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Late Spring To-Do List
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Tuesday, January 24, 2006 No, really: this floor is very comfortable. And I could totally get up if I wanted to!
After 12 hours of interviewing, teaching, eating, touring, and enthusing on my campus visit yesterday, I slept for five hours and then left, very early, so that I could get to Big Urban in time to teach my four classes today--two of which I hadn't prepped for, so I spent all my time in transit this morning scrawling lesson plans across legal pads and all my time in transit this evening grading the quizzes and semi-busywork I'd prepared for my other classes.
But I'm still alive, if not exactly vertical, and everything went, I think very well. I had quite a lot of fun on my visit and enjoyed seeing the campus, meeting the faculty, and teaching the students (indeed, the class I taught on Super Huge Famous Author there went better than my class in the same subject at Big Urban today). It's funny how much you learn just by watching people be themselves, regardless of what questions you ask or what answers they give*--and for the most part I was favorably impressed by what I saw. And now--and now, I'm in my pyjamas, on my second glass of wine, and thinking about turning to my thank-you notes. Although maybe the wine and my exhaustion mean that I should put that particular project on hold until tomorrow morning. *This is one reason I hate the excessively interrogatory style that so many schools use in their interviews; making me give an impromptu Marxist account of my work (which happened in one of my other MLA interviews) may indeed tell you how well I handle belligerent oddballs, and certainly that's a useful skill for a scholar to have. But. . . given that my work ISN'T Marxist, and that there's no real way it could be, there are, surely, more useful things that you could learn by letting me run in more loosely guided directions. If you've got basic horse sense and some knowledge of the field, you can tell who's full of shit, who's got scholarly chops, who's a good teacher--and who you'd want to have around your department for the next few years. 7 Comments:
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