Bearshorty's musings

For the first time in maybe half a year I actually watched Monday’s TV live. First “How I met Your Mother (HIMYM)” and then “House.”

I have been keeping up with “HIMYM” online but I was mostly bored with it and in the first half of this evening’s episode I switched to HBO and Harry Potter during the commercial and didn’t care to go back. The show seems to mostly stay in place and it is just not interesting anymore. I don’t think I’m coming back for it next season.

I need to catch up to about 4 episodes of ‘House’ and I don’t really care. I do like House and Wilson interaction in the latest storyline but that is about it – the rest, the patients just leave me indifferent. I will watch the finale, of course, and I will probably catch up to the episodes I missed by having them run in the background while I’m doing something else but I’m glad the show is ending. It used to be a must watch for me but I really stopped caring.

In fact, this TV season has the lowest number of shows that I follow or that I watch live. There are only three that I watch as they actually air and that I get excited about: Glee, Community and Grimm. I’m still surprised by how much I got into Glee this year after two years of indifference and occasional watching. Community is the funniest comedy around and Grimm is my favorite new show and I adore it to pieces and it just keeps getting better and better.

Modern Family and Grey’s Anatomy are shows I like that I usually watch online after they air. HIMYM is the show I do watch online but reluctantly. And House I kind of watch online now, but not really. I gave up on Bones in April when I realized that I just didn’t care anymore and I don’t miss it at all. But that’s it.

At least summer is coming up with the crack that is True Blood, SYTYCD and Burn Notice. I’m done with Leverage and I don’t even remember other shows. I haven’t even finished last four episodes of Dexter Season 6. (And I will watch Borgias all at once on Demand probably).

It is again one of those day where I can’t bring myself to grade. Migraine is not helping. At least I put together my lesson plan for tomorrow on how to have a good thesis.

Wow, the new TV resolution is amazing. Even before I turned it to HD. I was watching “Bones” on it and it was like I was in the room with the characters. Which was not always a great thing as the corpse was also in a very high resolution and a little gloss.

I’m still mad at “Bones” for denying an audience significant moments but at least we don’t have to deal with annoying will they/won’t they anymore. I like it better this way.

“Community” continues to rock. I want that jingle as a song.

Since we had guests last night I did not have a chance to watch “Bones” which is probably a good thing since I would have been cross stitching. And this episode was actually really good, so I’m glad I watched it this morning.

( Bones S6E22 )

“Brothers and Sisters” is officially cancelled. I was checking the news every day and even though it was expected I’m still sad about it. I know it is just the TV show but I loved the characters.

I finished my semester today. I graded all the final exams and calculated the grades. I have a few students who did not turn in their final papers and I gave plenty of chances so those are the only D and Fs. The rest did pretty well, a nice curve. I was done by 2pm and took the rest of the day off. Yay, it is summer.

I watched “Grey’s Anatomy” and one “Avatar: TLA” episode and then I went outside and actually did something active.

I was showing the Kid and her brother how to rollerblade. It felt nice to get on the roller blades again, it really feels like summer now. I spent an hour outside.

Our guests are staying until next Thursday, I think. It is weird to have to be social every evening.

Cross-stitching: all purple is done, that’s Big Bear’s bow and middle bear’s suit. It is coming along, two more weeks if I keep up this pace.

Today’s storm played havoc with my head. We don’t have anything like what is going on in the South (those poor people) but today’s skies were dark and threatening at many points. And in the afternoon, around eleven thirty, I was getting some lab work done for a doctor’s appointment next week, when I started to feel off filling out the paperwork. My head got full and heavy and I just didn’t feel stable. Since I got so used to this few years ago, I don’t immediately freak out but half an hour later when I was having a conversation with fellow teachers and eating pizza, my head felt like someone was squeezing it pretty hard. My blood pressure was doing something and reacting to the storm. I went and got water and paced mostly, since I feel better if I move and not sit still. As soon as the rain started my head began to feel better.

I had to give final exams today in my writing classes, and I’m glad the rain started when it did, so I felt relatively ok to give the test and sit at the desk. I graded my history quizzes and a few history papers while proctoring. I gave more "C" on the papers than usual; I just got mad at bad writing. Topic sentences are not that hard. And I read some National Geographic May issue.

I’m going to get more sleep tonight and hopefully my head and balance can get back to normal.
I did wear a suit to work today, I love my suit.

In the evening I watched “Community” and then “Bones”. The good thing about not caring that much about “Bones” anymore is that I just sat there and cross stitched. I didn’t really have to pay attention to the screen too much. I did a little more than hour and a half of cross stitching since I really have to finish that blanket in a month and last two month I didn’t have much time to work on it. So lots of May cross stitching coming up.

Cross-stitch: tan, tan, tan – I’m going to just work all tan color until I do all of it – middle bear’s head and paws and some on Big Bear.

My 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 )

Last day of writing class before Spring Break and, boy, I’m so ready for a break. I’ll still have to grade and everything but I just need a break from teaching. I taught them ‘idea’ and ‘example’ quotes today and how to explain their quotes better and make connections.

I also graded the map quiz for the second section of my history class. I really did not know Rome was in China. Half the class studied and got an “A” and too many got 34 and 40, which is silly since they had the study material beforehand.

I watched ‘Bones’ as my study break. It is really not that interesting anymore.

Today I needed to come up with Assignment 2 for my writing classes. I had a general idea of how I saw Jenkins and Faludi working together but I needed to talk and write things through to get at what I wanted to ask. With the help from Medusa by instant chat and Karen, a fellow teacher in my office, I have a question that is really about communities and the benefits and drawbacks of being a part of an interest-based community (like an online fan community and the military-type community of The Citadel). Big thanks for the help. Hopefully, my students will be able to say something intelligent about it.

About 40 minutes into one discussion class about the Faludi article, it finally occurred to one of my students that the story was non-fiction. The fact that Faludi was a journalist writing for the New Yorker did not give it away, apparently. I get the stories of the hazing at The Citadel seemed too extreme for her. At least, she realized this before she had to write her paper.

So after every lecture I give for my history class, I’ve been adding a drabble to a Highlander Methos story were he thinks or remembers something from that period of history. And this morning I wrote the Greece one where he thinks on the Thermopylae after watching “300.” He fought for the Persians, of course. Out of five I wrote so far, I think it is my favorite. I’m curious to see where these drabbles will go and what particular points of my lectures stick with me for this character.

“Community” was sweet today. I like having a Valentines episode that was about friendship more than it was about grand love. “Bones” – the episode was boring but the last scene, oh the last scene. I need to rewatch it. For once, great acting from Booth.

19 inches of snow. University only cancelled classes before 11:30 and as I teach after 1:30 I had to get to work. I did cancel the office hours in the late morning. So the day felt a bit surreal with no traffic and the whole world being white and clear.

( Some pictures of our snow )

In the morning I read and commented on a few close reading assignments. Many talked around the issue without clearly defining anything and many just paraphrased the whole two paragraphs and thought that it was analysis. Sigh. Run-ons also continue to be a problem. I was happy to see that one of my students from Basic Comp had the clearest paragraph that actually answered the assignment question and set up what the debate was in the fair use paragraphs. I was very proud of him. He definitely can write his ideas better now and I’d like to think that I had a little bit to do with it.

The classes went alright. We went over what makes a good paper, the structure of it. And the grading criteria. Then I actually made them take a piece of paper and draw a line on it, writing out how Jenkins would answer the assignment question and then how they would. I wanted them to make sure that the answer was not identical since that would not make a string thesis. I still know they will go for simple. My goal this semester is to get them to complicate their argument just a little bit.

First two minutes of today’s “Community” were so funny I couldn’t stop laughing. I need to rewatch it tomorrow. Good episode of Bones too. ( Bones )

Yemen joins the growing list of countries rioting against their governments .

( Winter Queen by Boris Akunin )

Why do students think I can help them at all with the final exam? It is a final exam – by definition I can’t critique your rough draft.

Grading papers – I do love it when a student tries hard all semester and clearly works at it and gets an “A” on the final paper. She will probably get a “B+” in the class but I’m proud of her that she got to that “A”.

( Bones S6E9 )

I also watched Barbara Walters special on Oprah since it was on and I’m in avoiding grading mode.

I went to Local College today to do the paperwork and meet the department chair. It is a very pretty place about 20 minutes away from my house. When I’m in a college environment it always reminds me why I love teaching. School always felt like the place I belonged. Now if I just get myself together and work properly and studiously. I don’t know where that girl went, who used to study and read and learn new things. Well, at least by teaching this global class I will definitely learn new things.

It was a good meeting and I got a lot of information out of it. I also explored the small campus. The bookstore was selling good notebooks for only 99c too. And the view from the café and student union was just amazing. My goal for next week is to come up with a book list for the class.

( Bones S6E7 )

I watched the next two 'Neverwhere' episodes as I'm two-thirds through the book. Still like the book more.