What to do?

So after maligning my students again yesterday, they were pretty good in section today.  It might have been my expectations were modified; it might have been the reading was complicated enough to work through without being so complicated they couldn't get through it all; it could have been that Dr. Comrade (the prof in charge of the course) emailed the class last night to ask if it was worth continuing to hold sections if only 6-8 people are making use of it.  I mean, I would love to have my Fridays clear, but I got a lot of panicked questions today about whether sections were going to be cancelled because I had something more important to be doing, and please don't cancel section, because it's really helpful.

What?  This was from students who text all during class, and in fact were texting as they asked me not to cancel section.  That's supposed to mean they're bored and not engaged.  I don't know how to gauge interest.

The students who have been to every section said it's made the readings much clearer; the students who come occasionally said it was good to have a resource when a particular reading made less sense than usual.  And then we had really good discussions about the intersection of religion, race, and politics in American history.  (Which is another one of those areas I have to fake my way through--I bet no one enrolling in a 20th century course thought they would learn so much about 17th century theology, but that's what I know).  So I don't know what to do.  If five people out of forty are getting good use out of section, does that make it worth it?  The prep time is the same for me.

It just feels odd to try to lead discussion when there's only two people, and the scattershot attendance means that if something comes up from a previous discussion, anyone who wasn't there doesn't know what's going on.  Regular attendance at least means that even if they haven't done the reading, they got the jist of the important parts of the readings and the ideas to keep in mind for next time.  I try to pick up key themes to carry through the semester and throw discussion back to previous weeks to help students make connections between the readings, but that doesn't work so well if not everyone in the room was there.

In the mean time, though, J and I have been productive.  The blueberries are out of their vodka, tasting ok.  There's not much blueberry taste.  3 cups of blueberry vodka took 1 cup of 2:1 sugar syrup and 2 tsp of lime juice to bring out what blueberry there is.  It's more of a grassy taste, like in a blueberry ale, with a lot of alcohol burn to finish.  I think it'll be more pronounced over ice with some seltzer water or something.  J's shirt project is coming along, although he's monopolizing my sewing machine, and his carpenter brain could not get around the idea of easing a sleeve to match an armscye.  That's a whole nother mess of teaching problems.

Teaching the willing

The homemade orange liqueur in action

So, after my maligning of my over-worked seniors, I went to give a talk to a class of 6th graders about archaeology.  And it was pure, unadulterated awesome.  The wife of a friend in the history department I'm in teaches social studies and science at the middle school one town over, and they're doing a unit on Egypt.  I don't work on Egypt, but I do a lot of my research with archaeological collections, so it's not that big of a jump.

They were interested, excited, and asked a lot of good questions.  I used to work at a museum doing school group presentations and workshop days, and I love working with middle school groups.  They're at just the right age to know a little about everything without being so old that they can't be excited in front of everyone.  I decided to go to grad school rather than get a teaching certificate in part because I felt like I found that excitement again in college, after hating high school, and in part because I didn't want to teach to the test or have my curriculum dictated by evolution denialists.  And college students are excited.  Sometimes.  It's just a lot harder to get them excited about the rhetorical differences between socialism and marxism than it is to get sixth graders excited about gold rings and mummies and playing detective.

It was also odd to have such a large age difference: I came into grad school straight out of college, so especially when I'm teaching seniors, I'm sometimes less than three years older than the students I'm teaching. Really, age shouldn't have much to do with it, and I try to present myself older than I am, but even the women in my department who are much older than me or the undergraduates are treated as if we were much younger than our male peers by the students.  Academic drag helps, but there's only so far some severe glasses and a blazer can take you.

Once, when I was TAing a US history course and we were getting ready to study the French and Indian War, the professor told the other TA and I: "Really emphasize to the students how young George Washingon was when he started the war."  (At age 20, Washington unintentionally triggered a global war by letting some French soldiers he was negotiating with in the backwoods get killed under his command).  "Really emphasize to them how young and stupid he was, only their ages and in command of all those people!"  I think I was 22 at the time, and in charge of a room of 18-20 year olds.  It didn't help much that the prof I was TAing for obviously didn't think much of twenty-somethings.

I'm sure I wouldn't be romanticizing sixth graders this way if I taught them every day, but it was just so nice to go into a class room where they were excited to talk about something, where they were so excited that we ran out of time, and where I didn't have to position myself defensively.  I felt like I had so much energy when I was talking to them that I could just keep going for hours.  When I get in a bad section, I can't wait for it to get over either and I look at the time as much as my students do.  If I could figure out how to bottle that energy and excitement and take it with me, I'd be set.

What I do have in bottles is the orange liqueur, which we made sidecars with tonight.  1oz orange liqueur, 1oz brandy, and a half oz of lemon juice per person shaken over ice and it's just heaven.  Super simple, and the taste of the clementines really comes through.

Delicious booze

Remember these guys, my progress oranges?  They came out of their brandy soak and the verdict on homemade Cointreau is that it is delicious.  As J said when we were sampling rather liberally on Saturday night, it has all the taste of clementines without the weird artificial orange juice flavor that orange liqueurs sometimes have.

Beer!

The malt steeping

This is our first beer, and so far it's going great.  It should be ready to bottle up some time this week.  We did a brown ale with 6.5 lbs of amber malt extract and two lbs of a dark roast malt, and with that and hops and yeast, our total cost was 20 dollars for what will become 50-60 bottles of beer.  The carboys, thermometer, airlocks, hydrometer, bottles, caps, and bottle capper all increase the total cost, of course, but we already had everything and got it for cheap in the first place.  (Or, in the case of the bottles, we've been saving recappable bottles from beer we'd have bought anyway, so we're out nothing on those).

Can only teach the willing . . .

Where the magic happens

I've been thinking about teaching lately, since I'm not doing much of it this semester. The 20th century political history course I complained about having to TA has been, so far, a whole lot of nothing.

The way classes work here is the students attend lecture two days a week with the professor, and one day a week attend a discussion section with me.  I am responsible for attending lecture so I know what the students know, leading the discussion section, and grading most of the exams and papers.  The prof may, if he feels like it, grade half of the final papers.  This is a little less grading than most profs here do--most split the grading evenly--but not abnormal.

Except that the sections for this class are voluntary--attendance neither hurts nor helps the students' grades, so they have no incentive to go except to hang out on Friday afternoons with me and other students with nothing better to do and talk about the development of 20th century American Socialism.  So they don't go.  The first week of classes I had 8 students, the second, 5 students.  I'm guessing this week will have even fewer.  

This, paradoxically, makes more work for me, or at least less return on the work I put in.  I still have to put enough time into the readings--more than 200 pages a week--so that I can lead discussion on material I've never seen before.  That takes the same amount of time no matter how many students show up to class.  And now I've had several students emailing me saying they can't make it to the scheduled section time, and could I please email them the discussion questions.  And I figure that as long as I email them to some students, I might as well email them to everyone, so that at least when the exams roll around I'm not flooded with "I don't understand the readings, can you explain what the important parts are?"  Which is almost a certainty.  

But I don't know if that will just encourage students to not come to class.  And am I obligated to go out of my way to do more work if the work I'm supposed to be doing doesn't show up for class?  I want everyone to do well--I want them to get the material, and if discussion questions will help that, then great.  But showing up to discussion would help that more.  I don't know.  Some days I want to help as much as possible, and some days I just don't care.  I've got almost 2000 photos from the disastrous State Capitol research trip to go through--I guess this week I don't care.

Craftie Quickie: The Fellowship Dress Belt

The belt was the last thing I did for the fellowship dress, and I was surprised at how quick and easy it was.  My sewing projects tend to be epically complicated.  I wasn't originally going to make a belt for it, but the pattern of the fabric was so overwhelming without something to break it up and define the waist.  In all, it took about a half hour, most of that turning it right side out, to make a really cute belt.

Our regularly schedule programming

Modeling courtesy of my beat-up ducktape
dress form

The February round of fellowship applications is written and sent out; now the March round begins. When I finish the March round, I'll be done with this year's fellowship application marathon and will allow myself to start another dress. Round 1's dress is done, and turned out very well. Waiting til I'm done with the next round of apps to start the dress is a little arbitrary, since I'm teaching J to sew his own shirts, but at least it will make it so there's only one fabric explosion covering the house.

The dress was relatively quick and easy.  I used Simplicity 2588, but did a couple of modifications: The bodice was faced, and I added a lining, which made the back zipper trickier, and I added the pocket details and the ruffle at the bottom.  The pattern was also extraordinarily tall and had waaaay too much ease: despite my measurements matching the pattern sizing guide exactly, I had to shorten both the skirt and the bodice by an inch and a half, and take in the bodice quite a bit.  I've found out that I looooove working with piping also.  It's a very fun detail, and although I love the fabric, I think it would have been a little much without the accent.  It's turned out well, but the muslin looked like a nightmare.

Speaking of nightmares, I've been having this recurring dream in which Dr. Asiago emails me to ask why I'm not applying for a fellowship whose application is due tomorrow.  I've been writing these applications to the neglect of real dissertation writing, and I know it's for a good cause, but he keeps telling me to apply to these grants that are due in only a few days (in real life as well as in the dream).

I'll be glad when the spring round is done and I have a few months of reprieve to do some dissertating.  One of my other committee members, who we'll call Dr. Smackdown, has written a lot of my letters of rec, and recently wrote me that she expects I'll get so many fellowship grants I won't be able to use them all.  I think this was her way of saying she's done writing letters, because I could only hope to be so lucky.  Even getting half the ones I'm applying for would be great, as last year's grants only had a 30% success rate.

Shibori dying

I actually did this project before we had our little research adventure, but I didn't get a chance to post it.

One of the things that convinced us to move into this apartment was the washer and dryer (a hard thing to find in apartments in Overcast).  They're great--really new, Energy Star, and very quiet.  With all the sewing I do, it's nice to not have to schlep everything to the laundromat to pre-wash.

But they're in our bathroom, and the bathroom is tiny, so the washer and dryer is all anyone sees.  Plus our extra cat litter, broom, and potting soil or whatever we've thrown in there because there's no room for it anywhere else.  I've been looking for a nice curtain or even bedsheet to hang up and add some pattern while screening it off, but haven't been able to find anything nice.  I took a class on dying in college, though, so I decided to shibori dye a bedsheet myself.

To the archives!

After last night's car drama, J and I bussed to the archive today, and we're back on track for the stress of doing research travel with a spouse.  This involved a brisk walk across a lot of partially plowed imperial plazas and side walks in State Capitol, which was probably the most pleasant part of the day.  

Most of my stress surrounding this trip (pre car drama) was in the planning: I have a lot of flexibility in leaving Overcast City for research travel, because I'm only locked in to teach one day a week.  I'm TAing, so I can miss lecture the rest of the week and it's not too big of a deal.  J, on the other hand, works retail, and has neither regular nor back-to-back days off.  I originally had a four-day research extravaganza planned, because like all good research trips, my last trip to State Archives ended with me stumbling onto an amazing collection of records which no one has worked with before, and which the archivist told me I wouldn't be interested in or find helpful.  They are, in fact, actually what I need for the last chapter of my dissertation, and I found them literally a half hour before leaving the archive last time.

This post is dedicated to

Just a regular evening, "hiding" in the couch.

J, and Kyle, the tow truck driver who rescued us from freezing to death in rural Cloudy State and gave us a scenic tour of State Capitol while driving us to a repair shop.

This post was going to be about the stress of planning for a research trip with partner in tow (no pun intended), but now it's about the stress of having a minor single car accident during a research trip. I am ok, J is ok, we didn't really nearly freeze to death. What we did do is decide to try to leave Cloudy City for State Capitol before Snowmageddon '11 was supposed to start, and spun out into a guard rail on the interstate without hitting any other cars. We broke a headlight, a turn signal, most of the front passenger corner, and probably the radiator. At any rate, when started back up, the engine runs but belches a lot of anti-freeze smelling steam/smoke, makes horrible noises, and spills antifreeze everywhere.

We have AAA, who called a tow truck for us, but because we decided to drive in Snowmageddon '11, there were a lot of other people who needed tow trucks also, and we had to wait for two hours for ours. But at least that gave us time to call J's sister and have her look up the best-reviewed mechanics in State Capitol on the interwebs, for us to call them, and find one that had space to look at the car tomorrow. Right now the plan is to see if they can make it safe to drive so we can be back in Cloudy City by Friday (both J and I are scheduled to work), rent a car to get to the state archive in the mean time, and if it's not, arrange to drive the rental car back to Cloudy City and come back for the broken car later. It may get sold or scrapped once it's repaired-ish. We're not sure about that, it depends on how much the repairs get quoted as.

So far the cost of repairs, towing, etc, is not going to break our budget. I got a very generous research grant to look at collections at this archive, and we've been very frugal with the hotel and other expenses, so my research grant will probably cover the accident and our hotel and rental car, maybe with a little bit out of pocket. Of course, I can't report that the research grant money was spent on the car repair, but it makes me feel better to think about it as replacement of the money spent on the very foolish car accident.

So that's why there's a picture of our cat sitting with his head in our couch. It's a cat blogging kind of day.  At least today will make a good anecdote on the dedications page when my dissertation gets published