Baby Bird Update

July 17, 2006

I’m too tired to write what I want to tonight. Too many deadlines, not enough sleep. Meanwhile, however, you can look at these babies who are currently residing in the hanging ivy basket on my front porch with their mommy.

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Beautiful

July 16, 2006

“Beautiful is not a big enough word. It’s like saying the sea is wet.”

—Midsomer Murders

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Out of Time

July 11, 2006

Wow am I tired. Sorry Dr.B but I never managed to log about the travel. I still have a bunch of notes on Texas to write for that matter. I need more time for everything it seems. Not getting things written. Not reading what the doctor asked me to read. Zeroing in on the weight of a sea lion. I’m not very successful these days.

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The list of teaching/writing stories

July 4, 2006

I’ve decided to try to go through Williams Hall mentally, stopping in each room that I taught in and seeing if there are any memories related to the classes in that space. I should also go through my folder of handouts and whatnot, but they’re in Champaign, and I’m in Blacksburg. So here goes.

  • Godzilla stamp
    I was teaching business writing with a behavioral method where you got P/F on all papers, and you had to compile a certain number of Passes to get various grades. The idea, which I had some article to support at the time, was that in business world you don’t get A’s and B’s. You either get a pass and you send the piece out, OR you get told to redo the work. I don’t like to mistrust students, but well, they are students. I realized that it would be easy for someone to fake a check mark or some such handwritten thing on their papers; so I used some stamps and an ink pad to indicate the P/F. Because I had this silly Godzilla stamp, I told them that if they made really stupid mistakes (like failed to spellcheck), they’d get the Godzilla. Oddly, the Godzilla stamp became a POSITIVE thing. It was the one and only time that giving criticism was taken as positive feedback. They laughed and carried on about the Godzillas that they got. And when someone typically got a Godzilla on every paper and then got a Godzilla-free paper, there was much pride. I’m not sure I could ever repeat the way that this worked, but it was fun while it lasted.

  • Space Shuttle
    Not really a writing/teaching story, but when Challenger exploded, I threw out my class plans and we just watched and talked about the news coverage that day. A number of people were sort of shocked, and it seemed like the best thing to do. [and yes, it feels freaky to write this down on the day of a space shuttle launch]

  • Guitar
    A failed experiment, but in the first class that I taught, I brought in my guitar. Someone in GTA training brought in a guitar to talk about the importance of practice and trial and error. I’m not a good guitar player, so this really failed miserably.

  • Tennyson article
    Also in my first class, I brought in all the drafts that I had gone through for a Tennyson paper that I wrote, and which was going to be published in The Explicator. I think they thought I was crazy to have so many drafts, but I did try to demonstrate what a complete writing process looked like. Might be interesting to digitize all that stuff actually.

  • Nikki Giovanni
    I was lucky enough to teach in the same department as Nikki, and I had her come talk to my students in American Lit. They were so entertained and asked loads of questions. The most memorable of which was about her use of lowercase letters.

To be continued…

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The list of teaching/writing stories, Part 2

July 4, 2006

Okay, the continuation. I know that blog entries are supposed to be in reverse order, but it seems odd to have the continuation of a list above the beginning of that list. So while it’s the next day, I’m faking the time on this one so that the list falls in the original order that I was brainstorming in.

  • Own Criteria
    This is one of those experiences where the students amazed me. I was teaching second semester American Lit (roughly Mark Twain to present) for the second time, using the same basic assignments that I had used the previous term. I had students sign up for and present various handouts on the pieces of literature that we covered (e.g., biographies, general lit criticism, summary). I had lots of examples from that previous class, which I removed the names from and passed out to the students. I asked them to use those examples to help them define the requirements for the work that they were to do. They came up with incredibly harsh guidelines, more strict than I would have designed for them. And of course because they had ownership of the guidelines, they accepted them more than anything that I would have brought in from outside.

  • Modeling, not just models
    I remember a successful class where I worked through the process of gathering details for an analysis paper. I was asking students to compare a song’s lyrics (their choice) to any poem in their text (also their choice). To demonstrate the process, I remember doing an elaborate demonstration that compared the lyrics to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Old Friends/Bookends” to some poem that I can’t recall right now. I asked students to help point out similarities and differences. The whole thing worked as if it had been choreographed, and the students “got” the process that was needed for their papers. (I also had the best success when I had models of the essays that students were to compose. The BSM book Student Writers at Work was my favorite.)

  • Student Authority
    In another assignment that focused on song lyrics, I asked students to do a simple explication of a song (their choice). The assignment resulted in great engagement, as the students focused on explaining their favorite songs (some very complex). The whole activity put them in the position of the authority—they knew the songs and the bands, and typically I didn’t. Making them authorities led to stronger work too.

And some more general listing w/o notes:

  • outside; focused circle writing
  • demoing pc use in conferences
  • “New York is a City of Things Unnoticed” activity
  • Grammar Rules writing assignments (off Math Rules)
  • computers
  • Rhetoric of War class
  • What is American Lit? class

I also need to check the Lists and the lesson plans that I’ve written. They may well bring some stories to mind.

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Packing the car

June 28, 2006

The car is partially packed. The remaining things (which shouldn’t get hot during the day tomorrow) are piled and ready to load at the last minute. The mail is stopped. The housesitter taken care of . . . . . . . . . The road trip is imminent.

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Two Doctor’s Appointments

June 27, 2006

So tomorrow I have two doctor’s appointments. Just one apparently wouldn’t do. The first one is about swelling in my legs and feet. They’ve gone insane. Started middle of last week I think. Through some miracle I got in with my doctor tomorrow. It’s gotten to the point where it really hurts. Everything that is swollen is incredibly dry. Embarrassingly dry. I figured that I needed concrete information for her, so I measured things. Last night, my left ankle was 11.5 inches and my right was 12. This morning, they were both 10. That’s a lot of swelling. It’s no wonder it hurts. I just hope she can come up with some solution. It’s not as bad as it was a couple of weeks, around the 10th. They were about 14 inches then, but they went back down and I thought all was fine. Surely bodies are not supposed to do such things.

The second doctor’s appointment I’m just going to get in trouble because I didn’t do what I was supposed to and I don’t know if I can. That one I don’t know how I’m going to endure. I hate that I screw up so much. Really I just gave up and quite trying. Maybe if I don’t think about it I can pretend I don’t have to do it.

That’s apparently what I did after work. Since I have to show my feet to the first doctor and all… and since they’re still in horrible shape from C&W (blisters still peeling and all), I went and got a pedicure. My bloated piggies are the color of Aphrodite’s Pink Nightie. The poor guy who had to do it. It’s a miracle he didn’t vomit. All the loose skin from the blisters and whatnot. Bleh. I tipped well.

Favorite book quote for today:
“the lantern had its own little solar system of very stupid moths” (Equal Rites, p. 46)

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“Writing grows out of many different purposes”

June 26, 2006

I need to come up with a revised outline and schedule for the mysterious book that I never manage to get more than a few minutes to work on every 9 months. I dug out all the books and notes last week, from a bag that I carried to Virginia at Christmas. I didn’t pull them out in Virginia, and I hadn’t pulled them out here either.

So they’re pulled out, and I’ve read through them. The problem is that I’m stuck. I need to work on writing beliefs 5–11, and I’m totally unable to think of anything useful to say. Perhaps it’s partially that #5 seems to be a wider topic, but I’m not really sure. I have read and reread the text of #5, but I can’t come up with anything. It’s so bad that I’m wondering if I should dump the entire chapter. That’s annoying though given that I currently have 8 pages of single-spaced text that DO work.

I thought that I should try to freewrite, but that didn’t get me anywhere either. I don’t know how I’m going to get past this; and I feel like I have to figure out how to get past #5 if I’m going to come up with a schedule. :(

The evil #5 states, “Writing grows out of many different purposes,” and it explains that “Writing is not just one thing. It varies in form, structure, and production process according to its audience and purpose.” Now that should be easy as hell to come up with text on. My problem is that for all the others I have included either a personal anecdote about my writing experience or a story from my teaching, and I’ll be dashed if I can think of a good anecdote for #5. And I’ll be honest, as I cast forward and look at the rest of them, stories aren’t springing to mind there either.

Maybe it’s just been too long since I taught. Surely I have stories. They just don’t seem to be handy right now, and I haven’t got a clue how to summon them forth. :( Where are the dang things hiding, and what am I going to do with #5 until I figure it out?

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Terry Pratchett Audiobooks!

June 25, 2006

I’ve been at work all weekend, trying to catch up/get ahead. I’m not working hard enough. Don’t ever seem to get enough done. I used to go to the office every weekend, and I guess I need to go back to that habit if I’m going to get everything done.

I need to try to get ahead because I’m going to Virginia for the 4th and won’t be back here at NCTE World until the 10th. I’m not even sure what all to haul with me to work on. I have begun the process of planning everything else though—which mainly means I’ve made a list. Okay, a bit more, I’ve figured out what book to listen to, and that brings us to the evil that is Audible.com.

Audible.com is a fine and inexpensive option for downloading audiobooks. It worked out to be cheaper than iTunes; but they made me mad yesterday and I’m not sure about forgiving them yet. I decided to look for a new Terry Pratchett book, but I didn’t really want to figure out the reading order and all that nonsense. And what wonder! Audible had Truckers, Diggers, and Wings (The Bromeliad Trilogy) as three separate downloads. Perfect! I already owned the book—I like to have the print book to refer to when I miss something or what to reread something. I thought I was set. I entered all my info to join and pay for an exciting Audible.com membership, and the site promptly told me that I was in the wrong geographical region to buy the books and dumped me out. Apparently, American are not allowed to buy audiobooks of The Bromeliad Trilogy. :(

The only reason that I’m still speaking to Audible.com is that they didn’t charge me for that little exchange. If I had paid AND been told that I couldn’t get those books which look perfectly available when you do a search on their site, someone would have been getting quite an inbox-load of invective on Monday morning.

Unfortunately, that meant that I still had to figure out the reading order and whatnot to find a Pratchett book for the trip. So I googled about, remembered that the L-Space Web had been recommended to me once before, and found there the Discworld Reading Order Guides. After looking up blurbs on the various books labeled as Starter Novels, as well as any others that caught my fancy.

I like the character Death, and seriously considered going with Mort or Thief of Time. But the plots of neither caught my interest.

I ended up going with the first three witches books (Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters, and Witches Abroad). I’ve done Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, which show up at the end of the witches line on the chart, and also The Amazing Maurice, which the chart claims has “minor plot links” (though I don’t know what they’d be). I liked Granny Weatherwax in what I’ve read, so I decided to gamble on her rather than Death. I won’t get through all three of them on the trip, but it’s a good 10–11 hours, and the book claim to be 8, 10.5, and 8.5 hours each.

Okay, so that’s more than I need, but things should be done in threes. Besides, I’ve already started listening to Equal Rites, though I don’t have the print copy yet, so I don’t really know how far along I am. The books have a different narrator from the Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, so I’m still trying to get used to her. I think I prefer Stephen Briggs’ Granny Weatherwax to Ms. Imrie’s; and I have no idea who is doing the Death voice on this recording, but it just feels wrong, perhaps because it’s such an interruption from Imrie’s voices.

So the books are generally out of the way for the trip (if you will count that I’ve ordered the paperbacks and just have to put them in the car when they arrive Wednesday). Now I just need to do everything else for the Vue’s first road trip.

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Doublespeak Fun

June 23, 2006

Virginia Tech student charged in planting of explosive device – Roanoke.com: “They found an explosive device containing gunpowder and ball bearings, police said. No one was injured, and the device was rendered safe by the state police bomb squad.”

“rendered safe” = they blew it up

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