Opinions, art, debate
This avatar looks exactly like me!
Some of the answers I received to the question “What is the name of the group of languages Spanish belongs to?” included:
1. Nahuatl
2. Indigenous
3. Arabic
4. Visigothian
5. Christian
6. Latino/a
To be fair, 12 out of 20 students in this course got 100% for the mini-quiz. So things are not as dire as they might seem.
And you know what is the name of the indigenous civilization whose capital, Tenochtitlan, is located where today’s Mexico City is? The one conquered by Hernan Cortes?
The Inuit.
At least, this student is aware of the Inuit, so that’s something.
A student kept referring to “aerobic language” and “aerobic people” in his mini-quiz.
Of course, he meant “Arabic.”
Welcome to the Midwest, everybody!
One of the best non-medicinal ways of combating chronically high blood pressure is to eat a small peace of dark chocolate every day.
So I decided to make this sacrifice for my health and bought 3 large bars of Russian chocolate at the store right now. People who like chocolate will probably not understand me when I say that it’s an effort to make myself eat chocolate every day.
Wouldn’t it be great if one could substitute a piece of chocolate with a piece of sausage to improve one’s health?
Of course, I also bought sunflower and pumpkin seeds. They are even better for hypertensives but at least I love them.
A professor I had in grad school once told us that the only occasion for which he had interrupted the regular teaching schedule was when the verdict in the OJ Simpson trial was announced. He said that this verdict was so important that he dedicated the class to waiting for it and then discussing it when it finally came in. Hugo Schwyzer, a popular blogger, mentioned two events for which he departed from the scheduled topic of discussion in class: the OJ Simpson verdict and the events on 9/11.
The fascination with the OJ Simpson trial has always baffled me. I was stunned when I heard a TV anchor say something to the effect that the entire world eagerly awaited the moment when the verdict would come in. I was even more stunned when quite a few of the Americans I met when I came to live in the US started asking me what we in Ukraine had thought of the verdict. Ethnocentrism truly rules if people manage to convince themselves that a verdict in some tawdry trial can possibly be of interest to people living on a different continent. It is as if we didn’t have our own issues, problems, natural disasters, political upheavals, and even – believe it or not – famous trials.
I wasn’t here, of course, when the entire OJ Simpson drama unfolded. At the time of 9/11, however, I was teaching my very first college-level course in Canada. I wasn’t scheduled to teach on Tuesday the eleventh (that was the day when I attended grad courses) but I did teach my Beginners Spanish course on the next day. People have often asked me how I addressed the issue with the students. The truth is, however, that I didn’t. I conducted a regular class where we conjugated verbs and did vocabulary exercises (I wasn’t a very good Spanish teacher then).
For me, the goal was to show to the students that a university is a temple of knowledge, a place where the learning process continues as planned no matter what. In this, I was inspired by the story of Fray Luis de Leon who, having been imprisoned for five years by the Inquisition, returned to the classroom and continued the lecture with the words, “As I was saying yesterday. . .”
Today, I read a post by feMOmhist who tried to talk about what was happening to her students 10 years ago. As you will see from the post, she found it very hard to establish a meaningful dialogue with the students at that time and only ended up being exposed to their feelings of the need for vengeance against vaguely defined “them.” Ten years ago, my knowledge of the US history and culture was quite limited. If somebody like feMOmhist, who is a historian and obviously a lot more knowledgeable about the US than I am, didn’t manage to get the students to discuss what was going on productively, I would have failed even more.
This is why I’m still glad I concentrated on Spanish verbs with stem changes in the classroom on 9/12.
What I find really surprising is that I keep finding really great posts today. Among all the photos of the Twin Towers that inundate my blogroll today, I found the following insightful commentary:
Marriage reduces the stresses and demands of ‘wage slavery’ for women, while frequently increasing it for men. Marriage also generally allows women much more time for interaction with and bonding with the couple’s children. The inability of fathers to enjoy similar amounts of family intimacy as their wives is a complaint that surfaces repeatedly in surveys of working fathers, frequently coupled with the wish that they would gladly trade some income for more time with their families if they could do so without adversely affecting their careers and job security. Some men also believe — rightly or wrongly — that if they earned less money, they would face a greater risk that their wives would leave them.
I think that looking at how the gender binary hurts both men and women is what is sorely lacking from the majority of today’s feminist discourse. This is why I’m glad that there are people who are conducting this sort of analysis.
A fellow Hispanist has started a Liberation Front whose goal is the following:
Here are the sentences against which I am in open rebellion:
1. Writing is an onerous, and also meaningless exercise you must undertake for form’s sake.
2. Publishing is almost impossible.
3. Teaching is dangerous since doing it responsibly can cost you your job.
4. Any service or administrative experience proves you have no intellect.In this liberation front we say instead that writing is fun, publishing is easy, teaching is a pleasant social and artistic experience, and administration is creative. It is an antidote.
The moment I read this post, I became enamored of the entire idea. I am also exhausted by the endless whining that pervades the academic world, so I want to join this liberation front.
Let’s liberate ourselves from the erroneous idea that a good academic is a perennial miserable, overworked, suffering creature!
I had what I call “a bad autistic day” today. On a bad day, I feel like my head is filled with wet cotton wool, I lose all peripheral vision, my language skills and hearing get impaired, and I can’t perform many of the very simple, basic tasks. I was trying to work on my translation but I had to keep looking up in the dictionary words like “smooth” and “eternal”.
And this, of course, had to be a day that I had to attend a departmental party.
This was a baby shower for a colleague I really adore, so missing it was out of the question. Besides, I had promised to bring a dish, and the person who was organizing the party – and who is a colleague I adore even more – was counting on me to bring the dish.
Honestly, it took all I had to make the shepherd’s pie I wanted to make tolerably well and deliver it to the party.
Autism gives one many amazing gifts but it also limits you a lot on what you are and can do. I even have to tell N. regularly, “I’m autistic, you have to accept that I will do XYZ.”
So this was one of the bad days.
The moment I got to the party, a colleague to whom I speak to every day at work exclaimed, “Oh, so this is your husband! You have to introduce me to him!” And, of course, at that point I didn’t remember anybody’s name, including hers. I felt completely humiliated.
“This is N., my husband!” I announced. “And these are my colleagues.” The colleagues (all of whom were instructors and adjuncts) must have surely thought I was snubbing them for not being “real professors” and, therefore, worthy of being presented by name.
I know that I should have discussed my autism with my colleagues who are instructors by now, especially since one of them, according to the departmental rumor, has two autistic sons. However, it has been quite a trial on my patience to discuss it with people I hang out with more often. Some try to pretend I never mentioned it and just talk over me out of a sense of discomfort. Some start treating me like a have a terminal disease to the extent of leading me to a chair. Some get so uncomfortable that I start wondering whether, instead of autism, I might have said I have three heads, two of which are growing out of my ass.
Nothing makes me happier than discussing autism but it’s hard to do when people just clam up whenever you mention it. So I stopped bringing it up in a professional context.
During the party, a colleague came up to me, put her hand on my forearm and said, “Look, I just heard about your predicament, and I have to say that I’m very very sorry. My husband and I had to go through the same thing, so I totally get how you are feeling right now.”
N. and I recently were told that the green card process will be delayed for moths yet again. For us, this means N. will have to stay unemployed for at least 6 months more. Of course, we are understandably distraught. I had no idea how my colleague had found out about all this, but I was grateful for the compassion.
‘Thank you!” I said. “It is very hard on both of us.”
“You know, my husband and I had to keep trying for ten years before we got there,” the colleague said.
‘Ten years?” I thought. “OK, that’s just horrible. Nobody said it could last this long for us.”
“And you know what happened?” the colleague continued. “We finally got what we wanted. And – believe it or not – just nine months later we got another one!”
“This is getting too weird,” I mused. “Why would anybody want a second green card 9 months after the first one?”
So I wandered off and then a second colleague accosted me.
“I have just heard you’ve been trying to get pregnant forever,” she said. “This must be so hard on you!”
Before long, another colleague approached me to share his compassion with my supposed conception issues.
Finally, I realized that somebody must have started a rumor that we’d been trying fruitlessly to get pregnant and were suffering as a result. It’s good that I don’t mind this specific rumor, but just imagine a person for whom this is, indeed, a sore point. What kind of emotional damage such rumors could have caused?
When my sister got pregnant but was still unwilling to share the news, her colleagues practically hounded her with endless “Are you pregnant? I know you must be” questions. Finally, she snapped and said to her most insistent colleague, “Please try to concentrate on what’s going on between your legs rather than what’s happening between mine.”
This is a piece of advice many people would be served well to heed.
. . . the posts of people who are acquainted with somebody who was acquainted with somebody who died in 9/11. It’s like having some tenuous connection to one of the victims is some sort of emotional capital that people want to milk for as long as they can. 9I’m not talking about people who were actually connected to the victims, of course.)
I’m in a bad mood, so I will now annoy everybody – including myself – by sharing how I learned about the events of 9/11. At least, my story will be short.
I was a student and, as usual, was late for class. When I ran in, bleary-eyed and still half asleep, the prof announced, “Have you heard? The Americans attacked themselves. They crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center. It’s just like what happened in Cuba in 1898. They must be planning a war with somebody.”
I thought this was all some weird, outlandish joke and didn’t believe either the explanation of the events or that the events had even taken place.
Clarissa's Blog 