Thursday, February 12, 2015
Today at work, we discussed the new reading - Ethan Watters "The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan". As part of the homework, the students had to make up a vocabulary list of words they don't know and post it in a Drop Box on the class website. The most common words not known to 18-19 year olds college students in this essay - inkling, vulnerable and bureaucracy. Sigh. I was also worried that this essay was too similar to Michael Moss' "The Extraordinary Science of Junk Food," which we read first and which the students will have to connect to Watters. And yet one girl (a jock, though) was all surface level with it: "This essay is about depression. How are we supposed to connect it to junk food?" Let's see: both are about corporations and marketing which changes culture; in both science is used to advance the corporations and to justify the marketing in the first place. But I guess that requires too much thinking.
I need go grade Paper 1s but Tanya seems to want my attention more during the days. I will try to do 8 to 10 papers tomorrow somehow. Tonight, she had a problem going to sleep - maybe it were the pears she ate this afternoon, or maybe she just needed to cuddle - so that was an extra hour I wanted to use to grade. Ah, well. I'm not really stressing about it too much.
I started to read Thomas Hardy's "Far from the Madding Crowd" again - I was at 20% on my Kindle a few years ago. I really wanted to read the whole thing but I think I got distracted. So I started again now and reread those pages, which seemed to go faster. But now I paused again in almost the same place because Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" came through on the library hold and I need to read that before the hold ends. But I definitely want to get back to Hardy. I enjoyed "The Mayor of Casterbridge" a lot and I really like his characters and the general flow of his prose.
I've read a lot of Asimov's short stories and his autobiographies when I was a teenager. He deserves the acclamation as one of the best sci-fi writers; I adore his stories. And I read a few of his books. But I never read the Foundation series and this year I thought it was time. It is an easy read; I'm already a 3rd way through. But it suffers from being written in 1950s. It is technologically silly in many ways because Internet exists now. And most glaringly, there are absolutely no women. I haven't met one yet. 50,000 people - scientists - move to this planet, "with their wives and children" - no girl scientists ever exist, apparently. I know this book is a product of its time and I have the same problem with the collection of classic sci-fi short stories, but it gets a bit much sometimes.
I need go grade Paper 1s but Tanya seems to want my attention more during the days. I will try to do 8 to 10 papers tomorrow somehow. Tonight, she had a problem going to sleep - maybe it were the pears she ate this afternoon, or maybe she just needed to cuddle - so that was an extra hour I wanted to use to grade. Ah, well. I'm not really stressing about it too much.
I started to read Thomas Hardy's "Far from the Madding Crowd" again - I was at 20% on my Kindle a few years ago. I really wanted to read the whole thing but I think I got distracted. So I started again now and reread those pages, which seemed to go faster. But now I paused again in almost the same place because Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" came through on the library hold and I need to read that before the hold ends. But I definitely want to get back to Hardy. I enjoyed "The Mayor of Casterbridge" a lot and I really like his characters and the general flow of his prose.
I've read a lot of Asimov's short stories and his autobiographies when I was a teenager. He deserves the acclamation as one of the best sci-fi writers; I adore his stories. And I read a few of his books. But I never read the Foundation series and this year I thought it was time. It is an easy read; I'm already a 3rd way through. But it suffers from being written in 1950s. It is technologically silly in many ways because Internet exists now. And most glaringly, there are absolutely no women. I haven't met one yet. 50,000 people - scientists - move to this planet, "with their wives and children" - no girl scientists ever exist, apparently. I know this book is a product of its time and I have the same problem with the collection of classic sci-fi short stories, but it gets a bit much sometimes.