Well, survived the first day of the semester. My CMPL 841 class should be okay, I think. There are only five people in it, two of whom I know, which is cool. The reading load seems not bad at all, which is good, because I'm seriously going to have to devote the bulk of my time this semester to figuring out how to teach composition and reading my ( Read more... )

Well, that's it. I'm just not spending any more time on this effing teaching philosophy. It's funny--I'm at a point in the semester where I've actually done just about everything, but now the little stuff that's left is taking me forever to do because I just have no motivation. Whatever. Tomorrow is movie night! I'm spending tomorrow grading my ( Read more... )

Urgh. Project: Productivity failed utterly today--perhaps not so terribly surprising, given how burnt-out I was by the end of yesterday. So it's early to bed, early to rise again tomorrow for this procrastinator of a grad student: by cracky, that German Romance paper is gonna get done.

( 'Song on the End of the World' by Czeslaw Milosz )

Poop on a stick am I tired. I've been up since 3:30 working on my Latin paper and I turned it in at about 6:00. It ended up being 12 pages, which...heck, it was supposed to be a 10-20 page paper, so, whatever, 12 pages is in that range. Boy, doing source criticism on medieval Latin texts using databases is a job and a half. The Brepols database has ( Read more... )

Yeah, tonight's gonna be another short entry. I'm tired and cold and I've been awake since 4:30. I hate the end of the semester, I really do. I just have to get through this week, though, and things should calm down a bit. So that'll be good ( Read more... )

TGIF, world, TGIF. It was my last German Romance class today, which made me kind of sad. It was fun, though; Prof. S. brought pastries and juice and stuff, and we pretty much just sat around and chatted. A couple guys in the class talked about their papers, we argued about film adaptations of Beowulf and King Arthur stories, we talked about the ( Read more... )

So what was really awesome about yesterday was that I started the day with 2 members of my exam committee and ended it with--I'm pretty sure, barring misunderstandings or some kind of wild drama--all five. This is pretty big for me. The whole "contacting faculty and asking them to do stuff for me" is terrifying for me. You'd think, having been at ( Read more... )

Gah. So tired. I got up at 3:15 this morning to work on my German Arthurian Romance paper. I must be losing my touch, because I was only on page 11 when 9:00 rolled around. The professor seemed to think I was making okay progress, though--as it turns out, I really didn't need to have the whole paper, since everyone's project was still very much a ( Read more... )

So, I met with my adviser today. He was super nice and encouraging, but holy shit, I have to e-mail a bunch of faculty asking them to be on my exam committee, and the whole thought of it makes me nervous as all get-out. I'm gradually getting better at e-mail (read: I don't have panic attacks at the thought of checking it at the moment) but e- ( Read more... )

Well, I made it through our presentation in Pedagogy today. I talked way too much, and I felt super awkward during the workshop parts, but I think it went okay. The professor seemed pleased enough, which is really what one aims for in such a thing anyway. So that's one less thing to worry about. (Not that I'm short of things to worry about. I'm so ( Read more... )