Grad School Report - Spring 2008 (Week 2)
Time is doing that contraction and expansion again thing this week. It moves slowly, has a burst of sudden speed, only to slow again. Like the Whip at Coney Island, as I have said before. . . I loved that ride as a kid, mostly because I was too cowardly to ever do the "scarier" rides like roller-coasters, or ones that spun around a lot like the Tilt-a-Whirl. Hell, I didn't even do the log flume until I was in my middle teens. And I still don't like roller-coasters, though I have been on a handful of different ones in my life, including the Cyclone, which I try to take a trip on once a year if I can, as a kind of ritual of self-challenge - and the Cyclone is fucking scary. Other roller-coasters and rides are not so scary in terms of fearing something bad will happen while on it, I just don't enjoy that sensation of falling with great speed. I feel no need to skydive or bunjee-jump. I don't even like driving too fast on the highway, though that depends on traffic conditions and who is doing the actual driving.
On Monday I headed to campus to TA English 2. The students had to do an in-class writing assignment for the entire period, doing a close-reading of one of three poems: Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" (a poem in the fine tradition of men trying to convince women to abandon virtue for a little hit-it-and-quit-it), William Carlos Williams' "This is Just To Say" (a poem in the fine tradition of apologetic notes left to excuse male transgression), or John Keats' "To Autumn" (a poem in the fine tradition of infusing nature with tension of sex and death). Class is held in a writing lab with two-dozen computers, where the students clickity-clacked away for over an hour, and I walked around helping them how and when I could.
One student said, when asking me to look over his opening paragraph of his essay on the Williams' poem, "This obviously the one that looks simple, but that fucks you over if you choose to write about it." He wanted to know what I thought of his thesis statement (Oh, instructors place so much emphasis on thesises that I sometime wonder if they forget about the rest of the paper - In this case, the professor asks that the students underline the thesis in their paper) and I told him that I thought it was a little too broad, and that a strong thesis should be a little more specific so that it can be closely argued. "Can you tell me what would be a good thesis?" he asked.
"Well, look at your second paragraph and what you are actually arguing, and see if you can craft a thesis from that," I replied.
"What? Are you not allowed to tell me a thesis to use?"
"I would rather help you learn to craft a strong one yourself," I said.
"I know how to write a thesis," he said, with the slightest hint of offense in his voice.
"Sometimes. . ." I began, ignoring his attitude, while considering how I might best navigate this kind of situation. "It is better to come up with the best way to phrase your thesis after you have written some about what is you want to say or argue, this way you know for sure that the evidence you are using directly applies to the thesis statement itself."
When he called me back over later, he had written a much stronger thesis, and I told him I thought so.
"Does that mean I can blame you if I don't get an 'A'?" he smirked.
I noticed that a lot of the students seemed to interpret "To His Coy Mistress" a little coyly themselves, talking of the speaker's desire for love and fear of rejection. I wanted to tell them, "HE WANTS TO GET LAID!" But of course, I couldn't say that. I could only tell them to look at the poem closely for stuff that supports these opinions.
I only noticed two students writing about the Keats poem, which I think was the most difficult of the three. Most wrote about the Williams poem (from what I could tell).
Between helping students I did some of my own reading of poetry for my Comparative Lit class, A Brief History of the Lyric. . . You know, the class I accidentally missed last week? I don't recall why I was hesitant to take this class, but now I'm glad I did. I guess poetry is one of those things I sometime forget that I love, but when I start reading it again, I feel that echo inside me, the reverberation of my own feelings and observations that cannot be so easily or directly expressed by prosaic means. And then there is the admiration of the craft of poetry itself that simultaneously makes me want to destroy all my own attempts, even as it makes me make an attempt again. I have not written a poem in years, maybe five, maybe six, but there was a time I wrote them compulsively. Poetry begets poetry for me. I mean, the last poem I can remember writing was on the subway as a result of this guy who sells photocopied booklets of his poetry, and to whom I gave $2 for a copy if only in appreciation of the audacity of taking the Whitman route. I read them on the way home, and the next thing I knew I was writing one of my own in the little book I carry around for those increasingly rare occasions I am inspired to write.
On Tuesday on the way to the poetry class, I felt inspired again and observing a pigeon trapped at the Brooklyn Bridge subway station as I waited for the '4' or the '5' train, I took out my little book and wrote down some raw words to go back to and craft a poem from. I think I was inspired by recently reading a quote from the venerable Bede regarding the metaphor of a sparrow flying through a room used by a Northumbrian high priest to describe a man's life.
The class itself was nothing special. We read and discussed some ancient poems, Sappho and Catullus, and stuff from the Psalms, and some chinese poetry, and also some more relatively recent poems that could be said to have been influenced by or re-written from these ancient lyrics. I like the class if only because I love reading poems and discussing them. Also, the prof seems rather affable. Otherwise, it is a kind of small and unusually quiet class - so we'll see how it goes.
So, I kind jumped ahead in time and skipped Literature of the Middle Ages, which is on Monday night. We discussed the first half of Augustine's Confessions, though the prof seemed a little frustrated with the general lack of response. I mean, a handful of people made comments (myself included), but generally speaking I don't think we were getting to or bringing up the things he wanted from us. The discussion was also dominated by this one woman in the front who not only had her hand constantly in the air, but attached "Right, right. . ." while nodding to everything the prof said in a voice loud enough for the whole class to hear. The fact that other folks were not talking as much, meant that every time the prof looked over the class for comments, the pause was longer before he called on her, as if waiting for some other student to save him - to save us all. As I observed this, I waited for the clucking to start in class, and soon enough there it was. The knowing looks of annoyed amusement between some of my classmates whenever she spoke. The note passed between two of them that I knew had to do with this woman's constant interjections. I was amused by their own amusement and annoyance. Not that I wasn't amused and slightly annoyed, but I did my part to participate. If you find someone else's contributions to be too frequent, well then, do a little contributing yourself and give the prof a chance to call on you to spout your own brilliance.
As for Augustine's Confessions itself, I am struck by the tension between autobiography as a means to construct a narrative of your life (how it suggests a path of experiences, growth and change that lead to the point from which one writes the autobiography), and Augustine's language (which discounts the importance of knowledge and experience as a means of to finding and accepting God). Personally, I think his point of view undermines the notion of freewill regardless of his convoluted means to simultaneously believe in that will and the efforts of God to guide him to righteousness which is explicit in his characterization of almost every episode he details. It makes me wonder what he meant to accomplish with these confessions. I mean, he says himself that God already knows all the things that are in his heart, and he says that it is God that moves his tongue (which God created) to confess. . . So in that case, it is not his will, but God's will that is (ostensibly) present in the text. Of course, this might be my own limitation, unable to escape the mire of causation.
Today: I did some more TAing this afternoon. I read over those close-reading papers they wrote on Monday, which the prof had already graded, just to get a sense of where they were at and what his grading is like. I was struck that for all the time spent on pedagogical theory and what makes for effecting marking and commenting on papers in the class preparing to teach college comp, this guy's approach seems pretty straightforward and traditional. Red pen, straight up grammar correction, rewording of sentences and other word choice suggestions. . . Basically, what you'd expect, and what we learned (in theory) does not work. Maybe it's that it's English 2 and he is giving them less leeway, I don't know - But I will say that the grades, ranged from D to B+ (with most being C/C-), struck me as completely arbitrary. Our professor for Teaching College Composition used to joke that the best way to grade papers was to throw them from the top of a set of steps and give them grades based on their relative position on the staircase, with those that stayed on the top step getting A's and those at the base failing. The range of grades would be about the same. There was no difference I could discern between the the varieties of 'C' and even the 'B+' seemed anomalous, standing out there with nothing to distinguish it. Only one paper got a exclamatory "Good!" in the margins for one section, and that one got a 'C' as well.
As the professor took them over the actual poems, I read the papers and afterwards I handed them out and reminded the class of when I was available for 'office hours'. Afterwards, the professor asked me if I got a sense of how he graded. "Seems pretty straightforward to me," I replied.
"What I mean is, do you think you can do that?"
"Oh yeah! I can do that no problem," I said, with my practiced confidence. And I can. So, soon I will be getting a set of papers to grade. I wish I had some papers from when I was a freshman undergrad to compare them to. Actually, I do have one, but it was for a music class and is not a good example of a paper written on a literary subject.
Originally, I was going to skip out on TAing that class today, as my The Language of Space and Place in American Literature of Brooklyn and the South class is not meeting, so I was hoping to avoid going to campus at all and actually get a full day's work in at the office. But when he told me he would have the papers back so soon, I knew I would have to go in.
Speaking of The Language of Space and Place in American Literature of Brooklyn and the South {WHEW!}, I have started reading Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! for it, and wow is that some writing or what!! I mean, jeez, the man writes all wrong and beautiful. The sentences are dizzying in length, and it so easy to lose the thread of them in the flurry of en dashes, semi-colons, commas and parenthesis. I mean, Hemmingway he is not. It is not easy reading. I also set up the blog we will be using in that class to post our weekly responses and comment on them. Being in a playful mood as I set it up last night, I named it Knishes n' Grits.
This weekend I hope to visit mi abuela and I will be having dinner at my mom's on Sunday, but aside from that all I will be doing is reading the second half of Confessions and the great majority of Absalom, Absalom! that remains to me. Let the four months of little to no social life begin!
On Monday I headed to campus to TA English 2. The students had to do an in-class writing assignment for the entire period, doing a close-reading of one of three poems: Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" (a poem in the fine tradition of men trying to convince women to abandon virtue for a little hit-it-and-quit-it), William Carlos Williams' "This is Just To Say" (a poem in the fine tradition of apologetic notes left to excuse male transgression), or John Keats' "To Autumn" (a poem in the fine tradition of infusing nature with tension of sex and death). Class is held in a writing lab with two-dozen computers, where the students clickity-clacked away for over an hour, and I walked around helping them how and when I could.
One student said, when asking me to look over his opening paragraph of his essay on the Williams' poem, "This obviously the one that looks simple, but that fucks you over if you choose to write about it." He wanted to know what I thought of his thesis statement (Oh, instructors place so much emphasis on thesises that I sometime wonder if they forget about the rest of the paper - In this case, the professor asks that the students underline the thesis in their paper) and I told him that I thought it was a little too broad, and that a strong thesis should be a little more specific so that it can be closely argued. "Can you tell me what would be a good thesis?" he asked.
"Well, look at your second paragraph and what you are actually arguing, and see if you can craft a thesis from that," I replied.
"What? Are you not allowed to tell me a thesis to use?"
"I would rather help you learn to craft a strong one yourself," I said.
"I know how to write a thesis," he said, with the slightest hint of offense in his voice.
"Sometimes. . ." I began, ignoring his attitude, while considering how I might best navigate this kind of situation. "It is better to come up with the best way to phrase your thesis after you have written some about what is you want to say or argue, this way you know for sure that the evidence you are using directly applies to the thesis statement itself."
When he called me back over later, he had written a much stronger thesis, and I told him I thought so.
"Does that mean I can blame you if I don't get an 'A'?" he smirked.
I noticed that a lot of the students seemed to interpret "To His Coy Mistress" a little coyly themselves, talking of the speaker's desire for love and fear of rejection. I wanted to tell them, "HE WANTS TO GET LAID!" But of course, I couldn't say that. I could only tell them to look at the poem closely for stuff that supports these opinions.
I only noticed two students writing about the Keats poem, which I think was the most difficult of the three. Most wrote about the Williams poem (from what I could tell).
Between helping students I did some of my own reading of poetry for my Comparative Lit class, A Brief History of the Lyric. . . You know, the class I accidentally missed last week? I don't recall why I was hesitant to take this class, but now I'm glad I did. I guess poetry is one of those things I sometime forget that I love, but when I start reading it again, I feel that echo inside me, the reverberation of my own feelings and observations that cannot be so easily or directly expressed by prosaic means. And then there is the admiration of the craft of poetry itself that simultaneously makes me want to destroy all my own attempts, even as it makes me make an attempt again. I have not written a poem in years, maybe five, maybe six, but there was a time I wrote them compulsively. Poetry begets poetry for me. I mean, the last poem I can remember writing was on the subway as a result of this guy who sells photocopied booklets of his poetry, and to whom I gave $2 for a copy if only in appreciation of the audacity of taking the Whitman route. I read them on the way home, and the next thing I knew I was writing one of my own in the little book I carry around for those increasingly rare occasions I am inspired to write.
On Tuesday on the way to the poetry class, I felt inspired again and observing a pigeon trapped at the Brooklyn Bridge subway station as I waited for the '4' or the '5' train, I took out my little book and wrote down some raw words to go back to and craft a poem from. I think I was inspired by recently reading a quote from the venerable Bede regarding the metaphor of a sparrow flying through a room used by a Northumbrian high priest to describe a man's life.
The class itself was nothing special. We read and discussed some ancient poems, Sappho and Catullus, and stuff from the Psalms, and some chinese poetry, and also some more relatively recent poems that could be said to have been influenced by or re-written from these ancient lyrics. I like the class if only because I love reading poems and discussing them. Also, the prof seems rather affable. Otherwise, it is a kind of small and unusually quiet class - so we'll see how it goes.
So, I kind jumped ahead in time and skipped Literature of the Middle Ages, which is on Monday night. We discussed the first half of Augustine's Confessions, though the prof seemed a little frustrated with the general lack of response. I mean, a handful of people made comments (myself included), but generally speaking I don't think we were getting to or bringing up the things he wanted from us. The discussion was also dominated by this one woman in the front who not only had her hand constantly in the air, but attached "Right, right. . ." while nodding to everything the prof said in a voice loud enough for the whole class to hear. The fact that other folks were not talking as much, meant that every time the prof looked over the class for comments, the pause was longer before he called on her, as if waiting for some other student to save him - to save us all. As I observed this, I waited for the clucking to start in class, and soon enough there it was. The knowing looks of annoyed amusement between some of my classmates whenever she spoke. The note passed between two of them that I knew had to do with this woman's constant interjections. I was amused by their own amusement and annoyance. Not that I wasn't amused and slightly annoyed, but I did my part to participate. If you find someone else's contributions to be too frequent, well then, do a little contributing yourself and give the prof a chance to call on you to spout your own brilliance.
As for Augustine's Confessions itself, I am struck by the tension between autobiography as a means to construct a narrative of your life (how it suggests a path of experiences, growth and change that lead to the point from which one writes the autobiography), and Augustine's language (which discounts the importance of knowledge and experience as a means of to finding and accepting God). Personally, I think his point of view undermines the notion of freewill regardless of his convoluted means to simultaneously believe in that will and the efforts of God to guide him to righteousness which is explicit in his characterization of almost every episode he details. It makes me wonder what he meant to accomplish with these confessions. I mean, he says himself that God already knows all the things that are in his heart, and he says that it is God that moves his tongue (which God created) to confess. . . So in that case, it is not his will, but God's will that is (ostensibly) present in the text. Of course, this might be my own limitation, unable to escape the mire of causation.
Today: I did some more TAing this afternoon. I read over those close-reading papers they wrote on Monday, which the prof had already graded, just to get a sense of where they were at and what his grading is like. I was struck that for all the time spent on pedagogical theory and what makes for effecting marking and commenting on papers in the class preparing to teach college comp, this guy's approach seems pretty straightforward and traditional. Red pen, straight up grammar correction, rewording of sentences and other word choice suggestions. . . Basically, what you'd expect, and what we learned (in theory) does not work. Maybe it's that it's English 2 and he is giving them less leeway, I don't know - But I will say that the grades, ranged from D to B+ (with most being C/C-), struck me as completely arbitrary. Our professor for Teaching College Composition used to joke that the best way to grade papers was to throw them from the top of a set of steps and give them grades based on their relative position on the staircase, with those that stayed on the top step getting A's and those at the base failing. The range of grades would be about the same. There was no difference I could discern between the the varieties of 'C' and even the 'B+' seemed anomalous, standing out there with nothing to distinguish it. Only one paper got a exclamatory "Good!" in the margins for one section, and that one got a 'C' as well.
As the professor took them over the actual poems, I read the papers and afterwards I handed them out and reminded the class of when I was available for 'office hours'. Afterwards, the professor asked me if I got a sense of how he graded. "Seems pretty straightforward to me," I replied.
"What I mean is, do you think you can do that?"
"Oh yeah! I can do that no problem," I said, with my practiced confidence. And I can. So, soon I will be getting a set of papers to grade. I wish I had some papers from when I was a freshman undergrad to compare them to. Actually, I do have one, but it was for a music class and is not a good example of a paper written on a literary subject.
Originally, I was going to skip out on TAing that class today, as my The Language of Space and Place in American Literature of Brooklyn and the South class is not meeting, so I was hoping to avoid going to campus at all and actually get a full day's work in at the office. But when he told me he would have the papers back so soon, I knew I would have to go in.
Speaking of The Language of Space and Place in American Literature of Brooklyn and the South {WHEW!}, I have started reading Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! for it, and wow is that some writing or what!! I mean, jeez, the man writes all wrong and beautiful. The sentences are dizzying in length, and it so easy to lose the thread of them in the flurry of en dashes, semi-colons, commas and parenthesis. I mean, Hemmingway he is not. It is not easy reading. I also set up the blog we will be using in that class to post our weekly responses and comment on them. Being in a playful mood as I set it up last night, I named it Knishes n' Grits.
This weekend I hope to visit mi abuela and I will be having dinner at my mom's on Sunday, but aside from that all I will be doing is reading the second half of Confessions and the great majority of Absalom, Absalom! that remains to me. Let the four months of little to no social life begin!