Waiting is Hard
So a moment ago, I cold-emailed a professor in the department a letter asking about the possibility of TAing for him in the fall. There's a fellowship for that, you see. In typical academic fashion, this professor is a good friend of my Feudal Overlord (who has STILL not read my prospectus draft, aaaaah!) and apparently a really nice guy--the Feudal Overlord grumbled that he's too nice, and likes everyone, and this is apparently NOT a desirable quality in a search committee member as it makes the decision process even harder--and he is scheduled to teach two courses this fall: science fiction (pleasepleaseplease need a TA!) and African-American drama (for which I feel vastly under-qualified but volunteered for anyway). My reading list will probably be very weird this summer if this works out, either way, but the problem is that I have no idea. In a surprising and not-so-fun twist this year, the department heads have decreed that grad students must find professors who are willing to accept TAs before we can apply for the funding, and I was getting desperate because they sent that particular note to an email address I don't use very often. One of my own professors, who I shall call The Juggernaught because that's what he is (not fat or encased in mystic metal--un-fucking-STOPable, the man is in his 80s and routinely runs undergraduates into the ground during abroad trips), is very much in need of assistance, but has been teaching without a TA for 40 years and the F.O. and I judge that he would not be too keen on the idea. Hence targeting the F.O.'s buddy. I have a secondary target if this one falls through--Lint, it's Meatloaf, she's teaching Celtic Women's Lit in translation next spring!--and really, I would like to try to teach two courses at once. It's good practice, and this is a nice safe way to ease into the pool, which is the point, I guess.
Anyway, I'm spastic, unwilling to sign and address and stamp a slew of recommendation letters that I have to send off for Panic!Duck in the morning, and have begun to contemplate what should go in the writer's resource post valtyr requested for the Cap / Ironman comm. I use a lot of stuff from the UNC Chapel Hill Writing Center--which I just noticed included under their Specific Writing Assignments/Contexts section a handout on "Working with your International TA" and I'm...not sure how I feel about that!--and I will occasionally supplement from the very pedantic Purdue Open Writing Lab (OWL). OWL is good people, but I really do think they're run by specialists who've never had to teach writing. It's not that they're theory heavy like the Utopian Clusterfuck, but, well, in their punctuation guide they just leap into how to use a semi-colon, comma, etc., but they never explain what these marks are for. Which I think is the most important thing to establish--I can't even begin to tell you how many of my students think semi-colons are extra-dynamic commas. Or that m-dashes are "bad punctuation" or that exclamation points are either the work of the devil or that every time you fail to use one a kitten dies. By the time I get to the punctuation unit in my class, it's mostly water under the bridge, but still.
Hmm. So. Punctuation--I think I posted that here, under f-lock. I could re-do and make it S/T appropriate, and merge back in the explanations that I cut out for the post but use as a lecture in the lesson. Urm, there's a Reed Richard Explains HTML:
Which I found in a MacroMonday post at noscans_daily, thank you, kijikun for alerting me to that a few weeks ago!
I've got handouts on reading to write, the various rhetorical styles for persuasive writing, some assorted funny guides that people with mad photoshop skillz have put together (alas, none of them bookmarked on Quinjet), the usual standards of thesis and argument and evidence, which are not useful as they stand for creative writing. I mean, all the principles apply, but none of the phrasing is relevant. I think I need to start making my own handouts on "How to Mitigate or Avoid Race!Fail," and "Gender, Sexuality, and You: Tab A and Slot B Talk Back," and perhaps even "Cursor_Mundi's Guide to Not Being an Internet Douchebag." I haven't found anything, certainly.
Writers on the F-list, what would you find helpful? Random passers-by (ha!), what would you find welcoming on a comm that produces a lot of fiction?
In reward for your services, I shall share the fruits of my adventures with Gimp's blur tool and Quinjet's new optical mouse a few weeks ago.
LOL, WOT? I suck.