Friday, October 10, 2003
 

Today was one of those exhausting, never-ending days. I taught this morning and had to spend most of the class lecturing, since it was a writing workshop day. And of course I forgot to take fluids with me, so I had a dry mouth and a hoarse voice by the end.

I then had spread-apart meetings with students who were dissatisfied with the grades on their first essays. I have a lot of freshmen (or freshpersons, as I prefer), so there's a lot of sticker shock going on, in terms of how college essays are graded.

Later that afternoon, there were two back-to-back talks. I'd read the paper for neither (since both were over 20 pages long-- who on earth gives a talk that's 20 pages long???), and they were both about Early Modern lit. Whoosh, over my head. That isn't to say they weren't interesting; both, in fact, were very much so. It's just that it's hard to pay attention to something less-than-relevant to you on a Friday afternoon. The first one did have a lot of cool and useful postcolonial stuff, though. Unless postcolonial (or at least on its way out) is dead as a field of study, in which case it was a cute little exercise in anachronism. Hullo, transnational studies!

Or something.

At any rate, the talks lasted two hours, and I didn't get home until 4:30, and which point I took a nap. After that, I drafted the kiddies' assignment for Monday and sent it out to them. I've assigned them the "June Recital" section from Welty's The Golden Apples, which really has nothing to do with our course theme at all, but I thought we needed a break. Or they needed a break, rather. I could run my mouth about this stuff ad infinitum.

So, let the record show that I'm not a total sadist in the classroom.

So now it's Friday night, and I'm reading Sister Carrie. Woo-hoo. Par-tay ON . . .

Elvisette philosophized at 10:37 PM