Well, I’ve finished the in-class portion of what has been a brutal semester. Brutal in workload and brutal in commuting, made worse by the recent rash of stinky weather. I’m withing touching distance of finishing up. Remaining on the docket:

* Finalizing a few creative works, including a cycle of seven flash stories (3 complete)

* Finishing my 15-20 page paper on rhet/comp theory (5 pages in)

* Rewriting my assignment sequence for spring (0 assignments written)

* Attending the final portfolio assessment session, where we start at 9:00 AM and finish around 5:00 PM doing nothing but determining whether student portfolios deemed as borderline or failing should actually pass or fail English 101, along with random “control” essays where the instructors believe the portfolio is a “clear pass.”

Of all of these, that last one is the one I’m dreading most. The sheer amount of paperwork involved with the way we teach English 101 is staggering, and of course hardly any of it is done electronically. From what I can tell, I am the only one who used Excel for my grade book. We have an assessment sheet for each portfolio where we need to write our name, our section number, and the student’s 12-digit university ID number.

It would be pretty easy to download the roster from the university’s website as an Excel spreadsheet, then create a mail merge to automatically populate this info into the Word document we use for the assessment sheet. Since I only have 19 students, it would hardly save me time so I probably won’t do it but I’ll keep it mind for the future. Even if that’s perhaps an overly elaborate solution, it beats the hell of having hard copies put in our mailboxes so we have to retrieve them, remove the staples, and make copies of the necessary pages. Technology wise, that’s a small step up from the typewriter. (sigh)

I’ll be finishing Alan Moore’s and David Gibbons’ Watchmen as well as Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore on audio in the next few days—neither for class, and the first one (!) purely for pleasure reading. Although I have nitpicks with both, overall they’ve both been fantastic. I’ve found Watchmen to be a bit hokey in parts but when I look past it, it’s pretty remarkable. The trailers make it look like they’ve done a fine job recreating the world, but it could easily fizzle like it did with the ham-fisted movie version of V for Vendetta.

I was also interested to see that I’m not grossly behind in my reading this year. Last year I read 64 books in all, and I’m currently at 50 for 2008. I would imagine that I’ll finish the above two and probably a few more before the end of the month, which means I’ll wind up somewhere in the mid-fifties. This seems about right since one class last spring and one class this fall have been article-based rather than book-based.

What I also find alarming is how few of these books (100+ over two years?) I would readily recommend to a typical reader. Overwhelmingly, I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read, but there’s a certain esoteric nature to these lists that bothers me. There’s a sweet spot somewhere between no-brainer popular fiction and academic literary fiction that simply makes for a good, compelling read for an intelligent audience. One of the great pleasures of reading is being able to recommend books to friends and family and talk about their experiences reading it. Most of the books I’ve read for classes have spawned good discussion, but much of the time it’s because grad students and faculty members alike are generally referencing the same literary index of titles and authors that we’ve either read or know about. Even though my program has quite a bit of cross-disciplinary courses that put creative writers in the same room as Modern Studies and Literary Studies students, it still trends towards being pretty insular, and I don’t like it.

I’ve been reminded of this any time grad students from outside English (I’ve had history, visual art, and film students in my classes) take grad classes; they’ve been very intelligent, insightful people, but all have commented at one point or another that the English folks are often speaking another language. While I’m sure I would experience the same thing if I took grad-level history or philosophy classes (and I often experience it when the Modern Studies students go on name-dropping binges of every theorist from the 20th century), and while I’m sure this is and always has been the nature of academia, it doesn’t mean that it’s right. While the specificity of language (read: jargon) helps in some cases to clarify the exact point someone is trying to say, more often it seems to be deployed to obscure meaning, or at the very least deny entrance to a rarefied conversation, as if one can’t contribute meaningfully unless they know the passwords. I’m much more in favor of putting difficult but accessible works in the hands of people who perhaps aren’t as well read in classic literature and see how they make sense of what’s going on.

With all the stuff on my plate dying to be completed so I can be done with my semester, long blog posts really aren’t on the agenda. Nor is playing indoor soccer, but that’s exactly what I’m off to do.

Current Mood: Daunted |