sooo busy

This quarter sucks–everything that I am taking has just a little bit more reading than normal, but all together it means a lot more. I’m drowning.

Let me preface this by saying that in general, both of the sections for the class that I TA this quarter are pretty great. However…. They have paper due next week, so I had them work on them in class today, just so that they would have a topic and central argument to think about before the weekend. While most of them seemed to get something out of it, a girl actually raised her hand about five minutes into it and said, “This seems more like a rough draft exercise and I don’t have my book.” I offered to lend her my book.  She continued, “I don’t usually do drafts, that isn’t how I write, and I actually have a Chemistry midterm in an hour that’s really important…” I told her if she didn’t care about my class and had better things to do, then to please go ahead and do them.  I’ll just mark that she left in the roll book. Of course, she started saying she did care and I gave her the evil eye. I also reminded her that she was supposed to be working in partners and that maybe her partner would be able to give her some ideas that she wouldn’t have thought of herself. The nerve of some students. As if I am supposed to make lesson plans according to how she likes to do her papers! I bet hers will be bad, too.

oregon was cold

So, Paddy and I are back from the spring break road trip to Oregon.  It was freezing there (literally–it snowed!), so we got to make a lot of jokes about escaping the gorgeous weather of College Town to do body shots in parkas. We tried to drive too much every day (who knew that the 101 in Oregon slowed to 25 mph every town? Certainly not us!), but we got to spend a lot of time together, which is what we really wanted to do anyway.  Portland is an awesome city and we got to hang out with some friends that moved there recently.  All in all, it was cold, wet, too much driving and I got food poisoning in Arcata (damned hippies), but had fun anyway. Maybe that is love.

I finally have figured out my classes after a struggle and am happy with it.  I met with one of my discussion sections yesterday and they seemed pretty great.  Unfortunately, I printed out the wrong roll sheet, so after I called 4-5 names with no response, I told one of them just to tell me their name so I could look for it.  Nope, right class, wrong roll sheet.  Mildly embarrassing, but not a big deal. Besides that, I told them they should really read the introductions to the books because it gets them used to reading about literature and help them put it into context.  They all  looked at each other funny and told me the professor told them not to.  Why in the world would he tell them to do that? Because then they could figure things out for themselves and they could read them after if they wanted, which seems fair enough, but some of these old texts are really hard to follow.  They are reading The Epic of Gilgamesh, so the fact that in the intro there are plot summaries for each tablet (all of which have long ellipses because parts of it are missing) would be helpful to them.  So I told them to scan it for helpful reference material, even if they wait to read interpretative parts later (which I recommended).  This is what happens when you can’t make it to the first lecture and haven’t actually met the professor you are working for.  He is supposed to be nice…

Otherwise, it was pretty good.