very first paper presentation. I waver between being deathly afraid of absurd things (not wearing pants accidentally, misquoting someone who turns out to be in the audience and pissed, that sort of thing) and madly excited. That, and my insomnia has come back. So. Mostly, I am perplexed by the insanity wandering around inside my head.

So. Best case scenario: this turns into the Best Conference of Ever and I am thrilled by everything that happens for the next four days. Worst case scenario: I forget to wear clothes while reading the paper and someone yells at me.

There are, I'm sure, plenty of more reasonable expectations to be had but I haven't had more than a few hours sleep each night for, like, a week or something and I seem to be stuck in hyperbole mode.

I leave you with this completely tangential and unrelated question: how badass is the lady in this music video on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being Starbuck?

So I like, totally and unabasedly love my undergrads. I get all heart!eyes at them all the time when they say clever things or even not-so-clever things that show signs of maybe clever things happening in their heads. I mean. I am a little ridiculous about them.

And, right, so my reading material for this course is all detectives and stuuuufff and there's nothing like my deep and abiding love of Watso--*cough* Sherlock Holmes. So. That is also quite rawk.

The PROBLEM, of course (who didn't see this coming??), is the craptacularness of their writing. This has always been true for me and, luckily, does not interfere with my Teacher Love. That, I think, is my actual philosophy on teaching. I am about to be asked to articulate my philosophy on teaching in my hippy-dippy teaching "circle" (it's a class, OK, call a spade a fucking spade) tomorrow and I may just wax poetic on Teacher Love.

GOD. It is SAD and WEIRD how much I model my teaching self on a skeevy-free Hector and fluffier Irwine. WHO, in their right mind, uses History Boys as a life lesson. I ask you.

Their sucktastic writing has made my head hurt. Also. I don't know why they have such massive loathing for Dupin. I mean. He's a bit snooty but...Holmes isn't?? Since when?

SUCH a load of awful. The closest-to-being-decent paper in the lot compared Dupin to a peacock who had to ruffle his luxurious feathers in the narrator's face. I mean. I don't even know what that means.