In John Williams’s novel Stoner, the main character spends years teaching primitive beginner courses that a hostile Chair assigns to him until he finally invents the method I came up with in my first semester of teaching.

I knew I was overqualified for the boring Intro courses. So I simply taught them as whatever research topic interested me at the time. Yes, the students were a little confused at first but they got over it.

Want to know what kind of crap I got assigned? Introduction to Learning Spanish. IN ENGLISH. For people in Engineering and Nursing. Not a word of Spanish was supposed to be used in that course. I have no idea what we were supposed to be doing. Chatting in English about how to learn Spanish?

Obviously, I wasn’t going to do that. The first semester, I taught it as “Spain: The History of Ideas.” Then I’d change it up because it bores me to do the same thing. Last Fall I taught it as “Democracy in Central America.” It still has the official title of “Intro to Learning Spanish” but not for long. As Chair I finally can put in the paperwork to change it.

I could have spent years here on the blog wailing about how I get assigned boring courses and how I’m a victim. Instead, I went and did what I needed to enjoy my teaching. And there’s a million things like that. That first semester, the department gave me a syllabus for the Beginner Spanish, said I had to follow it. I binned it immediately, didn’t even read it. Still have no idea what’s in it.

It’s funny to see this method described in a novel published a long time ago. I was so certain it was my know-how.

When Cuomo was murdering elderly people by the thousand and concealing the deaths to be able to continuing doing it, nobody batted an eyelash.

But now that he’s sinned against the puritanical mortality, he’s going to be persecuted.

Of course, it’s still a win for the good to remove this homicidal maniac from power but having to read about how adult women were “groomed” with some utterly inane comments is aggravating.

A new joke from Russia:

The descendants of Pushkin’s slaves are suing the BLM.

For those who don’t know, Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet and the founder of the Russian literature was black. At least, according to the US standards that are based on the “drops of blood” theory. He was also a slave-owner known for sexual abuse of the women he owned.

It’s stupid to explain jokes, I know. But it’s a really good one. Russians and Ukrainians find the BLM hilarious because slavery existed there until 1861.

I love this piece by David Hockney:

It captures perfectly how I feel inside.