Tag Archives: podcasts

* Ways we know Mr Stanley Bull Squinkles, III, was not always a stray: (1) Doing that little ‘pat your lap’ thing to encourage a cat to jump up is almost Pavlovian for him; once he hears the pat, he is positively compelled to jump towards it. (2) The speed with which he runs into the kitchen whenever a can is opened, and then the intense expectancy with which he looks up at you.

* Things that went well today: My midday class had a fruitful and interesting discussion about the different ways of conceiving of knowledge. The student who made it explicit is Malaysian, and talked some about how Malaysia (and many other East Asian countries) view knowledge as a communal, public good, and so feels little need to cite; the West, on the other hand (broad strokes, as always), with our obsessions about individuality and worship of genius, becomes congruently obsessed with and worshipful of rigorous citation practices.

At least some of my jokes landed in all of my classes. To be clear, I am not a comedian, and certainly don’t ‘tell jokes’, but I am who I am, and I tend to incorporate into my lectures and discussions little details and tangents that make me laugh on the fly (or seemed especially effective in earlier classes). Given my decidedly arid sense of humor and delivery, my students don’t tend to think I’m nearly as funny as I think I am, but we can’t all et cetera.

I didn’t have many student meetings between classes, so I sat outside in the unseasonably warm sun (with remnants of last week’s blizzard all around) and listened to the most recent Greg Proops, and laughed out loud several times. It stresses me out when he starts to abuse his audiences, sometimes – like, when he does it for real, about people who sit and chit-chat, not when he jokingly berates them – but his memory is prodigious, and his knowledge of baseball and history legitimately remarkable.

* Things I wish I had handled better: Team Seniors in my last class got on my nerves a little. It’s because Berlin and London were sitting next to each other, and they are the least… ‘pliant’ is not the word I want, although there’s a soupçon of that involved… game and willing, I think. Perhaps not convinced there’s anything to be gained from my class, but putting up a good front, and that is all I require from seniors. Especially in spring.

Paris and America, so far, are doing an excellent job. I catch America occasionally exchanging Meaningful Glances with London or Berlin, but that’s fine. I have no problem with that, so long as it doesn’t get out of control. Paris seems legitimately invested, or is doing such a good performance of Legitimately Invested Student that he has achieved Suspension of Disbelief.

But I had to snap-snap Berlin and London twice today, because they were falling into whispers. Partly it makes my autistic features flare up, and I find it almost impossible to keep my concentration in the face of other conversations (this is way less of an issue in casual situations, but actually quite a challenge when I’m teaching). And partly it’s rude, and they’re seniors, and, as I’ve said, it is essential to the health of my class community that they are kept in-line as a model for the freshmen.

I have a Plan on this front, incidentally. Right now we’re at the snap-snap ‘Gentlemen, is everything okay over there?’ and snap-snap ‘Gentlemen, stay with us’ stage. Next is the Light Shaming stage, where I embarrass them just a bit. That will be hard for me, as I am myself so sensitive to embarrassment – mine or others’ – but these are privileged finance majors. I think they can handle it. If all that fails, we come to calling them in to office hours, which will annoy me to no end, so fingers crossed it doesn’t come to that.

Things as yet unclassified as ‘having gone well’ or ‘having gone badly’ because I really can’t decide: Today in my fairy tales class, we had the library presentation. It was on the schedule for Thursday, but the librarian and I worked it out for Tuesday because it was better for her schedule. And I forgot to warn students. So I sent them an email yesterday afternoon explaining the situation, and telling them to look at the readings on the schedule for Thursday, and acknowledging that I was giving them less than 24 hours, and that therefore didn’t assume they would all be able to read them in great detail, but hoped they would at least skim them all.

I think that was the right thing to do, in light of my oversight. I think it is the respectful thing to do: it was my mistake, so I adjusted my expectations of them accordingly, and let them know.

But I can’t stop thinking that giving them permission to skim assigned readings is dangerous.

I went with ‘respect’ trumping ‘dangerous’, but time will tell.

In my last class, in our discussion of the ways that home and self are mutually constitutive, Paris was giving a very thoughtful answer about how the physical, concrete space of, and items in, a home were actually a kind of performance of ideal self, and I laughed, and then wanted to explain that I wasn’t laughing at him or his thoughtful answer, but rather at being reminded of the old joke about how you should never sleep with someone who doesn’t have books in their house.

That got a pretty good laugh, although I didn’t look up to see who was laughing. I wanted them to be able to exchange all the looks they wanted for a second without my interference.

Now, this is college, so that kind of joke is fine, and, as I’ve said before, the only ‘policing’ I do in class discussions is to do with respect, I don’t really get worked up with ‘bad words’ (which I never use (believe it or not), and which students rarely use, because they are extremely well socialized to ‘proper culture’) or ‘risqué’ topics. But I tend to avoid risqué topics myself, in the service of maintaining my Objective Leader stance.

Still, that’s really good fucking advice.

And yes, I’m letting both senses of ‘fucking’ – adjective and noun – operate there.

* Moments I enjoyed: sitting in the afternoon sun, as mentioned above.

The evening idly chatting and perusing the day’s media with the husband this evening.

The walk from campus to the bus. It felt warm, although it was actually not much above freezing, and it was a clear calm night, and the lighted buildings – I mean the big buildings that typically have some kind of colored light accents – were all red, for some reason, and I wondered for the first time if there is rhyme or reason to the colors on the buildings in this city. Like how the Empire State Building’s colors change for various events and seasons.

Speaking of, this bit of graffiti I noticed when I stopped to take this picture:

I’m not really sure what the image is – a paper with a tack in it, right? Is it a reference to that game that got so much attention last year? But I haven’t played it, so I don’t know, I just recall a bulletin board as part of its central ‘trailer’ iconography.

* Words I think I may have used imprecisely in this post: congruently; mutually constitutive.

There are lots more ‘somes’ to discuss, of course, but we’re a tad over the half hour, and I’m now looking forward to some cheese and some TV before bed.

some goats

(whence)