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.

I'm back!

So after a slightly mad start to the summer, I've been spending some quality time puttering around the house and enjoying life. Unfortunately, my computer's been on the fritz and hasn't wanted to connect to the internet, so I haven't been able to chronicle said putterings for you, my adoring fans. The computer's at least fixed enough now to connect to the internet from public wi-fi hotspots (I'm at the library now, which is blissfully air-conditioned, so this is not entirely a bad thing), although the dumb thing still won't connect at home. Oh well. Here I am, anyway.

The project I was working on in June was defending my master's theses, and, as all (2) of you probably know by now, I passed. Callooh! Callay!

Now I'm working on getting my reading list together for my general exams, which I'll take in January, and after that (assuming that I pass, of course) I'll be "ABD", or "all but dissertation." Callooh! Callay!

In the (copious amounts of) time that I haven't been working on my reading list this summer, I've been very much enjoying my garden, which is thriving, and riding my snazzy (old) new bike in to the farmer's market on Saturday mornings with Paul. We're also in the finishing stages of a very fancy bathroom remodel that I'm excited to share, although I've been sworn to secrecy until the project is complete. Paul thinks that people won't appreciate it as much if they see it before it's all the way finished. We finally ditched our dumb phones for smart phones this past weekend, so I'll have pictures to show for myself again as soon as I figure out how to get the pictures off the phone and onto the computer. The problem I'm finding with technology is that the operator is still required to be smarter than the device. That wasn't hard with the dumb phone. It's proving to be slightly more of a challenge with the smart one.

In any case, this was meant to be a quick check-in, yes, I'm still alive, sort of post, so I'll wrap it up with promises of being back again soon. Love and best wishes and all those sorts of things.

I thought I was, but I wasn't

So I thought I was starting summer and things would calm down. I finished grading my student's papers and final exams, I turned in my final paper, I spent about half a minute just lounging and enjoying life... and then things got busy again. I have a project that I'm keeping under wraps for the next week, but assuming all goes well there will be balloons and streamers and general merrymaking around these parts, and then maybe posting will pick back up. But things will be busy, busy for the next week.

Back soon, I hope.

(P.S. The garden is growing beautifully. I harvested my first Costata Romanesco zucchini yesterday, and I have a couple of okra ready to eat today. Tomatoes are coming on, and the edamame and peas are looking good. We've been eating radishes for a couple weeks now. Yum.)

Bang!

Me: "I love it when students make up words on their exams. Listen to this: "The printing press changed the course of history. It changed how people taught, it universified language....""

Paul: "Isn't that what happened at the Big Bang?"





(Finally done grading exams. Now finishing my paper, then doing absolutely nothing for a few days. Back soon.)

Rain, rain, go away....

I'm disgruntled because it's planting time and it's been raining torrentially and it's supposed to keep raining pretty much forever and the world is ending on Saturday anyway (or so I hear) and I really just want to play in my garden. I didn't have time to mow on the one nice day we had last week, so now the yard looks like we should just leave it and harvest it for hay in another week or so. I made a plan for my big garden plot yesterday and I'm ready to put it into action, except that the garden plot is just a big mud pit. *le sigh*

Rain, rain, go away,
Come again another day,
Little Elizabeth wants to play.

Photo here.