jliedl.ca

In pursuing some research relating to the perceptions of disorderly maternity in early modern England, I came across an interesting case thanks to the Old Bailey Online where a woman claimed to be the mother of the child she was discovered to be, instead, robbing:

Mary Skip, of the Parish of Stepney, was indicted for robbing Joseph Murrel, an Infant, of a Stuff Coat and Petticoat, the Goods of Joseph Murrel, senior, the 18th of March last, on the King’s Highway. The Witness swore, That seeing the Prisoner with the Child upon a Bank, and hearing it cry extremely, she ask’d her if it was her own Child, and she answer’d it was; whereupon she went away, but saw the Prisoner strip off the Child’s Cloaths, and then came back again, and ask’d the Child if that was its Mother; to which it reply’d, No; upon which she seiz’d the Prisoner, with the Goods upon her, and found another Child’s Cloaths in her Lap. The Matter being fully prov’d against her, the Jury found her Guilty of the Indictment.

That same day she received a sentence of death. The accounts note that of the eighteen so sentenced, six were women and four attempted to delay their sentences through claims that they were pregnant:

Elizabeth Still, Sarah Blandford, Mary Skip, and Sarah Wilmot, severally pleaded their Bellies; and a Jury of Matrons being impannell’d, found Sarah Wilmot to be with Quick Child, and the other three not.

Let me direct you to The Little Professor’s wonderfully amusing tale of a grade challenge. Oh, it helps to be fluent in the Trek-verse, but you are, of course, aren’t you? It’s only logical!

Today’s New York Times‘ Bits column is a Valentine to the combined wonders of iTunes U and the Open University in which other universities are chided for not putting their classes up on Apple’s podcast-packaging vehicle.

Whether it’s this or Youtube.edu’s version, colour me unexcited because a lecture is not a class. A lecture is something that can be used in a class. It can be five minutes or fifty. Some rhetorical elements and illustrative anecdotes that I used in this term’s class sessions will reappear in future class meetings. Some have built off of previous classes. But even when I work from my most detailed notes, what I say in the classroom varies from year to year and from group to group. And sometimes I don’t lecture at all!

The best classes are not all talking head moments. Read more »

More Wordle-play as I mark student work.

This time, I tackled Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women from 1559.

Rather revealing, don’t you think?

Adapting from The Star’s cutline taken from the conclusion of the piece that serves to introduce Rose DiManno’s nasty opinion piece on the Duchess of Cornwall, let me say:

Rose DiManno personifies what many people hate about columnists: the shiftlessness of to-the-snark-born or those conscripted by employment. . . .

Almost four months after moving my office, my phone extension is finally transferred. (Telephone services, my department and physical plant are still duking it out over who pays for the flip of the switch that made that possible.) So if you phone my extension, the phone will actually ring in my office (instead of going directly to voice-mail and leaving no sign of the same anywhere until I phoned into the voice-mail system).

Which? Hooray on the one hand but I’m kind of missing the feeling of supreme isolation that the previous situation had fostered.

As I’ve been predicting for the last year and a half, Ontario’s premier Dalton McGuinty is now talking about unpaid “days off” for public sector workers (including doctors, teachers and professors).

Of course, our “Dalton Days”, when they come into being in 2010, will have to be taken on non-teaching days so as not to affect students. And, as I remember well from my experience with Rae Days in the 90s, no co-workers respect your schedule of days off when it comes to setting meetings. So your unpaid “day off” as an academic means you’re simply working without pay for those days when you’re in meetings or marking student work.

Don’t get me wrong: lay-offs would be much worse. I’m also pretty sure that the health-care workers are going to make sure that the public realizes they can’t have it both ways: all the health-care, all the time AND an unpaid day off a month for all public-sector employees including their doctors and nurses. But right now, the public mood is ready to see public-sector workers “suffer”, giving the provincial government some ammunition to go after our pay-cheques or even our pensions.

We’ve been through August’s mystery virus that left me debilitated with full-body arthritis into September. Mid-October brought a garden-variety cold virus that left me easy pickings for the H1N1 virus that came home from the local school system the next week. And everybody’s suffered through that last bug!

I’ve been healthy for a much smaller chunk of the last quarter than I’ve been sick.

Now? I’m so far behind with work duties that it’s untenable.

On the upside, I don’t think there are any more viruses going around in the community at present which I haven’t already had!