teaching

blogging / teaching / writing — No Comments
6
Feb 09

The Paragraph Beehive

beehiveI’ve been in a paragraph beehive of my own during the past two weeks. I’ve waited it out with crashers who wanted to get into my classes, said no to the ones who thought they could just waltz right into my classes without attending the first day, and expelled the no shows. Also, I’ve been back to the grind of preparing lessons on the paragraph and other writing skills-related topics (along with turning in this form or that), which brings me to the bees.

In reinforcing some of the basic ideas taught last week on the paragraph, I decided to use the quirky analogy of a beehive. It may not be scientifically accurate, but I figured comparing the topic sentence to the queen bee, the supporting ideas to the drones, and the details to the worker bees would be a way these concepts would stick in my students’s minds. Or, somehow the 15 year old Shindo who wrote short stories about the facts about plants while his biology teacher lectured about them was channeled.

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blogging / communication styles / friends / teaching / technology — 4 Comments
14
Jan 09

You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk

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I’ve been writing about paper forms of communication in several of my recent posts, but technological forms of communication are still an urgent issue. One of the most commonly used technology is the telephone in its various incarnations over the past one and half centuries. It’s also among the most commonly abused.

Disclaimer: The numbers displayed in the image above do not belong to any of my friends. 1/14/08, 11:00am.

Drunk phone calls are always fun to get. Actually, they’re not. One of the most dangerous things about mobile phones, especially in the hands of the inebriated, is the ease of getting a hold of people and having no qualms about harassing them. Even better yet is when they leave those messages on the voicemail system that they’ll have no memory of, yet are all too painful for the recipients.

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blogging / creative writing / reading / shindotv / teaching / writing — 2 Comments
2
Jan 09

The Year of the Write

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I took this iPhone screenshot at 8:09pm for the visual pun.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, I want to stop procrastinating. It is my goal for this year, even if I might not cut out all of my bad habits. The idea is to start.

One manifestation of living on Procrastination Street is writer’s block. It is easy to put off writing because the rewards aren’t so immediate. Twittering my time away or posting witticisms on Facebook get more response, but those sentences are sent out on the quick and don’t take much process to make it into a story or a poem that expresses an idea.

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college / teaching — 1 Comment
13
Feb 08

Monkey II

In my last post, I discussed the joy of dealing with incomplete grades for students. For anyone who doesn’t know what this entails, it is a basic right students have in the event they are not able to compete the coursework for a semester. There may be some variations on this policy from school to school, but here are the basic conditions:

  • The student needs to fill out an agreement with the instructor regarding their need to finish their coursework beyond the semester.
  • There is usually one assignment that’s needed to satisfy the requirements for a student’s grade, but there may be more.
  • The student has one year from the end of the semester date to complete their work.
  • After the conditions have been outlined in the agreement and the instructor turns in the agreement, the student’s grade is recorded as “I” or INCOMPLETE.
  • Here is the dangerous part: If a student does not complete the work necessary for them to get a passing grade, their “I” or INCOMPLETE will turn into an F.

I’ve never took an incomplete in college. I’ve never been a big fan of paper work, and the less there is, the better. Now, this is an unrealistic desire for someone in my profession. When I was in graduate school, there was some silly piece of paper to turn in to some office every week. Of course, this is a gross over-exaggeration, but I don’t think I’m too far from the truth. The incomplete was simply another document to fill out.

Given that, I did not make it a habit to approach my professor mentors and tormentors for incompletes. I usually finished my coursework by the end of the semester, even it killed me. There were many times where it almost did.

There was only one semester where I ever approached a professor to do an incomplete. It was a course on the great world novel and I chose to my semester paper on Shusaku Endo‘s Silence. This novel’s theme was suffering, which I would ironically experience as I struggled through the year to do the paper.

For some reason, it took me a while to decide on using this work as the topic for my paper. However, it would take me a long while to get it done. I often found excuses not to do it. The following semester, I dealt with drama. I had a personal and professional falling out with the professor who helped me get into graduate school (a cautionary tale against doing graduate programs in your undergraduate alma mater). It didn’t help that I worked as assistant editor for his disturbingly sick literary* journal at the time (I formally resigned mid-year shortly after any sign of friendship and personal regard disintegrated on both sides). I had an unrequited interest in a supposedly good friend of mine who took advantage of it. He lived in my apartment for a while and he didn’t hesitate to cash in the benefits when it suited him. He rejected me at a point when I started to think I had a chance with him. I then kicked him out of my apartment, but my woes were far from over. I wound up seeing a counselor that spring semester to deal with both issues, and one of the things that came up in the conversation from time to time was the incomplete.

In the aftermath, I was dealing with the emotional issues listed above, but I still struggled with getting a silly essay done. I still had to do creative writing for the workshops and readings for the lit courses in my program, which also had essays. I kept putting it off and putting it off, but the incomplete was always on my mind.

I did manage to get it before the year was over. The paper wasn’t great at all; however, I didn’t let it turn into an F. I just couldn’t afford it.

After that, I vowed never to take on another incomplete again. To use a cliché, it was a monkey on my back. I could not stop thinking about it even when I wasn’t working on it, and that was a constant distraction. As for the drama that served as a nice excuse? It soon passed. From time to time, I had to deal with the former mentor on a bureaucratic level. As for so-called friend, I realized he was useless and I never fell into that unrequited trap again. I am glad that the counselor didn’t let me forget about making sure I satisfied the incomplete.

Knowing that I don’t work well like this, I always feel some concern for students who take this on. As a teacher, I’m not too crazy to being tied to any class for a year.

*This is not a statement of literary conservatism on my part as it is more of a pot shot.

teaching — No Comments
12
Feb 08

Monkey

One of the joys I have returning to teaching this year is letting students take on incompletes. Actually, it’s not, but I somehow got into giving a student one at the end of a very short term summer course, the one that caused me to take marathon naps.

It was not my intention to enter into an incomplete agreement. With this student, I didn’t get all of her work, and I originally set out to assign a substandard grade. The grade gods must have been looking over her, because I wound up entering the grade as an “I” and I couldn’t change it, even with a grade change form. I could have pressed on, but it was difficult once she accessed her grades.

It’s also been difficult as she’s claimed to have e-mailed me the paper I never got. She has stuck to this claim and I’ve stuck to mine about never getting it. I have obsessively checked my e-mail many times for it. Recently, I have told her to print out the e-mails she sent me, attach it to a hard copy of the paper, and put it in the student drop section of the faculty mail room. For some reason, I never hear back from her after giving instructions like this, and I only get an e-mail when she has to deal with her college transcript.

Hopefully, she heeds my last e-mail and may the grade gods be with her.

teaching — 2 Comments
6
Feb 08

¡Ay, ^@%#&%! Office 2007

Today, Chris went on this crusade against e-mail priority flags (a God-awful invention if I ever saw one) and I went on some mini-tangent about Office 2007, which I saw as another useless Microsoft invention (Zune is one of those things, but that’s another post altogether).

A lot of my frustration with Microsoft’s finest creation stems from my experience with the software during my first week of school. At the college in the desert/mountains, the composition classes have one hour of computer lab time and they’re in these brand new classrooms with state of the art PC’s. Last semester (before the new building was completed), my class met for their lab in the library, and those computers were polished white iMacs (circa 1999-2002, the cathode ray tube variety). All of my students (and yours truly) hated those antiquated devices (which were updated with Panther, but incredibly slow. The spinning rainbow wheel was a common occurrence). Even though I’m not a PC person, I feel the new computers are a vast improvement. Of course, they come equipped with Office 2007.

Since I teach English, I naturally have them use Microsoft Word for their in-lab writing assignments. I suspect all of them were familiar with some previous version of the word processsing program. Before my encounter with the new Word, my most recent experience was with Office 2004. Two weeks ago, I plunked Office 2008 into my new MacBook, but that did not prepare me for its PC-based sibling.

Unfamiliarity with the program didn’t make the lab an easy one, especially since I had students create writing samples during that first day.

The interface was the thing that confused all of us. Office’s website calls it “Fluent User Interface,” but it was a foreign language for all of us. Certain formatting features (new ones) are laid out in a way for the user to easily click on them to use, but this does very little good if you don’t need them right away. For some simpler functions, they weren’t so readily available like on the older versions. Mac’s Office 2008 retains this older interface and integrates it with the new interface. However, Office 2007 goes for something newer and flashier. It took one of my students to figure this out, and she told me to click the “medallion”* on the upper left hand corner and comes the functions to save, print, and some of the other basic ones we all love.

Once we all understood these things about Office 2007, things are easier. I’m sure there’s some more learning we will all do as the semester comes along. There are a few other computer issues I can think of, but that’s for another time. Sometime down the road, I should call the school’s IT department and arrange for someone to come to the lab as a guest speaker.

As I played around with Word 2007 today, I have to say it grew on me. One of the coolest features I discovered was that files can be published as blog entries. Strangely enough, this feature isn’t available in Mac’s Word 2008. Yes, I am eating some earlier words. Perhaps I’ll say more as I become more and more familiar with the program.

*my little term for the Microsoft crest that adorns the upper left hand corner of the Office 2007 program window.

teaching — 2 Comments
4
Feb 08

Back to reality

I’ve endured this awful cold last week and got a little behind with all my work. The worst of this cold is over, but I’m still dealing with the post-cold sinus congestion, which makes it a nightmare to teach early in the morning. Even if I’m not ranting for 15 minutes straight in a lecture, I still feel it one or two sentences into what I’m saying. This super-early class has some very sharp and awake people, which makes it enjoyable. So far, they tend to be good in Socratic situations, and I know they’ll make some interesting contributions to class.

One thing I did this morning which I’ll definitely remember for future reading assignments is to ask them what they can learn from the essay or chapter as writers. It’s such a basic question, yet it is one that can keep the class grounded when it’s so easy to go off on many different tangents (many of which don’t help the students in the end).

I’m still getting used to this early morning thing again after having such a long break. This goes all the way until the end of May, so I have a few months of this. Spring Break interrupts this, but I can’t get too comfortable sleeping in.

I’ve got some catch up work and a late afternoon class to teach.

religion / teaching — No Comments
2
Feb 08

Being Sick is Bitch

This past week has not been fun. I got sick on the first week of school and I’m the one who winds up playing hooky, partly because I felt horrible and partly because I didn’t want to be “incubus of the viral plague.” I had to call two schools to report absences, and I showed up to the Thursday night class only because it was the first night and I wanted to see who was present and wanted to crash. The session went on a little longer than I wanted due to some student questions. On some level, teaching is theater and I think my students had a perverse desire to see me die in front of them. Maybe not, but I can’t help thinking it as my voice rapidly deteriorated that night.

I’ve been resting and doing what you’re supposed to do when you have a cold: drink plenty of fluids. I have also been taking Airborne like candy, a habit that will stick around when I’m better.

People who work in public spaces like schools run the risk of getting all kinds of nasty bugs. I wonder how many times I was in college that I picked up some cold or flu from a fellow student or some super-sick prof. There was also the grocery store I worked for all through my college days and lots of people showed up sick and suffering. When I was in graduate school, I tutored students, which provided a one on one risk factor. I wonder how much of this could have been avoided if people helped themselves and others by not calling in sick when they’ve come down with the cold, especially early on.

I’m sure it’s worse in office settings, where people often have to be in the same room with each other for 8+ hours a day. Somehow, I don’t think cubicle walls provide that much protection. I could go on and on about the evils of the cubicle, but that would be getting off-topic.

I wonder how much germs get passed around in religious settings. When I was in a small evangelical church in my early twenties, people got sick all the time. When someone came down with a common cold or flu, they didn’t stay home on Sunday morning. They showed up and gave a whole new definition to communion with a gift that keeps on giving. Speaking of communion, I occasionally wonder if I’ll catch something drinking the wine during Episcopal services. I’ve been told that the chalices are made of silver and thus germ proof. I’ll take their word for it, but it doesn’t stop me from thinking about it every time I’ve gone up to receive the bread and wine.

I’ll get some rest soon. At least the worst is over.

teaching — 2 Comments
31
Jan 08

I write this blog because I’m sick

Perhaps this should be an apt description of why I blog. Alas, the truth is that I have a head cold and it has put me out of commission on the second half of the first week of school. I’ve made it to the first days of class, but I’ve had to cancel some second classes. There’s a night class I have to make it to tonight and I’m going to have to cut that one short. Thank God I don’t teach on Friday or Saturday.

This spring, I am forced to wake up super early a few mornings out of the week. I’m not a morning person, so I must resort to using one of those ungodly contraptions – an alarm clock. Whether it’s a wind-up, something digital with a mildly offensive noise, or some music, an alarm clock is an alarm clock is an alarm clock. Not even something like the iHome is exempt.

It’s hard for me to say what my students are like so far. Right now, all I can think about is 30 odd faces per class, and I can’t remember a single one. First days of class always feels like I’ve drank five triple espressos, a definite effect of meeting all of these people. I usually have my students say something about themselves that makes them unique, so thing I did when introducing myself was to come out as an introvert. Some students followed suit and said they were shy, while others were more than happy to say a few things about themselves.

Anyhoo, I’ve got to rest up for the evening class. I’ll keep the first session short as I don’t want to be “an incubus of the viral plague.”

teaching / television — No Comments
19
Dec 07

Some Random Things

After being so bah humbug in my last post, how do I follow that level of Yule time cynicism? It’s hard, but I’ll manage.

Last week, I got some postcards from the Post Due Collective exchange. They are absolutely fabulous. I haven’t posted them yet, but they’ll be up soon.

This has got to be one of the wettest winters we’ve had in a while. Every other weekend, there has been a lot of rain. Very rarely, like tonight, has it rained in the middle of the week. God knows we need the rain, especially after those fires.

I had the last two classes of the semester today. For the critical thinking class, I had an informal wrap where it was an informal gathering, I bought some beverages, chips, and dips from Trader Joe’s. One of my students brought pizza. Other contributions included a chocolate bundt cake and cupckakes. It was definitely a nice closure to a class that greatly improved after the departure of Felicia. Unfortunately, my English Skills class did not end on a festive note. I did have a final prepared for them, which most of them seemed to understand. Only one student seemed to think the essay exam was open topic, though she quickly adapted after I made the issue clear.

I went to Costco after giving finals at the urban college. I don’t really know why I stopped by there as I left empty handed, but they didn’t seem to be crowded with late night shoppers. I missed out on getting Babylon 5 season sets for $15 each when they had them. Even though I’ve always liked the show, I’m more of a Star Trek guy. If I saw Star Trek sets for that cheap, I would have grabbed them all.

Every once in a while, I’ll catch an episode of Real Housewives of Orange County, which is about the reality of a few people – affluent, nouveau riche types. The trailer for this week’s episode makes it out that Vicki has it out for one of her friends, going into an out of control “fuck you!” and shaking her middle finger session while they’re riding in the back of a limo. 15 minutes into the show, it turns out that they are having a minor disagreement about the gay decorator who’s living in Vicki’s house during a flip and the rent he’s expected to pay. After that scene passed, I quickly last interest and I changed the channel. It’s usually the same thing over and over – middle aged adults with tons of disposable income going into second adolescence while their children are entering adulthood.

Chris the Ricky Gervais clone has some competition life in an episode or two of Project Runway after being brought back, but we’ll see. I missed doing Friday’s recap, but maybe I’ll do one tomorrow to get back into the swing of things. I always love seeing what the Bjork Lady comes up with – will it take courage to wear it?

That’s it for tonight. I’m turning in soon, got some grading tomorrow. I’ll also figure out who are some good candidates for the gift of duct tape with the stipulation that they put it over their mouths as their Christmas gift to me. I think we all know some deserving people.

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