Seen in a Lab

A student today, asking me whether there was any construction paper to be had in the building. She was sitting at one station in the computer lab, the computer surrounded by cut up, colorful construction paper, a bottle of glue, pair of scissors, markers, stapler, tape.

I suppressed the urge to giggle*, told her that no such item was to be had in the building, but that the University Bookstore would likely provide what she sought. The situation was utterly incongruous and entirely enthralling.

*I don't mean to imply that I wanted to laugh AT her. It really was just a bizarre occurrence; students are frantically trying to get their digital files uploaded correctly, and here was a young woman converting this digital workstation into a traditional arts and crafts center. The mind reels.

The Right Side of the Page

This afternoon, in the midst of grading student papers, I've indulged in a bit of cyber window shopping. The object of my browsing? The Amazon Kindle, a sassy little piece of technology that, were it not for the beyond-my-current-reach price tag, would so be mine. Every time I order a book from Amazon, I check to see if it's available on Kindle, and when it is, I die a little bit inside. Sigh.

While browsing I decided to look at recent comments on the device and came across the following statement in a comment from Chester Ritchie:

The other thing that is so awesome about this unit is that the book is always flat and on the page you read the best (the right side of the page). Makes reading so much easier and faster.

I'm going to chew on that one for a while. Is the right side of the page the best one? What, if anything, is the Kindle-using reader missing with no left-side experience? I smell a research project coming up.

I wonder if I can get Amazon to hook me up with a copy for testing? ;-)

On Writing

I have never considered myself a writer. Instead, I've happily been a reader, consuming text like breakfast cereal. Heck, I've consumed the text on the box of breakfast cereal (which seems to have declined in quality in recent years--maybe I need to just try a different cereal). In short, I read. I'm drawn to words. I love the feel of books and paper.

But I read, like a good little academic, with a pencil in hand. Were my bank account healthier, I would purchase books instead of borrowing them from the library. I like to mark them up, to write on and in them, to underscore and sidebar spar.

I realized today that it's easier to read. Reading is, for me, the easy way out. It's perpetual stalling. I find myself intrigued by some new idea or concept and I read--a lot. Sometimes I take notes.

I went to a panel discussion today; we had a group of poets on campus for a symposium, and at one point they were asked about the personal nature of their writing. The moderator wanted to know if they had suffered any grief from their families for exposing the soft underbellies of family life. The poets were clearly not biting and focused on the two things that allowed them to explore their family lives in their poetry: the unconditional love of family and the respect they felt for their families in spite of whatever dirty laundry got aired in the poetry.

I don't write about my life, my family, my history, and in that moment I wanted to tell some stories. One of the poets talked about her writing as emanating from a drive to understand herself by understanding this stew she'd been brought up in. I dug that.

No, I'm not building up to some grand manifesto where I reveal my plan to turn my blog into some cavalcade of family shame, nor do I intend to sharpen my quill, dip it in ink, and start penning the Great American Novel. How trite that would be.

I just realized today that I don't write, not in the way that woman writes, and not in the way that I apparently think I ought to write. I am lazy. I prefer the easier task of reading; writing demands work.

Bad Day, or This is What Burnout Looks Like

I wrote this post several days/weeks ago, but didn't post it because it was just too raw. I realized today, though, that I'm experiencing burnout; I think I acutally hit the burnout point about 10 months ago, but only now am I able to actually identify and articulate the problem. More on that in another post. For now, I'll just let the words speak for themselves.

_________

Dear Blog,

I had a bad teaching day today. One of my classes is driving me crazy, so much so that I actually thought about shaking a student. I was really frustrated at their obvious apathy.

I have to tell them to take out their notebooks and tell them when they need to write something down. In a writing class. I have to constantly pull answers from them. I find myself having to talk over them constantly as some of them tend to have little side snide conversations while I'm explaining something or answering someone else's question. They really are little s&#ts.

I know that I've created this problem; I won't indulge in that exercise of self-reflection right now because for once I want to just experience this absolute sense of hopelessness and helplessness that I feel in this class. I know that I've spoken to other teachers about this feeling, but I've never really felt it myself. I'm just amazed at how awful it is. I don't think I've ever hated a class in my career; this one may just put me over the edge.

With semi-righteous indignation,
fulgora