Back to blogging...

Well, I'm back on campus, and back to blogging. (Did you miss me?) It's been an interesting day, on the whole, and there's a lot to say. We'll see how much I have the energy to convey.

I came in largely because the two students who are fulfilling incompletes were supposed to submit their work today. One of them asked if he could submit tomorrow instead, and I said OK; it just means I won't be able to give him his grade as soon as I would have otherwise. The other diligently arrived with her work exactly as specified. (Good girl.) Of course, now I have to read it an respond; she's fulfilling the second essay for 101, which requires two versions, so ... more work for me. I do like that she wants to come in to talk with me about the revision; I'll meet with her next week about that.

While I was here, I was also going to sign a couple of travel requests (as the local and available member of P&B)--but it turns out there are problems with all three. I dutifully signed them, but I had to send emails to the requesters, detailing what they need to provide in order for the bean counters to approve the approval. (Bureaucracy: ain't it great?) I also was going to meet with a student from the SF class--and I did (more on that in a minute)--but before I could do that, a summer student had a complaint about her professor, and since Cathy was called away with an emergency, it fell to me to deal with it. Long, involved story--and I was talking with the student with her father present--but the upshot is that I will need to come in again this week or next to meet with the professor against whom the complaint has been made. This is one of two potential hairballs with student complaints in the last few days. Fun and frolic.

But the main thing is that I had a great time talking with the student from the SF class. I haven't given him a moniker, in part because he's hard to reduce to a quick few words--but I'll call him the Taoist, as he is fascinated by Taoism (and wrote his final essay on how Taoist ideas are apparent in The Left Hand of Darkness). He wanted to meet with me to discuss his revision of his second essay, to see what he could do to improve--nice--and we ended up talking about writing, literature, ideas, spirituality, breathing and meditation practices.... He's intelligent, artistic, relatively mature, and in need of a little more discipline in order to write as well as he could, which is part of what we talked about. He does want to finish his degree here, but then he wants to go to Purchase, which is an excellent choice for him: in the SUNY system, Purchase has a reputation as the most "artsy" of the campuses, and, after considering majoring in film, he's decided he'd rather major in English and minor in film. He says he wants to practice the kind of thinking and expression that is required of an English major. I applaud his decision (of course; always happy to have students move into "our" territory).

And in addition to loaning him Paolo Baccigalupi's The Windup Girl, which I may teach instead of Left Hand whenever I next teach SF (assuming I get some feedback from students saying it would be a good switch to make), I've also told him I'm going to get him Le Guin's version of The Tao Te Ching, as well as the Winnie the Pooh books (all of them; he only knows the Disney versions, poor deprived child). My gift to a gifted young man.

He's also one of the students who said he would be interested in taking Native American Lit. Turns out, it would actually fulfill a requirement for him so ... well, we'll see if he actually signs up. If so, great.

So all that transpired today. What didn't happen--and won't, now--is my cleaning out any of my files or organizing any of the stacks of crap all over this office. Well, I'll be in again sooner than I might like, so, later for that.

Meanwhile, I've done some reading of possible replacements for the books for the Native American Lit class. I read a novel, The Hiawatha, by David Treuer, that was jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and is set as much in the city as on the res (more so, in fact), which would be a good thing to include, but ultimately I've decided to stick with Ceremony. The downsides to it are that it's older--and I'd like students to know that Native writing didn't stop in the 1970s--and that it invites plagiarism (so much available about it online). But there are also a ton of critical works students can draw from (and introducing critical material is part of my mandate in these classes, dammit); there are far fewer for
The Hiawatha, and they rely on knowledge of more books or more of the modern "tradition" than I can teach in the class. So, with reluctance, I let that one go. But ... holy God, what a wonderful read. Heartbreaking but magnificent.

And with that, I think I'll call it a day. I have no idea when I'll post again; it rather depends on when I next have a day in which I am focused on work stuff--which may be sooner than I'd ideally like, depending on what happens with the student complaint I fielded today (or anything else, for that matter). But I will be back at it periodically throughout the summer, more as it gets closer to start of the fall semester, of course. As always. For now, I will wend my way homeward, with work to be continued. As always.