Teaching Freshman Composition in GIF form.

All of them are accurate, but I have to say the two for "Introducing myself to the class during my first semester of teaching" and "Introducing myself to the class during my second semester of teaching" (and particularly the difference between them) are spot on. There was notably less oversharing in my ( Read more... )

Tried watching Undercovers tonight. Really liked the married couple characters, but spies and I just don't get along. Con men are even more boring, but spies are definitely up there. Still, the Blooms were cute. Maybe there will be good short fanfic.

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Awesome gadget: Livescribe. I consider myself an excellent notetaker, but that would've ( Read more... )

The editor took my revised book review with only minor stylistic changes! Woot! And I turned in the dance paper while I was up on campus this morning, so my semester is ooooooover ( Read more... )

For their quiz today, I had my students write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry on any subject they wanted. It was pretty great, although they seemed strangely resistant to reading them out loud. I eventually got a few to volunteer, though ( Read more... )

Chapters/articles left to read and annotate: 7 ( Read more... )

Apparently the trick to getting kids to talk is...make them read something they hate? I assigned an essay by James Gunn on the definition of science fiction, some aspect of which most of them disagreed with, and paired it with Italo Calvino's "A Sign in Space," which all of them were confused by (I expected this). Since the story an allegory of ( Read more... )

I've decided to give my class a one-page chunk of an essay which spends part of its time looking at The Forever War through a Jamesonian lens, theorizing that it allegorizes the dislocation and alienation of postmodernity through its structural conceit of having Mandella go back and forth between space/combat and ever more changed and disorienting ( Read more... )

This. This is hilarious. I rarely read the Chronicle of Higher Ed, but I'm glad I tuned in today. It slayed me with "Adam...put up mankind's first justification: 'The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat' (Genesis 3:12)" and only got better. (I, uh, may have gone to join that Facebook group as soon as I ( Read more... )

Apparently the way to get my students to talk is to take them outside on a nice day. They talked me into going outside (which I was all for, although I quickly realized that being in the sun for an hour and fifteen minutes was going to give me a sunburn, and yep, I can feel it on my neck), and I figured they'd all be distracted by goings-on around ( Read more... )

I showed my 102 class Serenity tonight so that we can discuss it tomorrow, in addition to the mini-lecture on the tradition of the western as translated to science fiction I'm planning. We're also going to watch some fanvids and talk about them in class.

I will leave you all to seethe jealously now. :D

I only had five kids out of twenty-three ( Read more... )