You know school is about to start when....

This is the week that it all begins again.  The public school kids started back today (I almost got hit by a big a** school bus who crossed three lanes of traffic with no signal and no looking - and as a former bus driver myself I find that horrific) and the college kids start on Wednesday.  This past weekend was freshman move in weekend (u-hauls were parked on every spare curb on campus and every student parking lots has cars double and triple parked) and the seniors are starting to enforce their senior-ness.  But for me, I always know school is about to start when these things happen (and they always happen).

1.  I run into students in the coffee shop.  I'm up early and they're just ending their night last night.

2.  I run into students in the gym - you know, when I look my best.

3.  My inbox is full of emails asking if the books in the bookstore "are really necessary."  Um.....yes.

4.  My blackboard sites, MyItalianLab, and Supersite platforms are malfunctioning and I can't get ahold of anyone to help me fix it.

5.  Deadlines for my article, book, promotion packet, and syllabi are all coming up within five minutes of each other.

And so it begins.  Freshmen are wandering scared around campus while sophomores are trying to shrug their parents away and seniors are trying to figure out how to demonstrate their senior-ness.  Ahh, yes....the dance begins.

Pay it forward

My apartment is quite unique in it's trash collection.  You know you live in a city's premier apartment community when they provide valet trash service.  Yup, that's right.  You leave your trash at the curb and it magically disappears for you.  BUT they only pick it up on MWF before 9am.  So on Sunday night I left a bag of trash outside of my door to be taken downstairs when I left for work Monday morning.  When I emerged this morning someone nice had already taken it down for me!  And it was filled with glass jars, a watermelon, three year old TV dinners that were blocks of melted ice . . . in other words it was not the world's nicest bag of trash.  I assume its' the people across the hall from me (the ones that slam their door so hard that they rattle the pictures on my walls every time they enter and exit their apartment) but now I have to figure out how to pay it forward.  Ideas?

Just because YOU don't work hard doesn't mean I DON'T!

I have a friend who loves to throw little jabs at the glamorous life of a college instructor.  He loves to tell me how cushy my life is, how few hours I have to work, how I get my summers off, how flexible my schedule is.  Let's get a few things straight:

1.  My job is not glamorous and I challenge you to find one hard-working lecturer who will tell you that it is.  Perhaps you're not familiar with the hierarchy in academia, but I haven't yet worked my way into a professorship, not to mention a tenure track professorship.  I teach 4 classes each semester, two classes over the summer, and a handful of independent studies for which there is no compensation.  I chair two committees, again for which there is no compensation other than knowing I'm doing a good thing, and coordinate the other Italian instructors.  My office has no windows, always smells a little funny, and has such terrible fluorescent lighting I had to invest in standing lamps so I could avoid the daily migraines.  yup, super glamorous!

2.  Ok, yes, perhaps I do only officially teach 13 hours per week.  But the planning, grading, grading, grading, grading, planning, grading definitely puts me way up over 40 hours each week.  I'm in the office 6 days a week and I take my work home with me every night.

3.  I don't get summers off.  I'm either leading a study abroad, which is WAY more work than you can imagine.  Try teaching six credits in five weeks while acting as mommy, counselor, taxi driver, tour guide, and academic counselor to 30 students.  It's a workout!

As for flexibility, yes I do have more flexibility than most and for that I'm thankful.  But listen, I work hard, and while it was funny for a while, the joke has run its course.  I like my job and it is hard work, but having to defend it constantly is exhausting, so please understand when I start ignoring your jabs.  Please and thank you.

Roll over and die? No thank you, not today.

Today was another reminder that there's a grand chance that I may not make it in academia.  I realize that there are hierarchies and untouchables and ultra secret magical powers that I'm supposed to pretend don't exist . . . and it all just makes me think that I may have gotten lost in a world where I don't belong.  Here's why:

1.  Why are things like discrimination based on race or gender illegal, but discrimination based on other elements (even when blatant) can sometimes be strategically overlooked?

2.  I know I'm not a professor yet and I know I don't have tenure, but that doesn't mean I walk around with my eyes closed.  If I see something that's unfair, even if it doesn't have to do with me, I'm not going to stand for it.  Isn't that what responsible, caring people do?  Isn't part of collegiality looking out for each other?

3.  When did the word "service" become an obscenity?  Am I not providing the world a service by educating its young people?  Am I not helping others to expand their horizons and the opportunity to explore new cultures?  So why is the service I provide less valuable than the same service provided by someone who teaches a different discipline?  It's not, but how do I prove that?

4.  Respecting your elders and standing up for what is right can be mutually exclusive.  Just because someone has been around for a long time doesn't mean that you shouldn't discuss decisions that you feel are unfair or made in error.  Everything is negotiable, is it not?

5.  I don't roll over and die in anything that I do.  Why do you think I'd do it for the one thing I'm most passionate about?

Comments?  Advice from my more worldly, seasoned, and experienced friends and colleagues?  All thoughts are welcome!

My thoughts on the Bachelor

I have recently been sucked into yet another brain-draining reality show: the Bachelor.  I don't think I've ever watched a full season before, but I did watch way back when Trista and Ryan got together (is that dating me or what?!).  But . . . the other day I came across this show on ABC.com and thought, what the heck?!  Well, I watched the first four episodes in one day.  One day!  I know, I probably killed a few thousand brain cells in one sitting.  It's a horrific show, I'm not sure what the actual time frame is, but it's just ridiculous.  Yet, I have quite a few questions on how this all works.

1.  In the first episode, I'm assuming that only two or three days were filmed.  So how are these stupid girls saying that they've "fallen" for him after 5 minutes?  And how can you really know that when you're just hoping the other 25 girls around you won't "fall" harder than you?

2.  Why isn't there a stylist to tell the bachelor that he needs a haircut?  Or even to just wash it . . . it's a little bit greasy looking.  Blech.

3.  Why doesn't it dawn on any of them that by kissing this stupid guy that has kissed their 25 roommates, they're all making out with each other?  What if one of them gets mono?  Gross!

4.  Why does he always go for the crazy one?  Seriously, I know he doesn't see what happens when he's not there . . . but does he sign some kind of contract that he'll keep the crazy one around for 80% of the episodes or something?

5.  How do these girls pack for this show?  They are wearing evening gowns every night and cocktail dresses every day.  How many bags are they bringing?  Who's doing their laundry?  Are they shopping while they're there?  What's the wardrobe situation?

6.  Group dates.  What?

What a ridiculous show . . . I wish I could stop watching but I just have to see if he keeps the crazy girl around.  Plus, she's got even crazier eyebrows, and I want to see if any one else notices but me.

Highly Effective Teaching

The fall evaluations came out recently and yours truly has received rankings in the highest bracket in all of my classes for another semester.  It's funny too because it was the same day a student actually said the following to me: "I showed up to class and when I realized your teaching schedule had changed, I was like, 'Man, this teacher is super nice, but I need Professoressa Jessica back.'"  Well, it's true, I'm not the nicest teacher in the world . . . but apparently I'm effective, so whatever!  

In honor of a request from the lovely and talented Ms. Cari, here are my top ten effective teaching techniques.  Hopefully I'm not giving away my secret weapons!

1.  I never reuse lesson plans year to year or even class to class.  Yes it's more work, but each class has its own personality and a "standard" lesson plan will not work.  I've also never taught the "perfect" class and until I do, I'll never reteach from the previous years' daily plans.

2.  I plan each lesson three times.  Yes it's overkill, I am very aware, but it works.  Once on the weekend with a weekly goal and a skeleton daily plan.  Once on the day before the lesson with a specific list of activities, exercises, etc.  And finally, the morning of the lesson adjusting for time, review, and questions from the previous lesson.

3.  The weather will affect your teaching.  Take today for example: the flood arrived in Texas.  That means about 5% of the class will not show, 50% will be depressed, and the other 50% will brood disruptively about their wet socks.  Probably not best to teach a super heavy lesson seeing as you'll probably end up reteaching the majority of it later.

4.  Students only have an attention span of about 27 minutes.  Plan to use the middle 27 minutes as your "meat and potatoes" if you will.  If you teach a 50 minute class, the first ten minutes are the "appetizer," review and questions from the previous lesson.  Then a "palette cleansing sorbet," a transition exercise that hopefully gets their heads out of last time's lesson and into the present.  Now it's "entree" time and make it quick, concise, and remember, you've only got them for 27 minutes.  That leaves you 8 minutes for "dessert," open-ended activities or games that will wind down your lesson and hopefully end on a good note.  

5.  College students are just tall elementary school students.  If you don't assign them homework every night, chances are they'll leave everything to the last minute (or perhaps not do it at all).  You can help them along by assigning daily work or you can gripe about their lack of time management skills later.  Either way they're going to need a little help planning and managing their time.

6.  You will need to embarrass yourself at some point, it's a rite of passage.  I can usually be found with a big white chalk mark across the butt of my black pants, pink ink smudged on my face, dancing around like a lunatic acting something out.  Have you ever made up a song about grammatical elements?  I have a whole arsenal.  Embarrassing?  Yes.  Effective?  Yes.

7.  Use your colleagues.  They always have good ideas you haven't thought of and you probably do something great that they haven't considered before.  

8.  Consider your tendencies.  I cradle the book like a baby even though I rarely look at it, I cannot write in a straight line on the board and I always favor the left side of the room.  Therefore, I try to make an effort to spend time in all the "neighborhoods" of the class and put my book down for a nap.

9.  Teaching is like comedy . . . if you can pull something funny in from the beginning of the class for your finale, you can hook 'em good.

10.  Always remember that what you think is easy or common sense is not to your students.  What you think is difficult may be insurmountable for them.  Remember how you're feeding them a "meal" each lesson?  You'll probably have to cut their meat for them; into teeny, weeny, little bite size pieces.  

MLA debriefing

Last week I went to the MLA convention in Seattle.  It's been called many a different name (the shark pit, the pit of desperation, and hell for language nerds are just a few of the choice nicknames) but I enjoyed it.  It's the annual national convention for all modern languages and is held in a different city each year.  This year it was in Seattle (yay west coast!) and included almost 1000 sessions over 4 days, 12 official hotels, another dozen unofficial hotels, and some of the top (and perhaps bottom?) minds in languages today.

MLA is also the place where many universities hold their first round interviews.  That in itself is a whole other dog and pony show.  Everywhere you look you see people in their best dress (and we are language nerds, so we dress a little weird) trekking all over the city from hotel to hotel hoping for the best and trying to size up the competition while nervously chatting with other interviewees in the hotel lobbies.  Interviews take place in the hotel rooms (sometimes suites, sometimes not) and there is always at least one little snafu (like the cleaning lady coming in part way through or the interviewee falling off the bed into the interviewers suitcase and simultaneously shooting aforementioned interviewer's undergarments into the air - this didn't happen to me, thank goodness).  Meanwhile, all the interviews seem to start on the hour and the elevators are like a sauna as ten desperate recently "doctored up" grad students hope for the best and sweat out the worst.

Then there's the "runway."  That is, the procession of your language colleagues to the different sessions across the city.  In a smaller language like Italian pretty much everyone attends every session.  In languages like Spanish or French, you have a better chance of missing people.  If you're trying to avoid any of your former professors or fellow students, this is where you'll see them . . . actually especially if you're trying to avoid someone.  It's one giant exercise in professionalism.  Everyone wants to know what you're doing now, are you here for interviews (and if so, then it gets really tricky because you're probably interviewing with the same schools!), when did you finish your dissertation, what publications have you done this year, what conferences have you attended, what grants have you gotten?  You are trying to measure if they're really interested or if they just want to know if they have a leg up on you for the perfect job, and try to answer diplomatically while hiding the fact that you might, perhaps, be sizing them up at the same time.  It's a workout!!!

I left feeling pretty good and happy to have caught up with my grad school buddies - which probably means I "didn't do it right."