Last night I had a worse-than-standard "teaching anxiety" dream: I dreamed I was reading my students’ course evaluations, and all their comments were not only negative, but horribly detailed. One said something like "We could tell she’d read a lot about Lacan [not that I’ve ever taught Lacan], but this class was, on the whole, […]
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Amanda
All this talk about rhetoric reminded me of my favorite mock-oration ever, Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, and especially its conclusion: I conjure you all that have had the evil luck to read this ink-wasting toy of mine, even in the name of the Nine Muses, no more to scorn the sacred mysteries of […]
There’s been a small flurry of interesting posts about the infamous five-paragraph essay recently. Body and Soul links to a New York Times article about the low standards in Texas high schools, which begins with an anecdote about a Texas high-schooler who was "trained to write five-paragraph ‘persuasive essays’ for the state exam" and was […]
Via Maud Newton, I found the Invisible Library, "a collection of books that only appear in other books." At last there’s a library for The Murder of Gonzago (the play-within-a-play in Hamlet), the novels from Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, the complete monographs of Sherlock Holmes, and all the imaginary books in […]
I finished grading a round of papers only to discover a documentable plagiarism case. I hate having to deal with that kind of thing. I hate having to give the stern "You’re looking at an F on the assignment, a very unpleasant meeting with the dean of students, and academic probation" lecture. Even more than […]
I saw Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World over the holiday weekend. I liked it better than I thought I would. I hasten to add that I’m not the kind of person who always insists that the book was better than the movie; such people are, on the whole, irritating. But I’m […]
After grading the better part of my students’ next-to-last round of essays, I think I can now safely say that if I never have to read the phrase "relate to," used as a synonym for "empathize with," "understand," or "identify with," again, I will die happy. And while I’m at it, I never again want […]
My friend T. and I were going to have a fabulously low-key Thanksgiving get-together, but we were both too low-key to organize it in a timely manner, so the cooking and eating and the hanging out and the movie-watching will take place a day later instead. There may be some redundancy in the menu, as […]
Thumbing through Barbara Walker’s A Treasury of Knitting Patterns and A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns in search of lace patterns I can actually make without losing track of where I am,* I keep coming across patterns with oddly poetic names. Consider, for instance: Parenthetical Rib All Fools’ Welt Tilting Ladder Crest of the Wave […]