Ennui the People
Feb. 20th, 2010 11:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violetclmI've been holding off on posting anything here until the semester had stabilized and I had a good sense of how things were going to go and where I'd be spending my time, but so much of that is still kind of in flux (but stabilizing, I think) that I decided to post something now rather than waiting several weeks longer.
This is my second semester living off-campus now, and it will not be the last, for I continue to stay on through next year. (The summer in-between: totally undetermined.) Reed's hit housing lottery season and as a result we are on the lookout for people, preferably people we already know, to replace those housemates who will be leaving us at the end of the year. There's a house meeting tomorrow and presumably this will be discussed in further detail then; I've probed a few candidates (but could think of more if necessary) and doubt I'm alone in having done so. It really is a lovely house: at pretty much the perfect distance from campus (very short bike ride, but not so close that it doesn't feel like you've escaped residence life at all), within elementary walking distance of Safeway, situated in a quiet neighborhood, not too small... I'm not actually trying to advertise it in case Reed students are reading this, I'm really just reflecting. Honest. Some of us played Arkham Horror last night and discovered that "Lost in Time & Space" roughly translates to "going to bed now." We had a decent party about a week ago (in honor of St. Valentine) with a large number of desserts, and many jokes were told. Significant others have keys to the house now, which is weird in concept but practical.
My school day (M-F) begins with Greek, it being a year-long course. Originally Tuesdays and Thursdays began with Phonetics at 9 AM, which I was auditing, but the hour, my non-enrolledness, its being on a subject I don't particularly care for, and the fact that the course required a textbook which the library quickly ran out of copies of all together led to my losing interest in it. Based on the syllabus, they'll be out of (or taking some time off of, forget) the textbook in a few classes, but by then I'd have missed enough that I don't think it would work out. Oh well. Greek is similar to last semester in format but more about syntax than morphology, which I think I appreciate. Somehow, this far into the Spring, my vocabulary's still a bit rusty from winter break, and hopefully I'll get myself to take some time to review the old flash cards tomorrow and finally figure out the various pieces of such verbs as "die," "kill," "see," and of course "know." I broke the verb flash cards into two sets and determined that while the majority of verbs we've learned so far have been regular in their conjugation, the numeric difference isn't all that large. Yesterday I felt skilled enough in the recently-learnt Conditional structure to get around to translating a short refrain from Chabbat at the Rabbi's, which gets translated into as many languages as the rabbi can find guests to translate it into. My contributions, with the English I worked from on the left, follow. Translation in each case is near enough to exact, minus words like "and" in the third line lost for scansionic purposes, that I don't think I need bother providing any sort of "literally:" gloss.
I continue to lunch host for the admissions office, this time around on Wednesdays, with one of the same co-hosts from last semester and also a girl whom, if memory serves, I met on a train. There's the same mix of very thoughtful students with probing questions and students who seem to be here for the ride and don't have the energy or curiosity to raise their voice. I still haven't read through the student handbook's list of majors, to prep myself for giving at least overview descriptions of the various departments, and I definitely need to considering how often History seems to come up and how little I know about it. (Take that in any of at least two ways.) Either that or I should pay more attention when people talk about professors whom I've never met and presumably never will. It's a lot of fun, though, and I usually come out of it feeling, outside of well fed, very skilled and knowledgeable. I try my best to be very truthful in describing Reed, but it often ends up being a positive description unless they specifically ask for negatives. Like, more positive than my thoughts about the school in private. It's an odd line between honesty and not wanting to come across as warning kids not to come here when every other school they visit presumably describes itself as glowingly as possible. Joy the train girl seems to be very good at the job, so that should be fun.
At least so far, though this is not necessarily timed, on Wednesdays after lunch I may well end up taking my mid-week weight room workout. My enrolled PE credit for the quarter (and next quarter as well, although I change my mind about second-quarter PE credits as they approach oftener than not) is "Weight Training," which boils down to exercising six muscle groups in at least two distinct ways at least four times a week without two workouts on immediately adjacent days. One of the workouts is on Saturday from 12-2, which is when the class meets, and for the other we are left to our own imagination/devices/calendars. It's a very unfamiliar environment for me, and I'm eying the treadmills (and step machines) with slight trepidation mixed with mild lust, but I'm definitely enjoying pushing the weight of this or that exercise up by five or ten pounds every once in a while as I get more used to it. On the one hand, the room seems surprisingly crowded for, y'know, Reed College, but on the other hand there are a fair number of adults, and of the students, you see a lot of the same faces crop up repeatedly. I want to say more girls than boys, but maybe girls exercising are just that much more interesting to look at. Not sure. Anyway there are some big machines in the weight room to supplement the basic dumbbells and cables, and they're very safe, adjustable, and nifty. Much water gets drunk.
Monday and Wednesday at 3:10 is Film & Fiction, a technologically-reliant course taught by an elderly Luddite, and the latest (last? who knows what I'll be taking senior year) course I'm taking with Kaylee. Stephen's there too, newly back on this side of the pond, and we've got a couple dudes with British accents in the class to keep him nostalgic. Belonging to the latter half of the alphabet, I haven't had to write a paper for it yet, so I don't have a sense for how the criticism etc. works, but it's a reasonable class in general with some discussions I don't agree with and would rather never took place. I'm not sure what makes me disagree with so much that's said in there (or feel that it's not interesting enough to discuss at all), but whatever it is, it sure does. So far we've read and watched two book-film pairs, and for Monday we're reading the first seventeen chapters of Washington Square, of which I have so far read exactly: none. I'll be fine...
Immediately Film & Fiction gets out I bike off to Lane Middle School for a not-so triumphant return. After a semester of band instead, the musical theater program(me?) at the school is back and running, with Stephen and I resuming our directorial roles, less our PSU cohort and with a new lady I don't know much about instead. We're doing Annie Jr. -- I've never seen Annie Sr., nor read the comic, but I have the kids on dramaturgical duty this weekend so hopefully I'll learn a whole lot about it come Monday -- and while I haven't gone through the script to determine how few people we could mathematically get away with producing it with, I'm pretty sure we have fewer than that. There are a couple old faces, including one of particular celebration because she was only allowed in the show as a reward for greatly improving her report card (the kind of thing you thought only happens/exists in books!), and some new ones, but overall just not enough. Wednesday we hold auditions in the hopes that some kids who haven't been showing up will decide to come audition and may be persuaded to continue coming after that... I have my doubts, but on the other hand, I have no better solution in mind; I am a notoriously bad advertiser. Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm also at Lane, teaching a class called "Thinking Logically" from 5-6 about formal sentential logic (basically the Cabrillo class simplified farther), but I've never had a student outside of the first day, and that was only really one kid, so it's not going well. I emailed seven Language and Mathematics teachers at Lane on Wednesday asking them if they would mention me in their classes or to specific kids they had whom they thought might be well-suited, and so far have not gotten any sort of response, but I'm willing to give it another week of optimism before giving up. On the one hand, I wouldn't mind not trying to throw that 5-6 hour in my TTh schedule, because it results in extremely awkward dinner timing, but on the other hand, I've wanted to teach this for quite a while and I thought I was actually going to get to do it this time. If only I hadn't been three days late in emailing the new LASER head about it back in mid-November, I guess.
Wednesday nights I theoretically audit Juggling, by which I mean Poi Spinning really, but my Wednesdays are full enough, and my Thursdays likewise full enough, that I sometimes defect in favor of homework... or senate meetings... or going to Trader Joes just before it closes and wandering the parking lot for an hour... but enough of that. Anyway, theoretically I go there to learn to spin poi better, but unfortunately I don't really know anyone who goes there who spins, so I haven't been taught anything new since Paideia, which makes for less incentive to go in the first place. Next time I drop by -- which, for the sake of argument, we'll say will be this coming Wednesday -- I need to suck it up and ask someone "hey, I don't really know you, and I can see that you're busy having fun talking to your close friends and practicing stuff you love, and you make no attempt at all to reach out to people who come to learn poi spinning and teach them things, but if I ask you, will you show me what I should be doing next?" Not in so many words. Juggling last semester, when I was actually juggling, was one of the least pleasant parts of my week, and since I'm only auditing it this time, it had better be bloody amazing.
Speaking of Paideia, it happened, as it tends to.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nitoya2 came down briefly, experienced the human-sized hamster wheel in the SU, did some pie-baking, chatted with some people a bit, and was sent back home again. Her visit coincided with part of that of Kay, who was dropping by before classes started to hang out with her (former) classmates and maybe learn a few things. We had her over for dinner at the Future because we were spending most of the day making this immense Indian dinner and she had nothing else planned, and I stayed up entirely too late with her another night in a Sullivan common room talking about dreams and things. I spent most of one day playing a one-shot Call of Cthulhu -- in a different setting than last time -- in which I was a plucky seventeen-year old whiz-kid (or "boy wonder" as the adults in the party insisted on calling me) looking to improve his religious study resume' and to impress a love interest back home. Is it typecasting if you do it to yourself? Somehow, despite my youth and the fact that I fell off a tower and badly hurt my wrist, I proved quite useful in exploration and even managed to survive the adventure. Also I knew Latin like whoa. Other things I went to included Scottish Dancing, Sewing, Bollywood Dancing, Charm School, and a general journalism course from Chris Lydgate (who not only recognized me but didn't despise me... what??). I didn't go to any of Dr. Demento's talks this year, not anything hosted by your_sapster, thanks to scheduling conflicts, deliciously tempting as they sounded. (Giant Scrabble is one of those things that Reed is advertised with yet I have never actually seen take place for whatever reason.)
Anyway, I'm a Ling major, in case that is forgotten, and it's on Tuesdays and Thusdays -- getting back to the actual school week -- that that really manifests itself as I take three Ling classes, two of which I'm even enrolled in. First off is Semantics at 1:10 with Svitlana, the new hire from last semester, and I don't think teaching semantics is her forte. Most of the class agrees, or at least the ones I worked on the first problem set with. Our second problem set is proofread to the point where we are asked to semantically evaluate sentences "e through e" from an alphabetical list. There's plenty of time left in the semester, so I suspect the material will get better -- currently it's fine in concept but the presentation makes it really tough to get through. On Thursday we had a lengthy argument, in that Svitlana thought the text said one thing and the class disagreed on the basis that such a conclusion made no intuitive sense, and at length we managed to bring her to our side through various arguments and references to sections in the text. In theory, that would have been really cool, had she been taking the position she took for the sake of argument to get us to understand the material better by disproving it, but I don't think that's what went down. Apart from that I don't think she doesn't understand the material, though, it's mostly just a communications problem.
Afterward I head on over to Advanced Topics in Syntax with Matt Pearson for a breath of cool fresh air. (I took a class with the same name last year because the topic in particular changes each time it gets taught.) So far there's been a lot of review (maybe not review for some or all of the other students because we took Intro Syntax from different professors) and some new ideas, but on Thursday we started transitioning into the non-review portion of the class and I got extremely excited, leaning forward eyes wide taking notes with lots of question marks in the margins of my page about things to think more about later. Soon we'll be looking into disposing of X-Bar Theory altogether, which makes me sad because I still want an image similar to this on a green shirt with the text "SYNTAX: It works, bitches," but perhaps I will have to put that dream away in favor of a better explanation of the evidence. And that, of course, is the rationale we should make theoretical decisions based on, or?
Syntax is followed by a mad rush to Lane combined with dinner seeking, mentioned earlier, and afterward I bike back to Reed for my last class of the evening, 6:10-7:30 (unless there's a film showing for Film & Fiction at 7:30 down the hallway, which sometimes there is), Introduction to Language, Culture, & Society from Steve. So I've got the whole Ling department, professorwise, over the course of the day, and a decent chunk of its students too one assumes. This class is a reduction of his old Language & Society course, hypothetically reduced to a 200-level course (the first time in a long time I realized those little numbers meant anything) as part of the now-year-long Introduction to Linguistics program, and the reading is basically the same, though the syllabus fluctuates a little (between what is printed and what is reality) so it's hard to say for sure. It's a much more general class than the other two, not being upper-division and all, so there are a bunch of non-Ling majors in attendance. Right now we're on something called semiotics, which is looking at how different "signs" mean things to us and what possible types of sign there are, which is apparently the basis for all Steve's thought and ultimately the subject of a lot of theses inspired by him. He'll be leaving Reed after this year, because he's been visiting here a while, his position is becoming tenure-track in response to the rapidly growing number of students in the department, and he doesn't have the credentials to apply for his position, and we've got three candidates -- two already and one next week -- coming to campus to give talks and eat lunch with interested students. We'll see how it turns out...
Meanwhile, just like last semester, my main subplot is intended to be e-Questrian, the Quest website I've been developing since, oh, January 2009. Seriously. And it's not online yet. Well, okay, it's online, but it's not viewable yet by anyone but me and it's pretty buggy as it is (libraries missing that were on my computer but not the server, files that aren't recognized by the server as having been modified since they were uploaded) so I'm email-corresponding with the Student Information Network webmaster (the third webmaster I've dealt with for this site so far) to figure that whole thing out. I assumed it would be online and viewable a long time ago, but there have been numerous circumstances beyond my control. More of an issue is money: outside of representing the paper as it currently is and making discussion of current issues that much easier (particularly for off-campus students), one of the main goals of the sitewas is to provide a digital, searchable archive of past Quest articles. Adding the articles to the database requires human labor, understandably, so I created an organization "Archiving the Quest Online" and put it in funding poll, where the voting student body ranked it #26 out of 95 organizations as deserving funds. I explained explicitly in the organization description that funds would be used for compensation for students adding said articles to said database, but when I brought my proposed budget before senate, it consisting of minimum wage for a projected eight student workers, I got exactly $0 because the student senate is not in the business of paying students to do things -- outside of a huge list of things they do pay students to do -- despite the section in the Signators' Handbook about how to set it up so that your organization can pay students. It doesn't look like there's any home of changing their minds, so once the site is successfully set up online, I'll have to proceed with volunteers instead, and naturally less work will get done that way than would be if they were paid something for their time, and fewer articles will get added to the site, and people will get less use out of it, and so on. In the interest of not making any more enemies, I refrained from giving my reaction to this whole set of affairs in any detail while being interviewed for an article about the whole funding affair in the Quest last week, and I'll do the same here, other than to say: I've been working on this site in part because I view it as my gift to Reed College, an incredibly useful resource for both access to the past and easy communication of the present for generations to come, but the longer it takes, and the more people I have to butt heads with (and only sometimes win against), the harder it is to care enough about the college to want to see it done. At least I still believe that when it gets released people will perceive me with my web skills as incredibly sexy.
That's an angry note to end on, but that's most of what's been going on this semester that I'm willing to talk about in a public setting. I'm a tutor for Introduction to Syntax but not a single student has approached me about that so far, and thus there's not much to say. I haven't done too much off-campus traveling so far this semester, although I biked up to a park a little ways past Hawthorne and back yesterday, which was something I definitely needed. The hand-holding bench, another project I've been working on for over a year, still hasn't been returned to campus for general use. The department had a meeting recently to inform us Ling Juniors about the Qualifying Exam ("qual"), which we'll be taking a little after Spring Break to determine if we've learned enough to be seniors and write theses next year. They handed out a practice qual which looked easier than I'd expected, so that's good news, I suppose.
This is my second semester living off-campus now, and it will not be the last, for I continue to stay on through next year. (The summer in-between: totally undetermined.) Reed's hit housing lottery season and as a result we are on the lookout for people, preferably people we already know, to replace those housemates who will be leaving us at the end of the year. There's a house meeting tomorrow and presumably this will be discussed in further detail then; I've probed a few candidates (but could think of more if necessary) and doubt I'm alone in having done so. It really is a lovely house: at pretty much the perfect distance from campus (very short bike ride, but not so close that it doesn't feel like you've escaped residence life at all), within elementary walking distance of Safeway, situated in a quiet neighborhood, not too small... I'm not actually trying to advertise it in case Reed students are reading this, I'm really just reflecting. Honest. Some of us played Arkham Horror last night and discovered that "Lost in Time & Space" roughly translates to "going to bed now." We had a decent party about a week ago (in honor of St. Valentine) with a large number of desserts, and many jokes were told. Significant others have keys to the house now, which is weird in concept but practical.
My school day (M-F) begins with Greek, it being a year-long course. Originally Tuesdays and Thursdays began with Phonetics at 9 AM, which I was auditing, but the hour, my non-enrolledness, its being on a subject I don't particularly care for, and the fact that the course required a textbook which the library quickly ran out of copies of all together led to my losing interest in it. Based on the syllabus, they'll be out of (or taking some time off of, forget) the textbook in a few classes, but by then I'd have missed enough that I don't think it would work out. Oh well. Greek is similar to last semester in format but more about syntax than morphology, which I think I appreciate. Somehow, this far into the Spring, my vocabulary's still a bit rusty from winter break, and hopefully I'll get myself to take some time to review the old flash cards tomorrow and finally figure out the various pieces of such verbs as "die," "kill," "see," and of course "know." I broke the verb flash cards into two sets and determined that while the majority of verbs we've learned so far have been regular in their conjugation, the numeric difference isn't all that large. Yesterday I felt skilled enough in the recently-learnt Conditional structure to get around to translating a short refrain from Chabbat at the Rabbi's, which gets translated into as many languages as the rabbi can find guests to translate it into. My contributions, with the English I worked from on the left, follow. Translation in each case is near enough to exact, minus words like "and" in the third line lost for scansionic purposes, that I don't think I need bother providing any sort of "literally:" gloss.
If I would have the might, I would run into the night, and I would shout Shabbos! Shabbos, Shabbos, Shabbos... | Doch hätte ich die Macht, so liefe ich in die Nacht. Ich würde schreien „Schabbos“, Schabbos, Schabbos, Schabbos | εἰ δύναμιν ἔχοιμι, εἰς νύκτα ἂν δράμοιμι, βοήσαιμι τάδε· Σᾶββος. Σᾶββος, σᾶββος, σᾶββος. |
I continue to lunch host for the admissions office, this time around on Wednesdays, with one of the same co-hosts from last semester and also a girl whom, if memory serves, I met on a train. There's the same mix of very thoughtful students with probing questions and students who seem to be here for the ride and don't have the energy or curiosity to raise their voice. I still haven't read through the student handbook's list of majors, to prep myself for giving at least overview descriptions of the various departments, and I definitely need to considering how often History seems to come up and how little I know about it. (Take that in any of at least two ways.) Either that or I should pay more attention when people talk about professors whom I've never met and presumably never will. It's a lot of fun, though, and I usually come out of it feeling, outside of well fed, very skilled and knowledgeable. I try my best to be very truthful in describing Reed, but it often ends up being a positive description unless they specifically ask for negatives. Like, more positive than my thoughts about the school in private. It's an odd line between honesty and not wanting to come across as warning kids not to come here when every other school they visit presumably describes itself as glowingly as possible. Joy the train girl seems to be very good at the job, so that should be fun.
At least so far, though this is not necessarily timed, on Wednesdays after lunch I may well end up taking my mid-week weight room workout. My enrolled PE credit for the quarter (and next quarter as well, although I change my mind about second-quarter PE credits as they approach oftener than not) is "Weight Training," which boils down to exercising six muscle groups in at least two distinct ways at least four times a week without two workouts on immediately adjacent days. One of the workouts is on Saturday from 12-2, which is when the class meets, and for the other we are left to our own imagination/devices/calendars. It's a very unfamiliar environment for me, and I'm eying the treadmills (and step machines) with slight trepidation mixed with mild lust, but I'm definitely enjoying pushing the weight of this or that exercise up by five or ten pounds every once in a while as I get more used to it. On the one hand, the room seems surprisingly crowded for, y'know, Reed College, but on the other hand there are a fair number of adults, and of the students, you see a lot of the same faces crop up repeatedly. I want to say more girls than boys, but maybe girls exercising are just that much more interesting to look at. Not sure. Anyway there are some big machines in the weight room to supplement the basic dumbbells and cables, and they're very safe, adjustable, and nifty. Much water gets drunk.
Monday and Wednesday at 3:10 is Film & Fiction, a technologically-reliant course taught by an elderly Luddite, and the latest (last? who knows what I'll be taking senior year) course I'm taking with Kaylee. Stephen's there too, newly back on this side of the pond, and we've got a couple dudes with British accents in the class to keep him nostalgic. Belonging to the latter half of the alphabet, I haven't had to write a paper for it yet, so I don't have a sense for how the criticism etc. works, but it's a reasonable class in general with some discussions I don't agree with and would rather never took place. I'm not sure what makes me disagree with so much that's said in there (or feel that it's not interesting enough to discuss at all), but whatever it is, it sure does. So far we've read and watched two book-film pairs, and for Monday we're reading the first seventeen chapters of Washington Square, of which I have so far read exactly: none. I'll be fine...
Immediately Film & Fiction gets out I bike off to Lane Middle School for a not-so triumphant return. After a semester of band instead, the musical theater program(me?) at the school is back and running, with Stephen and I resuming our directorial roles, less our PSU cohort and with a new lady I don't know much about instead. We're doing Annie Jr. -- I've never seen Annie Sr., nor read the comic, but I have the kids on dramaturgical duty this weekend so hopefully I'll learn a whole lot about it come Monday -- and while I haven't gone through the script to determine how few people we could mathematically get away with producing it with, I'm pretty sure we have fewer than that. There are a couple old faces, including one of particular celebration because she was only allowed in the show as a reward for greatly improving her report card (the kind of thing you thought only happens/exists in books!), and some new ones, but overall just not enough. Wednesday we hold auditions in the hopes that some kids who haven't been showing up will decide to come audition and may be persuaded to continue coming after that... I have my doubts, but on the other hand, I have no better solution in mind; I am a notoriously bad advertiser. Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm also at Lane, teaching a class called "Thinking Logically" from 5-6 about formal sentential logic (basically the Cabrillo class simplified farther), but I've never had a student outside of the first day, and that was only really one kid, so it's not going well. I emailed seven Language and Mathematics teachers at Lane on Wednesday asking them if they would mention me in their classes or to specific kids they had whom they thought might be well-suited, and so far have not gotten any sort of response, but I'm willing to give it another week of optimism before giving up. On the one hand, I wouldn't mind not trying to throw that 5-6 hour in my TTh schedule, because it results in extremely awkward dinner timing, but on the other hand, I've wanted to teach this for quite a while and I thought I was actually going to get to do it this time. If only I hadn't been three days late in emailing the new LASER head about it back in mid-November, I guess.
Wednesday nights I theoretically audit Juggling, by which I mean Poi Spinning really, but my Wednesdays are full enough, and my Thursdays likewise full enough, that I sometimes defect in favor of homework... or senate meetings... or going to Trader Joes just before it closes and wandering the parking lot for an hour... but enough of that. Anyway, theoretically I go there to learn to spin poi better, but unfortunately I don't really know anyone who goes there who spins, so I haven't been taught anything new since Paideia, which makes for less incentive to go in the first place. Next time I drop by -- which, for the sake of argument, we'll say will be this coming Wednesday -- I need to suck it up and ask someone "hey, I don't really know you, and I can see that you're busy having fun talking to your close friends and practicing stuff you love, and you make no attempt at all to reach out to people who come to learn poi spinning and teach them things, but if I ask you, will you show me what I should be doing next?" Not in so many words. Juggling last semester, when I was actually juggling, was one of the least pleasant parts of my week, and since I'm only auditing it this time, it had better be bloody amazing.
Speaking of Paideia, it happened, as it tends to.
nitoya2 came down briefly, experienced the human-sized hamster wheel in the SU, did some pie-baking, chatted with some people a bit, and was sent back home again. Her visit coincided with part of that of Kay, who was dropping by before classes started to hang out with her (former) classmates and maybe learn a few things. We had her over for dinner at the Future because we were spending most of the day making this immense Indian dinner and she had nothing else planned, and I stayed up entirely too late with her another night in a Sullivan common room talking about dreams and things. I spent most of one day playing a one-shot Call of Cthulhu -- in a different setting than last time -- in which I was a plucky seventeen-year old whiz-kid (or "boy wonder" as the adults in the party insisted on calling me) looking to improve his religious study resume' and to impress a love interest back home. Is it typecasting if you do it to yourself? Somehow, despite my youth and the fact that I fell off a tower and badly hurt my wrist, I proved quite useful in exploration and even managed to survive the adventure. Also I knew Latin like whoa. Other things I went to included Scottish Dancing, Sewing, Bollywood Dancing, Charm School, and a general journalism course from Chris Lydgate (who not only recognized me but didn't despise me... what??). I didn't go to any of Dr. Demento's talks this year, not anything hosted by your_sapster, thanks to scheduling conflicts, deliciously tempting as they sounded. (Giant Scrabble is one of those things that Reed is advertised with yet I have never actually seen take place for whatever reason.) Anyway, I'm a Ling major, in case that is forgotten, and it's on Tuesdays and Thusdays -- getting back to the actual school week -- that that really manifests itself as I take three Ling classes, two of which I'm even enrolled in. First off is Semantics at 1:10 with Svitlana, the new hire from last semester, and I don't think teaching semantics is her forte. Most of the class agrees, or at least the ones I worked on the first problem set with. Our second problem set is proofread to the point where we are asked to semantically evaluate sentences "e through e" from an alphabetical list. There's plenty of time left in the semester, so I suspect the material will get better -- currently it's fine in concept but the presentation makes it really tough to get through. On Thursday we had a lengthy argument, in that Svitlana thought the text said one thing and the class disagreed on the basis that such a conclusion made no intuitive sense, and at length we managed to bring her to our side through various arguments and references to sections in the text. In theory, that would have been really cool, had she been taking the position she took for the sake of argument to get us to understand the material better by disproving it, but I don't think that's what went down. Apart from that I don't think she doesn't understand the material, though, it's mostly just a communications problem.
Afterward I head on over to Advanced Topics in Syntax with Matt Pearson for a breath of cool fresh air. (I took a class with the same name last year because the topic in particular changes each time it gets taught.) So far there's been a lot of review (maybe not review for some or all of the other students because we took Intro Syntax from different professors) and some new ideas, but on Thursday we started transitioning into the non-review portion of the class and I got extremely excited, leaning forward eyes wide taking notes with lots of question marks in the margins of my page about things to think more about later. Soon we'll be looking into disposing of X-Bar Theory altogether, which makes me sad because I still want an image similar to this on a green shirt with the text "SYNTAX: It works, bitches," but perhaps I will have to put that dream away in favor of a better explanation of the evidence. And that, of course, is the rationale we should make theoretical decisions based on, or?
Syntax is followed by a mad rush to Lane combined with dinner seeking, mentioned earlier, and afterward I bike back to Reed for my last class of the evening, 6:10-7:30 (unless there's a film showing for Film & Fiction at 7:30 down the hallway, which sometimes there is), Introduction to Language, Culture, & Society from Steve. So I've got the whole Ling department, professorwise, over the course of the day, and a decent chunk of its students too one assumes. This class is a reduction of his old Language & Society course, hypothetically reduced to a 200-level course (the first time in a long time I realized those little numbers meant anything) as part of the now-year-long Introduction to Linguistics program, and the reading is basically the same, though the syllabus fluctuates a little (between what is printed and what is reality) so it's hard to say for sure. It's a much more general class than the other two, not being upper-division and all, so there are a bunch of non-Ling majors in attendance. Right now we're on something called semiotics, which is looking at how different "signs" mean things to us and what possible types of sign there are, which is apparently the basis for all Steve's thought and ultimately the subject of a lot of theses inspired by him. He'll be leaving Reed after this year, because he's been visiting here a while, his position is becoming tenure-track in response to the rapidly growing number of students in the department, and he doesn't have the credentials to apply for his position, and we've got three candidates -- two already and one next week -- coming to campus to give talks and eat lunch with interested students. We'll see how it turns out...
Meanwhile, just like last semester, my main subplot is intended to be e-Questrian, the Quest website I've been developing since, oh, January 2009. Seriously. And it's not online yet. Well, okay, it's online, but it's not viewable yet by anyone but me and it's pretty buggy as it is (libraries missing that were on my computer but not the server, files that aren't recognized by the server as having been modified since they were uploaded) so I'm email-corresponding with the Student Information Network webmaster (the third webmaster I've dealt with for this site so far) to figure that whole thing out. I assumed it would be online and viewable a long time ago, but there have been numerous circumstances beyond my control. More of an issue is money: outside of representing the paper as it currently is and making discussion of current issues that much easier (particularly for off-campus students), one of the main goals of the site
That's an angry note to end on, but that's most of what's been going on this semester that I'm willing to talk about in a public setting. I'm a tutor for Introduction to Syntax but not a single student has approached me about that so far, and thus there's not much to say. I haven't done too much off-campus traveling so far this semester, although I biked up to a park a little ways past Hawthorne and back yesterday, which was something I definitely needed. The hand-holding bench, another project I've been working on for over a year, still hasn't been returned to campus for general use. The department had a meeting recently to inform us Ling Juniors about the Qualifying Exam ("qual"), which we'll be taking a little after Spring Break to determine if we've learned enough to be seniors and write theses next year. They handed out a practice qual which looked easier than I'd expected, so that's good news, I suppose.
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on 2010-02-23 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-02-25 07:31 am (UTC)