The Hazards of Six Feet Under

I enjoy living alone. I truly do. It took a little while to get used to after having had a roommate for so long. The heater, air conditioner, dishwasher, refrigerator, neighbors below, and what might be ghosts in my walls all made interesting and loud noises when I first moved in. Particularly at night. But I adapted and quickly grew to love it. It's quiet when I want it to be, I always have control of the TV remote, and I can spend half the day unshowered and in my pajamas without a second thought if that's what my heart desires. It only gets lonely when I let myself think about the possibility of living alone my whole life. That, on some level, I know is a real possibility and that's sad.

I saw an episode of Six Feet Under last night (Netflix Rocks!) where the dead guy du jour was a woman in her 40's who lived alone. She choked eating a microwave dinner and ended up dying on the floor in her kitchen. Apparently she had no friends either, as it took a week for anyone to notice something was awry and to find her body. I think that's my new biggest irrational fear. And I fully know that it's irrational! It certainly gave me pause, though, sitting on the couch and watching this woman die while shoveling broccoli into my mouth.

Re: my previous post. Just to let you know, I have in fact offered to do interpretive dance for a class grade in lieu of writing a research paper. It was my first semester here. My prof found the idea quite amusing (two of us proposed it to him), but he declined. He preferred the paper in the end. Which was good, because we were only serious about the dance in the most vague terms. But I'm not above doing cosmology-interpretive dance if that's what it take to get my class involved. :)

The Sound of Silence

You could hear a pin drop in my class today. I swear. These students don't say a word, not even when directly addressed! No questions, no comments, no discussion when I ask for their thoughts.

Granted, it is a class of 75, so it's difficult to really have an interactive discussion, but I don't want to just be standing up here talking my little head off while they sit there and stare off into Neverland (or, worse, stare at me as thought I might have tentacles growing out of my head!)

I'm really really really not a fan of the "turn to your neighbor and discuss the implications of blah" and "write a one-minute essay, now share it with a small group" schools of college teaching, because they seem overused in a completely non-helpful way anymore. It seems to have become a clever proxy for calling the roll or forcing students to come to class. Around here, at least, that is what it seems to have deteriorated into. But a little bit of interaction and involvement by my students would be nice. It's just the first week of class, so maybe their minds are still elsewhere, but I cannot help wishing that they would at least pretend to care for a little while.

Perhaps I should start doing interpretive dance during my lectures.

One Down, Forty One to Go

I've been more than a little be preoccupied recently, so I apologize for the lack of posts. Classes started yesterday. I was a little bit terrified around a half hour before my class. I was ready, but terrified. I couldn't help but think of the sheer multitude of things that could go wrong. My mental list included, but was not limited to: technology snafus, falling down, saying something stupid/wrong, falling down, clothing mishaps, boring my students to sleep, and oh yes, falling down. Don't know why I was so worried about tripping over my own feet, but I managed to convince myself that I would inevitably do a face plant during lecture.

But I managed to remain vertical and all went well. My favorite faculty member (Dr. FacultyMember?) came by my office about 20 minutes before class to check on me. He asked if it would make me nervous if he came to my class, I said yes, so he just walked down to the classroom with me to make sure everything was set up, wished me luck, and left. Turns out he's my "mentor" in this whole graduate student teaching experience. Who knew I even had a mentor! But class did, indeed, go fine. Granted, it was just the first lecture, but I finished everything I had planned (in roughly the right amount of time) and even managed to get a few laughs out of the class in the process. So, go me!

Of course, I already have had a student ask to take the final exam at a non-designated-final-exam time. So it goes. *sigh* The student addressed me as Professor LastName, though, and that was pretty cool. I kind of like the sound of that.

Odds & Ends

Lots of little things have caught my attention in the last few days. Yesterday, as I walked to my office, I looked up and saw over a dozen big black birds circling my building. Only the building with my office, not any of the others nearby. They looked like vultures, though I suppose that's technically rather unlikely. I wondered, as I hauled my weekend worth of work up to my office early Monday morning, whether this was a sign from above regarding the future of my career. I seem to be oscillating wildly anymore on what I really want to do when I graduate. Presently, "become a hermit on a boat in Maine" is topping my list.

I'm so sad that Peter Jennings died. My parents always watched Peter, every single night when I grew up. World News Tonight was our dinner table entertainment. I attribute my insane adult addition to the news to Peter Jennings alone. What a great journalist he was. I spent my lunch today watching little video clips from the tributes different networks have put together. It's just sad.

During my websurfing recently I found the Starbucks locator page. It turns out that there are 29 Starbuckses within a 10 miles radius of my house. Geez Louise. They really are taking over the world! The Onion even did a little blurb a while back about how Starbucks was opening a new Starbucks in an existing Starbucks's bathroom. (Sorry, I can't find the link to the actual piece.)

I got a TA for my class, thank goodness. It's another graduate student in the department, of course, which is a little bit awkward for me. But he's actually sort of a friend of mine and we get along well, so I am hopeful that the weirdness will go away. At least now I have someone to help me grade.

My friend Pigs, a teacher, has written a lovely Ode to Summer. You should check it out.

Excitement/Terror

Classes start here in a few weeks. (As I suppose they do elsewhere). So I have exactly 17 days to finish getting ready for my class. I'm getting pretty excited about it, as I have this completely unrealistic picture in my head of how all of my students are going to love me and learn so much. My class will be super cool, fun, and highly educational. My students will be astronomy geniuses by the end.

Then the terror sets in. I only have ~4 lectures done at this point and my outline for the semester is pretty ambitious for a class that I don't feel entirely comfortable teaching yet. I still haven't settled on the details of what their research papers should be like and the prospect of actually writing 3 exams and a final is completely daunting. Plus, obviously, only 1/4 of the 75 student signed up will actually care about the class and many will probably think I am a horrible bitch.

I feel kind of bipolar or something, what with the frequent oscillations between excitement and terror. It's wreaking a little bit of havoc on my general mental well-being.

And to bring you up to date on the topic of my previous post, I have taken it upon myself (now that I'm done complaining and whining about it) to do something about what I perceive as holes in my education. I have signed up for a mini-Med School at the local medical school. It is a series of 9 weekly lectures by professors at the med school on different current medical topics. It's intended for the general public to increase their knowledge about medicine. Sounds right up my alley. Perhaps I'll follow Craig's lead and buy a really boring book about Reconstruction next time I'm at the airport, too. :)