- I just woke up from a nap after having stayed up until 3 AM grading annotated bibliographies.
- Week seven is hell.
- I am almost finished taking classes – forever and ever — two more weeks and one of those is the week of Thanksgiving.
- Apparently some college freshman have never heard of apartheid. I’m adding that to my long list of things students are too young to remember.
- Also, students only vaguely remember Hurricane Katrina.
- Lack of sleep makes me want to eat carbs.
- Grading makes me want a glass of wine.
- I wrote a draft of my comps questions and sent them to my advisor, but he is sick, so there has been no word.
- Our comps process takes six weeks. (WTF.)
- I am so ready to be done with classes and focusing on my research.
- I don’t have funding for my research, so I need to get moving on the fellowship applications.
- If all goes well, I will spend April-August “in the field” and be ready to start writing in September.
- This time next year I could be sending out job applications.
- I really need to find a post-doc because I doubt I will be “ready” for a TT job by next winter.
- Some kind of Oprah Christmas present special just came on the TV and the people in the audience are screaming like they won the lottery, which they kinda did. But it is still creepy. Sort of like a revival meeting, only consumerism = god.
- My Spanish skills are finally returning to their 1992 levels. Between homework and classes I have been spending several hours a day working on this. Too bad that after this quarter is over I have no way to maintain or improve these skills since I need to focus on my comps and dissertation research.
- I still don’t have down the names of all 66 of my students. How do other people learn their students’ names? (I think it it must be some sort of learning disability on my part.)
- That is all for now.
Sleeping in the Forest
I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. – Mary Oliver
Sleeping in the Forest 
4 comments
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November 20, 2010 at 4:07 pm
wil
I wouldn’t be surprised if a cult eventually arises around the goddess Oprah the Beneficent. And “grading annotated bibliographies” sounds like something that violates the Geneva Conventions. 😉
November 22, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Belle
Oh, let me tell you, the things students have never encountered far exceeds apartheid. The Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, the Reagan Revolution, ‘read my lips’… on and on. I teach world history, and their ignorance of even their own history – much less of things in the world – is jaw-droppingly awful.
Oprah’s holiday give-aways are like everyone’s fairy-tale holidays – an orgy of giving and receiving, with few worries (if any) about what things cost. Add it all up, and each of the people in that office walked out with – easily – $15K worth of gifts. Me? I saw maybe two things I’d be okay getting, and didn’t get the one thing I’d have liked: an iPad.
November 22, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Breena
It was a give away, but she was carefully advertising each item for the TV audience. I wouldn’t be surprised if she makes more money from sales of those items then she spent on the giveaway since several items were customized “Oprah” things. Hopefully any portion of the proceeds that Oprah receives would go to charity, but in my mind it is still all about consumerism. For that matter, I will be cynical and say that most of the time the Christmas holiday feels like mindless consumerism as well.
Current events figure prominently in my classes, but it is difficult to understand current events if you know nothing of recent history. I am use to students not remembering the Soviet Union or the fall of the Berlin wall, but sometimes I forget and assume that they know things. Hurricane Katrina wasn’t even six years ago!
December 1, 2010 at 5:58 pm
a.b.
I supervise college work-study students, and I am often amazed at how little some of them are familiar with outside their own experiences. I have to remind myself that those are the ones that stick out in my memory, and do not represent everyone. An instructor friend of mine from India came to see me, aghast that her students didn’t know who Bob Dylan was. That a lot of them don’t know what a record (LP) is amazes me, because don’t they watch movies that may depict a time before the 70s?
The poem snippet on your header reminds me of the novel “Lolly Willowes”, which I had not thought about in years.