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Thursday, April 7, 2011
Apr. 7th, 2011 10:34 pmMy brain was so wired from all the grading and stress about grading that I barely slept last night. I worked 6 to 6 again. I didn’t finish all grading, I still have more this weekend and then a whole new cycle starts. I’m so taking this one step at the time and not thinking of having to grade 126 papers in April plus 42 rough drafts. The deadlines got weird this semester. Well, I have all the rough drafts done, and 30 papers graded so far. (I’m not counting 58 history papers waiting for me – I wish I had a grader for those. But at least history papers are easier to grade.) My plan this weekend is 4 papers a day to finish Paper 3 grading before I start on 4 next week.
My two writing classes are on the different schedule for the next paper because of the delayed grading for the second one. So in my first class, they turned in their Paper 4 and I assigned the new reading. Jonathan Boyarin’s “Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul” is one of my favorite readings from the book for the class and I’ve taught it every time I taught this class. And this is maybe my third or fourth time reading it and I always find new and wonderful sentences in it. He is an anthropologist and he writes about his identity as a Jewish man and how it evolved over time from a New Jersey farm to New York and Paris. He grew more religious over time but he also thinks his search for Jewishness was to recover that lost childhood sense of community that, of course, was an illusion.
So in class today, I gave the students a crash course on Jewish terms like shul, yarmulke, synagogue, Yiddish, kosher, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Ashkenazi, Sephardic and most importantly for the story, minyan (10 men needed for a formal prayer service). I so take all these terms for granted, being Jewish myself, that I need to remember that the students don’t really know specifics. One of my students, a Catholic, I think, didn’t even know Christianity came out of Judaism. He asked if Jews had the Ten Commandments and was very surprised to learn that the Old Testament is the Jewish Bible. A few students, who are Jewish, did ask him if he knew Jesus was Jewish. Another kid, also a Christian, actually told the student who didn’t know of Jesus’ origins to perhaps check out an episode of “Family Guy” where Chris finds out Jesus is Jewish.
For Paper 5, they have to look at Boyarin and Ahmed and one more past reading from the class to answer this question (I came up with it in the car on the way to work, and typed it up at the end of office hours):
How do marginal groups define their identity as opposed to mainstream groups? What function does identity perform in both these groups?
In my second class, we went over thesis and topic sentences as their paper is due on Tuesday. My students did much better on Paper 3, I think they liked the question and Gladwell was pretty easy and it was really fun to see some get so excited over grades. One of my girls who wasn’t passing got a C+ on this paper and her gasp of happiness was wonderful. Another was so excited that he progressed from C to C+ to a B. Now, I told him, you have to keep it. (They have to get the grade twice to get it as a final grade – we really only look at the last three papers).
And students came to office hours, one with her anthropology paper, which was fun little personal essay. So long day but it is nice to feel productive. And a student who I had in my “Development of Europe 1” class in 2006, her freshman year of college, and later in my “England in Middle Ages” class, who is now doing a Masters in education came to visit too, to ask questions about a lecture on ancient Rome she will be student teaching.
( Bones )
My two writing classes are on the different schedule for the next paper because of the delayed grading for the second one. So in my first class, they turned in their Paper 4 and I assigned the new reading. Jonathan Boyarin’s “Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul” is one of my favorite readings from the book for the class and I’ve taught it every time I taught this class. And this is maybe my third or fourth time reading it and I always find new and wonderful sentences in it. He is an anthropologist and he writes about his identity as a Jewish man and how it evolved over time from a New Jersey farm to New York and Paris. He grew more religious over time but he also thinks his search for Jewishness was to recover that lost childhood sense of community that, of course, was an illusion.
So in class today, I gave the students a crash course on Jewish terms like shul, yarmulke, synagogue, Yiddish, kosher, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Ashkenazi, Sephardic and most importantly for the story, minyan (10 men needed for a formal prayer service). I so take all these terms for granted, being Jewish myself, that I need to remember that the students don’t really know specifics. One of my students, a Catholic, I think, didn’t even know Christianity came out of Judaism. He asked if Jews had the Ten Commandments and was very surprised to learn that the Old Testament is the Jewish Bible. A few students, who are Jewish, did ask him if he knew Jesus was Jewish. Another kid, also a Christian, actually told the student who didn’t know of Jesus’ origins to perhaps check out an episode of “Family Guy” where Chris finds out Jesus is Jewish.
For Paper 5, they have to look at Boyarin and Ahmed and one more past reading from the class to answer this question (I came up with it in the car on the way to work, and typed it up at the end of office hours):
How do marginal groups define their identity as opposed to mainstream groups? What function does identity perform in both these groups?
In my second class, we went over thesis and topic sentences as their paper is due on Tuesday. My students did much better on Paper 3, I think they liked the question and Gladwell was pretty easy and it was really fun to see some get so excited over grades. One of my girls who wasn’t passing got a C+ on this paper and her gasp of happiness was wonderful. Another was so excited that he progressed from C to C+ to a B. Now, I told him, you have to keep it. (They have to get the grade twice to get it as a final grade – we really only look at the last three papers).
And students came to office hours, one with her anthropology paper, which was fun little personal essay. So long day but it is nice to feel productive. And a student who I had in my “Development of Europe 1” class in 2006, her freshman year of college, and later in my “England in Middle Ages” class, who is now doing a Masters in education came to visit too, to ask questions about a lecture on ancient Rome she will be student teaching.
( Bones )
