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In a classic example of crazy priorities, our university’s imposed an across-the-board 20% cut on departmental discretionary budgets, meaning that we literally don’t have enough money to copy handouts and quizzes for all of our students, anymore. (Handouts must be distributed electronically excepting for the course outlines.)

On the other hand, the new medical school apparently has enough money to buy a helicopter in order not to have to wait around when they need to conduct research into the antioxidant properties of blueberries.

the less I can tolerate the smell of coffee.

Blech! Give me tea or give me ventilation!

They gave an Emmy for Best “Costumes for a Series” to The Tudors.

The show whose only redeeming feature in historical costuming appears to be the frequent recycling of garments from shows and films set two generations (and many changes of fashion) later in the century?

Gah!

One aspect of large-group teaching and public speaking that I always underestimate is the toll these endeavours take of my energy, physical, emotional and mental.

Today I gave a major presentation to a reasonably large crowd in the morning, followed by a further forty minutes of one-on-one with audience members. Then an hour break had me back in the classroom, trying to stir my second-year students to energetic discussion of the anti-clerical themes in some selections from Boccaccio, Erasmus and Rabelais. Prowling up and down and around the classroom, reading selected passages with theatrical gusto, throwing questions out to the crowd? On top of the earlier event, it simply left me feeling worn out!

Teaching and public speaking are activities that I enjoy (and at which I hope I’m reasonably adept), but they also burn a significant amount of my reserves. I can’t expect those reserves to be restored instantly and, in truth, I’ve been fairly quiet since then. Most of my time since then has been spent in relatively low-energy activities: meeting students, ferrying family members around in the car, helping youngest with her homework, fixing dinner, setting up my Excel gradebook, answering student emails, finalizing a conference proposal, browsing the weekly flyers, watching Smallville, settling down the kids and attempting to tidy my crazily disordered house. I’d hoped to get some stitching done, too, but it’s past ten and I’m still plum worn out.

Time to recharge? I think so. Thank goodness tomorrow has nothing energy-intensive on the calendar: just meetings, paperwork and the prospect of a fun lunch with a former student. By Monday, I’ll be ready for the meat grinder, er, classroom again!

• The first assignments are due tomorrow. There’ll be pretty constant marking from now until sometime late in December. Maybe I can juggle a week off in October if I’m extremely dedicated.
• Why are there 73 students registered in a class for which I was promised a cap of 60? Fortunately, this is for next term so I have time to revise the assignments to be a bit less grading intensive (see above).
• I vow that tomorrow’s “How to Apply for the Very Important Provincial Graduate Scholarship” Workshop that I lead will be the last such for a little while. I’ve done this now for four years in a row and I keep telling the office that they really ought to find someone who’s equally fluent in English and French or at least a team of two different faculty members who can do this. I will politely tender my refusal for the 2009 session now so we can start recruiting one of the above prospects sooner, not later!
• It’s heartening how many students are taking the time to come to office hours or just drop by my office and consult about their upcoming assignments. Now if only the administration would do something about the doorless washroom just across the hall from my office. I keep the office door open when meeting to avoid the sense of any impropriety. That impact is lessened when there are periodic flushing episodes ringing from across the hallway.

Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism carries an additional cutline on the title: “A Father, a Daughter, and a Search for New Answers”. But this book is much more than a personal memoir about living with autism in your family: it’s an insightful exploration, by a thoughtful anthropologist, Roy Richard Grinker, into historical and cross-cultural approaches to autism. In this book, we see that autism has both medical and cultural connotations and that it is impossible to address autism without understanding both. Read more »

As one of the by-products of teaching my graduate methods course, my own scholarship and assumptions comes under the microscope as I take the questions we grapple with in class time and apply them to my own projects (both in the classroom and in my own writing).

This year, I’m struck by the issue of hermeneutics in historical interpretation — essentially, the belief that one has to see the past (or whatever culture one is studying) on its own terms; to understand the text (written document, image, series of actions) in the context of its creation.

As a teacher, I spend a great deal of time exhorting students to try and interpret their material through the perspective of the people we’re studying rather than simply dismiss the message of the past after cursory examination through the condescending lens of twenty-first century insight. But I’m still not sure that I’m doing this in the most helpful of ways. Read more »

And you think you’ve got problems with critters? Hah! From the local newspaper:

Bear shot after climbing in window

A resident on Bancroft Drive got an unwelcome surprise on Thursday morning after discovering a bear trying to enter a home through a window.

The bear was killed after a neighbour shot it with a shotgun.

The start of term always leaves me feeling as if I’ve fallen behind. Even though I’m ahead of the game (course preps are all nicely lined up for the next week, though I must remember to post the discussion prompt for my grad class and maybe I should get another week ahead in pulling together classroom material for the Reformation course), it doesn’t feel as if I’m ahead of the game. No, it feels as if I’m watching the world whiz by my slowly putting scooter that somehow has wandered onto the far left lane on the academic highway.

It’s frighteningly easy for a day to progress all the way to seven p.m. and still leave me with the sensation that I haven’t had time to think. There are so many people around, all the time. My classes are, as usual, full to the point of absurdity. We’re busy between school for the girls and work for the adults. Committee duties ramp up:

I’m teaching one more class this term than I’d originally planned (the pay off is another dropped in January term) so I genuinely am more occupied than I thought I would be: more hours in the classroom, more hours in course prep, more hours sitting in my office waiting for students to drop on by. The fact that the washroom just across the narrow hallway from my university office has no door anymore (accessibility on the cheap, we have it!) might also have something to do with it. It’s hard to sustain much of a train of thought in between flush!, rush! and chit-chat at the mirror just like it’s hard to concentrate on your driving when the traffic races past you.

But, most of all, it’s just the reality of term-time at a reasonably busy teaching-intensive university. I know that start-of-term has its own torments at places where faculty have greater insulation from the classroom. Not that I’m complaining: it’s what I signed on for as an academic (research is fantastic, but I’m a teacher first and foremost) and I know that I’m going to feel more in control of my life and time as I adjust to the faster pace.

Still, I have a feeling that PHD Comics said it better than I could.

They found a new classroom for my crazily-crowded senior seminar. Just next door to the old one.

On the plus side? Seats for all, even for me! There might even be a tiny bit of elbow room!

On the negative side? No classroom computer or projector, so my students’ll have to reserve and haul a multi-media cart up to the classroom if they want to use Powerpoint or any other projected images for their once-a-term presentations.