My event today went phenomenally well. It was the university’s annual languages day that never in its entire history had my department participate. But this year the whole event was completely ours. Because I know people and I got them to agree to give the event to me.
We had 9 booths, one for each of the languages we teach. Each booth had language-related activities, games and prizes. And there was free food!
The second best part was that my department didn’t have to pay a dime for any of it. I got the diversity office to pay. They are rolling in money, and I brought them African music, Chinese hieroglyphics, Mexican bingo, Ukrainian art, and so on. That’s mega diverse.
I think we had at least 300 students come through the booths. The professors were in heaven because they love being the center of attention and having students crowd around them. I don’t but I’m unusual.
The actual best part, though, was that I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t conduct any activities at all. I delegated everything. It’s paradise. We had a reporter, a professional photographer, 15 volunteers. It was so good.
The Provost came, looked around, left, and when the event was wrapping up I received an email from her granting my entire hiring request for the next semester. Now I don’t know what to do because I had inflated my request massively on purpose. We are in a hiring freeze, so I was hoping maybe to have 25% of the request granted if I was lucky. Now I’ll have more people than I know what to do with.
I can’t believe that I’m now this person who organizes big events. It’s very funny if you think about it.
Clarissa's Blog 
Congratulations on getting the “diversity department” to pay for your booths.
At least your university’s diversity department managed to be good for something.
Dreidel
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More ASL sections?
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Among other things!
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“the university’s annual languages day that never in its entire history had my department participate”
No one else has asked, so I’ll bite….. huh? What did they do without the foreign language department participating?
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They didn’t know that we existed. Because they are diversity people, so not too bright. They usually put up posters with badly spelled phrases in foreign languages and gave speeches about the importance of languages while, obviously, speaking no foreign languages.
You should have seen the absolute stunned joy when I informed them I can actually provide native speakers in all these languages.
Remember, we are a university whose previous top administrator was shocked to discover that people in China aren’t native speakers of English. She went on a trip to China and was very surprised that there was a whole different language that the Chinese spoke. I spared her the intellectual hardship of finding out about the Mandarin vs Cantonese.
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