At the risk of belaboring the point, beating a dead horse, and continuing ad nauseam, I have to say again that my students are a pretty decent bunch. As I said in an earlier post, they were almost as excited and relieved as I was to hear that I had received tenure. In the months [...]
Archive for the ‘teaching’ Category
Pizza
Posted in teaching on March 27, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Relief
Posted in teaching on March 24, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Thank you to everyone who left the kind comments on yeterday’s post! I have been so worried about the tenure decision coming down that I feel completely wrung out now that the stress has been pulled away. It seems almost as if the stress were the only thing keeping me upright.
The reaction to my news [...]
Some Good News
Posted in teaching on March 23, 2009 | 20 Comments »
As I was driving home today, my cell phone rang, and I, being a very bad Connecticut driver, answered. It was Dorothy, telling me that Tony had called and left a message. Because I had answered without turning down the radio first, and because I apparently am losing my hearing in my old age, I [...]
Fatigue Is a Sneaky Bastard
Posted in teaching on March 5, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Ordinarily, when I am under a lot of stress, I suffer even more from insomnia than I usually do. Lately, though, I have been falling asleep almost as soon as I go to bed around 9:30 or 10. I do wake up very early, but that is at least partly Muttboy’s fault, who seems to [...]
March Massacre
Posted in teaching on March 4, 2009 | 6 Comments »
I’m not sure how much detail I want to reveal here, but I’ll try to tell my story without compromising anyone’s privacy. The economic hard times have hit my university fairly hard, though probably not as hard as some other institutions. We have a small endowment that lost something like 25% in the last year, [...]
This Is Just to Say
Posted in teaching on February 26, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Tonight in my American lit class we spent more than twenty minutes discussing William Carlos Williams’s poem “This is jus to Say.” It’s an interesting little poem, a mere 33 words (counting the title). This long discussion, which ranged from the image that the poet constructed to the way some thought the tone of the [...]
Finished
Posted in teaching on December 15, 2008 | 3 Comments »
My grading, that is. I had a huge load of papers, as I usually do, made even bigger by the take-home final exams from my American lit classes. I started the grading process last week, I think, but when I really try to think about last week and the grading I did, I [...]
A Shout Out to the Puritans
Posted in teaching on October 2, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Note to Sarah Palin and her handlers: Ronald Reagan did not make up that line about the shining city on the hill. John Winthrop said it first in “A Model of Christian Charity” in 1630.
Just sayin’.
Poor John gets no love.
End of the Year
Posted in teaching on April 30, 2008 | 8 Comments »
It is the end of the academic year, or almost. I have classes tomorrow and my final class on Monday. We have finals for almost two weeks and then graduation on the 18th. It has been a strange year, with some very deep and dark lows and some strange highs. I’ve [...]
Link Time
Posted in teaching on April 17, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Check out this other blog. I know the author, if you know what I mean.
