Suck it, Negativity

So it's the end of the term, I'm in the last long day of office hours for the next several months. It feels like someone is slowly, ever so gently driving a spike into my skull just above my left ear. But rather than succumb to the headache and the boredom of the last day, to the tendency to bust down the term with stark reflection, I'm going with the road less traveled: today's about what I've liked.

It's easy, actually, because I do enjoy this part of the term quite a bit - and not just because it's almost over. Maybe it's the grouping of students I get - students just starting and students finishing - but there is always a sense of change and excitement at this point of the year. I hope one thing that happens in this blog is that when I complain, it mostly isn't about the students. I like them. I like them here. I liked them at my last job. I liked them when I was teaching them in grad school. Yes, sometimes they're inconsiderate. Sometimes they're disinterested. Sometimes their work is so bad you feel like you're teaching writing at the University of Iowa (see this) . But I like them.

Last night, I got to help our seniors celebrate their passing a bit (as a side note, check out this band somehow when you get a chance), and it was a nice moment. It was good to see that they'd picked up some things. And it was good to see them before they'd accepted all the little rules and obsessions "grown up, working world" life is going to insist on.

Tomorrow, I get to congratulate our best and brightest and thank them and wish them well. I get to do it in a big public moment, and I'm excited for that. A lot of them are students I had my first year here. They're students I've been writing confidential reference letters for, busting out my best praise in prose for. I like that I get a chance to tell them in public what I've said about them to their future employers and teachers, to my colleagues and friends, for ages now: that I expect big things of them and that I wish them well.

I was teasing a student recently about how they make faces every time I give out the day's objectives. And they laughed and said yes, but they've not missed a class because they can see a change from one day to the next, and that - though sometimes a pain - makes it worth it.

So that's what I'm going to frame these last days with - if it's a pain but worth it for one of my students, it seems alright that it might be for me.

Three cheers for a good day

It seems my MP3 player has come back from the dead. If it could turn my water into liquor, I'd found a religion. Essentially, once the battery ran completely out, plugging it in and letting it recharge did the process.

But really the whole term seems to be going well right now. Both of my courses are cruising along and even when - as in today's lectures - things are dry (and there were moments in the last lecture today where the topic could've been used to scour your pans), my students are hanging in and asking good questions. And even though the next month appears to be built to steamroll me - potential candidate interviews, a major departmental event, my third year review due - that the students are hopping seems to be enough right now to pull things through.
I'd still like some movement on my own job front, but I'm prepared to try a little patience at the moment and hope something interesting comes my way (*cough: PARIS!*). That does mean, though, that I'm a little at a loss for blog topics, so suggestions are certainly welcome (I'm also behind on my blog reading, so perhaps there are memes or something that I'll rip off and, at the very least, maybe I'll turn up elsewhere).

Tangents and Positive Thinking as Schtick

This trying not to complain for a few days is already proving difficult.

Wait. Is that a complaint? Aigh. Let's try again.

This trying not to complain for a few days is already proving difficult a worthwhile experience that is pushing me to new limits and realizations.

That's better. Unfortunately, it means I don't have such a well thought-out post for today. That has resulted in a more free-form sort of post. In the past 24 hours, as I've been undertaking this new adventure with a smile on my face, I've found myself pondering the following things:

• drawing a cartoon with a superhero called "Riot Grrl," intended as a positive feminst role-model, whose arch-nemesis would be "FemiNazi" would be the straw-woman my students often make feminism out to be. Unfortunately, I cannot draw, but I have a great script if anyone is interested. What a great opportunity for me to learn to draw, unless someone would like to collaborate which would be keen, too!
  
• how much my insurance is paying beyond my copay for a physical therapist to have me do an exercise I was taught in first grade
• the unintended consequences of race in teaching (see here - particularly the comments for what started this thought process)
• where are the eligible women in my age bracket have gone from the place I currently live and whether this would have been considered a plague in Biblical times, assuming of course that women counted in the Bible how fortunate I am, as a single male, to be in place that makes it so easy to focus on my career, which is good because some naysayers might compare this to a Biblical plague only to then use that comparison as a negative commentary on the foundational text of one of the world's major religions
  
• what I was thinking assigning weekly essays to my two largest classes and how when I make it out of this term alive (ha! you thought I was going to say something that needed to be struck out, didn't you?) I will be much more cautious for at least two to three days in choosing what assignments to hand out
• that probably only my father would have appreciated the reply, "No, I'm not such a grand uncle. I'm really kind of average." to his phoned announcement that my niece just had a baby girl as much as I enjoyed making it
  
• how wise it was of me to spend extra money on a boxed set of John Lee Hooker's music at this time in my life (answer: so very, very!)
  

There was other stuff. But the stack of essays appears to be growing as I type this.