I have a question for my fellow educators. Do you let the students know what their grade is before the final exam? I never did this before but I decided to do it this semester. I need to be able to enter my final grades into the system very fast because I’m leaving for Europe almost immediately after the finals. So I calculated what the grades are like minus the final exam. And I let the students know where they stood.

The results have been confusing. On the one hand, many of the struggling students were terrified of their projected grade and REALLY prepared for the final. Some of them handed in the kind of high-quality work that I was so unprepared to see from them that I kept checking their names on the first page. (This is a language course, so cheating is impossible.)

However, several of my star students did atrociously. I don’t know how one can manage to forget the entire Spanish language within a week just because one has seen one’s final grade but that is precisely what happened. To give an example, a Francophone student did not get a single case of the Subjunctive and the Preterite / Imperfect right. Not a single one! And these are the tenses that exist in the same form in French and in Spanish, which was a constant subject of jokes between me and her. (“Ah, Jacinthe, I guess you are finding this material to be super easy!” “Yes, professor, it’s exactly the same in French!”). I can’t believe she messed this up so completely.

So I’m wondering whether I should continue the practice of telling the students their grade before the final exam. Do you have any suggestions? What do you do?

A student handed in an absolutely perfect final exam today. It’s an Advanced Grammar course, so the exam was harsh. At the end of the exam, the student wrote in beautiful Spanish a page-long message (which was not a part of the exam, of course) about how I’m the best teacher he has ever had and how my passion for languages and for learning has been a constant source of inspiration.

I feel happy, people.

The new Twitter! I can’t find anything in it. Where am I supposed to look for the messages that people send me through Twitter? I go to Direct Messages, and there is only the most recent one there.

I’d gladly not use Twitter at all but it’s becoming a preferred way of communicating for a growing number of people.

I really don’t get this changing things for the sake of changing them.

The Blogger has also adopted a new look. I participate in a writing group that operates in Blogger and I can’t help but notice how annoying the new Blogger structure is.

I’m reading David Graber’s Debt and I just discovered a very curious thing. In the Lord’s Prayer, English-speakers say “. . . and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” This is very shocking to me because Russian-speakers have a very different version of the prayer. We ask God to forgive us our sins. And so do Spanish-speakers, as far as I’m aware.

What about other languages? Does any other culture use this weird financial terminology to pray to God?

I don’t know why I’m so surprised if we are talking about people who came up with the brilliant idea to use the language of commerce to speak about sex.

Graeber, of course, commits the mistake of equating English-speaking Christian and all Christians. In his mind, if English-speakers do things a certain way, the rest of the world must certainly imitate them.

An unhinged person had the following to say about people who oppose Arizona’s anti-abortion laws:

Opponents of this law do not really prioritize women’s health and their right to choose. Instead of wanting women to make smart decisions for themselves, they become “pro-abortion.” Their ultimate goal is the slaughter of innocent babies, so women can maintain their more comfortable lifestyles rather than live with the results of their choices — both the trials and the blessings.

No, silly little freakazoid, it’s only the guilty babies we, the evil feminazis, want to slaughter, so you can rest easy.Where do such creepos come from and how can we ship them back to their weird planet?

For an intelligent, detailed takedown of this unhealthy statement from a deluded maniac, read the post I linked to.

The only reason I placed this quote here is as a response to people saying that instead of calling such folks vile freakazoids, I should debate them logically and reasonably. Of course, I’m guessing that I will be a lot more successful holding debates with the neighborhood pooch who hates me for some reason and goes into fits whenever it sees me. Holding an intellectual discussion with somebody who says that my “ultimate goal is the slaughter of innocent babies”, though? Seriously? Because I want to waste my life debating things with people who are congenitally incapable of formulating a rational thought?

No, I’ll just stick to using these creatures for the only purpose God and nature intended them: to serve as an object of ridicule.

This guy is some sort of a genius:

What people admire about Tony [Soprano] isn’t his freedom; that thing you think is freedom is actually  the lack of freedom. His story. His identity– that he has one, an obvious one, a clear one.  Tony Soprano is not free, his behavior is completely tethered to what makes sense for his character.  He acts exactly like Tony Soprano would act.  That’s what people want:  the limitations of that identity: if I know who I am, I know what I am capable of, I know my strengths and my limits, I know how I’d react to unknown dangers.  And I want other people to know this.  If other people know who I am, I wouldn’t have to keep proving myself.  Strike that: I wouldn’t have to prove myself in the first place.

Wow. This is so brilliant and so completely true that I have nothing else to add other than to repeat my “Wow!”

Do read the whole long post because the rest of it is just as amazing. Just one more little quote for you:

Not knowing who I am, not knowing what I am supposed to do next and what I am not supposed to bother doing next– makes us long for characters who know precisely what to do next even if it is the wrong things.  They may be flawed, but they are definite.  They exist.

A standing ovation is in order.

The following article would be funny if it weren’t so sad:

“Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business,” Romney told college students in Ohio. The statement is in context of a story where a friend of his borrowed $20,000 from his parents.

I don’t even have any friends with parents who can just lend $20,000 like it’s small change. My friends who are college professors with college age kids would be in stitches if somebody told them to loan this kind of money – that they obviously don’t have – to their children. Where are they supposed to get it from? Take out a second mortgage?

I can just imagine this scene:

“Mom, Dad, I need  $20,000.”

“It’s in my wallet, the one in the brown handbag.”

“Oh, thanks. I’ll give it back when I can.”

“Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing.”

I wonder what percentage of people who listened to this speech find Romney’s advice to be useful and say to themselves, “Shoot, I forgot completely that there is all that money my parents have lying around for me to borrow!”

I understand that a presidential candidate has to be out of touch. It’s among his job qualifications. But shouldn’t he also be just a little bit better at concealing just how out of touch he is?

Recently, it has become difficult for me to leave comments in my own Comments section. I try to leave a comment but the system refuses to accept it and gives me a nasty little zero instead. It appears right under the comment. This doesn’t happen all the time but it happens enough to be hugely annoying. Then, if I still want to leave my comment, I have to go to the actual post and hunt for the place in the thread where I want to leave it.

All of this is hugely annoying and time-consuming. Does this happen to you, too? If so, do you have any ideas why this happens? I’ve tried reloading the page but that doesn’t work. Has anybody found a way to avoid this issue?

If I can’t leave comments from my Comment section, that sucks because I can’t go hunting for each comment I want to answer in the actual thread.

My thanks go to my friend Ol. who sent me this beautiful image.

I find it really hilarious how all of the super-duper ultra-progressive Liberals turn into the worst retrogrades in the universe when a chance comes to dump on an enemy. Or his wife. I don’t know how many times in the past couple of days I found the following quote from Ann Romney bandied around self-righteously by people who fail to realize that dumping on Ann Romney for making this particular statement turns them into anti-feminist bigots of the worst caliber:

“I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.”

The following reaction to Ann Romney’s words appeared on the website that hides its contempt of women behind male privilege lists and commands to women as to which of our body parts we should not value:

You know who doesn’t love the fact that there are women (and men) who have no choice but to work, rather than staying home full-time? It’s those women (and men) who have no choice but to work. That’s not something they celebrate; that’s something they lament.

I’m a woman who always had and always will have to work. My sister is such a woman. My husband is such a man. We don’t have a choice to stay home even part-time, let alone full-time. And we in no way “lament” this. We actually do celebrate it, believe it or not.

I love it that I never had a choice to work or not. If I had, I might have given in to my indolence, my laziness, my inertia and deprived myself of the incredible joy my profession gives to me every day. It’s not easy to stay up reading when your peers are dancing in a nightclub. It’s no fun to receive yet another rejection from a journal. And it’s a total drag to have to get out of bed at 6 am to be at the final exam at 8 am, as I will do on Wednesday and Thursday.

Just like many of the people I know, I could have given in to the temptation and said, “Ah, to hell with all this trouble, the recalcitrant students, the mean publishing houses, the colleagues who constantly disagree, the tyranny of the alarm-clock, the annoying administrators, and the daunting tenure requirements.” I want to be honest here, so I won’t pretend that I would have worked nearly as hard if I had millions of dollars in a bank account. I know I wouldn’t have.

And if that happened, I would have never had the same intense intellectual growth as I experience now, I wouldn’t have cried for joy when getting yet another message from a student about how I changed her life, I wouldn’t have felt what it is like to create a comfortable life for myself from scratch, I wouldn’t have experienced making my very first big purchase with the money I made completely on my own, I wouldn’t have the same overwhelming pride in my own achievement as I do know. Hell, I wouldn’t even be with my husband because my passion for my career was the very first thing that attracted him to me.

This is why I absolutely love it that I don’t have a choice and have to go to work tomorrow. You couldn’t pay me enough to get me to become a housewife. Seriously, there isn’t enough money on this planet.

The blogger I linked to betrays his deep-seated envy for Ann Romney when he says that she is “tremendously lucky.” I guess if money is the only thing you value, then, sure enough, she is fortunate. I, however, can’t envy the situation of a person who never had a profession or a career of her own and whose identity is entirely diluted in that of her husband and sons. People only care what she has to say right now because her husband is running for president. On her own, as a separate individual, she interests no one. I have a small audience here on my blog, but at least my readers come here because they are interested in me, not my husband. Never having any meaning or value as a human being in your own right, how sad! I honestly wouldn’t wish this fate on my worst enemy, irrespective of how many millions accompanied it.