Monthly Archive for September, 2007

no one can say i do not have a winning attitude

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 25, 2007
in Paedagogy
. 10 Comments

Last week was filled with student conferences, which are, outside of grading papers, the profession’s biggest brain-crushing activity. It amounts to sitting in the office for hours on end while students stream steadily in and out with their sad, pathetic papers and you have to repeat, almost word for word, the same suggestions to each of them. Fifteen times a day it’s “So, may I respectfully suggest you make your argument suck slightly less? I think shifting the balance more toward logic and away from stank, steaming poo would really strengthen your essay.”

This week, on the other hand, must be spent in grading, a prospect so dire and depressing that all through the halls of the English department professors are hiding in their offices alphabetizing their bookshelves, organizing their different sizes of paper clips, studying their benefits policies, maintaining their cuticles, braiding their leg hair, counting floor tiles, writing on websites, or even just staring vacantly into space — anything to avoid facing the leaden piles of essays stacked up on the corners of their desks. Those who are actually grading must reward themselves every hour with a trip downstairs to the Starbucks. When they return to their desks, they don’t so much sit down to work but rather hover slightly above the chair, twitching and flapping through the pages with a maniacal, caffeinated glint in their dangerous eyes.

I am particularly dreading looking at the Freshman Composition papers, as my freshmen are the ones who seem constitutionally least able to follow simple directions. How does a person get into a college like Wordsmith without being able to comprehend basic instructions? When I think about the extent to which a certain segment of my Freshmen Composition kids are, to all appearances, medically brain dead, my blood starts to boil. There’s a whole crew of them, all in almost-matching striped rugby shirts and khakis and Topsiders, who sit in the back of the room and grunt indistinctly at me and their peers — when they can bother, that is, to lift their heads from the position of permanent slouch and engage in the world around them at all. Seriously, blood is boiling. It is in no way hyperbole when I tell you I wish I were allowed to punch their slack, spiritless faces right off their heads.

Okay, I am going to go fix myself a vodka and Fresca and work on writing an unnecessarily brutal midterm. In the meanwhile, wish me luck on both finishing my depressertation on time and managing not to murder anyone.

So, how is your job going?

the future leaders of tomorrow, fresh off the turnip truck

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 18, 2007
in Paedagogy
. 6 Comments

This week is being spent in the joyous, soul-feeding activity of “conferencing” (Verb! Bah!) with my whippersnappers as they write and revise their essays.  The process ranges between two extremes: my reading their full drafts and offering suggestions on their use of citations, on the one hand, and on the other hand, my sitting there while they wordlessly thrust a rumpled bit of notebook paper at me and I try to make sense of the delusional, serial-killer-style, chicken-scratch notes on it and they grunt indistinctly in the background.

(Bitchy Aside: It is my firm belief that there is absolutely no excuse, save a physical disability, for bad handwriting.  Write fucking legibly, or use a fucking computer.  End of Bitchy Aside.)

Today, during one of my meetings, my office phone rang and I decided to take the call.  As you may imagine this led me into a whole nother (as we say in grammar) world of hurt.  It was one of my students, and if I can make one generalization about them beyond the scope of their writing abilities it is this: they do not know how to ask for someone on the phone.  It’s all “Uh, um, yes, hello.  Is this, uh, that is, may I, uh, are you, uh, Mrs. The, uh, Vogue?”  Before they are halfway through their poetic-pathetic hemming and hawing, I have usually recognized the voice and am all “UM, UH, YESTHISISSHE!”

This time it was one of my freshmen asking me how to get to my office, which is in the biggest academic building on campus — the VERY SAME BUILDING WHERE OUR CLASS MEETS — in a clearly demarcated room, the initial digit of whose number corresponds to the floor on which it can be found. You know, just like every other fucking numbered room in every other fucking public building in the country.  Room number starts with a nine? WELCOME TO THE NINTH FUCKING FLOOR, ASSHOLE.

So I explained this politely and succinctly, all “take the elevator to the ninth floor, blahdy blah,” and when I hung up, the sophomore student who I’d been talking to when the phone rang looked at me with astonishment and started giggling.  I was sure she was going to make some crack about freshmen not knowing their way around, or about how much of an idiot a person has to be to need directions to the ninth floor of a building — “Enter the building. Start going up!” — or other such humorous banter, but oh no was I wrong.  She stares at me, all giggly, and blurts out, “Whoa, like, how did that phone just ring?!”

modernism cagematch: faulkner vs. nabokov

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 17, 2007
in Academia, Books, Cagematch and Depressertation
. 7 Comments

When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again. — William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud. — Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

internet: please fill in where pinot noir and tv can’t help

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 15, 2007
in Academia, Cheese Sandwich and Depressertation
. 4 Comments

Up late again. It’s Friday night and I just got paid. I believe there’s a Motown song about that very subject, give or take a day, but my night is oh-so-very Not Motown.

I have a writing day scheduled for tomorrow, and it’s one of those things: I have so much to do and I want to do it all right, and the more I think about it the more anxious I get in the stomach and chest, and the more I want to just hide under the blankets. You know I have a tendency to hide under the blankets big time, and as much as I love Blanket Time, I have no time for Blanket Time now. Now, it’s all Desk Time all the time.

At the moment, though, it’s Couch Time, because I know as soon as I go to bed I will feel wide awake and full of adrenaline, imagining my dissertation defense in alternate modes of fearfulness (awful, unexpected questions about the balance of theory and philosophy in my work; strangers showing up to pelt me with eggs) and exhilaration (groundbreaking critical maneuvers; a pair of killer pointy-toed heels).

At the moment, I’m stressing about the fact that both Firefox spell check and dictionary.com are telling me that the word I think is “manoeuvers” is spelled “maneuvers.” Ungodly amounts of wine coupled with tivoed Gilmore Girls reruns are doing little to relax my system.

Question: what do you, The Internet, do in such a situation? How do you relax a little and still remain keyed up enough to be productive? Balance, I need it.

seeking out new ways to make the whippersnappers cry

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 12, 2007
in Academia and Paedagogy
. 6 Comments

I should be in bed right now, but no, I am up late (well, late in the sense that I teach at 8am asfuckingusual) after having finished prepping for the day ahead, and what better time to post on my secret internet computer website?  I can relax with a modest cocktail in hand, as I have just written a bitchin’ quiz for one of the courses and designed a workshop day for the other.

Here is the thing about teaching, see: the more things like quizzes and presentations and workshops that you can do in class, the less time you have to spend talking in the front of the room while they stare at you with their dead fish eyes.  This is my tip to you, teachers of the internet. You are welcome.

Yes, of course, the real goal — especially in literature and writing classes — is to create an “intellectual discourse community” where “ideas” are bandied about in an enthusiastic yet respectful manner.  Yes, I know.  The Paedagogical Tastemakers of the Academe vastly prefer the “discourse community” model over the lecture model or the Socratic model, which, while it is fun in that you are allowed to torture students verbally, is apparently only stylish in law schools.  I learned about that by watching Legally Blonde, I will have you know.

As hilariously awesome as it would be to teach just like Holland Taylor and Victor Garber (Agent Spy Daddy!) do in that movie, all making Reese Witherspoon cry after she didn’t do the reading assignment, it is just not done in literature classes.  Thus, workshopping and discoursing it shall be.  At least I still have my reading quizzes, which are one of my few chances to make the little chowderheads cry.  Paedagogical Tastemakers of the Academe, you can have my quizzes when you pry them from my cold, dead hard drive.