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Category Archives: Teaching

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.

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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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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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