Here is how my kotlety turned out:

To make them, you mix ground turkey meat with ground chicken meat. Add some salt, an egg, and some cooked cous cous. I also add some coarse grained Dijon mustard. Squeeze some fresh garlic and mix the whole thing with your hands.

Now mold kotlety on your hands and roll them in flour or breadcrumbs. Almond flour works very well even if it’s expensive as hell. Here is what you will have as a result:

Heat up some olive oil in a pan and get it to bubble. Then place kotlety in the pan. Do NOT close the lid or lower the heat.

Wait until kotlety get a nice golden sear on one side, turn them over, lower the heat, and NOW close the lid.

Sometimes, you need to turn them over a few times to ensure a uniform golden color. Remember to keep the fire low and the lid closed.

Mmm, tasty!

From Zygmunt Bauman’s new book:

Condemnation of allegedly self-inflicted social inferiority has been stretched to embrace the slightest murmur of demurral on the part of the underdog, not to mention their rebellion against the injustice of inequality as such – as well as any sympathy and commiseration for the underdog on the part of the upper dog.

As I was just telling my father, when I came to class today, I found students sitting in the dark in complete silence.

“Why don’t you turn on the lights?” I asked.

“Lazy. . .” they drawled.

This is why I welcome any sign of engagement with or interest in pretty much anything. Even if I saw students with a poster saying, “Stalin kicks ass!”, I’d prefer that to indifference. If people know who Stalin is and have some – any – sort of emotional response to him, there is a chance to engage them in a discussion and change their minds.

It is much sadder when there are no minds to change.

For the foreign languages holiday celebration, I was planning on bringing these:

I don’t know what to call them in English but they are made of a mix of ground chicken and turkey meat, some cous cous boiled in milk, an egg, some garlic, etc. We call them “kotlety.” A colleague warned me, however, that people at these parties eschew anything that is not very familiar to them.

I wonder what the purpose of conducting a foreign languages party is if all people want to have is pizza. Of course, I will be happy to eat my own kotlety if they are not wanted by others.

In the cafeteria, two students put up posters “Jesus was a Communist!” and “Socialists unite!”

OK, how did Target make it onto my Twitter account? I haven’t visited Twitter in months and now I’m seeing weird things in my feed.

“Should computer coding be written into high school curricula?” asks this website.

Gosh, forget about coding, let’s at first ensure that everybody entering college is aware of how to add an attachment to an email. That is going to be a huge victory over computer illiteracy. And if somebody could throw in a class on the importance of signing emails, that would be amazing.

On Rate My Professor, many students condemn professors for being “judgmental.” Maybe it’s the generational gap but I have no idea what they mean by this. It’s a professor’s job to judge their performance and assign grades. What is it that upsets them?

I don’t visit the Rate My Professor website because, contrary to popular opinion, I’m not that narcissistic. N., though, does visit it because he likes to read nice things about me. So he told me that I should check it out because my reviews are phenomenal. I looked at the website and it’s true. One student says about me, “Basically, professor Clarissa is a genius.”

I feel very understood.