Still incredibly pissed about World Soccer Daily pulling the plug as I had my first commute to Milwaukee and back today for preseason training, followed by another session tomorrow. The show was so damn good, it made me laugh out loud so often, I’m wondering how I can fill the hole. And I’ve only been a fan through this past summer. I imagine this is truly heartbreaking for the long-time listeners of six or seven years, poor bastards…

We had a mini-boot camp for Intro to Creative Writing instructors today and it was time well spent. My syllabus and plan of attack was complimented, although I do need to work things around more to work in more workshopping. I designed the course figuring that you can’t really workshop competently until you’ve learned some of the lingo and tried—and failed—to blow away the world with your own deathless prose. While I’m not entirely unconvinced of this, I now understand that critiquing is a skill that needs to be cultivated along with the other skills these novice writers will be picking up, and that this course is the place to get exposure. I’m totally on board with this idea, and I got some good ideas about other areas of the course that need massaging, so it’s like I said: time well spent.

Tomorrow I have another brief boot camp, this time for the course on the research paper. I feel way more out to sea on this topic and I’m quite eager to get some ideas on how to teach this sucker. For Creative Writing I am far more comfortable, even with poetry, about playing things by ear and adjusting the course for maximal benefit for each and all. With a research paper, I have a pretty fixed way I do research, and I didn’t really develop this until I started doing the Ph.D. portion of my graduate work. I approach teaching as a “Things I Wish I Had Known As an Undergrad” and I suppose this class will be more of the same, yet I felt better browsing through the quite attractive DK Handbook, the book written by the awesome directors of comp at UWM and the text I’m planning on adopting for the course.

All in all, I’m looking forward to the semester and meeting the new crop of students. We have access to our rosters now and I was pleasantly surprised to see five or six students signed up for my section for the research paper—not a bad return considering that constitutes about 20% of my class enrollment and I’ve only taught two classes at UWM thus far, so I guess I gotta be doing something right! Seriously though, I take that as a huge compliment and I hope to give this next batch of undergrads more good learning experiences. College ain’t cheap and it’s sad that a lot of folks who don’t have a knack for teaching don’t get much guidance because it’s the paying student who ultimately suffers, so I make a legit effort to make the work as engaging as possible. So far, so good.

‘Tis a lot of work though.

For some unknown reason, I’ve had access to Setanta Sport for about ten days now and the DVR is picking up all the English football not on FSC or ESPN. I FF’d to the goals in Spurs’ 5-1 demolition of Hull, and all I have to say is that I’d like two servings of whatever the hell Jermaine Defoe is eating, because the man is quite simply frightening at the moment. The first goal was a decent enough shot (the keeper could have done more) but goals two and three actually made me feel bad for the ball. The only adjective to describe it is “violent.” The keeper doesn’t have a chance to react to either shot, but I wouldn’t blame him for diving out of the way.

And as they said on the last WSD (damn it again!), the person most mourning Defoe’s form is one Michael Owen. If Fabio Capello is looking for a starting striker for England, he might just want to go with the little fella banging them in like nobody’s business for club and country rather than a half-fit has-been who has only been newsworthy for missing a couple chances he should have converted.

Current Mood: A Bit Beat |