January 31
“Today was one of those days when I know I was born to be a professor. It's either nerdiness or the pedantry.”
1965
I didn't do anything today. (except think about V!)
Comment 2023
If you think today’s entry was awful, just wait. It’s about to get worse.
Honestly, I have nothing more to say at this time about my infatuation with V. Saving it for February.
1980 (Last semester of graduate school)
Time to reassess my work, my schedule, and my priorities. I have been managing, but am still over-committed. Time to pare down.
(a list of projects follows, filling up the page. The biggie: completing my dissertation, plus taking my remaining comprehensive exams.)
Strategy is essential! What has to be done and when? Priorities!!
1985
Still working on the house purchase. We’ve come up to $90,000 (they counter-offered $94,000) and we are even more interested in the house. Both of us have accepted the alteration in our living costs and the possible expenses of the house’s condition. I have been escaping into Jane Austen at every opportunity. This will be a crazy semester.
1987
Nineteen years ago Jim and I went to see Marcel Marceau on found ourselves in love. How far we have traveled since! Quite a trip; marvelous, fascinating, sometimes frustrating, always enlightening. Jim didn’t work today, so we managed to have something like a normal Saturday. Kiddo 2 has been fighting an ear infection and a bad cold for a week, poor thing. But today he was alert and cheerful, despite his runny nose. It’s hard going through this with a 2-month old. Kiddo 1 was quite a bit older when she got her first cold, and it made a difference.
A week after the snow storm, and the start of classes, I am feeling better and more organized. Jim is downstairs tending to Kiddo 2, a job he is much more comfortable with than he was the first time around. He is such a good, loving father. Just think, if we had gotten married the summer after freshman year as we wanted, we could have teenaged kids by now. I think this is fine.
2006
First day of classes for AMST 498J. I am very prepared , and looking forward to it. We have a SUPER group of undergraduate teaching assistants this semester.
I have started an odd writing task - expanding my 1965 diary in a blog. It asked to be done, so I am doing it.
It is raining and I have to walk to campus. Oh, well.
Comment 2024
AMST 498J - Popular Culture and Literacy was the pinnacle of my teaching career. It combined everything I had learned about student engagement, active learning and assessment. In a nutshell: each student signed up for one afternoon a week to provide mentoring and homework help at a local high school or an adult ESOL conversation group. We met as a class once a week to discuss assigned readings and the service experience. The course was team-taught: me, a PhD student from the College of Education, and four to seven undergraduate teaching assistants who supervised the service sessions. The team met once a week at my house for a meal and a planning session. I have kept in touch with many of them. Several - none of them education majors - have become teachers; one just wrote a best-selling book on comedy. Another moved abroad and started a non-profit advocating for migrants. The most frequent UTA - he took the course and then served three more semesters as a mentor - took flight as a teacher, mentor, artist, and entrepreneur.
When I say I miss teaching, this is what I am talking about.
2015 (Twitter)
“Today was one of those days when I know I was born to be a professor. It's either nerdiness or the pedantry.”
Comment 2024 It’s definitely both.