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Monthly Archives: December 2009

Written on our hands

Monday, December 28, 2009

When I was in high school, I had a horrible habit of writing notes to myself on my hands– so much so that sometimes the entire back of my hand would be covered, up onto my fingers and curving down onto my palm. (I had not yet discovered planners, and I didn’t have the [...]

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Merry Christmas

Friday, December 25, 2009

It’s been a crazy few weeks– what with flu and paperwork and friends and teaching and all manner of things– so it’s been quieter here than I intended. But there’s at least a little seasonal spirit in Antep, with Christmas cookies and plans for a few celebrations.
Merry Christmas, everyone, however you observe it.

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News and Blogs

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

I’m afraid this is nothing but an exhausted post again– I taught for eight hours today instead of my usual Wednesday four, as one of my partner-teachers was ill and needed a substitute. On the plus side, all of the classes went well, even the Emergency Substitution ones; on the minus side, that is [...]

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Paperwork

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

About a quarter of the results of trying to convert my old attendance system to my new attendance system:

Headed to bed.

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Little Things / Big Things

Monday, December 7, 2009

On the one hand (μεν), it was a rough day. I realized in the morning that I had another stack of midterms I’d forgotten to grade, and then found out I was supposed to vacate my office by the end of the day (that didn’t happen, unfortunately), and had to go to a meeting [...]

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Another Photo Post

Sunday, December 6, 2009

It’s late at night and I just realized I didn’t blog; have some photos from my trip to Istanbul (November 13th-ish to 16th-ish, if you count travel time). As I’ve been before and only had a weekend, I went up mostly to see one of my favorite professors from college and the staff member [...]

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Yesemek’e

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Tired, as I wound up in Yesemek (a village with a Hittite sculpture quarry, nearish to here) today, with a bunch of silly travel frustrations I don’t feel like recounting. Instead, you get two and a half vignettes of good things.
• (1) On the minibus ride from Antep to İslahiye (the nearest town), we [...]

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Scenes From a Day

Friday, December 4, 2009

Quite possible the single funniest student mistake I’ve ever seen:
Found while grading writing quizzes. About the Taj Mahal, one student writes,
“It’s made of white barber. It has two towels.“
…
It’s a sound-based mistake, of course, though as a friend pointed out, “How can you mistake marble for barber when the cognate in your own [...]

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Speaking.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

All the classes here took their first speaking exam today. I’m probably somewhere near as nervous as they are about the results; my biggest teaching responsibility is 12 one-hour speaking classes, taught once per week to 12 of the 15 pre-intermediate groups. I am, in a rather solipsistic way, seeing this partly as [...]

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Too tired to write; have a picture.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Or five, rather, all taken this weekend on the third day of the Bayram holiday. I took a break from visiting friend’s family to head west along the Mediterranean coast, winding up inland of Silifke at a little village called Uzuncaburç. More to come on experiences there and on Bayram generally, but in [...]

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