Serendib Teaching

Doing another revision pass on my c.v. this morning, preparatory to a meeting with my chair — it turns out that I keep forgetting to list things I’ve done. Hm. But mostly noting that I paused to wonder whether one should list sensitivity reader / cultural consultant work on a c.v. It’s such a new […]

It has been a long stretch of grading papers, and I admit I am feeling pretty exhausted and when this last paper is done, I’m going to go lie down for a while and think of nothing — but I do appreciate the title of my last student’s paper. It made me laugh. Thanks, student.

Woot! Taught Derrida for the first time. Was fun, as it turns out. . Although I admit, for my 200-level students, I did simplify quite a lot. But we managed to get to differance and the trace, and I think they might have understood it? Perhaps. We’ll see what happens in their final papers.

I used to be a get-up-at-5-to-6-a.m. girl as a default when I lived alone. With Kevin and the kids, that tends to slip later, and an hour or so later feels fine, if not quite as good. But the pandemic sometimes had me staying up ’til 2 a.m., and that was not good for me

I’ve set aside 15 minute slots to do little writing coaching sessions with my students mid-semester, and it’s great, I wish I’d done it last semester. With all the remoteness, it’s so nice to actually see their faces and chat one-on-one for a bit. I miss my munchkins.  

This week in lit. theory, we’re reading about existentialism, authenticity, and absurdity. (I repeat, this is much too much to cover in a week, but this is the reality of a survey class, so anyway…at least we come back to de Beauvoir in a few weeks, when we hit feminist theory.) I think they’ll have

I’m teaching the Surrealists this week (along with High Modernism), and I am tempted to record a video lecture, chop it up into random bits, reassemble it, and then invite my students to make whatever sense out of it they’d like. I am not actually going to do that, but it would be funny. My

I feel like all my teaching / employee management these days is about both: • providing plenty of structure and clear instructions • extending grace for missed work, etc. Essential in a pandemic. Pretty important the rest of the time too.

Teaching Freud today, “Mourning and Melancholia.” I haven’t taught Freud before, and I have to say, it’s a little bit of a tightrope between: a) He has a *lot* of useful things to say that have greatly influenced the study of psychology and how humans think about themselves (and about literature), and b) He had