The annual Christmas Eve entry is harder to do, it turns out, when I spend most of the day in Binghamton and then drive up to Syracuse. So here it is now, late again this year(!).
For the first time ever, I actually did stay home (in Binghamton, that is) on Christmas Eve long enough to see my church's annual Christmas pageant, which was, may I say, adorable. We have lots of little kids in the congregation, and there are quite a few scenes and songs in the play, so besides the goodness of the story itself, I got to see a passel of mostly-familiar children dressed as sheep, shepherds (one little one in particular solemnly held his crook, which stretched far above his head, with two hands, and his head-covering almost came down to his eyes - I was both tickled and deeply charmed), palace guards (for when Herod tells the wise men to go and search for the child), and angels. To say nothing, of course, of the children with named roles. I don't know/remember whether it was the story, the kids, the week, or all three, but a couple of times, I almost teared up.
It's been an odd Christmas season: people seem either to have more Christmas spirit than usual or much less, with little in between. I was a "more"; Carrie and I broke out lots of decorations on the first Sunday in December, and clipped evergreen branches and holly from outside, and arranged everything about the downstairs of the house (though, not gonna lie, Carrie, who's very particular about aesthetics, did a lot more of the arranging than I did). And since my semester ended, aside from a couple of sick days early on, I've (in no order) frittered, reread Laura Ingalls Wilder books for the first time in years, played trivia and joyfully made dinners and desserts, seen Tangled with Leah and watched a DVD of Hamlet with Carrie and her friends, and more than once gone to Ife and Zack's with people and played Rock Band long into the night.
But lots of people have had less merry a time of it, either because they're just skeptics about the whole seasonal-joy thing (see Anne and The Didactic Pirate) or because they had personal heaviness to deal with (a lot of people have had bad things happen this semester - students, acquaintances, friends). So it's with a certain amount of gravity, too, that I rejoiced this Christmas - watched the small miracle of Aunt Lisa and Uncle Paul, Amanda and her boyfriend, my parents and brother and me, all together, eating turkey and sides and pies - and then cleaning it up. Just like that. Just life.
This year, too, prose says it as well as poetry, so I offer you this.
And I offer my greetings, too - to all of you, who so generously listen when I talk.
A merry Christmas, as always, to my new friends this year - especially the ones who're actually old friends, refound more deeply this year. I'm really surprised, looking through my archives, that I've never greeted Zack, Kate, Nathanael, Rafi, or Brendan. Besides them, merry Christmas to Mari (after John and Libby's wedding, I think it's worth calling her a friend; I don't think I realized in Alfred how nice she was), Elisabeth, John, Jamie, SHW, other-Sarah, and Amber and Nicole; to Bill and to all the youth group kids; and to my students. (If I'm forgetting anyone else, I'll have to amend this later.)
Merry Christmas to Samweli and Manfred, and to our soldiers everywhere. Peace, as always.
12.25.2010
12.10.2010
Seven Quick Takes Friday: Semester's-End Edition
One: As I organized the strewn papers into piles sorted by class and then by student, my floor approached neatness for probably about ten minutes this evening (excepting the dust and lint and whatever, given how long it's been since I've vacuumed the carpet). Then I started separating out the revision pieces (which I still have to grade) from the grammar/style tests (some of which I still have to grade) from the homeworks (which I pretty much just have to check done or not-done). Now the various piles (plus the to-be-recycled pile, but that shouldn't stay there much longer) block my way even more than they did before. Oh, well - it won't be forever.
Two: Speaking of the grammar/style test, I gave my students a study sheet a couple of weeks ago - based on the mini-lessons we've been doing all semester - and reminded them over and over about the test's approach. And still I had only about three A's in the first class, out of about fifteen. By contrast, Carrie, Zack, and Leah all took the test yesterday out of curiosity - and all of them, despite not having studied, got 100%. (Carrie may technically have done the best, however: Zack and Leah got their hundreds despite each missing one question - not the same one - because each redeemed him- or herself with the bonus question, whereas Carrie missed the bonus question but got all the normal questions right.)
Three: In case anyone's interested in hearing about pudding (...anyone?), Wegmans has been selling Hunt's Snack Packs for $1-per-package (four servings come in a package), even for the newer flavors, so the other day I figured I'd experiment, and I bought the cinnamon roll and blueberry muffin flavors. I was a little worried about the blueberry, going in, but it wasn't bad, though not exactly a revelation or anything. The cinnamon roll is definitely tasty, and I recommend it.
Four: My brother's car (which is how I still think of it, even though it's mine now) accelerates really smoothly. He's a leadfoot to begin with, but I will say, it does seem kind of easy to go faster in this car than one intends, just because it takes less work to get the needle to rise. The partial-compensation factor, at this point, is that the speedometer also runs high by two miles per hour (that is, if my speedometer says 55, my GPS, or whatever showing-you-your-speed device I pass, will read 53)...which, because I am a legalistic driver who wants to go exactly the speed limit, is bugging the crud out of me because now I have to guess whether I'm right or below or over the target speed.
Five: Based on a presentation yesterday that Leah and I went to, which Zack gave about his work (he's a PhD candidate in geology), and on a couple of other times Zack's tried to tell my other friends and/or me stuff about what he does, here are the things I know, assuming I'm not remembering them wrongly, about graduate-level geology: 1) The math never really corresponds to real life; 2) Kenya has five or six lakes worth studying because of something-or-other that sort of has to do with evolution, or something; 3) lithium is apparently the future, at least if you work for a company that makes batteries; 4) five-to-six-thousand years ago, the Sahara wasn't yet a desert; and 5) at some point in the distant past, the earth should have been a ball of ice, based on the lower levels of radiation the sun was putting out (or whatever the right idea is if "radiation" isn't), but instead it wasn't a ball of ice, and geologists are trying to figure out why not.
Does #3 even count as geology, or is that just a sciency thing I also happen to have learned from him?
You can see that I have a bright potential future in geology, should composition not work out.
Six: I have sent only one Christmas card so far this season, and have bought two presents. Which may count as only one present, assuming I give them both to the same person, as I have considered doing.
Seven: Tomorrow is the church bake sale, and I signed up, figuring, why not? So I decided, for lack of other inspiration (and because I wanted to), to make a couple of loaves of bara brith. The problem is that I remembered the part of the recipe where you're supposed to let the fruit soak in the sugar/tea/cinnamon for a while, and mostly remembered the part about letting the batter sit in the refrigerator for a while after that...but not the part about having to bake it at 250 for three-and-a-half hours. I was supposed to come to church with my finished goods at ten. Am I seriously going to have to get up at six to pop two loaves of bread in the oven (particularly as that'll make them take longer than three hours)?
Well, if I am, it's probably time I went to bed.
Two: Speaking of the grammar/style test, I gave my students a study sheet a couple of weeks ago - based on the mini-lessons we've been doing all semester - and reminded them over and over about the test's approach. And still I had only about three A's in the first class, out of about fifteen. By contrast, Carrie, Zack, and Leah all took the test yesterday out of curiosity - and all of them, despite not having studied, got 100%. (Carrie may technically have done the best, however: Zack and Leah got their hundreds despite each missing one question - not the same one - because each redeemed him- or herself with the bonus question, whereas Carrie missed the bonus question but got all the normal questions right.)
Three: In case anyone's interested in hearing about pudding (...anyone?), Wegmans has been selling Hunt's Snack Packs for $1-per-package (four servings come in a package), even for the newer flavors, so the other day I figured I'd experiment, and I bought the cinnamon roll and blueberry muffin flavors. I was a little worried about the blueberry, going in, but it wasn't bad, though not exactly a revelation or anything. The cinnamon roll is definitely tasty, and I recommend it.
Four: My brother's car (which is how I still think of it, even though it's mine now) accelerates really smoothly. He's a leadfoot to begin with, but I will say, it does seem kind of easy to go faster in this car than one intends, just because it takes less work to get the needle to rise. The partial-compensation factor, at this point, is that the speedometer also runs high by two miles per hour (that is, if my speedometer says 55, my GPS, or whatever showing-you-your-speed device I pass, will read 53)...which, because I am a legalistic driver who wants to go exactly the speed limit, is bugging the crud out of me because now I have to guess whether I'm right or below or over the target speed.
Five: Based on a presentation yesterday that Leah and I went to, which Zack gave about his work (he's a PhD candidate in geology), and on a couple of other times Zack's tried to tell my other friends and/or me stuff about what he does, here are the things I know, assuming I'm not remembering them wrongly, about graduate-level geology: 1) The math never really corresponds to real life; 2) Kenya has five or six lakes worth studying because of something-or-other that sort of has to do with evolution, or something; 3) lithium is apparently the future, at least if you work for a company that makes batteries; 4) five-to-six-thousand years ago, the Sahara wasn't yet a desert; and 5) at some point in the distant past, the earth should have been a ball of ice, based on the lower levels of radiation the sun was putting out (or whatever the right idea is if "radiation" isn't), but instead it wasn't a ball of ice, and geologists are trying to figure out why not.
Does #3 even count as geology, or is that just a sciency thing I also happen to have learned from him?
You can see that I have a bright potential future in geology, should composition not work out.
Six: I have sent only one Christmas card so far this season, and have bought two presents. Which may count as only one present, assuming I give them both to the same person, as I have considered doing.
Seven: Tomorrow is the church bake sale, and I signed up, figuring, why not? So I decided, for lack of other inspiration (and because I wanted to), to make a couple of loaves of bara brith. The problem is that I remembered the part of the recipe where you're supposed to let the fruit soak in the sugar/tea/cinnamon for a while, and mostly remembered the part about letting the batter sit in the refrigerator for a while after that...but not the part about having to bake it at 250 for three-and-a-half hours. I was supposed to come to church with my finished goods at ten. Am I seriously going to have to get up at six to pop two loaves of bread in the oven (particularly as that'll make them take longer than three hours)?
Well, if I am, it's probably time I went to bed.
12.09.2010
Two-Not-Necessarily-Quick-Takes Thursday
1. So I was informed after being observed by one of my bosses last Friday, that most of the ENG 110 faculty members, myself included, have been teaching some research-paper skills that really ought to belong to ENG 111. He (said boss) was cool and nonjudgmental about it, but apparently what I should have done was just introduce my students to using sources (for example, give them a list of film directors, have them watch a film by that director, then have them look up three articles about that film and summarize them). Instead, taking the course description as my model (some apparently-in-the-process-of-becoming-outdated standards are listed there), I taught a full-blown research paper. So he praised my review lesson on everything they needed to re-learn about direct quotation, but essentially tactfully told me I shouldn't have bothered.
Also, in my case, I'm probably even more confused than everyone else because I was never given a departmental orientation in the first place (believe it or not, this is not for my lack of trying - I offered to go to this semester's if there was going to be one, but no one got back to me about it). Either way, I gave any student who passed (the ones missing major assignment requirements, such as in-text citation, needed to rewrite before I'd grade them, as the previous post may have indicated) ten extra points as compensation, and suddenly the grades looked much more normal.
2. I will probably do 7 Quick Takes Friday tomorrow, because I am so happy to almost be done with the semester, but in the meantime, I do want to give one small plug: check out at least the banner, and possibly some of the posts as well, on a blog I've been following for a month or two now, The Didactic Pirate (general rating...maybe PG-13, with occasional forays into R for profanity? Or does no one really care anymore anyway?), by a college English professor who's been at it longer than I have, is much wittier a writer than I am, and who has hilarious (and, once in a while, poignant) posts about teaching, as well as many other fine topics. Don't worry, he's much less emo about it than I am.
Also, in my case, I'm probably even more confused than everyone else because I was never given a departmental orientation in the first place (believe it or not, this is not for my lack of trying - I offered to go to this semester's if there was going to be one, but no one got back to me about it). Either way, I gave any student who passed (the ones missing major assignment requirements, such as in-text citation, needed to rewrite before I'd grade them, as the previous post may have indicated) ten extra points as compensation, and suddenly the grades looked much more normal.
2. I will probably do 7 Quick Takes Friday tomorrow, because I am so happy to almost be done with the semester, but in the meantime, I do want to give one small plug: check out at least the banner, and possibly some of the posts as well, on a blog I've been following for a month or two now, The Didactic Pirate (general rating...maybe PG-13, with occasional forays into R for profanity? Or does no one really care anymore anyway?), by a college English professor who's been at it longer than I have, is much wittier a writer than I am, and who has hilarious (and, once in a while, poignant) posts about teaching, as well as many other fine topics. Don't worry, he's much less emo about it than I am.
12.02.2010
Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah
It's that self-furious time of the unit again. I should get another job, I should get better at this job, I should do this and that, blah blah blah. More writing whiny blog posts with my spare time. More deleting them later.
But, just to show that I never really learn anything: if you see me doing anything between January second and seventeenth, between about the hours of ten and four every day, besides revamping my lesson plans, you should probably remind me of how this unit went. I think a fair amount of it's not my fault: when you have seventeen students not hand you a research paper at all, and a bunch of other kids change the spacing and/or fail to number their pages in what looks to be the wild hope that you won't notice that they never got to the four-page minimum, there's just a certain amount of negligence involved. But a startling number of my B students have failed this paper outright despite turning it in, and that worries me.
The worst part of being a teacher isn't just having to sink so many hours into comments that are never articulate enough, often won't be followed, and sometimes won't even be read. That's bad, but it's worse to have to look at someone's mess of a paper and come up with a numerical value for how much of it is their fault and how much is yours. Composition is not for the guilty of conscience. But I, when it comes to teaching, may be little else.
But, just to show that I never really learn anything: if you see me doing anything between January second and seventeenth, between about the hours of ten and four every day, besides revamping my lesson plans, you should probably remind me of how this unit went. I think a fair amount of it's not my fault: when you have seventeen students not hand you a research paper at all, and a bunch of other kids change the spacing and/or fail to number their pages in what looks to be the wild hope that you won't notice that they never got to the four-page minimum, there's just a certain amount of negligence involved. But a startling number of my B students have failed this paper outright despite turning it in, and that worries me.
The worst part of being a teacher isn't just having to sink so many hours into comments that are never articulate enough, often won't be followed, and sometimes won't even be read. That's bad, but it's worse to have to look at someone's mess of a paper and come up with a numerical value for how much of it is their fault and how much is yours. Composition is not for the guilty of conscience. But I, when it comes to teaching, may be little else.
11.04.2010
Another Thought While Grading Papers
When grading a paper written by someone older than I am, even if it's only a few years older, exclamation points and some of my usual terms of praise suddenly feel like patronization. Especially since this is community college - many, if not most, of my older-than-twenty-five students (and some of the younger ones besides) have jobs and families and are attending school on top of them. I can't even reliably get through three hours' worth of grading in a day.
When I'm talking just about their writing skills, that's one thing. They've come to learn those things, and they need to, as my comma-markings and margin comments about style and organization would suggest. But when they write process papers about ways to learn responsibility, parent a teenager, or solve one of the everyday problems connected to their jobs, they are clearly on their home ground. Obviously there's also a stylistic meaning to the comment, but really, what need have they for my writing, in teacherly fashion, and as though my approval's what makes it so, that they've given good practical advice?
When I'm talking just about their writing skills, that's one thing. They've come to learn those things, and they need to, as my comma-markings and margin comments about style and organization would suggest. But when they write process papers about ways to learn responsibility, parent a teenager, or solve one of the everyday problems connected to their jobs, they are clearly on their home ground. Obviously there's also a stylistic meaning to the comment, but really, what need have they for my writing, in teacherly fashion, and as though my approval's what makes it so, that they've given good practical advice?
10.30.2010
I still like this.
And that's all I'm going to say; right now, or at least pretty soon, I need to decide between sleep and grading more papers.
I think sleep will win.
I think sleep will win.
10.25.2010
Thoughts While Grading Papers
I'm a little too hard, mentally at least, on my Tuesday/Thursday section. True, they tend to be slowest on conceptual uptake, and they tend to have the students most willing to blow off my book-bringing instructions and talk under me to each other in class. But I will say this: their attendance, by and large, is better than that of the members of my other two classes; I think they tend to be quickest to e-mail me when I ask for that sort of thing; and every single one of them handed me in a descriptive essay, which did not happen in either of the other classes.
For the first time (I expected it to happen last semester, but it didn't), I have midsemester course-withdrawers. One of them had been witty and his attendance had been very good, but it was definitely still better that he left, because after handing in the first homework of the semester, he never handed anything else in again, and I was getting a little confused about why he was still coming. The other I'm genuinely sorry to see go, even though I know that it's for the best; he was, if sometimes a bit hard to impress, a nice guy. He tried hard, and he also cared about improving campus life as a whole.
There are three others who've never handed in anything, and so I wish they'd drop as well, but so far they haven't; we'll see what happens to them. So I have fifty-seven students overall, and fifty-four actually currently functioning as students.
So, at six papers a day, like now, I should be able to get my grading done in nine days. Since I didn't start as soon as I got the papers (or anything like - I seriously waited like a week and a half, as the amount of stuff I had to do battled with the amount of stuff I had the moral fiber to force myself to do...from what I can tell, apparently I suffer from a moral-fiber deficiency), that's still three weeks from hand-in, a week too long, but it's going to have to do.
I don't know that I fully like teaching yet, but I feel a lot less guilty about it this semester. It helps a lot to not have a second job to work. Even if I don't use my time all that much better, it's better enough to show at least a little, and anyway, the lower perceived number of things I have to do makes all the difference.
For the first time (I expected it to happen last semester, but it didn't), I have midsemester course-withdrawers. One of them had been witty and his attendance had been very good, but it was definitely still better that he left, because after handing in the first homework of the semester, he never handed anything else in again, and I was getting a little confused about why he was still coming. The other I'm genuinely sorry to see go, even though I know that it's for the best; he was, if sometimes a bit hard to impress, a nice guy. He tried hard, and he also cared about improving campus life as a whole.
There are three others who've never handed in anything, and so I wish they'd drop as well, but so far they haven't; we'll see what happens to them. So I have fifty-seven students overall, and fifty-four actually currently functioning as students.
So, at six papers a day, like now, I should be able to get my grading done in nine days. Since I didn't start as soon as I got the papers (or anything like - I seriously waited like a week and a half, as the amount of stuff I had to do battled with the amount of stuff I had the moral fiber to force myself to do...from what I can tell, apparently I suffer from a moral-fiber deficiency), that's still three weeks from hand-in, a week too long, but it's going to have to do.
I don't know that I fully like teaching yet, but I feel a lot less guilty about it this semester. It helps a lot to not have a second job to work. Even if I don't use my time all that much better, it's better enough to show at least a little, and anyway, the lower perceived number of things I have to do makes all the difference.
10.24.2010
People with Actual Fashion and/or Handbag Knowledge, I Need Your Assistance
Okay.
So back in 1996, at the close of my fifth-grade year, I was given a fantastic mini-backpack for my birthday (was it from you, Aneya, or was it from my parents?). You remember those; they were popular then. It was black and leathery-textured (though, as the tag confessed, it was actually vinyl) and had some kind of helpful buckle/clasp thing to close the main flap. I really liked it, and unless I'm totally confusing it with the fate of a different bag, I used it until it was stolen in the eleventh grade when someone broke into my dad's car. (Since it was in the bag, I also lost my learners' permit, such that I had to replace it, and such that I guess someone could have posed as me until it expired, but that's another trail of thought.)
So after that mini-backpack was no longer an option for me, I at some point asked for and was given another one. It served, but it wasn't the same (Velcro closings, rather than the metal fastener and zippers of the other one, and the material itself wasn't as sturdy). Now it's seriously worn out - ripped, frayed, knotted, all kinds of things - and I ought to get, and have been looking for, a new one. Because, as you can tell, I really like mini-backpacks.
The problem: it is no longer 1996. Mini-backpacks have not been around much for some years now, and while I hope in my heart that they will soon make a comeback (every 20 years things are supposed to, right?), I can't wait much longer. I own a purse, but purses are not the same. You have to carry them on one shoulder. I want one with two straps. But not one of those single-compartment drawstring bags made out of the stuff they make windbreaker jackets out of, or whatever. I want one with a main compartment and at least one smaller secondary compartment. Also, I want one that, while not real leather if possible, would serve for a semi-dressy situation (say, something I could bring to school if I were wearing my teaching clothes) as well as a more casual one.
So here's what I'm wondering: is there some term for them that I'm not aware of? I've found a few of them online under "mini backpack purse," but "mini backpack" alone seems to bring you to children's backpacks most of the time, and "double strap purse" turns out to mean something different. The reason I'm asking, really, is because I found some kind of mini-backpack at Target! the other day, but because the specimens were, well, a little cheap-looking, I wanted to figure out what they were called so I could look online for them in case they were making a comeback in department stores as well. But the price label on the Target rack was really for something else, I think, because it said "check clutch," and I looked that up, and even on Target.com that turns out to mean what it sounds like it means (a type of wallet that holds a checkbook, right?), and turns out not to mean anything resembling a mini-backpack.
And I want to know what they're called because I'm picky. I really want a new one, but I'm picky. So instead of just buying the Target one, I'd like to buy one I like.
Can anyone help?
So back in 1996, at the close of my fifth-grade year, I was given a fantastic mini-backpack for my birthday (was it from you, Aneya, or was it from my parents?). You remember those; they were popular then. It was black and leathery-textured (though, as the tag confessed, it was actually vinyl) and had some kind of helpful buckle/clasp thing to close the main flap. I really liked it, and unless I'm totally confusing it with the fate of a different bag, I used it until it was stolen in the eleventh grade when someone broke into my dad's car. (Since it was in the bag, I also lost my learners' permit, such that I had to replace it, and such that I guess someone could have posed as me until it expired, but that's another trail of thought.)
So after that mini-backpack was no longer an option for me, I at some point asked for and was given another one. It served, but it wasn't the same (Velcro closings, rather than the metal fastener and zippers of the other one, and the material itself wasn't as sturdy). Now it's seriously worn out - ripped, frayed, knotted, all kinds of things - and I ought to get, and have been looking for, a new one. Because, as you can tell, I really like mini-backpacks.
The problem: it is no longer 1996. Mini-backpacks have not been around much for some years now, and while I hope in my heart that they will soon make a comeback (every 20 years things are supposed to, right?), I can't wait much longer. I own a purse, but purses are not the same. You have to carry them on one shoulder. I want one with two straps. But not one of those single-compartment drawstring bags made out of the stuff they make windbreaker jackets out of, or whatever. I want one with a main compartment and at least one smaller secondary compartment. Also, I want one that, while not real leather if possible, would serve for a semi-dressy situation (say, something I could bring to school if I were wearing my teaching clothes) as well as a more casual one.
So here's what I'm wondering: is there some term for them that I'm not aware of? I've found a few of them online under "mini backpack purse," but "mini backpack" alone seems to bring you to children's backpacks most of the time, and "double strap purse" turns out to mean something different. The reason I'm asking, really, is because I found some kind of mini-backpack at Target! the other day, but because the specimens were, well, a little cheap-looking, I wanted to figure out what they were called so I could look online for them in case they were making a comeback in department stores as well. But the price label on the Target rack was really for something else, I think, because it said "check clutch," and I looked that up, and even on Target.com that turns out to mean what it sounds like it means (a type of wallet that holds a checkbook, right?), and turns out not to mean anything resembling a mini-backpack.
And I want to know what they're called because I'm picky. I really want a new one, but I'm picky. So instead of just buying the Target one, I'd like to buy one I like.
Can anyone help?
10.15.2010
Instead of Anything Productive...
...I give you Seven Quick Takes Friday: The Because-This-Blog's-Getting-Dusty version.
One: School's going all right. Though I've finally gotten through grading three sections' worth of one paper only to immediately be hit with the next (ugh), I've finally conceived of a research paper that I actually mostly want to teach - a comparison/contrast one (with cause-and-effect integrated). Basically, my students compare and contrast either something in their culture with something in another one, a group in history with its present-day iteration, or a historical figure with a popular-level adaptation (book, movie, etc.) about his or her life. In addition to just giving similarities and differences (comparison/contrast), they have to try to give possible reasons for some of the differences (cause/effect), and they have to draw from and cite at least three sources (research). So I am actually covering three units at once, which makes me feel accomplished.
Two: I went to Florida last weekend to visit Erik - we saw Universal Studios, including the Harry Potter section (the ride through Hogwarts is worth the wait, and the pumpkin juice is worth the price!); the Orlando Museum of Art; and the movie Despicable Me (very cute). And we played pirate-themed minigolf. And we ate restaurant food (including, but not limited to, Waffle House). It was a good time.
Three: But I am so glad to not have to go anywhere this weekend. Four out of the previous five weekends have involved my going out of town, and of those, three involved leaving the state.
Four: As you may imagine, that's put some extra miles on Lightning the Larger, the trusty and well-behaved car that I have been driving since just after my freshman year of college. It's currently at something like 91,000 miles, which means that soon my family is going to play what Jessie, when I told her about it, called "musical cars": my parents are about to replace one of their two vehicles anyway, at which point they'll give the other one to t3h br0, give his car to me (because it's better in the snow than my dad's car, and I'm more likely than my brother is to stay here in upstate New York), and keep my car as their backup vehicle.
This means, among other things, that I will need to get a new I-love-Alfred bumper sticker. But that should be relatively simple, maybe especially because...
Five: I will be spending parts of two consecutive weekends in Alfred come November - one to see Jo and some of the Seidlin crew, the other to attend InterVarsity's annual square dance. Besides all of that excitement, can we say, hello, New Jet? (Also, might anyone connected to either trip want to make the hourlong drive out to Sprague's? I know it's just a restaurant, and I know that the people who would most want to go there won't be in town at the time, but I kind of miss it.)
Six: Yesterday I went out in search of a gas station with a coin-operated vacuum so that I could get some of the months' worth of plant-debris-or-whatever-it-was and other who-knows-what off the floors and seats of my car (I don't own a handheld vacuum, so that was out). I finally found one in, not a gas station, but a drive-through coffee shop operating out of a building that, as far as I can tell, once held coin-operated car-wash hoses. It's called something like the Sip of Seattle, and it's out in Conklin (though apparently they also have a branch in Chenango Bridge, or Forks, or something), and why I went all the way out there is a longish story, but there it is, and you can use a vacuum there for only a dollar. I hope you all feel well-informed.
Seven: And speaking of Conklin, soon I should be hearing details for this year's Penguin Warehouse Sale, and I hope all you Binghamtonians will join me in the cheap-book glory that it is. If you have never gone, basically they fill the old Maines warehouse with cheap Penguin (and Penguin-subsidiary) books, and people buy them, sometimes by the boxful, for large percentages off the original prices. It's zooey, disorganized, and calculated to bring delight to the hearts of book-nerds all over the county and then some. How can I offer you more fun than that, right?
If you want more quick takes, go read Jen!
One: School's going all right. Though I've finally gotten through grading three sections' worth of one paper only to immediately be hit with the next (ugh), I've finally conceived of a research paper that I actually mostly want to teach - a comparison/contrast one (with cause-and-effect integrated). Basically, my students compare and contrast either something in their culture with something in another one, a group in history with its present-day iteration, or a historical figure with a popular-level adaptation (book, movie, etc.) about his or her life. In addition to just giving similarities and differences (comparison/contrast), they have to try to give possible reasons for some of the differences (cause/effect), and they have to draw from and cite at least three sources (research). So I am actually covering three units at once, which makes me feel accomplished.
Two: I went to Florida last weekend to visit Erik - we saw Universal Studios, including the Harry Potter section (the ride through Hogwarts is worth the wait, and the pumpkin juice is worth the price!); the Orlando Museum of Art; and the movie Despicable Me (very cute). And we played pirate-themed minigolf. And we ate restaurant food (including, but not limited to, Waffle House). It was a good time.
Three: But I am so glad to not have to go anywhere this weekend. Four out of the previous five weekends have involved my going out of town, and of those, three involved leaving the state.
Four: As you may imagine, that's put some extra miles on Lightning the Larger, the trusty and well-behaved car that I have been driving since just after my freshman year of college. It's currently at something like 91,000 miles, which means that soon my family is going to play what Jessie, when I told her about it, called "musical cars": my parents are about to replace one of their two vehicles anyway, at which point they'll give the other one to t3h br0, give his car to me (because it's better in the snow than my dad's car, and I'm more likely than my brother is to stay here in upstate New York), and keep my car as their backup vehicle.
This means, among other things, that I will need to get a new I-love-Alfred bumper sticker. But that should be relatively simple, maybe especially because...
Five: I will be spending parts of two consecutive weekends in Alfred come November - one to see Jo and some of the Seidlin crew, the other to attend InterVarsity's annual square dance. Besides all of that excitement, can we say, hello, New Jet? (Also, might anyone connected to either trip want to make the hourlong drive out to Sprague's? I know it's just a restaurant, and I know that the people who would most want to go there won't be in town at the time, but I kind of miss it.)
Six: Yesterday I went out in search of a gas station with a coin-operated vacuum so that I could get some of the months' worth of plant-debris-or-whatever-it-was and other who-knows-what off the floors and seats of my car (I don't own a handheld vacuum, so that was out). I finally found one in, not a gas station, but a drive-through coffee shop operating out of a building that, as far as I can tell, once held coin-operated car-wash hoses. It's called something like the Sip of Seattle, and it's out in Conklin (though apparently they also have a branch in Chenango Bridge, or Forks, or something), and why I went all the way out there is a longish story, but there it is, and you can use a vacuum there for only a dollar. I hope you all feel well-informed.
Seven: And speaking of Conklin, soon I should be hearing details for this year's Penguin Warehouse Sale, and I hope all you Binghamtonians will join me in the cheap-book glory that it is. If you have never gone, basically they fill the old Maines warehouse with cheap Penguin (and Penguin-subsidiary) books, and people buy them, sometimes by the boxful, for large percentages off the original prices. It's zooey, disorganized, and calculated to bring delight to the hearts of book-nerds all over the county and then some. How can I offer you more fun than that, right?
If you want more quick takes, go read Jen!
9.17.2010
Seven Quick Takes Friday: Oddities of Life, Weddings, Et Cetera
One: Last weekend I went to 2010 Wedding #3 of 4 (Kate and Nathanael), which involved a trip out to Rhode Island, a drive to Connecticut, and a lame affair of a phone I totally misplaced in my own car and spent about nine hours worrying about. I am so thankful, however, that this came prior to an entire week of class periods that I didn't have to do any outside prepwork for (Monday: computer workday. Wednesday: peer review. Today: Unit wrap-up, a couple of quick grammar/usage lessons, and everyone getting out between ten and twenty minutes early). It's been a nice week. A little lazier than was really necessary, but nice.
Two: I also did today, in class, a writing exercise I shamelessly stole from another teacher: have students list the parts of a tree, then have them write a paragraph describing a tree without using any of those words (hint: also ban the use of naming any specific type of tree, like oak or pine or what have you). It may also help if you yourself write your own paragraph and show yours first by way of getting a class's vulnerability problem out of the way, especially if they can tell that it wasn't the easiest thing for you, either. I used it to give them a practical taste of what I meant by writing subjectively, in images/metaphors/etc., rather than objectively and in simplified statements. ...As you may guess, I am getting used to my students occasionally giving me incredulous looks. But I'm also seeing a few of them grinning, too.
Three: By the way, the whole wedding thing is not done yet. Remember that I said #3 of four; I still have John and Libby's to go to in October. This finale will, unfortunately, probably lead to my getting home past midnight and then having to teach real live lessons the next morning at 8 and 9 AM, since BCC doesn't allow adjuncts to cancel classes without having to make them up. (For what little it's worth, said wedding will also deprive me of the right to sing with truthfulness, with the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, that I've never been to Boston in the fall.) But it should be worth it!
Four: Jo, I'm sorry I still haven't written anything about your wedding. Though at least the fourteen gazillion pictures people've put up on Facebook are doing much of the commemoration for me in the meantime.
Five: Carrie and I found in the cupboard the other day, to our surprise and perplexity, pretty much every kind of canned bean anyone ever wants except the kind we wanted, which was black beans. Our stock included - seriously, we have no idea - five cans of chickpeas, and none of them even set to pass the sell-by date anytime soon. Obligingly, I made Mark Bittman's chicken-and-chickpea tagine for dinner that night (though I think the version of his recipe that I have is a little different from the linked one). It was a little time-consuming, but worth the work.
Six: Also found in a different cupboard (those of you with Facebook have heard this, but I'll tell it anyway) and, not realizing how old they were, bitten into: Wegmans wheat entertainment crackers...four years past the use-by date. No moldy look. But the taste was basically of Brie rind and chalk. Guess what crackers I'm not going to be able to eat again for a while. (Heh. Gives the phrase "chalk and cheese" new meaning.)
Seven: While I do not recommend the apple-cider scent of those Yankee Candle hangy-down car fresheners (I really had such high hopes for that one, since the regular apple scent's so good, but no), I do recommend getting yourself to your local cider mill soon and - pay attention! This is one of the only times out of the whole year that I'm going to tell you to buy a grocery item from somewhere other than Wegmans! - celebrating the impending beginning of fall with a gallon of the real stuff. Maybe that's what I'll bring to Zack and Ife's potluck tomorrow. But I should really bring a main dish instead. Anyone have good ideas for vegetarian ones, or at least ones that don't mix meat with milk products?
Want more quick takes? Go see Jen.
Two: I also did today, in class, a writing exercise I shamelessly stole from another teacher: have students list the parts of a tree, then have them write a paragraph describing a tree without using any of those words (hint: also ban the use of naming any specific type of tree, like oak or pine or what have you). It may also help if you yourself write your own paragraph and show yours first by way of getting a class's vulnerability problem out of the way, especially if they can tell that it wasn't the easiest thing for you, either. I used it to give them a practical taste of what I meant by writing subjectively, in images/metaphors/etc., rather than objectively and in simplified statements. ...As you may guess, I am getting used to my students occasionally giving me incredulous looks. But I'm also seeing a few of them grinning, too.
Three: By the way, the whole wedding thing is not done yet. Remember that I said #3 of four; I still have John and Libby's to go to in October. This finale will, unfortunately, probably lead to my getting home past midnight and then having to teach real live lessons the next morning at 8 and 9 AM, since BCC doesn't allow adjuncts to cancel classes without having to make them up. (For what little it's worth, said wedding will also deprive me of the right to sing with truthfulness, with the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, that I've never been to Boston in the fall.) But it should be worth it!
Four: Jo, I'm sorry I still haven't written anything about your wedding. Though at least the fourteen gazillion pictures people've put up on Facebook are doing much of the commemoration for me in the meantime.
Five: Carrie and I found in the cupboard the other day, to our surprise and perplexity, pretty much every kind of canned bean anyone ever wants except the kind we wanted, which was black beans. Our stock included - seriously, we have no idea - five cans of chickpeas, and none of them even set to pass the sell-by date anytime soon. Obligingly, I made Mark Bittman's chicken-and-chickpea tagine for dinner that night (though I think the version of his recipe that I have is a little different from the linked one). It was a little time-consuming, but worth the work.
Six: Also found in a different cupboard (those of you with Facebook have heard this, but I'll tell it anyway) and, not realizing how old they were, bitten into: Wegmans wheat entertainment crackers...four years past the use-by date. No moldy look. But the taste was basically of Brie rind and chalk. Guess what crackers I'm not going to be able to eat again for a while. (Heh. Gives the phrase "chalk and cheese" new meaning.)
Seven: While I do not recommend the apple-cider scent of those Yankee Candle hangy-down car fresheners (I really had such high hopes for that one, since the regular apple scent's so good, but no), I do recommend getting yourself to your local cider mill soon and - pay attention! This is one of the only times out of the whole year that I'm going to tell you to buy a grocery item from somewhere other than Wegmans! - celebrating the impending beginning of fall with a gallon of the real stuff. Maybe that's what I'll bring to Zack and Ife's potluck tomorrow. But I should really bring a main dish instead. Anyone have good ideas for vegetarian ones, or at least ones that don't mix meat with milk products?
Want more quick takes? Go see Jen.
8.28.2010
Other Upcoming Post
...About Jo's wedding. I'm really sorry to take this long, Jo, but you may rest assured that you are not by any means the first bride who's had to wait a bit for my entry (though your wait is the longest, unfortunately). This one's pretty much at the top of my list - I may try to do it this week.
In the meantime, whether we have cause to be concerned or not (I know that that question will probably not be answerable for at least another decade), if you're curious about the amount of cell phone radiation entering that part of your body you may value the most (that would be your BRAIN), I've been poking around online, since I've been with Verizon long enough now to qualify for a free new phone, looking for radiation-level info. Some sites do the work for you, culling the information together from the manufacturer's websites; that's the type I went for. You can look someplace like here or, if for whatever reason you'd rather hear it from a technogeek (assuming your phone is new enough to still be on the market, which mine is not, so I looked on the other site), here (if you go there, the info you want is probably within the links to the left side of the screen).
In the meantime, whether we have cause to be concerned or not (I know that that question will probably not be answerable for at least another decade), if you're curious about the amount of cell phone radiation entering that part of your body you may value the most (that would be your BRAIN), I've been poking around online, since I've been with Verizon long enough now to qualify for a free new phone, looking for radiation-level info. Some sites do the work for you, culling the information together from the manufacturer's websites; that's the type I went for. You can look someplace like here or, if for whatever reason you'd rather hear it from a technogeek (assuming your phone is new enough to still be on the market, which mine is not, so I looked on the other site), here (if you go there, the info you want is probably within the links to the left side of the screen).
8.20.2010
Intermission, the Latest, Plus Bandwagony Seven Quick Takes
One: So this post and the last one are marked "Intermission" because at some point I really am going to write up a post, or more likely pair or trio of posts, explaining an important thing about orthodox evangelical Christianity: that what looks, out of full context, like modern-day Christians picking and choosing groups that they want to approve and disapprove of is, at least when we're talking about Christians trying to be both sincere and intellectually-honest, not what's going on (though, believe me, it makes sense that so many people have mistaken it for that). In other (though incomplete) words, the Bible doesn't say about slavery, and probably doesn't say about women, what non-Christian people commonly think it does, which hopefully will throw some light on why the Christian world has made some of the changes it has over the last couple of centuries, but why practicing-GLBT leadership in the church is still not a bus we're willing to catch. And I'm going to try to break that behemoth of a topic down for general understanding, and there may even, God willing and if I'm really on my game, be a little bit of humor. I sure hope so, anyway. All of this at eleven, by which I mean, whenever I actually write the post(s).
I'm hoping that will partly serve to answer the entirely fair question of why evangelical Christians aren't, essentially, the moral equivalent of racists.
Two: By the way, the reason it's going to take me so long to ever get to those posts is because I'm probably going to have to research them if I want to answer them with as much precision as they deserve. And considering that this will be my first semester with sixty students, that will probably happen only in dinks and dunks. I plan to blog more often in the meantime.
Three: Another thing I'd like to do this fall: follow football better. People here look surprised when they catch me listening to ESPN Radio and the like, but I've backed the Buffalo Bills since about first grade (which made me something of a young bandwagoner, since it was Rochester and the Jim Kelly era, but I think I've made up for it in the years since then!), and back in junior high and high school, I was all up in the NFL. I read my dad's copies of Sports Illustrated and the Democrat and Chronicle's "Monday Morning Quarterback" section and Leo Roth's and Sal Maiorana's columns, and I watched NFL Primetime every Sunday night, and in eighth grade I had a Doug Flutie jersey (and ate Flutie Flakes, oh yes I did) and talked Bills with Steve Cleere in Earth science class. Then I went to college and my attention wavered because Sundays became about many other things (among them InterVarsity, APO, and sleep). So now it's seven years later and, though I've done a pretty decent job of following the playoffs over the past couple of years, I still have a somewhat skewed understanding of which teams are supposed to be best and worst (as in, "Wait...are you sure it wasn't the Chargers that went 1-15 and the Rams that went 13-3 last season?"), and half the names I know have retired or switched teams. So I'm gonna try to get back into the regular season. We'll see how it goes.
Four: Speaking of Rochester, I still mourn losing my access to the best public-library system I have ever known. Binghamton isn't horrible, but it just doesn't begin to compare. And interlibrary loan is not free here.
Five: Speaking of reading, I am suddenly, after a lifetime of going at books more or less one by one, turning into one of those people (coughAlbertcough) who tries to read about 2349340955 of them simultaneously (or, in my current case, about seven). My chief literary interest at the moment, though, is David McCullough's 1776, which, if I haven't mentioned it, is not to be confused with the Broadway musical. I am not one of those people who usually finds military strategy interesting (the intricacies of battles and locations and the like, that is), but I have always thought the Revolutionary War pretty intriguing, maybe because history classes do a better job of connecting it to specific interesting figures (it's also one without cultural awkwardness connected to it, so I think teachers come at it more enthusiastically), and McCullough has succeeded in making even the strategy worth reading about. When I get done with this, I'll at some point start in on his biography of John Adams.
Six: I've been doing these quick takes instead of any of the things I should be doing. Among them: finishing up my church work; planning some more lessons; maybe trying to find a decent pair of black dress shoes (current pair has a hole in it, albeit a small one). The semester starts Monday. I will, come September (when Andrea takes over my church job), have more lesson-planning time than ever before in my life. And I will need it, for I sure didn't do much this summer. I mean, I did a lot of reading, and that'll certainly help. But I didn't do a lot of specific lessons.
Seven: Has it been a dry summer? I feel like mostly it has. I hear that makes for a particularly-brilliant fall. May it be!
If you'd like more or want to officially post your own, go check out Jen Fulwiler's site.
7.22.2010
Intermission
Sorry I haven't written in like three weeks, especially after that heavy last post. (Are any of you still out there? ...Bueller?) I actually have more to say about the previous, but because my monitor's officially beyond help, I've been waiting until such time as I don't need to type from my iPod. So, in the meantime, a roundup:
-I went to Rhode Island last weekend and hung out with Albert and, somewhat by extension, Nathanael and Kate (who are very engaged - wedding in September). It was good. Albert lives by the water now, within several minutes' walk of the ocean, and the whole setup is pretty captivating. Have I mentioned that I have long had a low-level fascination with many things maritime? I think some of it was Uncle Dave's pontoon boat from when I was fairly young, some was reading through the entire Horatio Hornblower series in high school (on top of parts of David Copperfield, potentially, itself accompanied by singing "Cape Breton Lullaby" for chorus), and some was factors unknown. Anyway, let me tell you, near-ocean breezes and beachhouses, friends and climbing beach rocks, cooking and Dorothy Sayers characters...in the right frame of mind, it can be a heady mix. (I'm a total northerner, though: the idea of sun on the water just does not interest me. What is the point of most beaches between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM? And altogether the very nonoceanic Alfred is still my favorite place. But this may be fairly high up there on the list.)
-Moving from heady to cerebral, on Tuesday night I ended up going to campus on the spur of the moment to help Charles host The Mad Trivia Party. (Capitalizing that "the" looks inappropriate, but in this case I think it may be right.) It was my radio debut, and it was fun. If it ever gets loaded onto the MTP podcast site, I'll let you know...assuming you have any desire to sit through the first sixtyish minutes as a background to my being on the last thirtyish. Or maybe I'll just try to let you all know in advance next time so you can listen along - or even call in.
-I'm also being more diligent tonight about my course. So it's time for me to go back to the books. Tallyho!
-I went to Rhode Island last weekend and hung out with Albert and, somewhat by extension, Nathanael and Kate (who are very engaged - wedding in September). It was good. Albert lives by the water now, within several minutes' walk of the ocean, and the whole setup is pretty captivating. Have I mentioned that I have long had a low-level fascination with many things maritime? I think some of it was Uncle Dave's pontoon boat from when I was fairly young, some was reading through the entire Horatio Hornblower series in high school (on top of parts of David Copperfield, potentially, itself accompanied by singing "Cape Breton Lullaby" for chorus), and some was factors unknown. Anyway, let me tell you, near-ocean breezes and beachhouses, friends and climbing beach rocks, cooking and Dorothy Sayers characters...in the right frame of mind, it can be a heady mix. (I'm a total northerner, though: the idea of sun on the water just does not interest me. What is the point of most beaches between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM? And altogether the very nonoceanic Alfred is still my favorite place. But this may be fairly high up there on the list.)
-Moving from heady to cerebral, on Tuesday night I ended up going to campus on the spur of the moment to help Charles host The Mad Trivia Party. (Capitalizing that "the" looks inappropriate, but in this case I think it may be right.) It was my radio debut, and it was fun. If it ever gets loaded onto the MTP podcast site, I'll let you know...assuming you have any desire to sit through the first sixtyish minutes as a background to my being on the last thirtyish. Or maybe I'll just try to let you all know in advance next time so you can listen along - or even call in.
-I'm also being more diligent tonight about my course. So it's time for me to go back to the books. Tallyho!
6.30.2010
A Sword that Cuts Both Ways
I'd actually like to start by calling out my own faith: Christians in Belgium and France, where have you been on this burqa thing?
It's no longer news, but there was what I think was an astonishing lack of outcry from religious communities the world over when, a couple of months ago, wearing a burqa in Belgium became punishable with jail time. (Though given less attention, that detail also appears here.) Not saying anything inflammatory, not coercing someone to wear one, but merely appearing in public with one. And feminists of my acquaintance, take note: the focus of the law is not on determining whose fault the burqa-wearing is and punishing the coercer. The focus of the law is not on upholding those women who want to bring charges against husbands who want to force them to cover themselves. No, the focus of the law is on punishing women who wear burqas. Whether they choose to or not, and no matter whose fault it is.
And by the way, some of them do choose to - we read about that when I took a course in Alfred on Judaism and Islam. Some Muslim women do it as a way of expressing their faith, and though I think this happens more often in mostly-Muslim countries than mostly-non-Muslim, some even do it - how's this for a reason the Western world can get behind? - because they want to get an education. They see being less visible as a way of deterring male attention, since they've made a conscious decision that being in a relationship is not something they want to do while they're getting said education (in part because getting married often leads to the end of said schooling), so they're using the burqa as a tool for self-defense. In other words, as we all should know by the time we're adults, things in and of themselves are not bad. The way things are used is what's good or bad. Almost all objects are swords that cut both ways: when I went through violence prevention-and-management training at BCC, we had to look at a typical office and find the objects that could, if we were being attacked and were truly in danger, be used as weapons. Staplers and keyboards could be used to hit someone with. Markers could be jammed into someone's eye. If you want to hurt someone and have enough creativity, you can probably do it.
Which is not to say that I think that everyone should, for example, be able to have guns because people kill people and guns don't. But I also don't think they should be banned. I think that (as there currently is) there should be a process for determining who should be trusted with one in Situations A, B, and C and who shouldn't. So while I'm against their total absence from society (can't you think of a situation in which you want a police officer to be armed, not just carrying a nightstick?), I am absolutely for their limitation. Similarly, if you have a reason to worry about men in your community forcing their women to dress in ways they don't want to dress - in essence forcing a certain brand of Islam on someone who doesn't want to be that brand thereof - then you should pass laws that make it easy for those women to bring charges against said men. You should make it easier to shelter women who want to wear whatever they want to wear. But even though I understand that clothing can send a message (after all, I don't want high schoolers wearing t-shirts with misogynistic slogans into elementary schools), I think that if there are other possible interpretations and uses than a misogynistic one (and with a burqa, there are), you shouldn't outlaw the burqa. That should be your very last resort.
But, importantly, you also should not assume that no woman "really wants" to practice an Islam that forces her to cover herself when she would prefer to show her face. From what it sounds like, Belgium simply believes that either women secretly don't want to wear it, or that their being okay with it is a sign that they've been brainwashed. There appears to be no middle ground wherein a Muslim woman of the burqa-wearing groups, though she would prefer to show her face, believes in Allah in such a way that she believes that covering up is what's most pleasing to him. And in the West, because we associate that with things like women acquiescing to abuse, we - perhaps understandably - find that intensely distasteful. But whether you're male or female, is there really nothing in your own life comparable to that? Is there really nothing you do, even though you think it's stupid, because you believe that someone wiser than you wants you to do it? Haven't you ever been a skeptical child of a good parent, or student of a good teacher? Again, I'm not suggesting that a woman who doesn't want to wear one should be made to wear one. Absolutely not. But I am suggesting that we do no favor to women by assuming that every one of them who doesn't hate the burqa should be saved from herself, by legal force if necessary.
But in Belgium, the government has pronounced that wearing one even by choice is worth fines or jailing. And though Amnesty International protested, I heard precious little protest from non-Muslim religious groups. We have, as I am about to point out, our own freedom-of-religious-expression problems to worry about. But that doesn't excuse us from our failure to ask, and ask loudly, where political-correctness lines should be drawn in the lives of people with whom we disagree. World citizens may have a right to be protected from danger. But they do not have a right to be protected from feeling offended. If we as religious groups cherish the right to say and do things that we believe are right, even in the face of the rest of the world's feeling of offense, then we need to make sure that everybody has that right. Otherwise, again, that sword cuts both ways: if we want to stand by and watch burqas get outlawed, then if anyone ever comes for things - not actions - that we Christians or Jews or Buddhists hold dear, then we will have nothing to say. We will have had it coming.
*
It is, says Monday's Supreme Court ruling, legal for colleges to insist that non-Christian students be allowed to be voting members of "officially-recognized" Christian campus groups, assuming the college decides to impose an open-membership policy. In other words, there are to be no exceptions on the basis of belief, particularly if that belief is offensive to the rest of the college.
It's like this: on some college campuses there's a group for Christian law students, and though all students in the college are permitted to attend the meetings, if you want to vote on policy, you have to sign on to a "statement of faith" - that is, a list of things that comprise that particular group's definition of what being a Christian legal student means. One of those items, however, is that you can't be a practicing gay or lesbian student. So, says the Supreme Court, if your college wants to, it can force you to accept such a student as a voting member.
Let me say that this is less clearly insulting to personal freedom than outlawing burqas. I understand that banning a gay student from officership looks like civil rights discrimination, the equivalent of a country club outlawing black members. And I understand that, not having been part of a Christian fellowship, many people assume that leadership should work much like leadership in any other group: there's a vote, there's a democracy, one non-Christian kid on a Christian fellowship's e-board wouldn't overturn a decision except in a case of a group so split that nothing's clear anyway, and if there're multiple non-Christians, it must be because they got voted in.
And in many cases, that may well be how it would work. But here's why it's still a problem.
In groups that aren't based around an identity, a wide latitude of positions on side matters is and should be permissible: you'd never think to require that a National Hockey League team be made up of political liberals, history professors, or even people who college-majored in physical-fitness education, because there's no logical connection between the NHL and those things. You make it onto an NHL team based on possession of a specific skill set, whatever other skill sets, beliefs, or traits you happen to have or not have.
In some cases, however, identity becomes important. If you're on a hockey team in the Olympics, that becomes a question not just of skill but also of identity: if you're the U.S. team, then, according to expectations that everyone's agreed on beforehand, the competition will judge each country's ability to produce good hockey players; ergo, you don't have a U.S. hockey team full of guys who've spent their lives in Canada. If they love the States and want to go get U.S. citizenship, then great. But if not, it doesn't matter how great they are as people or players: they can't be on our hockey team.
And a Christian fellowship - like College Democrats or College Republicans - is a group united by a shared identity. It's a group that exists to do things in a Christian way. We're not saying that non-Christians can't come to the meetings any more than the College Democrats would say that Sarah Palin isn't welcome at their meetings. But I think it's entirely fair to expect that a group full of Christians should have a space to say, "Okay, we as Christians need to decide what we, as a Christian body, want to do in this situation." In other words, if Sarah Palin (assuming, in this theoretical example, that she's a college student) makes a habit of coming to the College Democrats meetings, she should get the chance, during open discussion time before a vote, to raise as many objections as she wants to the College Democrats' proposal to send two thousand dollars of their budget money to, say, a Democratic candidate's presidential campaign. But she does not get to vote against it, because she is not a Democrat. If she doesn't like it, that'll have to be her problem. If she's not a Democrat, it's fair to deny her permission to help determine the Democratic response to Event X, no matter how many meetings she comes to.
And how does one decide who is and isn't a Democrat, as defined by College Democrats? Well, if College Democrats cared about defining that - and if Sarah Palin's coming to their meetings, then I think they absolutely should be able to define it - then they would draw up a statement of positions one would have to hold in order to be a Democrat. If you're on board with those positions, great. If not, you may be a Republican, or an independent, or a Green Party type, and you might want to look elsewhere or create your own club. The school should then give you money, which you can send to the candidate of your own collective choice.
And so, similarly, it should be fair for a Christian campus group - or any religious group - to say who is and is not, for the purposes of their particular fellowship, in line with their teachings. We need it for the same reasons that College Democrats needs to not have Sarah Palin trying to derail their efforts to endorse the candidate of their choice. If you don't like the prevailing definition of "Christian," then rather than force the group to change its definition, you should need to start your own group. If you're a college and you believe that by our very existence as ourselves we're discriminating against someone's civil rights, then you need to revoke our charter (though beware: Islam and orthodox Judaism also, like Christianity, forbid the practice of non-celibate homosexuality. Are you going to revoke their fellowships' charters, too?). But if you're letting us keep our charter, then you're giving us the entitlement to let us determine whom we allow to shape our policy. You are absolutely welcome to require that we let everyone see what we're doing. But are you sure you want to require that we let everyone have a say in what we're doing?
Because that sword cuts both ways. What will you do when Sarah Palin wants to be on the College Democrats' e-board, or even just vote for who's on e-board, especially if she insists that she's a Democrat despite clear indication that, according to the College Democrats' statement of what makes a Democrat, she's not? Do you require them to give her a vote? If you don't, what is the difference? While I understand that Christians legislating their beliefs onto a public college is unreasonable, is it really unreasonable to let them legislate their beliefs among themselves?
The non-religious world often tells us not to force our views on everyone else. "Go do that in your own spaces," it says, "and leave us to do our stuff in ours." But a university administration telling us that a religious fellowship can't limit its voting eligibility is essentially saying, "This is only your space to the degree that we say it is."
Belgium is saying that, too. A Muslim woman's wardrobe there, and a campus religious group's policies here: both may now permissibly become public space, at the mercy of majority rule.
_
Endnote: In researching this, I tried to use mostly mainstream sites, not specialized ones, because I wanted to make sure I could link mainstream ones. For Part 1, the sources I used for research were largely British - BBC, Daily Mail, etc. For Part 2, they were things like CNN, Washington Post, Cato Institute, and Christianity Today. If you've read Cal Thomas's recent column on the issue I discussed in Part 2, it may sound a little confusing as to what's really going on. I actually think he miscommunicates - he says that the ruling states that "a public university is not required to subsidize campus groups it considers discriminatory," and works from there, but not only was the phrasing not like that in any of my sources (the focus of the debate has seemed to be on voting and membership rights, though I imagine funding would come into that if CLI were to refuse to comply), but honestly, his thesis as stated doesn't sound like news to me. My purpose was really mainly to argue against Hastings's policy and the Court's interpretation thereof - the impracticality of an open-member mandate, and the need for exceptions for all identity-based organizations. If Thomas is right and this is about whether a college must provide a charter and funding to anyone it thinks is discriminatory, then that's a different argument, and I would have written a different piece. But I think he and I are arguing two different things.
Also, because I didn't want to link to an overtly-Christian site in this piece, I didn't read Christianity Today's article until after the fact. If I had, I would have seen that basically the whole world had already used the College Democrats example. So don't look here for originality! My apologies to the Supreme Court justice who'd already tried to explain it on those grounds.
It's no longer news, but there was what I think was an astonishing lack of outcry from religious communities the world over when, a couple of months ago, wearing a burqa in Belgium became punishable with jail time. (Though given less attention, that detail also appears here.) Not saying anything inflammatory, not coercing someone to wear one, but merely appearing in public with one. And feminists of my acquaintance, take note: the focus of the law is not on determining whose fault the burqa-wearing is and punishing the coercer. The focus of the law is not on upholding those women who want to bring charges against husbands who want to force them to cover themselves. No, the focus of the law is on punishing women who wear burqas. Whether they choose to or not, and no matter whose fault it is.
And by the way, some of them do choose to - we read about that when I took a course in Alfred on Judaism and Islam. Some Muslim women do it as a way of expressing their faith, and though I think this happens more often in mostly-Muslim countries than mostly-non-Muslim, some even do it - how's this for a reason the Western world can get behind? - because they want to get an education. They see being less visible as a way of deterring male attention, since they've made a conscious decision that being in a relationship is not something they want to do while they're getting said education (in part because getting married often leads to the end of said schooling), so they're using the burqa as a tool for self-defense. In other words, as we all should know by the time we're adults, things in and of themselves are not bad. The way things are used is what's good or bad. Almost all objects are swords that cut both ways: when I went through violence prevention-and-management training at BCC, we had to look at a typical office and find the objects that could, if we were being attacked and were truly in danger, be used as weapons. Staplers and keyboards could be used to hit someone with. Markers could be jammed into someone's eye. If you want to hurt someone and have enough creativity, you can probably do it.
Which is not to say that I think that everyone should, for example, be able to have guns because people kill people and guns don't. But I also don't think they should be banned. I think that (as there currently is) there should be a process for determining who should be trusted with one in Situations A, B, and C and who shouldn't. So while I'm against their total absence from society (can't you think of a situation in which you want a police officer to be armed, not just carrying a nightstick?), I am absolutely for their limitation. Similarly, if you have a reason to worry about men in your community forcing their women to dress in ways they don't want to dress - in essence forcing a certain brand of Islam on someone who doesn't want to be that brand thereof - then you should pass laws that make it easy for those women to bring charges against said men. You should make it easier to shelter women who want to wear whatever they want to wear. But even though I understand that clothing can send a message (after all, I don't want high schoolers wearing t-shirts with misogynistic slogans into elementary schools), I think that if there are other possible interpretations and uses than a misogynistic one (and with a burqa, there are), you shouldn't outlaw the burqa. That should be your very last resort.
But, importantly, you also should not assume that no woman "really wants" to practice an Islam that forces her to cover herself when she would prefer to show her face. From what it sounds like, Belgium simply believes that either women secretly don't want to wear it, or that their being okay with it is a sign that they've been brainwashed. There appears to be no middle ground wherein a Muslim woman of the burqa-wearing groups, though she would prefer to show her face, believes in Allah in such a way that she believes that covering up is what's most pleasing to him. And in the West, because we associate that with things like women acquiescing to abuse, we - perhaps understandably - find that intensely distasteful. But whether you're male or female, is there really nothing in your own life comparable to that? Is there really nothing you do, even though you think it's stupid, because you believe that someone wiser than you wants you to do it? Haven't you ever been a skeptical child of a good parent, or student of a good teacher? Again, I'm not suggesting that a woman who doesn't want to wear one should be made to wear one. Absolutely not. But I am suggesting that we do no favor to women by assuming that every one of them who doesn't hate the burqa should be saved from herself, by legal force if necessary.
But in Belgium, the government has pronounced that wearing one even by choice is worth fines or jailing. And though Amnesty International protested, I heard precious little protest from non-Muslim religious groups. We have, as I am about to point out, our own freedom-of-religious-expression problems to worry about. But that doesn't excuse us from our failure to ask, and ask loudly, where political-correctness lines should be drawn in the lives of people with whom we disagree. World citizens may have a right to be protected from danger. But they do not have a right to be protected from feeling offended. If we as religious groups cherish the right to say and do things that we believe are right, even in the face of the rest of the world's feeling of offense, then we need to make sure that everybody has that right. Otherwise, again, that sword cuts both ways: if we want to stand by and watch burqas get outlawed, then if anyone ever comes for things - not actions - that we Christians or Jews or Buddhists hold dear, then we will have nothing to say. We will have had it coming.
*
It is, says Monday's Supreme Court ruling, legal for colleges to insist that non-Christian students be allowed to be voting members of "officially-recognized" Christian campus groups, assuming the college decides to impose an open-membership policy. In other words, there are to be no exceptions on the basis of belief, particularly if that belief is offensive to the rest of the college.
It's like this: on some college campuses there's a group for Christian law students, and though all students in the college are permitted to attend the meetings, if you want to vote on policy, you have to sign on to a "statement of faith" - that is, a list of things that comprise that particular group's definition of what being a Christian legal student means. One of those items, however, is that you can't be a practicing gay or lesbian student. So, says the Supreme Court, if your college wants to, it can force you to accept such a student as a voting member.
Let me say that this is less clearly insulting to personal freedom than outlawing burqas. I understand that banning a gay student from officership looks like civil rights discrimination, the equivalent of a country club outlawing black members. And I understand that, not having been part of a Christian fellowship, many people assume that leadership should work much like leadership in any other group: there's a vote, there's a democracy, one non-Christian kid on a Christian fellowship's e-board wouldn't overturn a decision except in a case of a group so split that nothing's clear anyway, and if there're multiple non-Christians, it must be because they got voted in.
And in many cases, that may well be how it would work. But here's why it's still a problem.
In groups that aren't based around an identity, a wide latitude of positions on side matters is and should be permissible: you'd never think to require that a National Hockey League team be made up of political liberals, history professors, or even people who college-majored in physical-fitness education, because there's no logical connection between the NHL and those things. You make it onto an NHL team based on possession of a specific skill set, whatever other skill sets, beliefs, or traits you happen to have or not have.
In some cases, however, identity becomes important. If you're on a hockey team in the Olympics, that becomes a question not just of skill but also of identity: if you're the U.S. team, then, according to expectations that everyone's agreed on beforehand, the competition will judge each country's ability to produce good hockey players; ergo, you don't have a U.S. hockey team full of guys who've spent their lives in Canada. If they love the States and want to go get U.S. citizenship, then great. But if not, it doesn't matter how great they are as people or players: they can't be on our hockey team.
And a Christian fellowship - like College Democrats or College Republicans - is a group united by a shared identity. It's a group that exists to do things in a Christian way. We're not saying that non-Christians can't come to the meetings any more than the College Democrats would say that Sarah Palin isn't welcome at their meetings. But I think it's entirely fair to expect that a group full of Christians should have a space to say, "Okay, we as Christians need to decide what we, as a Christian body, want to do in this situation." In other words, if Sarah Palin (assuming, in this theoretical example, that she's a college student) makes a habit of coming to the College Democrats meetings, she should get the chance, during open discussion time before a vote, to raise as many objections as she wants to the College Democrats' proposal to send two thousand dollars of their budget money to, say, a Democratic candidate's presidential campaign. But she does not get to vote against it, because she is not a Democrat. If she doesn't like it, that'll have to be her problem. If she's not a Democrat, it's fair to deny her permission to help determine the Democratic response to Event X, no matter how many meetings she comes to.
And how does one decide who is and isn't a Democrat, as defined by College Democrats? Well, if College Democrats cared about defining that - and if Sarah Palin's coming to their meetings, then I think they absolutely should be able to define it - then they would draw up a statement of positions one would have to hold in order to be a Democrat. If you're on board with those positions, great. If not, you may be a Republican, or an independent, or a Green Party type, and you might want to look elsewhere or create your own club. The school should then give you money, which you can send to the candidate of your own collective choice.
And so, similarly, it should be fair for a Christian campus group - or any religious group - to say who is and is not, for the purposes of their particular fellowship, in line with their teachings. We need it for the same reasons that College Democrats needs to not have Sarah Palin trying to derail their efforts to endorse the candidate of their choice. If you don't like the prevailing definition of "Christian," then rather than force the group to change its definition, you should need to start your own group. If you're a college and you believe that by our very existence as ourselves we're discriminating against someone's civil rights, then you need to revoke our charter (though beware: Islam and orthodox Judaism also, like Christianity, forbid the practice of non-celibate homosexuality. Are you going to revoke their fellowships' charters, too?). But if you're letting us keep our charter, then you're giving us the entitlement to let us determine whom we allow to shape our policy. You are absolutely welcome to require that we let everyone see what we're doing. But are you sure you want to require that we let everyone have a say in what we're doing?
Because that sword cuts both ways. What will you do when Sarah Palin wants to be on the College Democrats' e-board, or even just vote for who's on e-board, especially if she insists that she's a Democrat despite clear indication that, according to the College Democrats' statement of what makes a Democrat, she's not? Do you require them to give her a vote? If you don't, what is the difference? While I understand that Christians legislating their beliefs onto a public college is unreasonable, is it really unreasonable to let them legislate their beliefs among themselves?
The non-religious world often tells us not to force our views on everyone else. "Go do that in your own spaces," it says, "and leave us to do our stuff in ours." But a university administration telling us that a religious fellowship can't limit its voting eligibility is essentially saying, "This is only your space to the degree that we say it is."
Belgium is saying that, too. A Muslim woman's wardrobe there, and a campus religious group's policies here: both may now permissibly become public space, at the mercy of majority rule.
_
Endnote: In researching this, I tried to use mostly mainstream sites, not specialized ones, because I wanted to make sure I could link mainstream ones. For Part 1, the sources I used for research were largely British - BBC, Daily Mail, etc. For Part 2, they were things like CNN, Washington Post, Cato Institute, and Christianity Today. If you've read Cal Thomas's recent column on the issue I discussed in Part 2, it may sound a little confusing as to what's really going on. I actually think he miscommunicates - he says that the ruling states that "a public university is not required to subsidize campus groups it considers discriminatory," and works from there, but not only was the phrasing not like that in any of my sources (the focus of the debate has seemed to be on voting and membership rights, though I imagine funding would come into that if CLI were to refuse to comply), but honestly, his thesis as stated doesn't sound like news to me. My purpose was really mainly to argue against Hastings's policy and the Court's interpretation thereof - the impracticality of an open-member mandate, and the need for exceptions for all identity-based organizations. If Thomas is right and this is about whether a college must provide a charter and funding to anyone it thinks is discriminatory, then that's a different argument, and I would have written a different piece. But I think he and I are arguing two different things.
Also, because I didn't want to link to an overtly-Christian site in this piece, I didn't read Christianity Today's article until after the fact. If I had, I would have seen that basically the whole world had already used the College Democrats example. So don't look here for originality! My apologies to the Supreme Court justice who'd already tried to explain it on those grounds.
6.17.2010
So the Last Three Weeks Went Fast, Huh?
Hi there! So guess what: summer has, as it sometimes does, more or less swallowed me up. (Really, though, you could say that about my whole life year-round since grad school, so why do I mention it now?) Things've been going well, though busily. Still trying to even begin to know where to start with my course overhaul; I've been slogging through my new textbook, a bit concerned at its errors and slight stiffness of instructional tone. My fault, though - I had five choices, and this's the one I picked.
Since many of my friends here have ties to another country (most of them because they've once lived in said other country), the World Cup is a bigger deal around here than I've ever known it to be before. We have, however, the complication of being young and fairly poor and therefore lacking cable, so we've had to get creative about our viewing. There are plenty of places to watch the games online, but tomorrow we're getting up early enough to be at Crepe Heaven, run by a Bosnian couple who're following the Cup and agreed to open 90 minutes early just for us (I hope they're willing to cook early as well, because I cannot think of a breakfast I would rather have tomorrow morning than a sweet crepe), by 7:30. That's right, we are starting our day with Germany-Serbia. It's going to be a good day for soccer, though: the US plays the 10 AM game, and England goes up against Algeria in the afternoon (though I probably won't have time to watch that).
On Saturday, the games will not be nearly as interesting, which is fine with me, because I will be too busy eating Dinosaur Barbeque and seeing family at my brother's graduation party to care about soccer anyway.
In other news, I've moved. As much as I liked living on the West Side (not to mention paying less rent) and got along all right with my housemates, six unrelated people in one house is just too many, especially when my housemates had a bunch of people over every alternate night, so I missed things like cleanliness and refrigerator space and being able to use the living room past sundown. So I moved in with Carrie, who was looking for a renter, and so far (it's been about two weeks) it's been great. Since it's Carrie's house and therefore her choice as to whether she wants a housemate, we're going to try it out for the summer. If it works out, I'll be there basically until further notice, and if it doesn't, I may well end up moving back to the old place this fall, since it sounds like there'll probably be rooms open. We'll see how it all shakes out.
In other other news, I'm going to be in Jodi's wedding this August. There are seven of us bridesmaids, and we all got to pick our own dress style (though they all have to be the same color and length and come from David's Bridal). It was just like senior prom: I ended up buying the first dress I tried on (though, like senior prom, that wasn't the only one I tried). Those of you who're Jodi's Facebook friends can see pictures of everyone's styles on her page if that strikes your fancy. Now, to get it altered and find some cherry-colored shoes to go with it!
Actually, right now I'm going to go eat soup and then go pump up my practically-flat tire. That's not quite as exciting, now is it?
Since many of my friends here have ties to another country (most of them because they've once lived in said other country), the World Cup is a bigger deal around here than I've ever known it to be before. We have, however, the complication of being young and fairly poor and therefore lacking cable, so we've had to get creative about our viewing. There are plenty of places to watch the games online, but tomorrow we're getting up early enough to be at Crepe Heaven, run by a Bosnian couple who're following the Cup and agreed to open 90 minutes early just for us (I hope they're willing to cook early as well, because I cannot think of a breakfast I would rather have tomorrow morning than a sweet crepe), by 7:30. That's right, we are starting our day with Germany-Serbia. It's going to be a good day for soccer, though: the US plays the 10 AM game, and England goes up against Algeria in the afternoon (though I probably won't have time to watch that).
On Saturday, the games will not be nearly as interesting, which is fine with me, because I will be too busy eating Dinosaur Barbeque and seeing family at my brother's graduation party to care about soccer anyway.
In other news, I've moved. As much as I liked living on the West Side (not to mention paying less rent) and got along all right with my housemates, six unrelated people in one house is just too many, especially when my housemates had a bunch of people over every alternate night, so I missed things like cleanliness and refrigerator space and being able to use the living room past sundown. So I moved in with Carrie, who was looking for a renter, and so far (it's been about two weeks) it's been great. Since it's Carrie's house and therefore her choice as to whether she wants a housemate, we're going to try it out for the summer. If it works out, I'll be there basically until further notice, and if it doesn't, I may well end up moving back to the old place this fall, since it sounds like there'll probably be rooms open. We'll see how it all shakes out.
In other other news, I'm going to be in Jodi's wedding this August. There are seven of us bridesmaids, and we all got to pick our own dress style (though they all have to be the same color and length and come from David's Bridal). It was just like senior prom: I ended up buying the first dress I tried on (though, like senior prom, that wasn't the only one I tried). Those of you who're Jodi's Facebook friends can see pictures of everyone's styles on her page if that strikes your fancy. Now, to get it altered and find some cherry-colored shoes to go with it!
Actually, right now I'm going to go eat soup and then go pump up my practically-flat tire. That's not quite as exciting, now is it?
5.25.2010
Maybe a Little Cryptic
Psalm 127:1-2 (NLT for a change):
Unless the LORD builds a house,
the work of the builders is wasted.
Unless the LORD protects a city,
guarding it with sentries will do no good.
It is useless for you to work so hard
from early morning until late at night,
anxiously working for food to eat;
for God gives rest to his loved ones.
Our little group at church has to remember that this summer, with everything we try to do. Let us throw ourselves into it. But let's not forget for a moment that we're the hands here, not the brain.
And let's not forget Jesus telling us that the poor will always be with us. There's plenty we can do, materially and spiritually alike. But if two or three or five people could fix everything forever, just by working hard and wanting it enough, by now we'd have seen more cities turned around. I wonder if I thought, in junior high, that all that was missing was workers. I wonder if I thought that apathy caused poverty, that it was just a question of whether structures were in place, just a question of lack of money.
I keep thinking of the semester that Charles and I graded for Schneider. I watched her try to teach 120 kids at once, read their papers, and almost despaired at the idea that maybe teaching was long stretches of disappointment alleviated by the occasional bright spot, the fraction of kids who care enough and manage somehow to learn (assuming always, which one can't always do in college or anywhere else, that the material's even worth learning).
I never realized that helping people is, in the long term, probably always like that. I kept thinking that a better organization would solve my problem - InterVarsity, Mercy Ships. But these days, looking around, I'm not so sure. I've come to believe that all service is like this - slow work toward change, few real takers. Every big thing built on a million little things. What God's view looks like from eternity, I can't yet say.
But when I look at my life, the work that I do and the benefits that I have, the friends around me and the possibilities, I sometimes marvel. I don't have the depth of friendship that I had in junior high or early college. I don't have the certainty of faith that I had then, either.
But increasingly this is the life I've always wanted. It isn't as breathtaking as I expected. The knowledge of its importance, to what degree it even is important, doesn't infuse me and make everything feel like spring winds, the way I guess I thought it might. But it's real and, though clumsy and not representative of anyone's best effort every day, it's right. And today I rejoice at the wonder, little by little, of God's master plan.
Unless the LORD builds a house,
the work of the builders is wasted.
Unless the LORD protects a city,
guarding it with sentries will do no good.
It is useless for you to work so hard
from early morning until late at night,
anxiously working for food to eat;
for God gives rest to his loved ones.
Our little group at church has to remember that this summer, with everything we try to do. Let us throw ourselves into it. But let's not forget for a moment that we're the hands here, not the brain.
And let's not forget Jesus telling us that the poor will always be with us. There's plenty we can do, materially and spiritually alike. But if two or three or five people could fix everything forever, just by working hard and wanting it enough, by now we'd have seen more cities turned around. I wonder if I thought, in junior high, that all that was missing was workers. I wonder if I thought that apathy caused poverty, that it was just a question of whether structures were in place, just a question of lack of money.
I keep thinking of the semester that Charles and I graded for Schneider. I watched her try to teach 120 kids at once, read their papers, and almost despaired at the idea that maybe teaching was long stretches of disappointment alleviated by the occasional bright spot, the fraction of kids who care enough and manage somehow to learn (assuming always, which one can't always do in college or anywhere else, that the material's even worth learning).
I never realized that helping people is, in the long term, probably always like that. I kept thinking that a better organization would solve my problem - InterVarsity, Mercy Ships. But these days, looking around, I'm not so sure. I've come to believe that all service is like this - slow work toward change, few real takers. Every big thing built on a million little things. What God's view looks like from eternity, I can't yet say.
But when I look at my life, the work that I do and the benefits that I have, the friends around me and the possibilities, I sometimes marvel. I don't have the depth of friendship that I had in junior high or early college. I don't have the certainty of faith that I had then, either.
But increasingly this is the life I've always wanted. It isn't as breathtaking as I expected. The knowledge of its importance, to what degree it even is important, doesn't infuse me and make everything feel like spring winds, the way I guess I thought it might. But it's real and, though clumsy and not representative of anyone's best effort every day, it's right. And today I rejoice at the wonder, little by little, of God's master plan.
5.18.2010
!
I missed this blog's eight-year anniversary yesterday because I was busy grading papers and playing trivia. So here goes: it's been eight years. Crazy, huh?
For this next year, I will try to write real posts instead of what are increasingly-often essentially just blogged-out tweets.
Well, anyway, I'll try to try.
For this next year, I will try to write real posts instead of what are increasingly-often essentially just blogged-out tweets.
Well, anyway, I'll try to try.
5.17.2010
*whew*
So some of them came out a little overinflated - next semester I'll have to spell things out better for both myself and them, and I've come up with some good ways to teach grammar so that I can be more stringent about grading it (since in the real world they have their professional lives to think about) - but the grades for this semester are done. They look like CB's, at least what I imagine hers are like based on how she hinted that they tended to look: almost evenly split between A's and B's (well, those ranges, anyway), and then a cliffdrop into F's for the people who were missing major assignments (mathematically it just didn't work out for them - although my plagiarist nearly passed, and I actually wonder if maybe he should have, repugnant as the idea is to me). Which is to say, no one passed with less than an 83. I wonder whether that's a good, bad, or indifferent thing.
Anyway, it's done, thank heavens, and I'm going to go out and do stuff and then play trivia. The end.
Anyway, it's done, thank heavens, and I'm going to go out and do stuff and then play trivia. The end.
!!!!!
I found my selected-computer-folders CD from 2005! The one that had so much of what I thought I'd lost forever after my old computer died and the Circuit City guy erased my secret folders when he fixed it! I have it! I have it! It's back! It's back!
So I've spent half the night reading, reading, reading stuff I'd written (or AIM conversations I'd been part of), much of it in high school. And carefully not reading some of the stuff I know is probably lame.
I have to say, not to be self-aggrandizing, but for an eleventh-grader, some of it is dang good. One of the best is about an RIT hockey game, a really big one. Next year it'll've been a decade since it happened - ruddy crud. But maybe I'll post it up sometime.
So I've spent half the night reading, reading, reading stuff I'd written (or AIM conversations I'd been part of), much of it in high school. And carefully not reading some of the stuff I know is probably lame.
I have to say, not to be self-aggrandizing, but for an eleventh-grader, some of it is dang good. One of the best is about an RIT hockey game, a really big one. Next year it'll've been a decade since it happened - ruddy crud. But maybe I'll post it up sometime.
5.08.2010
If You're Familiar with Either of These, You'll Know How Funny this Exchange Is
Reverend Matt, trying to get Reverend Anne to watch 24 with him: "This is a story about the search for true love, babe. After he shoots this guy, [Jack and the girl] go away for a romantic weekend away."
Anne, later, trying to get Matt to watch Babette's Feast with her: "But, sweetie, after the dinner, the tanks roll in and all the old ladies shoot up the town. It's actually a huge battle!"
So my plan to do anything productive past this midafternoon - including, but not limited to, riding my bike and grading the last essays - which at least some of my students would like to receive back on Monday, but which, since they only turned them in on Wednesday, they very probably will not - was ruined by what was accidentally an epic over-three-hour nap. And clearly I have done nothing since waking up at eight PM except go on Facebook, start to read Terry Pratchett's Night Watch (I don't believe I've ever read any Terry Pratchett, but Carrie loaned it to me months ago and said I should), which is good so far, and eat and eat. Sigh.
I'm so glad the semester is over in a week. It's ending all right, but I'm still so very, very glad indeed.
Anne, later, trying to get Matt to watch Babette's Feast with her: "But, sweetie, after the dinner, the tanks roll in and all the old ladies shoot up the town. It's actually a huge battle!"
So my plan to do anything productive past this midafternoon - including, but not limited to, riding my bike and grading the last essays - which at least some of my students would like to receive back on Monday, but which, since they only turned them in on Wednesday, they very probably will not - was ruined by what was accidentally an epic over-three-hour nap. And clearly I have done nothing since waking up at eight PM except go on Facebook, start to read Terry Pratchett's Night Watch (I don't believe I've ever read any Terry Pratchett, but Carrie loaned it to me months ago and said I should), which is good so far, and eat and eat. Sigh.
I'm so glad the semester is over in a week. It's ending all right, but I'm still so very, very glad indeed.
5.04.2010
Best Geekiest Security Question Ever
Changed some privacy information in the e-mail address I've had since early high school and was surprised at first by my security question (which I just changed so that I can tell this story): What's Drew's middle name?
I stared at it for a second, surprised I'd ask such a thing - have I ever known what my cousin Drew's middle name is? I can give his last name without too much thought, but his middle? It couldn't be him. But what other Drew did I know? The guy who writes Toothpaste for Dinner? But even his last name isn't public, let alone his middle.
And then I realized who I was talking about.
I made the account in, if I remember correctly, ninth grade. Think about what I was obsessed with in ninth grade. And it's totally the kind of secret question I'd write.
For I still, a decade later, remember Ryan Stiles's response in Whose Line is it Anyway?'s game "Scenes from a Hat" to the prompt, "Little-Known Facts About our Host, Drew Carey."
Said Ryan, looking confused, "What kind of a middle name is Allison?"
I stared at it for a second, surprised I'd ask such a thing - have I ever known what my cousin Drew's middle name is? I can give his last name without too much thought, but his middle? It couldn't be him. But what other Drew did I know? The guy who writes Toothpaste for Dinner? But even his last name isn't public, let alone his middle.
And then I realized who I was talking about.
I made the account in, if I remember correctly, ninth grade. Think about what I was obsessed with in ninth grade. And it's totally the kind of secret question I'd write.
For I still, a decade later, remember Ryan Stiles's response in Whose Line is it Anyway?'s game "Scenes from a Hat" to the prompt, "Little-Known Facts About our Host, Drew Carey."
Said Ryan, looking confused, "What kind of a middle name is Allison?"
5.03.2010
Bitlet
Ben is playing Disney songs as he practices the guitar. He's just moved from "A Whole New World" into "Hakuna Matata." But who knows, maybe it's a birthday present for Kelly, whose party will be tomorrow night.
(And he's just falsettoed his way through, "When I was a young wartho-o-o-o-og!")
I really don't have anything else to say. I'm gonna go back to grading now, I think.
(And he's just falsettoed his way through, "When I was a young wartho-o-o-o-og!")
I really don't have anything else to say. I'm gonna go back to grading now, I think.
Small Victory
Today, finding myself with an extra half-hour of class because so many people skived off on their presentations, I led my students in stylistic tweaking, including changing paragraphs that overrely on the verb "is" ("The ice cream shop is on Main Street. There are eighteen flavors. Some of these flavors are...") to ones based in more specific verbs ("Located on Main Street, the ice cream shop offers eighteen flavors, including...")
And by the time class ended, one of my students had rewritten a telegraphic paragraph into something that was so much more lively that I wanted to applaud.
Finally, something I can teach in five minutes, get the writers who need it to grasp it right away, and show the others in a demonstrable way how much of a difference it makes.
I feel oddly humbled, like God gave me that moment as a gift (especially in that I didn't plan to teach that today and that getting my students to participate is often like pulling teeth), and figured that I would record it to show you what else teaching, every once in a while, can be like.
And by the time class ended, one of my students had rewritten a telegraphic paragraph into something that was so much more lively that I wanted to applaud.
Finally, something I can teach in five minutes, get the writers who need it to grasp it right away, and show the others in a demonstrable way how much of a difference it makes.
I feel oddly humbled, like God gave me that moment as a gift (especially in that I didn't plan to teach that today and that getting my students to participate is often like pulling teeth), and figured that I would record it to show you what else teaching, every once in a while, can be like.
4.30.2010
Friday Night
I may have dealt with more animal excrement (literal, even, not figurative!) over the past three days than in my entire life heretofore.
However, I've also pretty much gotten through commenting on my minimum number of papers for the night, which is not nearly as impressive as it sounds because I only have twenty students and about four more days to grade.
So I'm going to come back to this whole thing later and hopefully comment on another paper, because the plagiarized one I set aside probably doesn't count. But for now...
For now, my stomach is full of barbecue pork and a little bit of salad.
For now, I have two chapters left to read in the fantastic A Year in Provence, and I'm going to save them for when I get through more papers.
For now I'm going to Wegmans to buy supplies for my very own Quarter-Century Birthday Celebration and Dessert Festival, which takes place tomorrow night, on the eve of my birthday. Despite the ever-increasing number of cookbooks and cooking blog sites I read, when it came to what I would make for this occasion, for the occasion of my twenty-fifth year and a gathering of as many of my generally-in-the-area close friends as I could summon, I decided to go with the experts. I chose two recipes...because it's my party, and I'll make two desserts if I want to. And, yes, I certainly want to:
-I am making this if I can find a good pan to do it in.
-And, of course, I am making these because, seriously, why would I not? (But I am halving the amount of butter and sugar called for, the variation Carrie and I tried at her house to previous success.)
And if I had time beyond that, I would make a flourless chocolate cake, because I think the last time I had some was when I made one my senior year at Alfred for Death by Chocolate, and it is high time I had some again.
But I don't think I do have time, so instead I'm going to prep for this party, which is so exciting (if I were Anne, I would go all German-style capitalization on it and write "which is So Exciting"). And I'd better do it right now.
However, I've also pretty much gotten through commenting on my minimum number of papers for the night, which is not nearly as impressive as it sounds because I only have twenty students and about four more days to grade.
So I'm going to come back to this whole thing later and hopefully comment on another paper, because the plagiarized one I set aside probably doesn't count. But for now...
For now, my stomach is full of barbecue pork and a little bit of salad.
For now, I have two chapters left to read in the fantastic A Year in Provence, and I'm going to save them for when I get through more papers.
For now I'm going to Wegmans to buy supplies for my very own Quarter-Century Birthday Celebration and Dessert Festival, which takes place tomorrow night, on the eve of my birthday. Despite the ever-increasing number of cookbooks and cooking blog sites I read, when it came to what I would make for this occasion, for the occasion of my twenty-fifth year and a gathering of as many of my generally-in-the-area close friends as I could summon, I decided to go with the experts. I chose two recipes...because it's my party, and I'll make two desserts if I want to. And, yes, I certainly want to:
-I am making this if I can find a good pan to do it in.
-And, of course, I am making these because, seriously, why would I not? (But I am halving the amount of butter and sugar called for, the variation Carrie and I tried at her house to previous success.)
And if I had time beyond that, I would make a flourless chocolate cake, because I think the last time I had some was when I made one my senior year at Alfred for Death by Chocolate, and it is high time I had some again.
But I don't think I do have time, so instead I'm going to prep for this party, which is so exciting (if I were Anne, I would go all German-style capitalization on it and write "which is So Exciting"). And I'd better do it right now.
because, that's why
My students' papers are probably a little better than they looked last night. Or else I'm more willing to think well of them because I had them write about the paper during a few minutes of class today and tell me what they had trouble with, or maybe it's because I purposely graded one of the better ones first, or maybe things are better because it's sunny and warm and Kay from church helped me with the house and animals today, or maybe the papers really are that bad but I've finally gotten over the initial shock of it.
Not that I suddenly magically think I'm going to succeed in this career - ultimately, I still rather think I won't, and frankly still have very little desire to, but right now I'd better try to because I sure don't have any better ideas.
Right now my biggest problem is really just how long it takes to grade them all well, and how little time and motivation I have. I guess that's my fault, as usual. I've been avoiding the things all week.
Not that I suddenly magically think I'm going to succeed in this career - ultimately, I still rather think I won't, and frankly still have very little desire to, but right now I'd better try to because I sure don't have any better ideas.
Right now my biggest problem is really just how long it takes to grade them all well, and how little time and motivation I have. I guess that's my fault, as usual. I've been avoiding the things all week.
4.29.2010
Just So You Know
I have pretty much forgotten why I ever liked cats, particularly male ones, but really all of them. I suppose I'll have to wait for a mouse infestation somewhere in order for me to remember.
4.23.2010
Seven Very-Quick Takes Friday
Vaguely in the style of Jen Fulwiler's series:
1. Last weekend I went to Rhode Island and saw (besides, of course, Albert and his family) the RI School of Design museum and, perhaps best of all (except for Albert himself), some pretty sweet live figure skating (including Olympians!). Oh, and all the places where land that used to be there got washed away by the Pawtuxet River's crazy overflow. And, for that matter, two Food Network shows that I have never watched before. It was all a very good time. (Driving back home late at night: not as much fun. I needed it to stay awake, but when I haven't had caffeine for a while, I always forget how much, the next day, I resent caffeine.) What've you all been up to lately?
2. On the cooking front, I made some enchiladas this week. I started with Pioneer Woman's recipe, but tweaked freely - deleted the olives and chilies, added green pepper, changed up the hamburger for chicken and the corn tortillas for wheat ones (the latter accidentally). They came out pretty well. Anyone out there have any recommendations for good pre-made enchilada sauce, though? The Old El Paso stuff's a bit too tomato-soupy in taste for my liking.
3. While we're on the subject, here's how you know either your last-minute cooking is better than you think or else your housemates just eat so much cruddy food that they don't recognize good stuff (call that the MFK Fisher Theory of Culinary Success, since she proposes that that's why Americans take pleasure in such mediocre food, because we're so used to outright bad food): the bodgy egg-drop soup I made last night got an enthusiastic review from, of all people, my Chinese-American housemate Brian. Then again, he said it was really good - he didn't comment on its authenticity level.
4. Speaking of housemates, I'll most likely be moving out of my current place by June 1st. Where I'll be moving to next, however, and with whom, is still coming together. Binghamton has these zoning laws that make it really hard for upwards of three unrelated people to live together, which's slowing down the hope that Ife, Zack, Leah, and I have for splitting rent/utilities for part of some house somewhere.
5. My lesson-planning and church-work have both been terribly-executed this week. When you have two jobs, sometimes you're just lame at both of them at once. It's probably because I'm so tired. I am really tired. Which is mostly my fault.
6. Allergy sufferers: I heard on the radio that a spoonful of honey per day, particularly if it's locally-made, can help lessen the effects because there's pollen in it and it's a way of building up a tolerance. My allergies are usually only light, but I'm trying it anyway. (And as for where the honey comes from, surely the flowers in Alfred are similar to the ones in Binghamton?)
7. On a final, football-drafty note: Dear Buffalo Bills, Jimmy Clausen and Colt McCoy are still available, and we have the ninth pick of the second round. PLEASE draft one of them. And/or the best offensive lineman you can find. Thank you.
1. Last weekend I went to Rhode Island and saw (besides, of course, Albert and his family) the RI School of Design museum and, perhaps best of all (except for Albert himself), some pretty sweet live figure skating (including Olympians!). Oh, and all the places where land that used to be there got washed away by the Pawtuxet River's crazy overflow. And, for that matter, two Food Network shows that I have never watched before. It was all a very good time. (Driving back home late at night: not as much fun. I needed it to stay awake, but when I haven't had caffeine for a while, I always forget how much, the next day, I resent caffeine.) What've you all been up to lately?
2. On the cooking front, I made some enchiladas this week. I started with Pioneer Woman's recipe, but tweaked freely - deleted the olives and chilies, added green pepper, changed up the hamburger for chicken and the corn tortillas for wheat ones (the latter accidentally). They came out pretty well. Anyone out there have any recommendations for good pre-made enchilada sauce, though? The Old El Paso stuff's a bit too tomato-soupy in taste for my liking.
3. While we're on the subject, here's how you know either your last-minute cooking is better than you think or else your housemates just eat so much cruddy food that they don't recognize good stuff (call that the MFK Fisher Theory of Culinary Success, since she proposes that that's why Americans take pleasure in such mediocre food, because we're so used to outright bad food): the bodgy egg-drop soup I made last night got an enthusiastic review from, of all people, my Chinese-American housemate Brian. Then again, he said it was really good - he didn't comment on its authenticity level.
4. Speaking of housemates, I'll most likely be moving out of my current place by June 1st. Where I'll be moving to next, however, and with whom, is still coming together. Binghamton has these zoning laws that make it really hard for upwards of three unrelated people to live together, which's slowing down the hope that Ife, Zack, Leah, and I have for splitting rent/utilities for part of some house somewhere.
5. My lesson-planning and church-work have both been terribly-executed this week. When you have two jobs, sometimes you're just lame at both of them at once. It's probably because I'm so tired. I am really tired. Which is mostly my fault.
6. Allergy sufferers: I heard on the radio that a spoonful of honey per day, particularly if it's locally-made, can help lessen the effects because there's pollen in it and it's a way of building up a tolerance. My allergies are usually only light, but I'm trying it anyway. (And as for where the honey comes from, surely the flowers in Alfred are similar to the ones in Binghamton?)
7. On a final, football-drafty note: Dear Buffalo Bills, Jimmy Clausen and Colt McCoy are still available, and we have the ninth pick of the second round. PLEASE draft one of them. And/or the best offensive lineman you can find. Thank you.
4.22.2010
Right On, Sir
Heard this week at the end of a pastor's answering-machine recording:
"Now have a blessed day...unless you've already made up your mind to do otherwise."
"Now have a blessed day...unless you've already made up your mind to do otherwise."
4.20.2010
On a Completely-Different Note
Two psychoanalysts met on the street and greeted each other: "You're fine. How am I?"
-Source Unknown
-Source Unknown
4.19.2010
Monday Thought, Following Tim's Pictures of Spain
I really believe that getting to know a "normal" place profoundly is of incredible value. I really believe that places are not defined by their sights, but by their people, and that you should come to love a place just because you live there and can sit in a random patch of grass and know you know it. I believe that Jesus, who was from a small and backwater town, values normal places. And I know that great and beautiful cultures are made up of very normal people, just doing all the things that normal people do.
I am not, despite all the stuff I did in high school, a revolutionary. I don't yearn for the exotic or necessarily the heartrending; I live at home and I do what I do, and on most days that is what I want. That said, sometimes I wish Binghamton were more interesting and impressive than it is, and many days the world is big and God's purpose is entirely beyond me.
I am not, despite all the stuff I did in high school, a revolutionary. I don't yearn for the exotic or necessarily the heartrending; I live at home and I do what I do, and on most days that is what I want. That said, sometimes I wish Binghamton were more interesting and impressive than it is, and many days the world is big and God's purpose is entirely beyond me.
4.02.2010
Friday Link
I am posting this for multiple reasons, namely:
1. Because the piece's author is the (witty and lovely) wife of someone I know.
2. Because it is, as I can say because I know them personally, absolutely believable. That totally is the kind of stuff "Napoleon" does...but also, towards the end, the kind of funny and decent he can be, too.
3. Because it's about cooking.
4. Because I am so relieved by Jillian's admitting to the kind of in-despair-about-the-whole-world fetal-position sob (while trying to be "systematic and rational") of which I have more than once been guilty, both from a romantic standpoint and not.
5. Because I should use it to help me figure out how to teach personal narrative to my students, even though this doesn't work as a narrative.
Today is Good Friday, but this actually would have been a good Ash Wednesday piece. Not that anyone's timing was deliberate anyway.
Anyway, you should read it. And I'm too tired today to say anything more inspired than that. The end.
1. Because the piece's author is the (witty and lovely) wife of someone I know.
2. Because it is, as I can say because I know them personally, absolutely believable. That totally is the kind of stuff "Napoleon" does...but also, towards the end, the kind of funny and decent he can be, too.
3. Because it's about cooking.
4. Because I am so relieved by Jillian's admitting to the kind of in-despair-about-the-whole-world fetal-position sob (while trying to be "systematic and rational") of which I have more than once been guilty, both from a romantic standpoint and not.
5. Because I should use it to help me figure out how to teach personal narrative to my students, even though this doesn't work as a narrative.
Today is Good Friday, but this actually would have been a good Ash Wednesday piece. Not that anyone's timing was deliberate anyway.
Anyway, you should read it. And I'm too tired today to say anything more inspired than that. The end.
4.01.2010
You Know I've Always Got Your Back...Really
I drew it myself. Feel free to print, cut out, and tape to an unsuspecting passerby today.
Happy first of April, everybody. And happy Maundy Thursday, too! All you Christians out there, once you've fooled people with your fish, go wash their feet. :)
3.23.2010
Heh
The thing about teaching is that the same stuff that's a pain in the neck is also the stuff that keeps you employed.
In other words, it's often difficult to try to come up with lessons to teach people how to develop/employ Skill X, but if they already knew, what would you be teaching for? You'd be a writing consultant instead.
In other words, it's often difficult to try to come up with lessons to teach people how to develop/employ Skill X, but if they already knew, what would you be teaching for? You'd be a writing consultant instead.
3.17.2010
3.15.2010
PS
Today I also bought one of those pre-made window "greenhouses" with peat pellets so that I can grow something in my room. What can I say: it was marked down to $2.47, I'm entranced every spring (or near-spring) by the appearance of flower and vegetable seed packets in otherwise-quotidian stores...and I didn't realize that the seeds weren't included. They kind of went out of their way on the label to hide that information, and, as mentioned, I was a little punch-drunk by the aforementioned seed-packet display right in the middle of the Wegmans general-merchandise area. (Can you tell that I think New York winters are too long?) So...y'know. Can anyone think of plants that grow well in only about an inch of soil?
Rays of Light
After asking JoAnn the Secretary if I had to submit midsemester grades this coming Wednesday and hearing that I did, I've been, as you'll know from a few entries down, a little worried about the prospect of trying to get everything graded by Wednesday despite having just having gotten the new essays in on Friday.
However, when I actually read the form, here is what I saw (underlining is theirs, not mine):
For midterm (WARNING GRADES) grades, enter all D, I, F grades in the midterm grade columns next to the appropriate student's name. Students who are making satisfactory progress do not need to be graded...
In other words, I don't have to grade anyone who's hanging higher than a D right now (read: all but about three of my students). Which means I have until Friday morning, not Wednesday morning, to get the new project grading done.
In other other words, I'm down to having to grade five papers a day, rather than ten each day for the next two days. I still promised everyone I'd get the new essays back to them on Friday, but at least now I don't have to know all their grades for them two days earlier than that.
It is almost too good to be true.
Also almost too good to be true: midsemester evaluations. You guys just missed, or at least I think you all missed because it only survived for about two hours before its deletion, my latest entry in angsty panic about how the semester was going, because my students' descriptive-essay cover letters were like "dude, I'm such a bad writer, and you confused me, and I had no idea what you wanted!", and today in class, as we started the new unit on the research paper, there was like this palpable feeling of sullenness and skepticism.
I've really been wondering if I'm any good at this.
But today I actually read the evaluations, and it turns out that everybody is actually pretty much fine with the class. In fact, I think the most frequent complaint I got was not about the way I teach, but about having to do a research paper...which I guess would explain this morning.
More shockingly, about half the class had no suggestions for me about what to change. One guy did say that I should find out what they're interested in so they write more about what they're more interested in, and one suggested I find a way to minimize awkward silences when nobody answers a question (well, that should be simple: I should call on people randomly more often, but I'm a bigger pushover here than at BU and haven't wanted to torture these kids any more than necessary), and one said that she (the handwriting would suggest a she, even though it was anonymous) did feel like the assignments were too easy (I probably know who that is, and when it comes to her, she's probably right...maybe I should give her a way this unit to do something harder). Several may have indirectly called the class boring by answering "haven't had it yet" to my question, "What is the most memorable class day we've had so far, and why?" But that was really most of the other-than-anti-research-paper suggestions. And since it's not my fault we're doing a research paper - it's one of the few things that I'm more or less required to do - I get off pretty easy on that one.
I mean, people liking my class still doesn't mean I teach well. I do think I may have to give everybody a five-point the-teacher-was-a-jerk-this-unit bonus on the newest essays: it turns out that I only took five actual class periods to try to teach the descriptive essay (we got snowed out on a sixth, and the seventh and eighth were just peer review and conferencing), which even at BU might have been pushing it, and in this case probably really was, especially since it's something I haven't taught before, which always makes me take about half the unit to figure out what I really want (as opposed to what, as we start the unit, I think I want). Like, there were a lot of x-factors I never cleared up, and looking at what I got on Friday, I think it shows. But, that said, I think this is still the best set of evaluations I've ever gotten, and either that means that I'm improving, and/or it means that these students have lower standards, but right now it means that I feel less like this is going to be a long semester and more like it's just going to be a long unit. Today, I think that's going to be enough.
However, when I actually read the form, here is what I saw (underlining is theirs, not mine):
For midterm (WARNING GRADES) grades, enter all D, I, F grades in the midterm grade columns next to the appropriate student's name. Students who are making satisfactory progress do not need to be graded...
In other words, I don't have to grade anyone who's hanging higher than a D right now (read: all but about three of my students). Which means I have until Friday morning, not Wednesday morning, to get the new project grading done.
In other other words, I'm down to having to grade five papers a day, rather than ten each day for the next two days. I still promised everyone I'd get the new essays back to them on Friday, but at least now I don't have to know all their grades for them two days earlier than that.
It is almost too good to be true.
Also almost too good to be true: midsemester evaluations. You guys just missed, or at least I think you all missed because it only survived for about two hours before its deletion, my latest entry in angsty panic about how the semester was going, because my students' descriptive-essay cover letters were like "dude, I'm such a bad writer, and you confused me, and I had no idea what you wanted!", and today in class, as we started the new unit on the research paper, there was like this palpable feeling of sullenness and skepticism.
I've really been wondering if I'm any good at this.
But today I actually read the evaluations, and it turns out that everybody is actually pretty much fine with the class. In fact, I think the most frequent complaint I got was not about the way I teach, but about having to do a research paper...which I guess would explain this morning.
More shockingly, about half the class had no suggestions for me about what to change. One guy did say that I should find out what they're interested in so they write more about what they're more interested in, and one suggested I find a way to minimize awkward silences when nobody answers a question (well, that should be simple: I should call on people randomly more often, but I'm a bigger pushover here than at BU and haven't wanted to torture these kids any more than necessary), and one said that she (the handwriting would suggest a she, even though it was anonymous) did feel like the assignments were too easy (I probably know who that is, and when it comes to her, she's probably right...maybe I should give her a way this unit to do something harder). Several may have indirectly called the class boring by answering "haven't had it yet" to my question, "What is the most memorable class day we've had so far, and why?" But that was really most of the other-than-anti-research-paper suggestions. And since it's not my fault we're doing a research paper - it's one of the few things that I'm more or less required to do - I get off pretty easy on that one.
I mean, people liking my class still doesn't mean I teach well. I do think I may have to give everybody a five-point the-teacher-was-a-jerk-this-unit bonus on the newest essays: it turns out that I only took five actual class periods to try to teach the descriptive essay (we got snowed out on a sixth, and the seventh and eighth were just peer review and conferencing), which even at BU might have been pushing it, and in this case probably really was, especially since it's something I haven't taught before, which always makes me take about half the unit to figure out what I really want (as opposed to what, as we start the unit, I think I want). Like, there were a lot of x-factors I never cleared up, and looking at what I got on Friday, I think it shows. But, that said, I think this is still the best set of evaluations I've ever gotten, and either that means that I'm improving, and/or it means that these students have lower standards, but right now it means that I feel less like this is going to be a long semester and more like it's just going to be a long unit. Today, I think that's going to be enough.
3.13.2010
Last Night
I had this dream last night - I think I felt college-age, and the earlier part of the dream involved Jess and Tim (not, as Albert will be wondering, Tim-and-Jessie) and whether she was going to ask him for a Bible as a combination Christmas/birthday present, but the later part involved, of all people, Mrs. Oldfield, proctoring a ridiculously-difficult science test that I hadn't studied for but had to take (so did other high school friends of mine, including Bethie)...except that it got cancelled because she'd accidentally given us the answer key along with the questions. So I caught a major break (figured I'd study for next time), and we all had to leave the huge and crowded (and fairly dark - I think a little bit of window light was all we were working with) room we were taking the test in, but Atwater and Donnelly were also there holding an apparently-impromptu concert as we were leaving (I forget what song), so the mass exodus wasn't as bad as I'd expected.
I bring all of this up both because it's random and because the dream made me think of this, which I posted before I'd ever been to grad school, but which makes even more sense now that I'm out of it. In terms of background detail, I mean. Not in terms of theme: that's as clear as ever.
While we're on teaching, my students are discouraged, and mostly so am I. We had a bad unit, and some of them are frustrated with me (and well they might be, considering), and the rest are, worse, frustrated with themselves. I really won't be good at this until I have more time to put into it - maybe not even until I quit my church job. Jesus is right: you really can't serve two masters. It's not even that I'm scheduled for a lot of hours - I'm not; it's really a question of divided allegiance. Sometimes the stuff I'm doing for church frankly makes it hard to care about school - or provides a convenient way to avoid the school work that intimidates me (read: pretty much all of it). Sometimes I wonder if I'm really going to teach all my life, despite my having gone out of my way to get a degree for it. It's not that I don't like it, but compared with so many of the other things I do, I wonder if my heart's really in it.
But this coming unit - despite its being fuller of "stuff," because it's the research-paper unit - should be simpler to teach, and the only thing I can do right now is focus on doing the easy things that should make everyone somewhat calmer. I've finally planned out my whole unit on a macro level, at least in a simple sort of way (Week 1: choosing a topic, finding and evaluating sources, deciding what details are important to include; Week 2: summary/paraphrase/quotation, in-text citation, Works Cited pages; Week 3: important grammatical concerns), and from here the next best thing I can do is to make them a specific grading rubric, since surely I should have done so for either of the first two projects, but, thanks to time constraints and other less innocent things, I didn't. All the things that one learns in grad school to do turn out really to be at the mercy of time and mood and basic human fallibility.
Anyway, today is sure to be an action-packed day, so I should go have it instead of staying here.
I bring all of this up both because it's random and because the dream made me think of this, which I posted before I'd ever been to grad school, but which makes even more sense now that I'm out of it. In terms of background detail, I mean. Not in terms of theme: that's as clear as ever.
While we're on teaching, my students are discouraged, and mostly so am I. We had a bad unit, and some of them are frustrated with me (and well they might be, considering), and the rest are, worse, frustrated with themselves. I really won't be good at this until I have more time to put into it - maybe not even until I quit my church job. Jesus is right: you really can't serve two masters. It's not even that I'm scheduled for a lot of hours - I'm not; it's really a question of divided allegiance. Sometimes the stuff I'm doing for church frankly makes it hard to care about school - or provides a convenient way to avoid the school work that intimidates me (read: pretty much all of it). Sometimes I wonder if I'm really going to teach all my life, despite my having gone out of my way to get a degree for it. It's not that I don't like it, but compared with so many of the other things I do, I wonder if my heart's really in it.
But this coming unit - despite its being fuller of "stuff," because it's the research-paper unit - should be simpler to teach, and the only thing I can do right now is focus on doing the easy things that should make everyone somewhat calmer. I've finally planned out my whole unit on a macro level, at least in a simple sort of way (Week 1: choosing a topic, finding and evaluating sources, deciding what details are important to include; Week 2: summary/paraphrase/quotation, in-text citation, Works Cited pages; Week 3: important grammatical concerns), and from here the next best thing I can do is to make them a specific grading rubric, since surely I should have done so for either of the first two projects, but, thanks to time constraints and other less innocent things, I didn't. All the things that one learns in grad school to do turn out really to be at the mercy of time and mood and basic human fallibility.
Anyway, today is sure to be an action-packed day, so I should go have it instead of staying here.
3.12.2010
As Many Quick Takes As I Can Fit In Before Sundown
-I'm not sure which of the words in the above title shouldn't have been capitalized, if any. The "as" seemed like a likely candidate, but it looked so bad with everything else capped that I gave in.
-My friend Laura's been volunteering with Mercy Ships. I'm adding her blog to the roll - it's really something.
-I love all forms of spring. Including this one, where the whole place kind of looks kind of like the outside of the RIT hockey rink in the late fall: there're little dirt-flecked snow lumps all around, resting on frozen yellow-green-brown grass.
-But Chaucer was so right: it makes me want to go pretty much anywhere besides Binghamton or Syracuse, which're about the only places I've gone since Christmas break. Carrie and I were supposed to poke around a neighboring town tomorrow and hopefully meet up with a church friend we haven't seen in a while, but now that the forecast includes rain all tomorrow, who knows what'll happen.
-I made another Monastery Soups soup: St. Christopher's Soup, not because I felt sick (apparently it's supposed to be a pretty good soup for that kind of thing), but because I was in the mood for cabbage. I have to say, though, if I'm going to do it again, I need to make my own vegetable broth: you can buy passable chicken or beef stock, but I really feel like tomatoes have no business in a vegetable stock, and it turns out that you cannot buy premade vegetable stock without them. I know tomato is one of those vegetables that everyone wants to throw into everything, but I'm going on record right now: not in vegetable stock.
-I am also getting really impatient for a maple festival. Any maple festival.
-Having finally gotten through grading my students' first essays (handed them back Monday), I now have to turn around and do it again: I just got in the descriptive essays today, but I can't take another not-gonna-tell-you-how-long-I-took-the-first-time because midsemester grades are due THIS COMING WEDNESDAY, and since I think everyone would prefer that something besides one essay and a smattering of homeworks be part of them, I'm going to have to turn these right back around. Don't pity me: it will be good for me. I'm pretty sure half the life angst you guys have to deal with out of me comes by way of how badly I always need to do work for my class, and how seldom I ever actually do it. The factor's always heightened when there're papers to grade, so really, this will save you headaches while reading my blog.
-Book recommendation as the sun finishes setting: P.G. Wodehouse's The World of Jeeves. That is all.
-My friend Laura's been volunteering with Mercy Ships. I'm adding her blog to the roll - it's really something.
-I love all forms of spring. Including this one, where the whole place kind of looks kind of like the outside of the RIT hockey rink in the late fall: there're little dirt-flecked snow lumps all around, resting on frozen yellow-green-brown grass.
-But Chaucer was so right: it makes me want to go pretty much anywhere besides Binghamton or Syracuse, which're about the only places I've gone since Christmas break. Carrie and I were supposed to poke around a neighboring town tomorrow and hopefully meet up with a church friend we haven't seen in a while, but now that the forecast includes rain all tomorrow, who knows what'll happen.
-I made another Monastery Soups soup: St. Christopher's Soup, not because I felt sick (apparently it's supposed to be a pretty good soup for that kind of thing), but because I was in the mood for cabbage. I have to say, though, if I'm going to do it again, I need to make my own vegetable broth: you can buy passable chicken or beef stock, but I really feel like tomatoes have no business in a vegetable stock, and it turns out that you cannot buy premade vegetable stock without them. I know tomato is one of those vegetables that everyone wants to throw into everything, but I'm going on record right now: not in vegetable stock.
-I am also getting really impatient for a maple festival. Any maple festival.
-Having finally gotten through grading my students' first essays (handed them back Monday), I now have to turn around and do it again: I just got in the descriptive essays today, but I can't take another not-gonna-tell-you-how-long-I-took-the-first-time because midsemester grades are due THIS COMING WEDNESDAY, and since I think everyone would prefer that something besides one essay and a smattering of homeworks be part of them, I'm going to have to turn these right back around. Don't pity me: it will be good for me. I'm pretty sure half the life angst you guys have to deal with out of me comes by way of how badly I always need to do work for my class, and how seldom I ever actually do it. The factor's always heightened when there're papers to grade, so really, this will save you headaches while reading my blog.
-Book recommendation as the sun finishes setting: P.G. Wodehouse's The World of Jeeves. That is all.
3.10.2010
Very Quickly on a Wednesday Morning
Temperatures hit the fifties today for the first time in I don't even know how long.
I had completely forgotten from this time last year how hard it suddenly becomes to care about dressing up for teaching. Especially when all I'm doing today is conferences.
I had completely forgotten from this time last year how hard it suddenly becomes to care about dressing up for teaching. Especially when all I'm doing today is conferences.
3.06.2010
Seriously, you have no idea how much grading I should be doing right now.
But instead I am trying to wrangle the church bulletins [edit: that isn't church's fault or anything...it's mine] and am also half-baffled over what looks, to my untrained eye, like my insurance company being lazy.
See, because of the BU layoff, my health insurance under them expires March 17th. Happily for me, however, I live and work in New York State, so I applied for Healthy NY, which's basically a reduced-rate insurance program for people like myself who don't make a whole lot per month (had I made way less, I could have qualified for free insurance, I think through the county or something, but I don't think I'm going to quit one of my jobs just to get under the line, assuming that would even work). You don't have to already have insurance to get it (in fact, as you'll see, it's probably easier to get it if you don't). It's sort of run by the state, but is really executed through individual insurance providers - which means that my paperwork didn't go to the state, it went to my current insurance carrier.
So I get a letter in the mail today, rejecting me from Healthy NY for the following reason: "You are not eligible for a change in insurance because you reside outside of our 28-county area. If you would like to cancel your insurance under [their name], please write to..."
In other words, if I understand correctly, despite my informing them on the paperwork of the date that my insurance is scheduled to terminate, they rejected me because I'm not allowed to make a "change" to the plan I have with them right now.
You know, the plan that's going to expire in a week and a half.
Which means, if I understand correctly, that the only thing that's keeping me from the program is that I submitted the paperwork about two days too soon. Because submitting by February 20th (I faxed it over on the 19th) was supposed to start my coverage on March 1st; had they received it after the 20th, the planned start date would have been April 1st instead. So basically, my guess, though I'm going to have to call the insurance people on Monday and find out, is that if I take my sweet self back to Kinko's on March 18th (or, for that matter, possibly this Monday) and refax the very same paperwork I faxed over on February 19th (or just send it this time, since I have it all together and won't be working with quite the same level of time constraint I was last month), I'll qualify to start on April 1st. Because next time, I won't have health insurance, so they can't object on the grounds that I'm not allowed to change the type of insurance I'm getting from them, because I won't be getting any from them.
Like, if my not residing in their 28-county area, whatever that means, genuinely ties their hands against covering me for March, okay, whatever. I'm probably not going to have a medical emergency between the 18th and 31st, and if I do, I'm blessed with parents who care about me and have good jobs, and they'll write the check. But can't the insurance people just make a note on my paperwork and then tell me, "Hey, we can't cover you under this plan until your insurance actually expires, but how's about we start you on April 1st, as though you'd submitted the paperwork the following week?"
So, in sum, I really appreciate the existence of Healthy NY, and the people who work only for Healthy NY and not for my insurance company were fine and very helpful and informative whenever I called. But as for my insurance company: really, guys?
See, because of the BU layoff, my health insurance under them expires March 17th. Happily for me, however, I live and work in New York State, so I applied for Healthy NY, which's basically a reduced-rate insurance program for people like myself who don't make a whole lot per month (had I made way less, I could have qualified for free insurance, I think through the county or something, but I don't think I'm going to quit one of my jobs just to get under the line, assuming that would even work). You don't have to already have insurance to get it (in fact, as you'll see, it's probably easier to get it if you don't). It's sort of run by the state, but is really executed through individual insurance providers - which means that my paperwork didn't go to the state, it went to my current insurance carrier.
So I get a letter in the mail today, rejecting me from Healthy NY for the following reason: "You are not eligible for a change in insurance because you reside outside of our 28-county area. If you would like to cancel your insurance under [their name], please write to..."
In other words, if I understand correctly, despite my informing them on the paperwork of the date that my insurance is scheduled to terminate, they rejected me because I'm not allowed to make a "change" to the plan I have with them right now.
You know, the plan that's going to expire in a week and a half.
Which means, if I understand correctly, that the only thing that's keeping me from the program is that I submitted the paperwork about two days too soon. Because submitting by February 20th (I faxed it over on the 19th) was supposed to start my coverage on March 1st; had they received it after the 20th, the planned start date would have been April 1st instead. So basically, my guess, though I'm going to have to call the insurance people on Monday and find out, is that if I take my sweet self back to Kinko's on March 18th (or, for that matter, possibly this Monday) and refax the very same paperwork I faxed over on February 19th (or just send it this time, since I have it all together and won't be working with quite the same level of time constraint I was last month), I'll qualify to start on April 1st. Because next time, I won't have health insurance, so they can't object on the grounds that I'm not allowed to change the type of insurance I'm getting from them, because I won't be getting any from them.
Like, if my not residing in their 28-county area, whatever that means, genuinely ties their hands against covering me for March, okay, whatever. I'm probably not going to have a medical emergency between the 18th and 31st, and if I do, I'm blessed with parents who care about me and have good jobs, and they'll write the check. But can't the insurance people just make a note on my paperwork and then tell me, "Hey, we can't cover you under this plan until your insurance actually expires, but how's about we start you on April 1st, as though you'd submitted the paperwork the following week?"
So, in sum, I really appreciate the existence of Healthy NY, and the people who work only for Healthy NY and not for my insurance company were fine and very helpful and informative whenever I called. But as for my insurance company: really, guys?
3.05.2010
I Can't Believe It's Only Been a Week Since the Snow Day
Especially because today is sunny in about the mid-thirties.
I have way too much work for both jobs to be blogging right now, or to have been doing anything I've been doing for most of the day. I'll only say these, in lieu of seven quick takes:
-You can give up nighttime internet for Lent, and it will help, but the gospel is true: what I ultimately need is not a behavioral change, but an inner change. Taking myself off Google Reader past sundown will help me get to bed a little earlier (and accidentally leaving my iPod in Syracuse will help, too), though not a lot. Forcing me to answer e-mails by day helps me to use my time a little more effectively and to put things in slightly better proportion. But even though I mostly gave up night internet to get more sleep (and how's that been working out for me, given that I shove all my BCC work off on the evenings?), I was also hoping that it would help me get my work done at something other than the last minute. But it has not: mere cyberdisconnection does not squelch my innate desire to avoid work I don't like or that scares me with its size or complexity. And that desire is good at getting its way. Really good at buying itself more time to operate. And really good at getting me to lie to myself about what's important.
-That said, I think my lessons have taken less time to plan without Facebook et al. to distract me.
-Also, I learned today (which was one of those mornings where a lot went wrong and so I ended up, among other things, teaching more or less from memory the lesson on comma rules that I had spent hours turning into a worksheet last night but then couldn't print off this morning) that comma rules are apparently hard to explain. I did my best with four of them, giving lots of explanation and multiple examples, and I thought I was making sense, but when I put sample sentences up on the board at the end and asked them what rule was being implemented each time, they got it wrong all three-or-four times. At least they knew where some of the commas needed to go, though I've no idea whether they already knew or would know in an actual essay setting. Also, when you get down to it, I don't know if my end examples were really all that good.
-I get headaches when I wear ponytails too long. So I'm taking mine down and then, despite all wisdom and despite everything I have written above, I am probably going to take a nap, because I am pretty tired. The end.
I have way too much work for both jobs to be blogging right now, or to have been doing anything I've been doing for most of the day. I'll only say these, in lieu of seven quick takes:
-You can give up nighttime internet for Lent, and it will help, but the gospel is true: what I ultimately need is not a behavioral change, but an inner change. Taking myself off Google Reader past sundown will help me get to bed a little earlier (and accidentally leaving my iPod in Syracuse will help, too), though not a lot. Forcing me to answer e-mails by day helps me to use my time a little more effectively and to put things in slightly better proportion. But even though I mostly gave up night internet to get more sleep (and how's that been working out for me, given that I shove all my BCC work off on the evenings?), I was also hoping that it would help me get my work done at something other than the last minute. But it has not: mere cyberdisconnection does not squelch my innate desire to avoid work I don't like or that scares me with its size or complexity. And that desire is good at getting its way. Really good at buying itself more time to operate. And really good at getting me to lie to myself about what's important.
-That said, I think my lessons have taken less time to plan without Facebook et al. to distract me.
-Also, I learned today (which was one of those mornings where a lot went wrong and so I ended up, among other things, teaching more or less from memory the lesson on comma rules that I had spent hours turning into a worksheet last night but then couldn't print off this morning) that comma rules are apparently hard to explain. I did my best with four of them, giving lots of explanation and multiple examples, and I thought I was making sense, but when I put sample sentences up on the board at the end and asked them what rule was being implemented each time, they got it wrong all three-or-four times. At least they knew where some of the commas needed to go, though I've no idea whether they already knew or would know in an actual essay setting. Also, when you get down to it, I don't know if my end examples were really all that good.
-I get headaches when I wear ponytails too long. So I'm taking mine down and then, despite all wisdom and despite everything I have written above, I am probably going to take a nap, because I am pretty tired. The end.
3.03.2010
Dude, Chinese Government, What's Teen Girl Squad Ever Done to You?
It turns out that Homestar Runner's banned in China.
So are a lot of things, obviously, but that one kinda made me giggle.
(Full spreadsheet, for the curious, here; I got it from Information is Beautiful, which I heard about last semester at BU and have been checking periodically ever since.)
So are a lot of things, obviously, but that one kinda made me giggle.
(Full spreadsheet, for the curious, here; I got it from Information is Beautiful, which I heard about last semester at BU and have been checking periodically ever since.)
2.27.2010
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this...
I missed out on seeing this in person - rightly, because Tom and Albert came into town that night, so first of all, I wanted to be with them, and secondly, it may have been important that I missed it then, and that all my efforts to watch it afterward failed by way of short time and an extra-temperamental internet connection, so that I could see it now, after a week and day when I needed it a lot more.
If you end up watching it yourself, do me just the single favor of watching all of it, even though it's long, even if you think you know around minute #14 where it's going to go, or if Matt's tone early on bugs you a little, because I think that altogether it (the message)'s really astonishing. Even if you've already heard such a talk before.
If you end up watching it yourself, do me just the single favor of watching all of it, even though it's long, even if you think you know around minute #14 where it's going to go, or if Matt's tone early on bugs you a little, because I think that altogether it (the message)'s really astonishing. Even if you've already heard such a talk before.
2.26.2010
The Unofficial But Hopefully Completely-Legitimate...
7 Quick Takes Friday: The Latest.
But without the cool iStockPhoto pictures Jen usually puts up.
And without the publicity.
But with, as it turns out, a number of movie and TV references.
1. I got my snow day today, which is good, inasmuch as I didn't really, if you want to be technical about it, plan a lesson for today. I had sort of decided that in the unlikely event that school hadn't been cancelled by 7 this morning, I'd throw it together then, because, having read my students' essays from the last unit, I've decided that if there's one thing we need to do, it's more writing. And when they're writing, I don't have to be talking, and that means that lessons don't take so long to plan. And that means that I can watch Olympic figure skating 'til midnight. (After whining allweek semester year about how much I suck at life, you can see how much work I put into, you know, not sucking at life. I really can't imagine why I'm not a blinding success as a composition instructor.)
2. Speaking of figure skating, I won't mention the results in case you've somehow managed to miss them and are waiting to watch some nbcolympics.com or some videotaped drama unfold, but all I will say is: whoa. Two Asian celebrities under a brand of pressure that, frankly, I think only Asian kids ever really experience (as someone who's been in InterVarsity-Binghamton long enough, I can give you extensive, if nameless, examples). One Canadian girl who just lost her mother something like a week ago. Two cute and impressive American girls batting for the home team. And a couple of other girls just trying to even get near the spotlight, in the midst of all that. I always forget how amazing figure skating is, and I wish I understood it better, so as to really know just how impressive last night was. But even in my amateur state, I grinned, I gasped, I even cried a little. It moved me, Bob.
3. As it turns out, Google-searching (I don't always like the word "googling," do you?) "I laughed I cried it moved me bob" brings you to, among other things, this. I got an eighty-eight percent, not to imply that even after all these years I'm still pretty nerdy-great or anything.
4. So back to the snow day: I started thinking of the one I had my senior year at Alfred and actually attempted this morning to make Jet-style cinnamon toast, or at least a bodgy version thereof (take powdered sugar, throw in bowl with cinnamon, add water and a splash of your housemate's rice milk because all your milk is gone, mix until pourable, pour over toast). It turned out to be, not just bodgy, but botchy: apparently I have had the powdered sugar too long or something...? Does powdered sugar expire? Or does it maybe absorb dust flavors from one's kitchen cupboards in need of renovation? Because the thing totally tasted like I'd shoved a Kleenex in my mouth (yes, I've done that: don't ask), and I couldn't eat it. I threw it out. And then I made regular cinnamon toast and, because all my milk and juice are gone and I was trying not to use the microwave much because one of Kelly's friends was sleeping on our couch about twelve feet away, drank it with Gatorade, which I had bought last week in case I got hit with the churchwide stomach virus (I did not, praise be to our merciful and mighty-fortress God). It wasn't exactly worthy of the Jet, but I suppose that will make my next visit there, once it reopens, all the better.
5. In other cooking news, last night I made my first recipe out of Twelve Months of Monastery Soups, which is what I got my dad for Christmas and then, this week, bought for myself because he loves it so much that if I wait for him to let me borrow it it'll be about 2013. I had originally intended to use it to make something involving carrots and celery because they were in my fridge and I didn't want them to rot, but instead I gave my carrots to my housemate Brian to use in his pot roast (more on that in just a minute) and pinned my own hopes on Spinach Cream Soup, which does not actually use cream. I used frozen spinach instead of fresh, and shaker Parm-Romano instead of freshly-grated Parmesan, and Wegmans chicken stock instead of homemade...and it was and is still delicious. After having a bowl as-was, I took (some of) the advice in the book, plunked a slice of bread in my bowl (rather than good homemade bread rubbed with garlic, as Brother Victor-Antoine would have liked, mine was "L'Oven Fresh" seeded Italian from Aldi, the epitome of I-have-only-ten-minutes-to-grab-groceries-on-a-Monday-night fare, without garlic), and ladled some soup on top of it. And you know what? That was delicious, too. So that's the first recipe I've made out of the book, and I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Though I still don't know what I'm going to do with that celery.
6. Weird coincidence alert: as mentioned, last night Brian, the one who's always cooking late at night, was looking to make pot roast. However, since he didn't have a good recipe for it (I mean, he's got a huge and gorgeous cookbook from the now-defunct Gourmet magazine, but Gourmet isn't practical, and our internet connection has been maddeningly dysfunctional lately, so that idea was also out), I brought down three of my cookbooks that had pot-roast recipes, and he chose the one from The Pioneer Woman Cooks. And guess what I found out this morning, reading the Pioneer Woman blog: yesterday - the same day as Brian made the pot roast - Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman herself, appeared on Good Morning America and made - out of all the hundreds of recipes on her main blog and separate cooking blog - pot roast. Seriously! (Okay, and about four other things, too, but still.)
7. But I have to say, I guess watching that GMA clip online was the first time I've ever heard Ree's voice (well, outside of her Ethel Merman impression, but...), and you know what? It's significantly higher and lighter than I thought it would be. I guess I have really firm ideas of what she and Mike and Marlboro Man sound like in my head, and reading her writing feels really different now that I have to make her sound, well, like she sounds. It's gonna be weird for a while.
And I'd like to close this by saying that after I had originally written this (by which time my internet had cut out for several hours, as its wont has been of late to do; I've updated the post time stamp accordingly) I went outside to find that my car was encased in a snowdrift, where it has stayed all day while I procrastinated and slept. Now I'm going to try to get it out so that I can do, you know, anything this weekend, not to mention refrain from getting ticketed for violating the alternate-side street parking rules. Cheerio!
But without the cool iStockPhoto pictures Jen usually puts up.
And without the publicity.
But with, as it turns out, a number of movie and TV references.
1. I got my snow day today, which is good, inasmuch as I didn't really, if you want to be technical about it, plan a lesson for today. I had sort of decided that in the unlikely event that school hadn't been cancelled by 7 this morning, I'd throw it together then, because, having read my students' essays from the last unit, I've decided that if there's one thing we need to do, it's more writing. And when they're writing, I don't have to be talking, and that means that lessons don't take so long to plan. And that means that I can watch Olympic figure skating 'til midnight. (After whining all
2. Speaking of figure skating, I won't mention the results in case you've somehow managed to miss them and are waiting to watch some nbcolympics.com or some videotaped drama unfold, but all I will say is: whoa. Two Asian celebrities under a brand of pressure that, frankly, I think only Asian kids ever really experience (as someone who's been in InterVarsity-Binghamton long enough, I can give you extensive, if nameless, examples). One Canadian girl who just lost her mother something like a week ago. Two cute and impressive American girls batting for the home team. And a couple of other girls just trying to even get near the spotlight, in the midst of all that. I always forget how amazing figure skating is, and I wish I understood it better, so as to really know just how impressive last night was. But even in my amateur state, I grinned, I gasped, I even cried a little. It moved me, Bob.
3. As it turns out, Google-searching (I don't always like the word "googling," do you?) "I laughed I cried it moved me bob" brings you to, among other things, this. I got an eighty-eight percent, not to imply that even after all these years I'm still pretty nerdy-great or anything.
4. So back to the snow day: I started thinking of the one I had my senior year at Alfred and actually attempted this morning to make Jet-style cinnamon toast, or at least a bodgy version thereof (take powdered sugar, throw in bowl with cinnamon, add water and a splash of your housemate's rice milk because all your milk is gone, mix until pourable, pour over toast). It turned out to be, not just bodgy, but botchy: apparently I have had the powdered sugar too long or something...? Does powdered sugar expire? Or does it maybe absorb dust flavors from one's kitchen cupboards in need of renovation? Because the thing totally tasted like I'd shoved a Kleenex in my mouth (yes, I've done that: don't ask), and I couldn't eat it. I threw it out. And then I made regular cinnamon toast and, because all my milk and juice are gone and I was trying not to use the microwave much because one of Kelly's friends was sleeping on our couch about twelve feet away, drank it with Gatorade, which I had bought last week in case I got hit with the churchwide stomach virus (I did not, praise be to our merciful and mighty-fortress God). It wasn't exactly worthy of the Jet, but I suppose that will make my next visit there, once it reopens, all the better.
5. In other cooking news, last night I made my first recipe out of Twelve Months of Monastery Soups, which is what I got my dad for Christmas and then, this week, bought for myself because he loves it so much that if I wait for him to let me borrow it it'll be about 2013. I had originally intended to use it to make something involving carrots and celery because they were in my fridge and I didn't want them to rot, but instead I gave my carrots to my housemate Brian to use in his pot roast (more on that in just a minute) and pinned my own hopes on Spinach Cream Soup, which does not actually use cream. I used frozen spinach instead of fresh, and shaker Parm-Romano instead of freshly-grated Parmesan, and Wegmans chicken stock instead of homemade...and it was and is still delicious. After having a bowl as-was, I took (some of) the advice in the book, plunked a slice of bread in my bowl (rather than good homemade bread rubbed with garlic, as Brother Victor-Antoine would have liked, mine was "L'Oven Fresh" seeded Italian from Aldi, the epitome of I-have-only-ten-minutes-to-grab-groceries-on-a-Monday-night fare, without garlic), and ladled some soup on top of it. And you know what? That was delicious, too. So that's the first recipe I've made out of the book, and I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Though I still don't know what I'm going to do with that celery.
6. Weird coincidence alert: as mentioned, last night Brian, the one who's always cooking late at night, was looking to make pot roast. However, since he didn't have a good recipe for it (I mean, he's got a huge and gorgeous cookbook from the now-defunct Gourmet magazine, but Gourmet isn't practical, and our internet connection has been maddeningly dysfunctional lately, so that idea was also out), I brought down three of my cookbooks that had pot-roast recipes, and he chose the one from The Pioneer Woman Cooks. And guess what I found out this morning, reading the Pioneer Woman blog: yesterday - the same day as Brian made the pot roast - Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman herself, appeared on Good Morning America and made - out of all the hundreds of recipes on her main blog and separate cooking blog - pot roast. Seriously! (Okay, and about four other things, too, but still.)
7. But I have to say, I guess watching that GMA clip online was the first time I've ever heard Ree's voice (well, outside of her Ethel Merman impression, but...), and you know what? It's significantly higher and lighter than I thought it would be. I guess I have really firm ideas of what she and Mike and Marlboro Man sound like in my head, and reading her writing feels really different now that I have to make her sound, well, like she sounds. It's gonna be weird for a while.
And I'd like to close this by saying that after I had originally written this (by which time my internet had cut out for several hours, as its wont has been of late to do; I've updated the post time stamp accordingly) I went outside to find that my car was encased in a snowdrift, where it has stayed all day while I procrastinated and slept. Now I'm going to try to get it out so that I can do, you know, anything this weekend, not to mention refrain from getting ticketed for violating the alternate-side street parking rules. Cheerio!