the week's highs and lows
Week’s high points:
- Working with a class of Early Childhood Education students on journaling as part of the Tutors without Borders program. Although I’ve led the Tutors without Borders program for four years, this is the first time I’ve actually been a tutor without borders. Working with a very different group of students from my own (the ECE students were all joking about how little their chosen career pays, whereas my students often choose careers based on the how much money they want to make) was fun, and, of course, being “the guest star” in someone else’s class always allows more freedom in certain ways, because I don’t have to evaluate these students and they know it.
- Meeting with an independent study student who is doing very interesting and innovative work in science fiction.
- Getting a draft of the summer schedule done a couple days before I expected to have it done.
- Having an email conversation with another college employee (not faculty) about Chomsky’s transformational grammar. I hardly know this person and out of the blue, she emailed me a question about whether I would classify a certain sentence as complex or compound and why. I ended up classifying the sentence the same way she did, which led to a discussion of how grammar handbooks oversimplify grammar (the sentence had come from a grammar handbook and classified the sentence as compound—we both agreed the sentence was complex).
- This entry from New Kid, which includes this quote from a book by Deborah Cameron:
Perhaps the most enduring [myth] is that women talk more than men, which is repeated endlessly and sometimes with actual numbers. There's never been any evidence to support this, and now there is quite full evidence to show that it isn't so. There's a lot of evidence that in more formal situations where status is a factor, it tends to be men who talk more than women — not because they're men, but almost certainly because the real correlation is the status.
I read the free content on the Chronicle Website, but this chunk comes from "premium content" and were it not for New Kid, I would never have read it and had that wonderful feeling of confirmation that comes when some bit of conventional wisdom doesn't ring true and finally, the conventional wisdom is show to be more conventional than actually wise. Aaaah.
Week’s low points:
- Not working out for three days in a row. But I worked out yesterday and today.
- T and Lily both being sick.
- Finding out that Lily needs more expensive dental work. She’s only five, for crying out loud. I thought the expensive dental work would come when she’s ready for braces.
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