Category: Uncategorized

This semester’s classes end April 19 (finals end April 26), and I am limping to the end. It has been an absolute crazy semester for me. Among other things:

• I taught two courses completely new to me (English 323 and English 621) and one class more or less new since I changed most of the way I did things (English 444). I haven’t had that kind of “prep” load since I started down the tenure-track in 1996.
• I taught two night classes, which I think is draining on me. I don’t know how students who put themselves through school by working all day and taking courses three or so nights a week do it.
• My wife and I were involved in a very stressful job search that involved many MANY twists and turns. I am happy to say though that EMU has offered my wife a tenure-track position and so we’re going to be staying here for quite a while.
• I did an unusual amount of travel because of the job search, the CCCCs, some family issues, etc., which meant I had to cancel an unusual number of classes.
• There was a bunch of other stuff in my own “unofficial life” (eg, we were living with one car for most of the semester) that made my official life a lot more complicated.
• Oh yeah– I’ve got a ton of scholarly projects I’ve been neglecting, etc. I literally just now remembered something I promised to do by the past weekend. Shoot.

In some ways, one could say “thus is the academic life,” but it has been a bit more stressful than usual this semester. All of this is a preamble of sorts to react to Michael Arnzen’s “Ambush the White Rabbit” in Inside Higher Ed. On his own personal blog, Michael points out he means this piece as a sort of “self-mocking rant,” though some of the comments left by others on the Inside Higher Ed. piece suggest that people don’t get the joke. Or maybe folks are just a bit on edge.

Anyway, tardiness, especially after everything else going on, doesn’t bother me too much. It doesn’t bother me as much as it used to, I suppose because I have become increasingly tardy in my own life. Why? See above.

What does bother me though is out-and-out absence, mostly of the literal sort (though the student who seems “absent” in a more abstract sense can be problematic, too). Ever since I started teaching college as a graduate student in 1988, I have always had a very straight-forward attendance policy: if you miss too many classes regardless of the reason why you missed the class, your grade would greatly suffer. The details of this has varied from year to year, depending on the course and depending on the school where I was teaching. This semester, I decided to suspend that policy; I merely told students that if they missed too many classes, they probably wouldn’t do that well.

I think I’ll go back to the way I used to do it.

I haven’t had a lot of students just not turning up for class (I’ve been lucky to have 3 pretty good groups of students this semester), but I just sense that the few students I have who have missed a few too many classes probably wouldn’t have done this if my policy was more clear. For one thing, I think a policy that says “if you miss ‘x’ number of classes, your grade will drop by ‘y%'” (or something like that) helps students recognize the implications of missing class. I mean, they know I keep attendance and I know they know exactly how many classes they’ve missed. End of story.

But the other thing I noticed this semester is I don’t know their names as well. It’s not like I have a lot of students, and I do have to cut myself a bit of a break (see above bulleted list), but because I did not keep regular attendance from the beginning of the term, I simply didn’t learn the names of my students as well as I usually do. It makes me feel a bit guilty to be passing back papers at the end of the term and to not quite know who is who.

Anyway, that’s just one crazy thought at the end. More will be coming, probably.

Here’s a kind of interesting site: http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ or “PostSecret.” The idea here is you write a secret on the back of a post card, send them the image, and they post it. Pretty interesting stuff, but my guess is that one “secret” not being talked about here is that at least some of these secrets aren’t really secrets; they look more like little one line poems to me. Still kind of cool.

I’m playing around with the look of the blog, trying to make it look sort of like the new stevendkrause.com site. There’s two thoughts (I guess) and once concern I have about the new look:

• I’m using verdana and georgia as the fonts for this page because (and I didn’t realize this until I read it in a book I’m teaching this semester) these fonts were designed to be particularly readable on the screen.
• I’m going with a pretty simple design with a dark block across the top of the page because in my Writing for the World Wide Web class this semester, my students and I again and again really liked the pages with this sort of big block of a header at the top of the page like this. It just seems to make it more readable.
• My concern is I want to do something with this page to make it distinct form my “official” blog, which I’m also going to redesign soon. I think what I might do is change the grey background to something a bit more colorful; we’ll see.

Anyway, what does my vast audience think?

I just caught the end the Food Network show $40 a Day, an episode specifically about Ashland, OR. Ah, Ashland…

We were out there from 1996 to 1998, and I have to say I had mixed feelings. Quite frankly, I didn’t like my job that much, and while I did like Ashland quite a bit, I did feel like it was kind of in the middle of nowhere. But they did have incredibly good theater and a lot of good restaurants, too. Besides all that, Ashland is where Will was born.

Like I said, I just caught the end of the show, so I’ll have to see it again on one of the days its airing again to see if I recognize any of the places they featured. I’m sure that a lot has changed since we were there. Still, $40 a day or not, I cannot imagine going back to Ashland without a stop at the Black Sheep Pub and Cucina Biazzi, which is one of the most charming Italian restaurants I’ve ever been to.

I believe the Oregon Shakespeare Festival lets eight year old kids into the shows, so maybe we’ll head back next year or the year after. I’m kind of curious to see what’s different and what’s the same after 10 years….

Do you remember that movie Seven, with Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, and Morgan Freeman? Here’s the final scene, performed by stuffed animals. Via Johndan’s blog.

Nick Carbone posted about this on the Tech-Rhet mailing list (I think), the paper mill service Custom Research Papers. It’s a typical sort of service, one that strikes me as being far too expensive ($15 per page for “regular” delivery, $25 per page for 24 hour delivery), and I suspect you don’t really get what you pay for and such. But what’s interesting to me is the way that this site is trying to work the “ethical” angle here. To quote:

There are strong reasons WHY your cooperation with Custom Research Papers cannot be labeled as cheating:

• you DON’T STEAL anything from us
• you pay a FAIR PRICE for our services
• our writers get both financial and spiritual REWARD for their work
• you simply DELEGATE your tasks and focus only on those things that REALLY MATTER IN YOUR LIFE

At Custom Research Papers we believe IT’S ETHICAL to get an outside help and delegate your writing assignments to professional writers same as if you would get your watches fixed or car repaired by third party experts.

Of course, this is all horseshit, but I have to hand it to these people for trying this line of argument. I’d be kind of curious to know though what sorts of things “REALLY MATTER” in the lives of the students who partake in this service and who are kidding themselves into thinking that this is remotely ethical.

While on a long drive last night, with my mind wandering, it occurred to me that I probably did have an extra pair of glasses around the house. They’re pretty ugly and disturbingly dirty around the nose pad thing-a-ma-bobs, but they aren’t so far off from my current prescription. And there’s no duct tape involved.

I just wish I would have thought of this earlier….

Here’s just a short list of things going on right now (and these are just the things I can remember):

• I was distracted by and then out of town for some family matters the last couple days;
• I have a draft of an article for something I really need to send off some time today;
• EMU Faculty Council is meeting today (I am our department’s representative), and we’re voting for a new president (among other things), so that will probably be an “interesting” meeting;
• I have many things to grade/comment on, and I ought to do most of that some time today;
• Tomorrow, I have at least two meetings in the afternoon after I teach;
• Friday is the gathering to celebrate and honor graduate students in our department, and Monday afternoon is the gathering to celebrate undergraduate majors;
• April 19 is the last day of classes; and
• I am certain I am forgetting something. And never mind the fact that I need to do stuff around the house like clean out my gutters.

This is all my way of saying that it might take me a few days to get back in the swing with any relevant or interesting blog postings. Stay tuned for details….

Mistake #1: While at Will’s swimming lesson Saturday morning, I was sitting around, minding my own business, a bit bored because I had forgotten to bring the newspaper with me. Absent-mindedly, I was playing with my glasses, bending them a bit. I’ve done this for years because I have these flexon eyeglass frames, which are supposed to withstand pretty much any sort of bending you can inflict upon them.

Well, apparently, I bent them one too many times, for while I was absent-mindedly bending and watching Will swim, I heard and felt my glasses go “snap” right at the bridge. What once was one piece now was two, a lens in each hand.

Long story short: if you break your glasses right at the bridge, there’s damn near nothing you can do about it. Duct tape has been serving me okay, but krazy glue was a non-starter. I suspect I’ll have to endure the Harry Potter look for a couple of weeks until I can get new glasses from the place where my insurance will pay for most of the cost. I must say though that I have considered the laser surgery thing. I don’t think my insurance will pay for it, but if it paid for even a portion….

Mistake #2: I made a few of recipes from this magazine I picked up at the Food (Whole) called LowCarb Energy, and two of the things I made– salmon crusted with pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes and a “taco lasanga” sort of thing– were quite good. But I tried to make this Thai Red Curry Chicken dish and it was about the worst food disaster I think I’ve ever had. It looked promising when I mixed it up this morning and turned on the crock-pot. The sauce included Thai curry paste, fish sauce, and coconut milk, and it looked nice and creamy and such. But by dinner time, it was just nasty-looking, all oily and watery. It tasted kind of metallic, and I thought it smelled vaguely like pee. Annette said that if she ate it, she was afraid she might be ill.

I don’t like tossing food, but toss I did.

The good news is that the weather was nice this evening, so I went back to the Food (Whole), bought some chicken breast on the bone, lump charcoal, fresh mozzarella, and a nice bottle of wine, and grilled chicken with a lovely cherry tomato salad was enjoyed by one and all.

I would have posted about this yesterday, but I don’t think people would have believed me about it (the whole April Fool’s day thing)….

Back in January, I had said I was going to get back on the diet bandwagon. I didn’t do that. It’s been a very stressful few months around here, mostly with things that revolve around work. I am teaching three different and mostly new classes this semester, Annette and I were both applying for different jobs, There’s been some time demands on some publishing projects, I’ve had trips to both New York City and San Francisco, etc., etc., etc. I think the result of all this was that I’ve been pretty “unconscious” about my diet lately, meaning that I pretty much didn’t worry about what I ate during all this time. This is the opposite of a diet.

Well, just about all of this dust has settled. At first, I thought that I should try to get “diet religion” with the South Beach Diet again, with the whole two week “no carb” induction phase followed by the “low carb” phase 2. But I think I’m going to try my own version of the “non-diet” diet plan instead. This is more or less inspired by a story I saw in the “lifestyle” magazine Real Simple. In the nutshell, here’s my plan:

• In general, eat less and exercise more. Pretty obvious.
• Be conscious and aware of what I’m eating. Also pretty obvious, but not as easy to do as you might think, especially when you’re stressed out.
• Eat as many veggies as I can stand, and follow it up with some fruit here and there.
• Don’t give up completely on carbs, but don’t fill up on them either, and steer toward things like whole grain breads and pasta, brown rice, etc. I made home-made bagels a couple weekends ago, and they’re simply too good to give up entirely, so they must be included in my non-diet diet. I guess the word I’m looking for here is “moderation.”
• Eat lean meats, but make veggies the center of the meal and meat the side dish.
• Cut down on snacks and sweets. This is a tough one because things like cookies are one of my weaknesses; I mean, what’s a nice cup of coffee at Bombadil’s without a white chocolate chip and Macadamia nut cookie? But I’ll try….
• Don’t eat at night. This one is harder for me than you might think because I teach two nights a week this semester and I always come home starving. Of course, this semester is over in about two and a half weeks.
• Oh, and one more time, get some more exercise, which I hope is going to get easier with better weather, a better work schedule, and an additional car.

There you have it. I’m going to try to do this non-diet diet as consciously as I can for this month and we’ll see how it goes. I’d like to lose at least 5 pounds this month; the more, the better. I’ll go get on the scale right now and then go for a brisk morning walk.