Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Jan. 17th, 2012 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bearshortyFirst day of school! Always exciting. And mostly involves lots and lots of printing and photo copying now. Today I had to print and photocopy: syllabi, close reading assignment, close reading practice, grading criteria, Assignment 1, How to Read handout, grammar presentation sign-up sheet, student info form and rosters. And this is just for writing classes. History photocopying tomorrow. And I had to make some copies from the book I had to return to the library. I do love making a list of everything I need to do and crossing it all off, though.
All that photocopying meant that I needed to get up at 6am and get to school early, even though I don’t teach until 1:40pm. My teaching is done at 6:20pm.
Last night, I started reading the Slave narrative I’m assigning my students in history and it turned out a really fascinating read. (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, an African , London, 1789 I was reading it on my Kindle (since it is free there) all morning with breakfast and on the bus and waiting for the office to open.
After all the photocopying and going to the library to let books on hold I start reading articles I will assign for my “Sex, Politics and Identity before 1800” class. I inherited this class and I’m using most of those reading – but not all. We will start with Laqueur and Cadden, which I will get to tomorrow, but today I focused on Joan Scott’s “Gender as a Category of Analysis.” Yes, a previous instructor assigned this to undergrads. I will have to warn my students not to panic if they can’t understand it without our class discussion and give them some guiding questions. I know I read it before. I probably have notes somewhere and I probably read it more than once. But reading Scott is always scary although very interesting. And she is so relevant to this class that I need to challenge my students. Good thing it is a seminar class and we will have time to break this article down on a very very basic level. At least that is the idea.
There are some quotes from this article that I just love and adore because it represents why I love history so much: (printed in Shoemaker and Vincent, eds, Gender and History in Western Europe).
“The point of new historical investigation is to disrupt the notion of fixity, to discover the nature of the debate or repression that leads to the appearance of timeless permanence in binary gender representation.” (56)
And
“We can write the history of that [political] process only if we recognize that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are at once empty and overflowing categories. Empty because they have no ultimate, transcendent meaning. Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions.” (61)
So good.
One good thing about being on campus all day is seeing other instructors and being social. I had lunch in Nika’s office and we had great conversation. And later on myself, Nika and two other instructors had a fun discussion of religion that ended up with volcano and Mary Shelley (where my brain started thinking about the Highlander episode – oh, fandom).
My classes themselves went well. I think the second classroom layout is better for discussion and I might like the students more – but it is a little early to tell.
I watched “Glee” for my evening decompression. I still find it weird that after two years of only watching an episode once in a blue moon and not really being into in, it suddenly clicked for me. Will asking Finn to be his best man was just very sad and inappropriate too.
All that photocopying meant that I needed to get up at 6am and get to school early, even though I don’t teach until 1:40pm. My teaching is done at 6:20pm.
Last night, I started reading the Slave narrative I’m assigning my students in history and it turned out a really fascinating read. (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, an African , London, 1789 I was reading it on my Kindle (since it is free there) all morning with breakfast and on the bus and waiting for the office to open.
After all the photocopying and going to the library to let books on hold I start reading articles I will assign for my “Sex, Politics and Identity before 1800” class. I inherited this class and I’m using most of those reading – but not all. We will start with Laqueur and Cadden, which I will get to tomorrow, but today I focused on Joan Scott’s “Gender as a Category of Analysis.” Yes, a previous instructor assigned this to undergrads. I will have to warn my students not to panic if they can’t understand it without our class discussion and give them some guiding questions. I know I read it before. I probably have notes somewhere and I probably read it more than once. But reading Scott is always scary although very interesting. And she is so relevant to this class that I need to challenge my students. Good thing it is a seminar class and we will have time to break this article down on a very very basic level. At least that is the idea.
There are some quotes from this article that I just love and adore because it represents why I love history so much: (printed in Shoemaker and Vincent, eds, Gender and History in Western Europe).
“The point of new historical investigation is to disrupt the notion of fixity, to discover the nature of the debate or repression that leads to the appearance of timeless permanence in binary gender representation.” (56)
And
“We can write the history of that [political] process only if we recognize that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are at once empty and overflowing categories. Empty because they have no ultimate, transcendent meaning. Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions.” (61)
So good.
One good thing about being on campus all day is seeing other instructors and being social. I had lunch in Nika’s office and we had great conversation. And later on myself, Nika and two other instructors had a fun discussion of religion that ended up with volcano and Mary Shelley (where my brain started thinking about the Highlander episode – oh, fandom).
My classes themselves went well. I think the second classroom layout is better for discussion and I might like the students more – but it is a little early to tell.
I watched “Glee” for my evening decompression. I still find it weird that after two years of only watching an episode once in a blue moon and not really being into in, it suddenly clicked for me. Will asking Finn to be his best man was just very sad and inappropriate too.