You know, I had a bad impression of the Academic Affairs Office where I work even before I was hired. I don’t know what happened, but twice they claimed not to have received my transcripts — transcripts that somehow arrived everywhere else they were sent. Ahem. Well, getting final, official clearance to match the unofficial permission I’ve repearedly to go to Clarion West, this seems to have become well-nigh impossible. Almost. But fill out this one more little paper, and maybe we’ll see. Oh,and this one. And can you fill out that form? And retype this letter, but leave this …
Month: June 2006
One major lessonI learned last night
I’ll be keeping the final projects for all my classes on file, which means that I’ll be giving students a brief chance to look at them, and then reclaiming them. One thing I learned is that when students have only 10 minutes to check out their writing feedback, half that time is spent hunting for explanations of the grade, and half is spent comparing with others. They tend not to very intensely read my summarizing notes, but if they do, they read it more closely than all the little notes I make throughout the text. So think I’m going to …
Do You Know This Song?
Sounds like it’s form the 70s, but that could mean it’s new. It’s sung by a woman and she sings off-key. There are strings in the accompaniment. She sounds a bit like Nico, and she’s singing these lines over and over that are vaguely like, “Yesterday is a day like any other day”, or “Yesterday was a day like everyday…” but I can’t remember what exactly. It’s very melodramatic and it was just very amusing and strange, and I’d like to hear it again. If anyone knows, please do comment. I heard it in a taxi the other night and …
Consolations
I’ve never really had to deal with a grading curve. I’ve always either had students that essentially fit the curve naturally, or else not been required to use it. So during conferences with my students, I showed them what the final grade was for their final project, and then told them a tentative grade. I like grading transparency. Most of the people whom I told, “You’re probably going to get a C in this class,” accepted it without much fuss. But a couple of the people whom I told, “Look, if there were no curve, I’m pretty confident you’d get …
Someone I’m Beginning to Get the Feeling I Wouldn’t Like Much
One of my students wrote an essay on Jo Jung-rae, who is a famous and well-known author in Korea. A friend of mine read his epic ten-volume Hangang (The Han River) back during my second year here, and spoke of it with praise, but also seemed to find reading it onerous. Interestingly, she was studying Japanese at the time and her boyfriend told her to study it (but, then, he was studying Japanese then, too, and was quite good at it). That’s ironic, because according to the essay my student wrote about his epic, Hangang, and about the author himself, …