The garden of our intelligence

"So let us then in the prime of our lives not be indolent or slothful, but with all vigor apply ourselves to the study of grammar until we have arrived at the knowledge of rightly reading, understanding and composing prose or verse. And let us now plant and seed the garden of our intelligence, so that we may eat the sweet fruit all the days of our lives."
- A sister at Ebstorf nunnery, c. 1490*




*Quoted in Anne Winston-Allen's Convent Chronicles, 2004.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm thankful for many things this year. A great family, good health, good friends, a good church, a nice house, a new car... the list goes on. We've been very blessed this year. I'm most thankful for my new branch of our family, though. Being married is every bit as great as I thought it would be (case in point: Paul woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at five am, put on his 'turkey pants' and is happily banging around in the kitchen getting ready to smoke our Thanksgiving tom. He even sang a song about it.) We've added a new member to the family since last year. Nick was our Christmas kitten and he's been a fun addition to the family. Penny is just as great as ever - it's been a learning experience being the primary caregiver for a puppy since she was five weeks old, but it's been a lot of fun. I can't wait to see what new adventures we'li have to be thankful for next year.

Happy Thanksgiving, friends!

Nostalgia

I've been feeling quite nostalgic about Penny's puppyhood lately, so I've been looking back through some old pictures. She was so little! These are from the Fourth of July at Brendan's cottage in New York last year.







And in case you don't believe that dogs end up looking like their owners (or is it the other way around?), check out these crazy 'dos:

Writing and Conferring

I'm in the process of turning a seminar paper into a conference paper. It's been a busy month and it's going to stay busy right to the end... I'll be back with something (potentially) more substantive in November. In the meantime, I leave you with my favorite Calvin and Hobbes comic- it sums up academic writing all too well.

In the meantime, Happy Halloween!

Pictures!

Hi friends!

Today while procrastinating... erm... working in my office at school I figured out how to get pictures off my phone onto my computer!

So here are a bunch of random pictures that sum up my life for the last couple of months.

The reason it's hard for me to work at home:


"Mom? Are you paying attention to me, or to your book? Mom? Mom???"

Paul's "new" shoes:


(Yes, he now has wooden Dutch clogs. We found them at a local antique store. Why does he need wooden clogs? Ask him.)

Tomato sauce cooking down:



Strawberry jam and stewed tomatoes cooling down after being canned.



A pretty bouquet I picked from the garden earlier this summer



The badass grouper we bought in South Carolina, grilled, and consumed with relish. The enjoyment kind of relish, not pickle relish.



Yay pictures!

Falling In

So apparently it's already the first day of autumn. Not quite sure how it got here so fast, since I'm pretty sure the first day of summer was about two seconds ago, but oh well.

Autumn is my favorite season. For me, the year doesn't begin in January, it starts in late August or September. Autumn is the season of fresh school clothes, sharp pencils, unsullied notebooks and new books and new ideas to be encountered. If I was a poet, I'd even wax poetic about the falling leaves as confetti heralding new beginnings. Luckily for you, I'm not a poet.

Autumn is also the season of new year's resolutions. I won't leave my work to the last minute. I will get up in time to eat a proper breakfast before I rush out the door. I will do all the reading. I won't pull an all-nighter to finish my paper. (... most of my vices deal with procrastination, can you tell?)

My new year's resolutions this year are also about teaching. Now that I've been a TA for two years (going on three), and teaching with the same professors several times, I want to make sure that I don't allow my teaching to grow stale. The first quarter I taught I was a little bit petrified (I'm teaching modern European history? I'm a *medievalist*!), and I fell into a rut that my students soon came to recognize, which, I'm sure, eventually detracted from what they could've learned from my discussion sections. While it's valuable to have a routine (college students are like toddlers in that respect), it's also important to switch things up a bit to keep them on their toes and so that they don't get into the habit of skipping the reading because they never have in-class quizzes, or because the TA always lets them get by without participating or whatever.

School started on Wednesday, but today was my first day of actual teaching for the quarter. My classes are awesomely small this time around (11 in the first section, 15 in the second), but it's always a bit of an adjustment getting back into the hang of teaching after a summer off. The second section went much better than the first, partly (I suspect) because it's at 10:30 instead of 9:30 (my students are never morning people), but also because I was warmed up and ready to be a teacher again by that point.

I've become more interested in pedagogy lately, and I think there may also be a pedagogical reason that the second class went better than the first. (Incidentally, pedagogy is just a fancy word for the study of teaching practices). Anyway, part of pedagogy is studying the effect body language has on a group of people, and the way it changes the dynamics of the class for the teacher to stand behind her podium for the whole class, or to stand back near the chalkboard with her arms crossed, to move around the classroom, to use her hands while she talks or not... all of those things change the students' perception of the teacher (although, naturally, two students perception of and reaction to the same actions can be totally different).

Anyway, I started my first class sitting down in a student desk facing the class while I had them introduce themselves and explained the course objectives and did the general opening day minutia.

It showed.

From the start, that class lagged. It's not that the students lacked enthusiasm, nor was it just that it was 9:30 on a rainy Friday morning. The energy was just not there.

For the second class, I stood while we made introductions and I talked about the class. There is a table at the front of my classroom that has a podium that sits on it, and I put my class list on it and leaned on it while my students were telling me about themselves and there was palpably more energy in the classroom throughout the period. I tend to walk around the front of my classroom a lot, and I like to write on the board and make lists while the class brainstorms ideas, so standing to start the class made for a smooth transition once we started to review yesterday's lecture and get them set up for next week's topics.

It was a good reminder that my actions, not just my words, have a direct impact on my students' experience in the class. Whereas the first section was awkward and boring, the second flowed smoothly and my students were much more willing to participate and interact with me and with one another. While some of that can probably be ascribed to the personalities of the people in the class and the later time, I think that getting off my lazy butt and "starting off on the right foot" (pardon the lame pun) had a lot to do with it. So add to my list of new year's resolutions an awareness of my ability as a teacher to make or break a class for my students, and a plan to always make my classes interesting, informative and enjoyable.

Happy New Year!

Gorgeous image found here

Hmm...

So I had this great idea that I was going to come to the library at least once a week to keep up on my email and write in the old blog and all that sort of thing, and when I did, that I'd bring my USB cord so I can connect my fancy new phone to my computer and upload the snazzy pictures I've been snapping.

Then I went on vacation with the fam for a week, and after that I worked a bunch and had an idea for a business I want to start, and then all of a sudden it was the end of August and I hadn't written for a month. So I hopped on my dandy bike and rode to the library. Without my USB cord.

So here's what you would be seeing if I could connect my phone to my computer:

Some adorable pictures of Penny, and a typical picture of Nick looking grouchy.

Me holding a six-pound red grouper that we bought at a fish market in South Carolina and cooked on the grill.

A very cute little baby jacket that I made for my friend Heather's baby shower.

A bouquet of Teddy Bear sunflowers, cosmos and assorted wildflowers that I picked out of my garden.

Penny wearing an old t-shirt to keep her from scratching. (She looks adorably sheepish).

Paul wearing Dutch wooden clogs that I bought him (at his insistence) at an antique store over the weekend.


Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Bet you're sorry to be missing out. Maybe next time I'll remember the stupid cord.