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Category Archives: Academia

Comedy of Errors

Friday, February 12, 2010

You know the advice I should have gotten or heeded or something last night?
“Make sure your class shows up.”
—-
Today was supposed to be the first real lecture section of the first real college course1 I’m teaching: Introduction to Greek Mythology, for the first-year literature students. (Yesterday we met to go over the syllabus. [...]

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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.

Filed in Academia, Photos, Quick Hit, Teaching | Comments (0)

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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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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What have I been up to?

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Teaching, mostly. People aren’t kidding around when they say that first-year teaching is tough. I’m learning how to plan a lesson properly, how to work with students who don’t yet know enough English to understand my classroom directions, and how to manage big classes of mostly-sweet but generally-distracted students not much younger than [...]

Filed in Ancient What-Not, Bazaars, Cooking, Food & Drink, Living in Turkey, Museums, Status Reports, Turkish | Comments (0)

The last five days

Sunday, October 4, 2009

For the last five days (Tuesday-Saturday), I’ve been in Ankara for Fulbright orientation, an intense and extremely helpful experience. I haven’t been posting because the orientation was so exhausting; I’m full of ideas for outreach projects, research plans, and English teaching techniques. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much time to see Ankara’s sites (primarily [...]

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And a little closer to the present

Sunday, September 27, 2009

One more quick status update before I go:
1) Yesterday Narin took me into the city proper for the first time, which was excellent. (She was joking about having no practice being a tour guide in Antep, but she was really helpful.) I now have the beginnings of an understanding of how the bus system works [...]

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Fortunes

Sunday, September 27, 2009

I am finally sitting outside the Gaziantep airport, after a rather chaotic trip over here. The last few days before leaving were a whirlwind– even more so than usual, I think, because I wound up needing to take the GRE the morning before I left. (I did fine, though not as well as [...]

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