Opinions, art, debate
OK, this is getting too bizarre for words.
From a female student’s essay:
“The husband goes shopping for shoes and clothes which is not normal because normally women are the ones who shop.”
I wonder what degree of abnormality she would diagnose my husband with. This poor perverted guy yesterday bought a broom and cleaning gloves he needs to clean the apartment. I wonder if DSM-5 has a name for the disorder he and I suffer.
From a female student’s essay:
“The situation we see in the movie is not normal. In a normal situation, a man works, provides for the family, and makes all the decisions while his wife stays at home and takes care of the kids. In the movie, Ana works and makes decisions which makes her husband unhappy because this is not how women should behave.”
Maybe I should ask her what she is doing in my class instead of staying at home and breeding like a rabbit.
Seriously, if I see the word “normal” in one more essay, I will gag. My feeble female nature rebels against the abnormality of having to grade papers to make my living.
From a male student’s essay:
“In the movie Mondays in the Sun, women behave in abnormal ways. They have jobs, make money, get divorced, and have sex with different men. These are not normal behaviors for women.”
The kid has still got a lot to learn about life. Maybe I should ask his female classmates to enlighten him a bit.
Of all the blogs I follow, mine has the best readers and commenters. I can’t tell you how good it makes me feel to see such a bunch of passionate, well-informed, fascinating and intellectual people come to the space I created. This is why I decided to start the Reader Appreciation Series where I will dedicate separate posts to my favorite readers and commenters. The names of readers will come up randomly. I have entered all of the people I want to show appreciation for into a Kindle app, and it will be feeding me names randomly. So please don’t read anything into being appreciated in a post #5 or #15. I love you all a lot. You, people, make me feel very happy and relevant. And if you read but never comment, now is the time to start, or I won’t be able to dedicate a post to you.
Z is a fellow Hispanist and an academic blogger whose great blog can be found here. Z is one of the most passionate bloggers I have ever encountered and a daily source of inspiration. Z’s analysis of the structural problems plaguing the academic world is always profound. I keep her inspiring words “writing is fun, publishing is easy, teaching is a pleasant social and artistic experience, and administration is creative” on the wall of my office and repeat them to myself daily. And it really helps.
Z belongs to the generation of female academics who have had to face incredible hardships on their professional and personal journey. She is an activist whose capacity for caring is nothing short of stunning. Her dedication and power offer an example for all young scholars. I relate to Z’s passion, her thirst for knowledge and I envy her the resilience and the courage she has.
People like Z are the hope and the pride of the American academia, and I’m honored to have her visit my blog.
People who say this debate will be less interesting than the previous ones because it has to do with foreign policy are arrant fools. This is the most crucial debate of all. The main reason why the possibility of a Romney presidency scares me is that I believe he will start military actions against Iran. If that happens, Iran will immediately retaliate against Israel, and we all know that Israel will strike back. As important as the taxes, the economy, the abortion and the repeal of DOMA are, the possibility that we might end up on the brink of World War III trumps all that. Romney will invade somebody for sure because the Republicans always invade. And that somebody is very likely to be Iran, so I’m terrified. Aren’t you?
Another fiercely pro-Republican moderator, yip-dee-do. He immediately allows Romney to roll out his only foreign relations talking point with the attack in Libya and the resulting brouhaha about who said the word “terrorist” first. Both the attack and the brouhaha will be forgotten in two days, yet here we are discussing it like it’s the most pressing issue of the moment. Romney says we need “a strategy.” How very specific of him. Again, he repeats that we need “a strategy.”
Obama again forgets to say the word “Bush.” Does he suffer from Obamanesia?
Romney explains that his strategy is to “go after the bad guys.” That’s a very condescending way to speak to American citizens.
Romney wants to bring gender equality to the Middle East. But, as we all know, he will start by destroying gender equality at home.
Obama stuck the comment about Russia into Romney’s chest. The attack of Obamanesia is finally over.
Obama finally says that Romney wants to take us back to the past. For the first time in this election, I love Obama.
Romney is losing his cool. “Don’t attack meeeee,” he whines.
OK, I hate Putin more than anybody in the US possibly can but he is not “Mr. Putin.” He is President Putin. A hateful president, yet a president. Elected in a landslide that neither Romney nor Obama can even begin to hope for.
The moderator is very professional but he is very obviously a passionate Republican. If that’s OK, why didn’t we see Rachel Maddow moderating one of the debates?
Obama seems to promise that the US will not be invading Syria. More than it has already, I mean.
Obama is trying to prove that he is hawkish enough to persuade the American exceptionalists of his worth. And just when I was starting to love him again.
Is there anything cuter than the British version of the English language? I’m reading a novel by a British writer and he uses the following beautiful turn of phrase, “fine words would butter no parsnips.” How delightful is this? This great expression really buttered my parsnips.
I was talking on the phone to my sister and decided to tell her that recently I started painting my nails. I was going to tell her that it turned out to be very easy and not at all a drag as I used to think. As I opened my mouth to share this bit of information, my sister began to speak.
“I recently started painting my nails,” she said. “It turned out to be very easy and not at all a drag as I used to think.”
My sister and I have been living in different countries for over 8 years yet our connection is intense. In the first year of her daughter’s life, I almost never got any sleep because if my sister doesn’t sleep in Montreal, I don’t sleep in Illinois.
And we are not even twins.
One aspect of my job that I really hate is that students come to my office to weep. It is very stressful to me and I believe that it is unfair that I have to be exposed to this. I’ve had to sit through a steady stream of weeping people passing through my office today and I’m completely drained emotionally.
I’m sorry but if a person made 165 mistakes in a 6-page essay forcing me to spend 2 hours and 50 minutes grading it, no amount of weeping will convince me to change the grade.
I now realize that there is a reason why psychoanalysts charge so much for their services. Being used as a dumping ground for people’s uncontrollable emotions is the hardest, most exhausting work I have ever done.
I still have one more class to teach and a stack of exams to grade today but I’m shaking uncontrollably and feel ready to burst into tears at any time myself.
My lecture on Panama’s military dictator, drug overlord and CIA agent Manuel Noriega was a huge success. At first, the students were skeptical, so I told them that when I first heard the story from my professor many years ago, I also didn’t believe it and thought the prof must have been under the influence of a narcotic substance. But then I discovered that she was completely sober and the story was true.
By the end of the lecture, everybody in class was in stitches. This is a tragic story that is also so hilarious that you can’t avoid laughing.
“This guy Noriega could have gotten a great movie deal out of this whole thing,” one student said, wiping off tears of laughter.
“Nah,” I responded. “It is too bizarre to be credible even for a Hollywood movie.”
My idea to add a series of lectures on Latin American conflicts
Continue reading “Manuel Noriega and the CIA”
“Claire” was a student in my Intermediate Spanish course that I taught during my very first semester at this university. Claire was very smart but hopelessly lazy. The few times she actually bothered to show up for class, she just slept on her desk. She refused to do her lab assignments and never handed in any homework. As a result, her Spanish was very weak and she failed the course. I tried hard to awaken Claire’s interest in the subject but nothing I did had any impact.
Three years later, Claire joined my course on the culture of Spain. This is an advanced course that requires a high level of linguistic competency, so I was worried about Claire. I soon discovered, however, that Claire’s Spanish had improved dramatically. Obviously, my colleagues who have been teaching Claire in the meanwhile found a way to get through to her and make her interested in the Spanish language and culture.
Claire participated actively in class discussions, did brilliantly on the tests, and showed great enthusiasm for the course. I was especially impressed with her beautiful and fluid writing in Spanish. So I decided to support Claire’s efforts and complimented her writing and the great progress she had made on one of the written assignments I returned to her.
That was a huge mistake. It turned out that Claire does not respond well to positive feedback. The day after I gave her the assignment with my praise, Claire sauntered into class late and spent the entire session sleeping on the desk. Since then, she hasn’t turned in a single homework and failed the last mini-quiz. With a single ill-considered paragraph that I wrote praising her progress, I undid all of the good work my colleagues had invested into making Claire a better student.
In the course of my teaching career, I have managed to turn around many students with praise and encouragement. However, this is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. Some people are motivated by compliments while other lose all motivation when they are praised. I wish I had invested more time into figuring out the approach that would work with Claire. I have 99 students this semester, and developing an individual approach to each student is not possible. This is the price we pay for taking on too many students and expanding our teaching loads.
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