A local high school is closing down its really great German program because the director of the program is retiring and a new one can’t be found.

In reality, however, there is a new German teacher who wants to work at that school and who is passionately wanted by the school. He is a graduating student at our department, fluent in German and Spanish, a brilliant fellow who is amazing at literary analysis, and a phenomenal asset to any school. I have him in one of my courses right now, and he is simply outstanding.

The teacher in question can’t start working at the school that wants him because he keeps failing the trig and geometry portion of one of the five teacher certification tests mandated by the state. If you are planning to ask why a teacher of German needs to pass an exam in trig, please ask someone else. I’m clueless about the logic of this process.

The state is experiencing a horrible dearth of teachers but we are failing to get our students to graduate because every year there are additional teacher certification tests for students to pass. Altogether, students have to pay over $700 for these useless and ridiculous tests.

I’m not into the “down with the Big government! ” rhetoric but this is an absolutely ridiculous situation. Our department is certified by the state to award teacher certification. Why isn’t that enough to just let the graduates work in the schools that want them?

My college unanimously recommended me for tenure. Which is not that shocking if you’ve seen my CV. Of course, there are 5 more stages the process has to go through.

In other news, N gave me an hourglass for the wedding anniversary. I’m obsessed with hourglasses, in case you didn’t know. And I gave him a goblet handcrafted in the West Bank. And we went to a chic new restaurant here in town. We sat in front of this huge picture window and watched the snow. It is amazing how many times people who are in love can tell each other the same old story of how they met and hugely enjoy it. Everybody else would die of boredom a hundred times already. 

So I’m done with my secretarial duties for the day and am ready to start celebrating the best marriage known to humanity*.

Students look very disturbed when they encounter me at the secretary’s desk, stuffing envelopes. I have a feeling that seeing somebody of my intellectual caliber and impressive qualifications engaged in such a task messes with their heads. I dig that because it’s funny to observe.

The only downside of sitting in the secretary’s office is that it is located at the entrance to the Chair’s office, and my colleagues suspect me of eavesdropping on their fraught discussions with the recalcitrant students they are obligated to bring to the Chair. I’m getting tired of explaining that I have a hearing problem that prevents me from listening in on these discussions even if I wanted to do so.

So I told the Chair I was hungry and was leaving for the day.

“Ah, so you are human!” he exclaimed.

N is at work so I started celebrating on my own by visiting the Indian buffet. Now I will go buy some gifts for myself.
And it’s still snowing intermittently which, I believe,  is a great sign.

I can’t explain it but I feel like this difficult semester ended today even though there are still weeks to go.

* Your marriage is amazing, as well, of course. I’m just talking from my own perspective.

A few years ago, I would have said he is slandering Western feminists:

So much for the idea that I’ve seen many Western feminists promulgate that Islam and Islamic countries with their restrictions on women’s behaviors “protects” women from rape.

But now I know better.

Am I going nuts or has it just started snowing??

Wow, that’s an amazing wedding anniversary gift. Snow before Thanksgiving (or before February, really) is unheard of in this region.

You know what’s horribly unfair and corrupt?  Mandatory car insurance. I never had a chance to think about it before but now it has become obvious that this is nothing but a form of taxation where the revenues go directly to private companies. And it’s a pretty high tax.

In this week’s New Yorker, Allen Kurzweil details his forty-year-long hunt for his childhood boarding-school tormentor, and his discovery that the former twelve-year-old bully had grown up to be a convicted felon. He has also written a book about it, called Whipping Boy.

People will truly go to any lengths to avoid placing their parents under critical scrutiny. Forty years is small potatoes. There are those who throw their entire lives away to avoid putting in words the intolerable truth.

I’m terrified this might one day happen to me:

 

I also tend to intersperse my articles with comments like “Professor X says [and what a stupid piece of shit he is] that this novel. . .” Maybe I should stop doing that.

Tonight, I was awakened twice by screams. Both times, the person doing the screaming was me. In the dreams (if we effectuate a Jungian reading), I was being violated by the male part of my persona. I urgently need to give nourishment to my female persona, it seems.

The good news is that tomorrow is my wedding anniversary, so there will be a chance for the female persona to come out.

In other news, after working as a salesperson yesterday, today I tried myself in the capacity of a secretary. We still have no departmental secretary, so I volunteered to stuff the envelopes with scantron sheets and forms for student evaluations for all of the courses we are offering. This is an intensely pleasurable activity because it’s so mechanical and relaxing that I feel rested after it.

Being a professor is great because it gives one a chance to try out many different careers.

Spent some time with people who are passionately opposed to the Common Core. When I asked them what it is they hate about it, they regressed to the pre-verbal stage and responded with moans and eye-rolling. I wanted to ask what educational standards had been used on them to make it so hard to express a deeply held belief of their own in a complete sentence but thought better of it. The moaning continued for quite a while, becoming very complex and inventive.

I’ve been trying to get people to talk about the reasons they dislike Common Core for months. But the result is always the same. As a result, I’m not sure if Common Core is dangerous but the discussions about it obviously are.