Clearly I've given up on the whole Anne of Green Gables title thing. It was fun, but I found myself not wanting to post because I couldn't come up with a good quote to match my life. I think my life just needed to parallel the movie more, so that I could have more appropriate titles. So anyway, we're back to title-less posts, unless I get inspired in some way with a brilliant title. Also, I have to warn you here at the beginning that I'm feeling the creative urge especially strongly tonight, so this post may be rather lengthy. If you need to go grab a snack or hit the bathroom, now is the time to do it.

I'm currently home for a couple of days, working during the day and following my family around in the evening. Tonight we went to the East Linn basketball game, which was a playoff game. I'd forgotten how worked up people get about high school sports. I remember a time or two in high school where I was down in the student section yelling my head off, but as an adult I have very little interest in who wins or loses and find myself almost clapping for the other side if they make a good play. To be perfectly honest, I think it could be argued that sports programs in high school (and college, for that matter) do more harm than good in the long run, but I suppose I won't find too many who are sympathetic to that position.

I have to also talk about another incident in my Sacred Violence class that happened this week: I think I've mentioned before that we're reading a lot of texts that argue unusual things about religion and the sacred. And the professor is very interested in taking the ideas in them seriously, on a personal level as well as an academic one. This is one of the things that has made the class so unique and challenging (in a good way.) Well, on Tuesday, he opened the class by talking about his personal religious background (which was, not religious) and the reasons that he has become more open to the idea of God and the sacred in his life. Then he basically opened it up to the class, offering us the opportunity to talk about what the ideas of the class texts have meant to us on a personal level, what value we think this particular class holds, and where we feel we are in our graduate education. We all sat in silence for about 7 or 8 minutes (this is not a professor who's afraid of letting people sit and think about a question for awhile), and then, one by one, people started talking, as though they'd been waiting for an opportunity like this forever. They talked about suffering they've experienced in their lives (suicides & deaths of family members among other things--we've been reading Why Bad Things Happen To Good People), what they feel about God and religion and how that's been changing over the course of the class, and other ways that they are searching for meaning in their lives. It was one of the most remarkable, eye-opening experiences I have ever had. It was amazing how eager people were to talk about things that were important to them--things that were real--rather than the usual wordplay that graduate classes often consist of. I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it, except that it was an education for me, that everyone--even the coolest rationalist--is trying to find meaning in their lives and that people are desperate to reach out--after all, who could imagine a place more ill-suited to soul-baring than a classroom full of fifteen critical, cynical PhD. candidates, and yet... I don't know whether the next class will be weird after such an experience, but for myself, I think I feel less need to be guarded about my faith than before and certainly less intimidated. When you start talking about God and why people suffer, it becomes apparent quite quickly that no matter how much education or brains you have, there are still questions that can't be answered.

Also on the graduate school front, I've come up with a paper topic for my Baroque class--a matter that had been of some concern to me, since after seven weeks of this course, I still have only a foggy idea of what the Baroque even is. But, in last week's reading (which I actually did) I noticed a mention of the Wesley's hymns being written in this same historical period and it came to me that perhaps I could look at them in the context of the Protestant Baroque. The more I thought about it, the better of an idea it seemed: it is cross-disciplinary, which is a plus in this particular course; I have the necessary background knowledge (at least I should hope I do, after four years at NNU); there seem to be legitimate Baroque influences in some of the hymns; my professor is pretty enthusiastic about the concept; John Wesley actually edited an edition of Paradise Lost, which is one of our class texts; and best of all, it's actually interesting to me. I'm even kind of excited about it. When I compare this to the dread that I had previously been feeling at the thought of this paper, it really seems something of a miracle. And I found out that I don't have to do a research paper for my GTF course; the final paper is instead going to be some kind of response to an assigned reading. Come to think of it, this term is shaping up rather nicely.

Even my time in the writing lab has improved. Somehow, this term I managed to get a time slot that is significantly slower than last term's. I can usually count on at least an hour of down time in my four hour shift, often more. And I've gotten to know another girl who I'm scheduled with this term. She looks and sounds startlingly like my cousin Julie, and although she claims she's never been to the Midwest, she admits to getting accused of having a Minnesotan accent a lot. In any case, she's quite nice and easy-going, which makes for a good work partner. The other day, an Asian girl came in when it was slow and asked if she could get us to clarify some American idioms for her. She wanted to know what "cheesy" and "whacked" meant, how "dope" could mean both good and bad, and when's the best time to call something "snappy." Quite possibly the most fun I've had in the writing lab, previously mentioned doctoral student excluded.

As for my training to become a bona-fide composition instructor next year (aka GTF course), I must admit that my professor for this course becomes more and more troubling as the term rolls by. I am still excited about being able to teach next year, but I'm thinking that I will possibly end up throwing out most of what she tries to indoctrinate us with and teaching the way that seems to work the best. Certainly the two GTFs I observed this week didn't teach anything like the elusive ideal composition instructor whose methods we try to discover every week in class. Most of their students seemed to be asleep, if we're going to get right down to it, and I'm pretty sure I can keep people awake, if nothing else. I have no problem with telling a student to go run around out in the hall until he can wake himself up enough to pay attention in class. I fell asleep in my fair share of college classes, but I'm pretty sure the threat of being singled out would have provided the incentive to prop my eyes open, no matter how tired/bored I was. I guess my main issue with the GTF class is that it imagines this ideal world, in which the instructor has an unlimited amount of time to grade papers and plan lessons, and the students are bright-eyed, motivated, and intellectually prepared for class, rather than preparing us for the real world, where we'll have our own classes to read and write for and the students will often be tired, hungover, unmotivated, have limited English-speaking skills, wretched grammar, or negative preconceptions about the irrelevance of the course for their lives, or some combination of the above. I know that sounds like I have a really bleak outlook, and I don't really. I just remember being a freshman. A class was only one hour in my whole day, and I spent time and attention on it for exactly one hour a day and no more--and I was a good student! No one comes to a freshman composition course with innate eagerness to learn what an enthymeme is. Certainly not in the same way that you might enter your first literature course, political science course, philosophy course or whatever meets your interests. Anyway, I am still excited about teaching, I just want to be done with the blasted training and get on with it.

Ok, well, if you are still reading, you are a truly committed friend or perhaps masochistic. I can't think of too much else to talk about, although if I could, I would keep writing, because I'm in the mood. I'm also in the mood for a good Mystery Science Theatre, but alas, they are all at my apartment, so I'll have to wait on that as well. I feel like I ought to end this like an epistle, since it feels like one, so, here you go: This salutation by my own hand. Remember my chains...

Labels: grad school

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Sunday, February 13, 2005

Happy Anniversary to ME!!