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.

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 all week 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!

Thursday-Morning Guilt

For many reasons, church secretaries really should not hang up on telemarketers, I am sure. But I have done it twice in the past forty-eight hours.

Clearly, Internet After Sundown is What I Need to Give Up for Lent

Midsemester break at BCC for the rest of this week means I can stay up and watch the Olympics.

But it also means, if I'm honest, that I'm going to get very little grading or lesson-planning done. Which is a bad thing, since I have a whole new unit to start teaching when we get back, to say nothing, now that I have a stack of turned-in essays on my floor, of figuring out to what degree community-college grading differs from BU grading.


Anyway, xkcd has had a run of mostly-good comics lately, so in honor of having gotten a snow day at this time last week, of the Winter Olympics, and of making something enjoyable out of the long stretch of days I've recently had here trying to brush off my car without my gloves (seriously, where are they?), here's my favorite (1000 points for "kid with transmogrifier," incidentally):




See also (though not connected topic-wise): this and this.


And really, I probably am giving up internet after sundown. Given that my internet-induced sleep deprivation has probably reached new depths post-Alfred, since now it's much harder to have time enough to nap, it's really time I did something the problem (and I really do consider it more of a faith hindrance than just a bad habit, for several reasons I won't bother going into here partly because, speaking of all this, if I don't finish here I will never get to bed). So I'm going to do all my interneting by day, since the way this semester's set up gives me that luxury to a greater degree than it has in many semesters, and go back to doing more productive things (and by "more productive things," I will probably 60%-or-more of the time mean "reading and/or doing crosswords on my iPod," but even that would be an improvement) by night.

So this has been your pre-Lent report. Tune in some other day for some other thing.

Ponderings

PS: This is the dilemma of being a Christian and a writer: how far down does my duty to my audience go, and where does it intersect with art? At the end of the previous post, should I have made sure to specify what/who my confidence should be in (God)? What if I'm not sure that God is who my confidence has been in as far as class goes (that much is probably obvious from the post as a whole)? Do I write based on what I (and my audience) ought to be learning, or how I feel even if that could be morally misleading? Since my audience is adults, not children, are they going to know what I mean anyway, and is it "going to matter" (my conscience screams back, as always, "Um, YES!") if they don't? Also, while we're questioning everything, is the end depicting what I feel, and why, even after a bit of editing, am I portraying the faking of confidence as though it's potentially good even though I really feel like it's kind of underhanded? And is faking confidence what I'm really doing?

It's not like I think that only Christians are interested in these questions, don't get me wrong. It's just that I feel like that's the reason I myself feel so compelled to deal with them.

And I share your frustration if you're wondering why I'm taking a pretty(ish?) piece and getting it dirty in my head, but I think it's for the best that I am. Hm.

Comm-Coll One-Ten, Episode 2: The Right Amount of Confidence

My freshman year at Alfred, Evan and Jay once told me in Powell that one can do anything in the world if one has access to one of three things: the right uniform for the job, enough confidence that no one will stop you, or a gun. The last item was a joke, as Evan points out now. Anyway, the theory's wording got twisted around in my head over the years, so that if you'd asked me what it was that they'd said, I would have told you that you needed one of three things, the thing in question to be determined by the situation you're in and what you're trying to fake without the necessary skill: the right clothes, the right tools, or (you have to end on this one, italicizing it with your voice) the right amount of confidence.

There are some days at BCC when I figure that that last is really how my students and I seem to have convinced ourselves that everything’s okay and I really do know what I’m doing. In real life, I really don’t know, when it comes down to it, how to grade my students’ papers without help without grading too hard – WRIT 111 taught me that, but this semester I’ve got no PDG group to appeal to. I also usually don’t, when it comes down to it, manage my time well enough to make the kinds of lesson plans I really should, and not just because in theory, between the two jobs, the assistant-to-the-youth-pastor thing at church, and everything else I’m trying to do, there’s a lot of demand on my time. And I really don’t know, many days, what my students really need to know, as opposed to what I think they probably need to know.

But I have to say, as valuable as WRIT 111’s setup is for a naïve (not to say flat-out stupid, sometimes) beginning teacher who’s starting with almost nothing – I really needed it then, and I’d certainly profit from it if BCC did the same thing – there are some really nice things about teaching my own course and being only minimally answerable to everyone else. It means that if I screw up in teaching, it doesn’t ruin my students, because I can adjust the grades accordingly. It means that it’s easier to choose readings, especially because I don’t have to relate everything back to rhetoric, since this is a composition course much more than it’s a rhetoric and composition course. And though I think that teaching critical thought is one of the most important things an English professor can do, I also appreciate that this course lets me put that on the back burner (since ENG 111, the level up from me, teaches it more formally) and presumably be a nicer person in grading. These days I’m not always having to ask myself whether my students are demonstrating college-level critical thought – I can let them pick their own purposes for writing (I do expect something beyond mere self-expression, but some of them, for example, will get a lot more out of it if I let them try to entertain their readers, rather than persuade them, and just as much work and audience awareness has to go into that if it's to be done well).

That leads into the nicest thing so far about teaching introductory community-college English: I get to be, within reason, the nice girl. Many – perhaps most; I don’t know yet – of my students do not expect A’s. I wouldn’t mind giving them, don’t get me wrong, but at BU, typically the student’s major goal is to figure out what an A looks like, and my major goal is to get them as close to one as possible. Whereas here, nobody’s trying to get into med school yet. Nobody’s mom or dad is going to be angry at them if they get a B. Few of them were in honors (though I do have one girl who’s still in high school, taking my course for college credit). So far, it seems like what the BCC kids want most is to be able to transfer to a four-year college someday (so, if I remember correctly from what Otto used to tell us at Alfred, that means they'll want at least C's), and to not be completely bored to tears in my class while working to do it. And some of them are used to being the bad kids of the English-class world. So I get to tell them, guess what, you’re probably a better writer than you think you are. Guess what, I think there’s so much more to your essays than whether you understand every comma rule. (It’s true that I’ll have to care more about grammar here than I did at BU, where we were literally discouraged from doing grammar lessons – comp scholarship tends to think these days that that doesn’t really work – so in that sense I worry that I’m going to put too little emphasis on it. But at least my students will know that there’s more to writing than that.) Guess what, I’m going to give you the genre form, but you can pick the topic yourself.

And though on the first day of the semester I worried, as I always do, about how young I look – besides the large, noticeable zit on my philtrum, I also had to decide between looking too young without my glasses and too dorky with them, given the rest of my outfit and hair (I dithered, chose “too young,” doubted, settled on “dorky,” then a few minutes later changed my mind and went back to “too young,” where I stayed) – somehow I have managed to win over my adult students. People had implied to me that this would be harder. I had a colleague at BU, Melissa, who’s also taught for a long time at BCC. Though older and taller than I am, she told me that some of her older guys had had trouble with seeing her as an authority; one apparently protested, “You’re just a little girl!” But the two middle-aged guys I have – both of them have served in the military – seem to like me all right and to be on board with the class, and the women (one current nurse, one hopefully-future nurse, and one who hopes to go into social work) were open and friendly right away. One even interviewed me for a study-skills class she’s taking: interview makes her nervous, she said, and so far I seemed like the teacher she could relax best around.

I have seen Melissa since getting here, by the way: we have office hours at the same time. I talked to her for a bit, but I never realized at BU just how pessimistic she is, though I recognize it in retrospect. She doesn't seem to like it here and was trying to prepare me, though her words were few, for a life of adjuncting woe - the students don't come to office hours, the instructors often don't escape the community college to a better place, et cetera.

But I think Aaron's going to be more right than she. So far, my kids have been good people, and the place has been so nice - so small! So friendly! - that it's kind of tempting to make disparaging remarks about BU and its student body by comparison, though while I was there I liked it all right and could hardly have asked for better bosses.

And, to my shock, I've already had students here tell me that so far they like my class much better than they expected to - a comment I hardly got at all at Binghamton. "I thought I was going to like history [class] better," one guy commented today when his group got done early with peer review and ended up just talking for a few minutes, "but instead I like this." And, sure, some of that is by virtue of my not doing just straight-up lecture, like some of their other professors do. Some of it is probably by virtue of my being comparatively lenient so far about a lot of things. And some of it will have been because they haven't seen me grade their work.

But some days I think I get it right: I plan lessons that they actually sort of need, I assign readings they turn out to like, I say things that it's helpful for them to hear. Even in the absence of the person I'd like to be, with the sterling work ethic I'd like to have, the telepathy I'd like to have, the time and energy I'd like to have, sometimes, praise God, I do the right thing.

Perhaps the rest is just infectious confidence.