Happy Birthday, Katya!
I was very happy to go into work today, since I knew the day was going to be pretty low key: office hours with some grading, a lecture on Black Death (which always, always goes over well) and a peer review day in the History of Law class. And this is the week of Thanksgiving, it is my only official workday of the week. I get a very much needed break.
My office hours were productive as one student showed up to talk about her research paper and then Abena and I talked about the Global History class we are both teaching next semester. I’m basically using her syllabus but we incorporated some of my suggestions too, like the writing class and the map quiz for the final. We decided on a textbook and that other readings will be online. I think this Sunday I need to sit down and plan my second class in terms of books too. I will definitely rely on her since I’m not as strong on modern Global History but I am looking forward to it – it will be something different.
My students really loved the Black Death video set to Hollaback Girl; they were singing along by the end. And in the other class I had a change to look over students’ ‘thesis’ and actually give suggestions, which works for me too since hopefully that will lead to stronger papers. Although, I always want to bang my head into the desk about the footnotes. I put the footnotes guide online for them and they still don’t bother to look at it and when I physically show them templates they look like it is a brand new discovery. One student actually emailed me asking me how to do footnotes since he never done it. So I emailed back and told him, for what feels like the fifth time, where to find this information. I showed this in class before too. And how to put them in Word. And how footnote and bibliography is not the same. And it is still like brand new information. Maybe they want us to chew the food for them too?
( HIMYM )( House S8E7 )On a random note, I’m so excited for theatrical re-release of “Beauty and the Beast.” I saw the trailer today and it just makes me smile.
I got into bed early with my laptop to get into the holiday mood to write my RS Small Gifts story. I turned on my Christmas music playlist and started writing it finally. I know what the story is about and what each scene should be but this story doesn’t want to be written easily. It is not flowing as well as I should like. I have a week to do it and hopefully it will come together.