End of Spring Break

Oddly enough, I can't seem to find a video clip from Heathers, of Veronica's dad asking how spring break withdrawal is coming along.   Oh well.

Tomorrow is the first day back after this terribly late spring break.  I'm mostly happy with the balance of work and not-work I achieved, although I'm still erring on the side of not-work.  I'm quite pleased that I met my goal of finishing the 518-page Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, an edited collection on my southern list.  It took a while--after getting through that behemoth, it only took me a day to read The Color Purple (which I'd read before, but it's been years.  Plus, it has the line, "The lord don't like ugly" in it, which is pretty important to my work).  I also finished the abstract for the Berry Southern Women Writers conference I've been working on, and got that submitted.  And I polished up a paper to submit for the department writing contest, which has tomorrow as its deadline.

In not-work news, we went to New Orleans Thursday for the book release/Eudora Welty's birthday event at Maple Street Books.  There was wine, champagne, cheese & crackers, and birthday cake.  The book, which is about the restoration of Welty's garden in Jackson, is a beautiful coffee-table book, and that author was quite entertaining.  I love Welty people.

I slept a lot the last week, and worked out a decent amount.  Knitted some.  Put away my clothes and suitcase that was still out since the SSSL conference.  Wore my pajamas until 3 and 4 in the afternoon many days.  Repotted some seedlings.  I also discovered that there's a jazzercise location much closer than the one I tried when we first moved here (as much as I love jazzercise, there's no way I'm driving 45 minutes each way for a class).  This one's in more the 15-20 minute driving range, which is much more reasonable.  And the student rate is $25/month, which is cheaper than the Y, which I was considering joining.  I love jazzercise.  So, I intend to try it out this week.  That would be fabulous if I could start going to jazzercise regularly.

I also managed to go a week without washing my hair, which may be a record (yay for ponytails!).  I shall now go and wash my hair in preparation for returning to school.  Still, this week is logical fallacy week in the classes I'm teaching, which is a not-labor-intensive week for me.  It's a nice way to ease back in.

Teaching and Tech

This Chronicle article has me thinking more about effective teaching, especially as I continue to struggle with my current class.  Its primary claim is that technology works best in the classroom when it fosters stronger connections between teacher and student.  This has been the idea that I've been circling around in the past week, that key to a productive classroom is one in which there is a strong connection between teacher and students.  In my current classroom, because the students came in with such strong connections already among themselves, it's been difficult to get their attention focused elsewhere. 

I've spent the past week meeting with students about their first papers--part of my intention in doing so has been to try to forge stronger connections individually with students, in an effort to improve the classroom.  I want them to engage with the class material during class time, rather than be chatting and passing notes about their social lives.  Friday, they workshopped their rough drafts in class, and I had them pair up with a random partner, in order to cut down on extraneous "underlife." 

I noticed an interesting change Monday.  In general, the students were a bit more focused and participated in class discussion more (partly after realizing that they wouldn't get 10s for participation just for showing up).  However, my overachiever student had the student newspaper out and read for part of class instead of participating.  I wonder if he's protesting my not letting him write the treatise on the effect of commercialism on marriages he wanted to write, instead of the assigned rhetorical analysis of a print ad?  Or perhaps I'm reading too much into it.

Either way, I realize that for the first time I'm missing that sense of "wonder" in the material.  This is definitely a sign I need to shake something up.  I really wish that the department would go ahead and announce fall teaching assignments; knowing what I'm working toward in the fall might be helpful in facing the rest of the semester, too.  I think I'm more generally missing a sense of "wonder" right now--even though my reading for class/comps is right down my alley right now, I don't want to read.  The part of my brain that translates words into meaning is tired.  It's not too terribly bad--when I feel this terribly, I get up and work out, or do something crafty (I haven't been too musical lately--that might help).  Still, when I come back to the book,  it's still feeling like work.

As I write this, I realize that (with a few exceptions), I have been enjoying the writing side of things more lately.  I'm quite happy with the pedagogy conference paper I'm giving this week (ironically, I suppose--though it's about group projects, which I really enjoyed last semester), and once I get through this new round of revisions for the <expletive omitted> Transatlantic paper I received two days ago, I'm looking forward to the writing projects I have going which I actually am excited about.  Hmmm.  Perhaps I should keep my focus on writing--I've got a really good writing partner right now, and our commitment to meet once a week has kept me working diligently on writing. 

And here's why writing is important--it allows me realizations such as this.

Smacked in the face by the end of the semester like a two-by-four

I felt a momentary relief to have that presentation behind me, but now face Friday's deadline for revising this paper on The Messenger.  I've done major revisions and more research to supplement my claims.  My wonderful professor is being quite helpful in making recommendations for other work to look at, but the quickly approaching Friday deadline is making me feel anxious.

All of the quickly approaching deadlines are making me feel as though the end of the semester is smacking me in the face with a two-by-four.  (Though that may be exacerbated by my forehead still hurting a bit from where I smacked it on the overhead compartment Sunday.)  We've got one more reading next week for my southern class, and then conference papers start the following week, with seminar versions of those paper due the end of the semester.  I've got to put something together for my independent study.  And I've got to write and then grade my classes' finals; I give finals Tuesday and Thursday of finals week, and then have to be in Ohio for my dad's wedding that Saturday.  Grades are due the next Wednesday.  I don't relish the thought of dragging two classes worth of blue books with me on the plane.

I got a flat out rejection back from the Mississippi Quarterly on my Welty paper which my adviser said would be "easy to publish."  That's not helping my feelings of usefulness at the moment.  At least my readings for teaching and for class right now are enjoyable reads--we start Alison Bechdel's Fun Home Thursday in WGS, and next week we're reading a post-apocalyptic South book called Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, which you've gotta love just for the name.  It takes place in East Tennessee, which makes it an enjoyable (albeit weirdly nostalgic, as I keep missing Tennessee a lot lately) read.

I don't like feeling incompetent and behind.  I will now have some lunch and read read read, something I can do, which I hope will make me feel a little more capable.

Moebius To-Do List

After a weekend during which I valiantly struggled to accomplish things, while my body staged giant protests (I went to be Friday night and slept for seventeen hours), everything is packed and ready to go for a big day tomorrow.  10:30-12 is the EGSA grad student panel presentation, where I'm getting to do a practice run of my Flannery O'Connor paper looking at Wise Blood together with the Ministry song "Jesus Built My Hotrod" (which samples dialogue from the film).  At noon, I professor I admire is speaking, and then in my class at 3 I'm presenting on Selah Saterstrom's The Pink Institution.  Once those are done, I can cross more things off of my list.

Sort of.  The O'Connor paper is a dry run for the Flannery O'Connor Society Panel at SAMLA, the primary reason I wrote the paper, which is the first weekend in November.  I wrote the abstract as a bit of a lark--as SAMLA's theme this year is poetry, it looked like the O'Connor Society was having trouble getting proposals (I assume, as they extended their deadline).  Since seeing the movie and realizing where the "Listen--get this: No one with a good car needs to be justified" bits from the Ministry song came from, I've toyed with writing up something about the juxtaposition of the two.  Who knew they'd actually say yes?  And that I'd have to come up with a coherent argument in only eight pages?  (As time goes on, the small scope of a conference paper seems more and more difficult.)

But, I've written something now--thank goodness for my discovery of the "technological sublime," as well as the weird phenomenon that a lot of punk musicians seem to have a thing for the novel.  I'll be glad to give it a go-through in front of other people and see just how many of them just stare at me as though I'm high.

And then in class, I picked a rather experimental/metatextual/nothing's been written about it novel to present on.  I'm not too terribly worried about it, as I've come up with some things to say.  I turned in a response paper about it, too, which means I've written the required number of response papers for the class.  And, as this is my last required course, it means it's the last such short assigned paper I'll do for school.  Weirdness.  I mean, I'm auditing a course next semester, but I won't have to do response papers if I'm auditing.  It's a nice, small milestone to recognize. 

In the midst of all of this to-do-list-crossing off, however, I got news that an article I wrote on Maria Montero's The Messenger was accepted for publication pending revisions.  Revisions are due in three weeks.  One of the requests from the readers was more secondary sources, which means read read read!  Happily, the wonderful professor (who is speaking tomorrow) already responded to my email with suggestions for reading.  I haven't actually looked at the drafts they sent back--after my talks tomorrow, I'll look at them.  I have to be on campus Wednesday for reading group and a student meeting, so I'll officially start tackling the revision then.

I'm still feeling occasional anxiety attacks, but between the days of sleep this weekend and the drumming I did today, it currently feels under control. 

A better day

After my less-than-stellar experience presenting Wednesday, Thursday I started the day by having my teaching evaluated.  (I might add that this was not automatic; I requested the evaluation.  Since I've been at LSU, no one besides my students has seen me teach.)  The new director of Women and Gender Studies sat in on my 10:40 section of Intro to WGS.  Though I enjoy both of my sections,  there are many more engaged, participatory students in my 10:40 class than there are in my noon one. 

Class went so well.  Tuesday I had handed out the final paper assignment, in which students will do a researched analysis of some sort of pop culture product; Thursday's reading was about gender construction in pop culture.  In introducing the concept of the "male gaze," I showed a short clip of Ripley in her underwear in Alien, and contrasted that with the scene in Firefly where Captain Mal is completely naked.  As I think the concept of the "male gaze" can be overused and a bit abstract, I was quite happy with how distinctly different the camera work is in these two different shots.  Ripley's body is panned over slowly, or framed in a voyeuristic way, or the camera focuses on her crotch or her midriff.  Mal is seen either from the waist up, or when we see his entire naked body, the camera is still, just including him as part of the shot.  That he interacts with other people while naked takes away any vestiges of voyeurism the viewer might feel in checking out his clearly visible tattoo.

And, by yesterday afternoon, Dr. Bratton had sent me a glowing evaluation for my perusal and revision.  The only revision I suggested was that, while I enjoyed reading her reference to "Dr. Miller," I'm not there yet. 

I'm glad to have ended the week on a positive note.  And I finished a book on both my independent study and gender exam lists today, and posted a write-up of it on bellatricksy, which is a nice feeling of accomplishment.  I realized today, though, that I haven't plowed through my independent study list as much as I'd like to have, so that's definitely moved up on my priority list.  Next up: Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight--and the two presentations I'm making Tuesday.  Happy weekend!