First Day of School!

[G.C.R]

Bummer,

Final test in Spanish is a group skit. However no one seems interested in writing the script and therefor it is now four hours before class and I am completing everything. We've been allotted no time in class and class and now I'm worried we will fail horribly. Goo.

Group projects were the complete fucking bane of my life.
After S-T-R-E-S-S-I-N-G like mad the last few days, I've pretty much finished my application to the limited entry course I want to do next year. Sweet, don't have to worry about uni until it starts next year, pat myself on back, go check email - message from the Honours Co-ordinator saying "you MUST have your proposal for your research project in by January 6th!" Here I was thinking I maybe could muse on what I'd even do for that until about June. Fiddlesticks.

[Bernard]

stuff I'm going to do when finals are over:
1. Finally go to the fucking post office (ellaguru, I am so embarrassed)
2. Bake almond lace cookies
3. Make felt flowers
4. Knit tiny sweater and scarf -- sleeves knit
5. Sew tiny coat and felt Christmas ornament -- pattern drafted, pieces cut, mostly basted, will try on tomorrow, goodnight!
6. Take baby to park
7. Cyb3r
8. Shoot film
9. Wrap presents
10. Make a big pot of something stewlike and comforting

[hannah]

So I did something I promised myself I wouldn't do, which was get an extension on one of my papers. This means there's going to be a bit of a dark cloud hanging over my winter break, but between the cold that had me in bed for all of Friday and a good part of Saturday, waiting on Interlibrary Loan to hook me up with some important microfilm, and my general out-of-it-ness this quarter, I figured this was the right thing to do. This still leaves one paper to write before tomorrow morning. Can I hammer out twelve pages in the next 19 hours? Yes, absolutely, but it ain't gonna be pretty...

[Bernard]

Hannah, ganbatte!

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

which reminds me, i was supposed to spend my summer off studying japanese! that seems to have gone out the window so far...

[hannah]

I finished! Thank you! Now I'm going to take a nap and then go buy myself a donut.

[elpollodiablo]

I just finished my last paper revision, which basically involved shoehorning in a single quotation from a "lesser known" scholar that I found at random via a Google search. Woot! for last-minute additional requirements and meeting them with great verve.

It's all grading and planning for next term from here on out.

[alex]

Wait, that was an official requirement, "make sure to reference at least lesser one known scholar"? "May not have an h-index higher than 4" or something? That's just ridiculous.

anyway, congrats, Hannah and Miles!

[Bernard]

 

add to list: write ITVS proposal, line produce last week of feature

when will I learn to say "I can't"

[elpollodiablo]

Wait, that was an official requirement, "make sure to reference at least lesser one known scholar"? "May not have an h-index higher than 4" or something? That's just ridiculous.

anyway, congrats, Hannah and Miles!

I also thought it was lame at first, but her rationale was actually pretty likeable. She said that she intentionally looks for work by younger/less published scholars and incorporates them into her own publications as a way of paying into the karma pool (not her words, but that was the gist of it). Not likely that I'll approach my own work that way, but she's got tenure and can do whatever the hell she wants.

Also, I'd never heard of the h-index before. That's awesome! It's like a quantifiable measure of schoolyard popularity! Or at least it would be if it were applied to the humanities.

[Bernard]

I think that's pretty nice, actually. Presumably not only well-known scholars have anything of interest to say?

[alex]

Yeah, I'm not at all denying that it's good to quote younger and less famous scholars. I'll even go as far as saying that having a reference list that has a certain amount of balance between canonical names and less-known ones makes your paper look a lot better because it shows you actually read and take an interest in your field rather than only being aware of whatever is being handed down to you on a golden plate. My exasperation was probably about equal parts being weary of rules beyond "write a good paper" (although I'm less sure of that weariness now: I can totally get behind all sorts of silly rules as long as it's being done playfully), equal parts being a bit concerned that it would suggest that having one, but exactly one, reference to a lesser known scholar is the amount a good paper should have. But if that's how she introduced it, that's probably not what she was saying, and she might have also meant "lesser known" a bit more strictly than how I took it; and besides, it occurs to me now that writing interpretative papers about literature is probably quite a bit different than the sociological/historical kind of work I'm used to. For me, it's just pretty normal that writing a paper involves all sorts of keyword searches in google scholar, the library catalogue, the databases of various selected journals, etc., but then, a lot of my references are for very specific historical and empirical content rather than grand theory. Most recently, I was looking for literature on the historical role of quantitative measurement to the constitution of psychology as a discipline, and then of course I'm going to come up with some more obscure and some more well-known references and make use of whatever happens to help my argument. If your references are mostly to either primary material or grand conceptual notions that inform your approach to your primary material, I guess that might play out differently.

As for the h-factor, yeah, goddammit. I think I first heard of it when a colleague in the social sciences told me about having to justify why his wasn't any higher than it is in the application procedure for a fucking post-doc project. I don't think referring to the biases inherent in citation cultures would have been an appropriate reply, either.

[Bernard]

Well, also you sound like a pretty diligent student, and things like 'include at least one X' are a response to people who are less conscientious about their work, or, to give people the benefit of the doubt, maybe they've been kicked upstairs, so to speak, and might think they should stick only to established names.

[alex]

Fair enough, but I was operating under the assumption that "pretty diligent students" would probably also apply to pollo's cohort of grad students.

(I don't really self-identify as 'student' at all anymore, diligent or otherwise, for what it's worth.)

[elpollodiablo]

There was an element of instruction in the additional requirement, as well, since she was teaching a class of largely first-year graduate students, who up until that point had likely been relying almost exclusively on the work of the grand sages of their respective areas.

[kyle]

So being that I haven't been able to due much studying for my exam in the last week I was lucky enough to attain an extension for my exam.

However I just remembered that I promised to bring scantrons for two of my classmates. The exam was last night... I hope they were able to figure something out.

[kyle]

And school is cancelled today so my exam is re-scheduled until Monday... two days after I'm supposed to drive eleven hours to visit my family. Hope I can work something out for tomorrow.

[hannah]

Stomach tied in knots about going back today. I feel like I'm in junior high again.

[Bernard]

Went back yesterday and tried to crash a grad art history class. It was so cool! They might let me audit.

[auto-da-fey]

I could not possibly be less enthused about this upcoming semester, mostly because I'm woefully overextended in terms of commitments and utterly unprepared for anything. At least I have a grader, that's pretty sweet. Otherwise, this is going to be a hold-your-breath-for-summer endurance test, I'm pretty sure.

[auto-da-fey]

although I guess I have roped four people into giving guest lectures, so that takes some heat off. except that one of them asked me to reciprocate, so it's some Sisyphus-style action here in terms of the eternal struggle to avoid work.

[hannah]

Is this your first time with a TA, adf?

Bernard, what other classes are you taking?

[Bernard]

stuff I'm going to do when finals are over:
1. Finally go to the fucking post office (ellaguru, I am so embarrassed)
2. Bake almond lace cookies -- this is probably not going to happen, but I did bake the tres leches and almond lemon tea cakes
3. Make felt flowers
4. Knit tiny sweater and scarf -- sleeves knit, back knit
5. Sew tiny coat and felt Christmas ornament
6. Take baby to park
7. Cyb3r
8. Shoot film
9. Wrap presents
10. Make a big pot of something stewlike and comforting

[elpollodiablo]

I've been vacillating wildly between hopefulness and creeping dread... I'm taking two lit seminars, which is going to be an insane amount of reading. I'm teaching a literature & composition course instead of simply a composition course, which I'm looking forward to--having a couple of seed texts will, hopefully, make class planning easier and class meetings less excruciating. Going to a conference in April. Would really like to try to publish something. Bluh.

[auto-da-fey]

phone everything else in and focus on getting published. i may be slightly drunk, but I will stand by that suggestion sober (if your plan is going the academic route, at least).

Is this your first time with a TA, adf?

well, it's a reader, not a TA proper; not the first time (second), but first time I've had one that reminded me of the hypercritical grad student picking apart every lecture-flaw the way I once did, so that throws some pointless surplus anxiety into the mix.
still beats grading, though.