First Week of Spring 2018: Completed!

After working manically on research and writing over Winter Break (more on that in a later post), the start of the spring semester really took me by surprise. I was originally assigned 3 sections of English 102, our research- & argument-orientated class in the sequence, but ended up accepting another English 101 because of some unexpected student demand. 

 Have to say that, while the extra income will certainly be useful (and I still think of money in impoverished "grad student" terms), I was looking forward to the reduced workload, especially with all my writing projects in the pipeline. Still, given the general insecurity of living year-to-year on one-year contracts, I couldn't in good conscience refuse. Plus, I still do have an ideal schedule -- all four of my classes are back-to-back on a MWF.

 So anyway, given that the semester snuck up on me -- and that I got that 4th class two days before the semester started -- you could imagine how I've been scrambling. So far, although I still need to tweak my major assignments for that 4th class I accepted last minute, I'm caught up.

 I'm more than a little sad, though -- my students from last semester were really memorable, and part of me wishes they were still around. C'est la vie.

 Incidentally, got my Student Course Evaluations from last semester. Pretty good, overall. Really good, actually, or at least so I think -- strangely enough, I don't think U of A does departmental- or university-wide comparisons like MTSU, so my data is somewhat de-contextualized. Nonetheless, judging from the quantitative and qualitative parts of the evaluations, most of my students seemed really happy. One of the skills I've especially worked on last semester was giving bad news, usually in terms of a grade, and that seems to have paid off -- I almost entirely avoided those grade-embittered students who have tended to drag my evaluation scores down in the past.. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony . And even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, I guarantee you'll never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two dis
Read more

Thoughts upon Reading Tolkien's New & Expanded LETTERS

So, I'm reading through the newly expanded version of Tolkien's Letters. One thing I hadn't properly realized is that these letters were part of Carpenter's original manuscript back in 1981, but Carpenter had to cut them due to cost. Turns out that Carpenter had a pretty keen eye on what could bear cutting -- most of this new stuff isn't terribly interesting, but I discovered a few nuggets. VINDICATED!! (Me, sorta) Naturally, whenever you read new primary material, your first instinct is to check to see if anything contradicts something you've said in print ... especially biographically. Well, I've made three big "biographical" claims, and here's my sigh of relief: Concerning my claim that, in 1954, Tolkien and colleagues contrived to create CS Lewis's academic chair at Cambridge in exchange for them nominating EM Forster for the Nobel Prize. Nothing in  Letters  supports or contradicts this. In my recent article for  Notes & Queries ,
Read more

Uncovering CS Lewis's First Religious Poem

 So, with my article's official acceptance by the journal English Text Construction , it's time to let the cat out of the bag. Using a combination of metrical analysis and biography, I've ascertained with near perfect certainty the first religious poem C. S. Lewis poem ever wrote .... a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of Caedmon's Hymn . The full metrical details will have to await my article, but one interesting caveat on my claims to firstness. In my peer reviewer's commentary, they recommended I contact a CSL scholar named  Charlie W. Starr, who's been working on Lewis's handwriting for quite a lon
Read more