We are not morning people in our house; we never have been. However, this semester, I had all early classes, and of course StepLadder had to be taken to school, so that meant everyone had to be up and out the door, and mostly it was Feckless doing the dropping off and me doing the picking up. Yesterday morning was no exception, we were all a little slow getting out the door, and StepLadder still had a piece of jam toast in her hand as we started off down the street. We said goodbye as I headed to the bus and they headed to school.

Feckless said “I am not awake yet,” as normally they chat on the way to school, to which SL replied, “That’s okay,” and they walked in companionable silence. The school is on a busy street, so we walk her across the road, but usually hug goodbye at the gate to the school field, and she runs to play for those precious 5 or 10 minutes before the bell rings. That part of the day went as usual.

Feckless waited for the lights, crossed the street, and then turned to see if SL wanted to wave goodbye. To his surprise, she was still standing just inside the gate. He watched for a few moments, and she didn’t seem to be moving. He wondered if there was something wrong. She’d seemed happy enough to go to school, but then, they hadn’t talked much on the way.

So he waited for the lights again to cross back to the school, all the time watching as SL stood, head down. By the time he got back across the street and walked up to her, she had moved all of a couple more metres.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” was the reply. “I’m being a turtle.”

“Well,” he said, “It’s nearly time for the bell, and you need to wash the jam off your face. Could you maybe be a leopard and run really fast and go wash up?”

“I can be a cheetah.”

“Excellent.”

By the time he got across the road again, she had run all the way across the fields, the playground and the courtyard, and was going in the door.

This morning, I took her to school, and as I hugged her goodbye, asked what animal she was going to be today.

“A wolf,” was the response. Well, they are fairly quick, even if they go on all fours, so that was fine.

Good News: My Children’s Lit Class is meeting at the Children’s Bookstore for our field trip, which is usually lots of fun.

Bad News: I still have to get up at sparrowfart to go teach Milton to the early class. Milton!

Good News: Students are far more into Paradise Lost than I am, so my instruction to “talk about it amongst yourselves and figure out a list of questions you want me to answer” cop-out actually produces some interesting discussion.

Bad News: Despite my repeatedly leaving a pile of essays invitingly for them on my desk, the Marking Fairies have not made an appearance.

Good News: I get to go home and be fortified by coffee before I walk around the corner to the Children’s Bookstore.

Bad News: When I use my break time productively to check how my character is going in Forumwarz, I find I have been the target of repeated assholings by those jerks, The Knights of LOL.

Good News: More exciting sock yarn arrives in the mail.

Bad News: I am the kind of dork who gets excited by sock yarn.

Good News: Most of my class have turned up at the bookstore and they are having an excellent time browsing, reading and discussing the things they see. Woot! Education is taking place before my eyes.

More Good News: When I go to purchase Scaredy Squirrel at the Beach, the nice bookstore owner tells me I have $10 in frequent flyer credit.

Bad News: Students are clearly skeptical about my excuses for not having their essays to hand back. Damn you, Marking Fairies!

Good News: Disgruntled Students are distracted by the arrival of Feckless at the store. Students always like to get a glimpse of your personal life.

Not Bad at all News: Weird Korean Sub and Bubble tea place down the road has been replaced by Vietnamese Cafe.

Good News: It’s busy-ish, but there is a table free.

Bad News: It becomes apparent that the table is free because it is next two Ladies (not women; women do not have the kind of conversation these ladies are having) of a certain age, who are lunching and talking about their inane lives in appalling detail, VERY LOUDLY. Srsly, it is sad that your mutual friend has cancer, and isn’t it good that she seems to be recovering, and how nice that her nice children were so nice to visit her, but we really don’t want to hear about it. Other things we also don’t want to hear about: your dog’s manicure, or whatever the hell it was, and who came to visit at Easter, and what you made for dinner.

Good News: The spring rolls are delicious.

Bad News: The Loud Ladies’ conversation has taken a turn for the gynecological. Your friend Holly, do you really think she would be happy to know that you told an entire restaurant how many times she “tried” before she got pregnant?

Good News: Both Feckless and I have iPods. So we put them on.

Bad News: Now, of course, we cannot converse about how yummy the food is, and did I notice if there was any more chili sauce.

Good News: Also armed with cellphones, we can text each other. So we do. Feckless texts, “This is SO much better.” I reply, “I am going to pwn them on my blog.”

Bad News: When we finish eating, and disconnect the tech, the Ladies are still at it.

Good News: The current topic of conversation - the son of one of them, who is a Special Snowflake currently studying at a post-secondary institution and cannot make up his mind what he wants to study - offers the opportunity for some lulz. Snowflake Son apparently has dropped a lot of classes, including, most recently, Sociology, because he is “trying to find his path.” “Oh well,” consoles the other lady, “he is a deep thinker.” This last observation prompts me to reply, “That clearly isn’t genetic.”

Bad News: I didn’t say it out loud. I know you were hoping one of them was going to hit me with her handbag.

Good News: Food was excellent value for money. Also, the Ladies provide us with an excellent topic for snarky conversation on the way home, all the way to the Badly Built House, which, despite a booming housing market in this city, remains unsold after several months. Tip for property developers: giant cracks in the stonework tend to deter potential buyers.

In other news: Sarcastic Bastard got an essay with a little photochopped picture of a rubber duck with a stapler in the upper right hand corner.

In my department, we have some policies, which are presented to students in handouts. Now, these policies outline our expectations with regard to things like spelling and grammar, and citation in essays. Essentially, they outline the bleeding obvious for the intelligence impaired. (You know, like Homer Simpson says, “Because of me, now they have a warning”.) I like to think of them as “Don’t Staple a Dead Duck to Your Essay” policies. I give these policy handouts to my students at the start of semester, and I also make mention of them in my Course Outlines and Assignment Handouts, and I remind them, a couple of times before work is due, not to duck up.

You know where this is going.

The Duck files. Conversation 1.

Little Miss Mallard: I see I got a D for my essay.
Me: Yes. That would be a D for “duck”.
LMM: Well, I did ask you if you wanted this work in “essay format”.
Me: Well, yes, but to me “essay format” means something quite different to “with a duck on”.
LMM: My prof last semester said it was okay to hand it in with a duck on.
Me: ORLY?
LMM: Yes, you can ask him. It was Professor Algernon.
Me: I will do that. If you go take the duck off and reprint your essay, I will, out of the goodness of my heart, reconsider your grade.
[Interval of a day, during which I ask Prof Algy about his duck policy, and he claims that no ducking way did he say anything of the sort.]
LMM: Here’s my essay!
Me: There’s still duck parts all over this thing! The D stands.
LMM [bursting in to tears]: No fair!

The Duck files. Conversation 2.

Muscovy Chick: I see you applied the duck policy to my essay. I just wanted to say that it’s not fair.
Me: How is it not fair? Did you know about the policy?
MC: Yes.
Me: And you have copy of the handouts where I explain that the policy applies to your essays in this class?
MC: Yes.
Me: I am failing to see where this unfairness lies.
MC: It isn’t fair.
Me: Are you suggesting that I don’t apply this policy equally to all students?
MC: No.
Me: Then I have to ask, how is it unfair?
MC: It isn’t fair.
Me [bewildered, and admittedly getting tetchy]: What about it isn’t fair? You said you knew about it.
MC: Well, it didn’t seem to me that I would get penalised for stapling a dead duck to my essay.
Me: Even though I said you would?
MC: Yes.
Me: So essentially, you are saying that people who have standards and then hold you to them are unfair?
MC: Quack.

The Duck files. Conversation 3.

Cayuga Girl [snivelling, which makes my score of criers for the week 3]: I have to talk to you about this. ["This" being her god-awful essay, and they always say it in that tone.]
Me: What about it?
CG: I can’t get this mark.
Me: Well, clearly you can, but you don’t want it.
CG: What did I do wrong? It’s not like it has a dead duck stapled to it, like last time.
Me: True, but it does have a metric duckton of, to put it mildly, infelicities and inaccuracies in it. Like this part where you say “anthropologists agree that women are genetically inferior to men”. Why drag the poor anthropologists in to it? This is a Chaucer essay.
CG: I meant “physically inferior”.
Me: I’m not sure that that is an improvement.
CG: Anyway, that is only one thing.
Me: It was your thesis.
CG: Well, what else?
Me: There’s this part where you go on for a page about the bourgeoisie in the 14th Century.
CG: My history professor does that; I thought it was okay. [You note this is a common theme? It makes me wonder what my students blame me for when they are arguing with my colleagues.]
Me: And there’s this part where you say that medieval women never talked about sex. What about Margery Kempe? She went on and on and on about sex: having it, not having it, wanting to have it with some guy other than her husband… You have no evidence for your claims.
CG: I did a lot of reading. And also, no duck!
Me: I saw that. But overall, it’s a clusterduck. You read all these feminist critics. I don’t think you really grasped what they were on about.
CG: So what do you want me to do?
Me: Me? I have no desires here. You wrote an essay, I marked it and gave it back. As far as I am concerned, this is the end of the transaction. Don’t make this about me.
[Long pause. Clearly this conversation is not going the way she wants. I think I was supposed to apologise and promise never to do it again.]
CG: What if I rewrote it?
Me: The last time I let you have a rewrite, you took the duck off and replaced it with a goose. I need some guarantee that letting you rewrite won’t result in more duckwittery.
CG: You are really unfair. [Exit, huffily.]

The Duck files. Conversation 4.

Snippy Duckling: What’s this D doing here?
Me: It’s a D for “duck”.
SD [with a real tone]: So. You’re telling me, I got a D just because I stapled a dead duck to my essay?
Me: Yes.
SD [tone now moving from snippy to threatening]: Interesting.
Me [thinking]: At least she didn’t call me unfair.

In other news, Gender Genie thinks I am a dude.

Hem. I have been slack. This is due to many factors, but I put most of the blame squarely on knitting, which I have been doing a lot of. Also hanging out on ravelry, because that is what us knitters do, nowadays, apparently. (If you don’t know about ravelry, it’s like Facebook for people who knit, except that it has actual, useful applications. Also, I am sorry to tell you, if you don’t know about ravelry, you are tragically non-hip.)

I learned to knit in my teens, when it totally wasn’t cool, out of a book my mother gave me which had nice, clear instructions for how to make more hideous garments than you would ever care to shake a stick at. She did this because she already, at that age, had me pegged as “crafty”; better at womanly pursuits like cooking and sewing (I was making my own clothes by the time I was 12) than she was. Which was a slight contradiction, because, in fact, she was the one who taught me to sew, but I committed the cardinal sin of apparently enjoying it, rather than seeing sewing as a chore, or a frugal duty. My mother was a pretty strong feminist, you see; not that I am not, but she definitely had that whole doing things that are gendered female is bad thing going on. At least in some areas. One day I will tell you all about her 3 husbands. But I digress.

Well, not entirely, because I kind of wanted to write about this tension between craftiness and intellect, clearly exemplified by Stephanie in this post. Stephanie is quite possibly the most intellectual person I know, and her blog is smart and funny and highbrow and sometimes very moving (and again, if you don’t read it: tragically non-hip), and yet it made me really uneasy to see her expressing that idea that somehow talking about crafting objects is inappropriate; like somehow admissions that you are good with your hands maybe means you are less good with your brain. Or maybe that’s just my issue showing.

The other side of the coin, which really doesn’t help with the whole “smart feminists can’t also be knitters” meme, is that conversations on ravelry’s forums show a tendency (horribly common in female-dominant communities) to succumb to pressure not to express unpopular opinions, because, however civilly they are expressed, saying contentious things is “not nice”. And heaven forbid that women utter any words that are “not nice”, because of course that opens them up to being labelled as bitchy.

Unfortunately, I cannot point you to the discussion to see for yourself, because ravelry discussions are only visible to members. The discussion was about Yarn Harlot, and whether her humour is gendered, but it rapidly descended into a whole bunch of shrill “You can’t talk about her! She’s a member here! You are not nice!” hysteria. Even though the discussion was exceedingly civil, and in some cases quite literary critical, rather than personally critical (my opinons were of the milder sort, but unpopular - I don’t think she’s very entertaining, but for god’s sake don’t tell anyone). You’ll notice the strong strain of anti-intellectualism mixed in with the whole “be nice” directive here, too, dear reader.

Having managed to alienate another mostly female community by (according to my adversaries) “overthinking and bringing feminism and literary criticism into everything,” I felt I knew where this was going, but at the same time, I don’t want to leave it alone. It bugs me that I cannot be a smart woman who thinks about stuff, and at the same time, a woman who is good at traditionally female activities like knitting or sewing, or who has an interest in Boarding School Stories for girls, or a Nintendo obsession.

I don’t have an answer, or a pearl of wisdom, here. Apologies if you were looking for closure.

Also, we made some kick-ass Easter Eggs.

SJ has been nagging me about blogging more (which I totally mean to do, and then she writes brilliant posts like this, so I read them and then hang out online and hope she will notice me), and there was a post about “Hai guys, what r u doin’ fer Spring Brake” on RYS, and the two collided in my mind. So here is my list of what I did on Spring Break, aka Reading Week, since it is waaaay to early for actual spring, here.

So my break started with DeKalb, which made me outraged, and sad, and I thought about writing something about it, but I think I said everything I have to say about it once before, unless I want to write a rant about gun control, which currently the spirit does not move me to do.

StepLadder is preparing for her RADA exam in a few weeks, so this week has involved taking her to ballet about a bijillion times, which normally means I get to sit in the lobby and knit, or gossip, or both, but this week we also had viewing week, which means I got to watch the ballet teacher, Miss Lilly, work her magic. This woman is a brilliant teacher. She is terribly strict, and she works the children hard (in the class which was late on a school afternoon, a couple of the girls wanted to sit while they watched one another’s groups because their legs were tired, and Miss Lilly said, “suck it up; you are a tough dancer”), but she does it with grace and humour, and the right amount of praise. Most of the girls (there is one boy, but come on) adore her. The best testament to her genius is that even surly teenagers who were taught by her still clearly respect and admire her. StepLadder listens in her class and visibly tries to do what Miss Lilly wants every second she is in that room. As we were walking out, she was still practicing her skip, and asking me if her toe was in the right place. It’s a great inspiration to see someone who can get that level of effort out of her students.

I read and prepared for my classes next week, in a leisurely way, and marked midterms. These offered a very clear divide between those who had done the reading and had something sensible to say, and those who had not, and did not. Marking provided very little hilarity or entertainment, although there was the gem from the chap who maintained that The Tempest could not be read as a text about colonisation because Caliban married Miranda.

I spent some time catching up on and following this business about Anonymous and the Co$, which I find fascinating, and may well write something more informed about at some point. For those of you who are all, “Wait, whut?” SJ has a summary on Blogher. For those of you who, like me, are more in it for the lulz (as Anonymous say they are, which would totally make me side with them, if I did not already), you can get all you need to know from this video.

Other things: I made a learned to use the video editing software on the mac, a bit, and made some videos of StepLadder disappearing, to amuse her; I edited a very silly video for a friend and bullied Feckless into doing the soundtrack; I wrote a silly story for another online community I am involved in (and NO, I am not linking you); I got caught up on my sleep; I watched a bunch of Muppets episodes because I got Season 1 of The Muppet Show on DVD for V-Day; I knitted quite a bit of a lace shawl; I played some games; I caught up with some friends and family, and I wrote this post. Things I did not do: get my hair or nails done, or any significant housework. All in all, an awesome week. I feel refreshed for the battle ahead.

I don’t think I mentioned that our wii broke a while ago. In fact, I may have failed to mention that my family are totally Nintendo’s whores, but we so are. We have 4 DS handhelds for 3 people (including a special edition pink 1st generation DS that Feckless and StepLadder won in a contest), and we had a gamecube, and now we have the wii.

Nintendo’s customer service is totally awesome. Unlike, say, the cable company or the IT guys at work, Nintendo customer service dudes’ default position is not that you are an idiot who is lucky to have electricity. Rather, they offer sympathy for the problem (”Hard drive failed just after you beat Bowser? That’s so frustrating! That battle is really long!), and they listen when you describe the symptoms and tell them what you tried. Bonus points for the one who was helping me, because he refrained from howling with laughter at StepLadder, who was wailing piteously in the background that her “heart was broken”.

So we had to send the wii to them for a couple weeks, but they returned it promptly, fixed, and replaced the game that was zorched by the defective harddrive. It’s been home for nearly a week, and I have been playing Mario Galaxy quite a lot. Hence, the not so much blogging, because I am pretty sure you don’t really need to know how many stars we need to get before we can beat Bowser again so then we can play as Luigi.

Funny things happened at work, but I wrote about them for RYS, so go read it over there. I need to grab some more 1-ups.

So, apparently, a number of people (like not just one or two, because it has come up several times now in my blog stats) are finding this blog by googling “how to say ‘dumbass’ in French.” Just thought I’d give you a shoutout.

So, this week I taught Beowulf for the first time since the movie came out, and so I had an opportunity to think through and then talk to my class (about half of whom had seen the film) about what I thought were the problems with the movie, or rather, What They Got Wrong ™.

Leaving aside completely the arguments about the quality of the facial animation, and the technical merit (or otherwise) of the film’s special effects, the woodenness of the acting, the oddness of the accents, or whether the penis-covering scene is funnier than the penis-covering scene in The Simpson’s Movie, I really just went to the heart of the narrative adaptation. And there I do have a couple of insurmountable objections.

Before your squeaks of protest get too loud, let position myself. Yes, I am generally a Gaiman fan, although not because of Sandman. The first Gaiman book I read was Stardust, and I read that because it was recommended by Diana Wynne Jones. (I think this came up in the context of both of them having written books which were in some way inspired by Donne’s “Go and Catch a Falling Star,” but it might have been because someone pointed out that Gaiman has a cameo appearance in Deep Secret.) I love Stardust, both in book and movie versions, and I was delighted to find that Gaiman is an author who can really read aloud, too. I follow his blog a bit, I’ve read and enjoyed American Gods, Anansi Boys and Neverwhere. Generally pro-Gaiman, okay? Got it?

I’m also not having a stereotypical kneejerk English Professor The Only Way to Read Beowulf is in the original Anglo-Saxon moment, either. (Although, having said that, Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon as presented by the eccentric Benjamin Bagby is pretty awesome.) I don’t have conniptions about the “hibernicisms” in Heaneywulf; I teach the poem in translation, and I do what I can to help students see what it means by relating the arc of Beowulf’s battles with increasingly impossible monsters to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I’m not offended that the movie strayed from the original text, and I do understand the idea behind the adaptation. I’ve read a couple of the reviews that Gaiman says capture his idea about what they were trying to do (I’ve read some of the other kind of reviews, too). I actually think the idea that Gaiman and Avary had of turning the poem into the “public” version of the story and having their version tell the “real” story is an interesting one. It certainly provides a better answer to the question “Why did Beowulf bring back Grendel’s head after he killed Grendel’s mother in their underwater home?” than anyone else has come up with.

So, what’s my problem? It’s that Gaiman and Avary present sex and kingship as the things that Grendel’s mother uses to tempt Beowulf. Beowulf, in the original poem, is not that kind of guy. He’s not perfect, and he has a fatal character flaw - he has buttons to push, all right, but sex just isn’t one of his buttons. In the poem, after he has killed the Grendels, Beowulf is rewarded by both Hrothgar (the king he has rescued by slaying the monsters) and Hygelac (his own king). The kings give Beowulf all of the traditional rewards suitable to a hero - money, treasure, weapons, land - except for one. Neither of them offer him the hand of a princess in marriage, and Beowulf passes up not one, but two obvious opportunities to ask for a wife. There are women in the poem who make eyes at him, but Beowulf doesn’t see it, and his failure as a king to produce an heir seems tied to his inability to see himself as anything but a single hero. In fact, he’s so disinterested in the women who are in the background in the mead hall sometimes students ask if it’s possible to read him as gay, but he seems oblivious to the boys making eyes at him, too. (Wiglaf, in the movie, might be one of them.)

Kingship is thrust upon Beowulf; the explanation of how he becomes king is brief, and then, suddenly, in one line, it’s 50 years later, and there is no mention of a wife, or heirs. The poem is silent on the topic, but it’s easy to read an implied criticism of Beowulf as king in this silence; he should have a dozen grandsons eager to go and fight the dragon, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t express regret over this mishap of fate; instead, he charges out - sword in one hand, cane in the other - to fight the dragon himself, as if he is still the young tough he was at the beginning of the poem. In essence, Beowulf’s death at the end of the poem comes about because he never was able to exchange his identity as a hero in order to be a king.

Fundamentally, then, it makes no sense for Beowulf to give in to the temptation to have sex with any woman, no matter how much her bosoms are defying gravity, in order to be rewarded with a kingdom. He doesn’t want a kingdom, and he doesn’t want to have sex with her either. He should have had no trouble in resisting temptation. That’s where I have a problem with the adaptation - Gaiman and Avary went for the most obvious Hollywood cliché - and the really irritating thing about it is, Beowulf really does have a flaw that could have been exploited, and it might have made the movie more interesting.

What is Beowulf’s Achilles heel? It’s his desire to be famous for his deeds. The poem ends with a description of the hero, and the final word of his epitaph sums him up perfectly. He is lofgeornost: the most eager for glory.

You can’t tell me that’s an alien concept in the movie industry.

Student evaluations of instruction are a thorn in the side of any instructor; it’s like, once a semester, they get to throw a free punch, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Of course, you get quite a few who only manage a swing and a miss: “this teacher were to tuogh on spelling and grammer,” but others do manage to connect, and it’s the ones that hit you in unexpected places that can really be disheartening. I don’t mind the random jabs at my meanness, or my dress sense, but the one who said, “do not mock people who are funnier than you,” really stung.

I know it’s not just me who has angst over evaluations; look at all the ink spent on navel-gazing. And what do we learn from all this scholarly research? That student opinions of their teachers are swayed by chocolate. Nice. That’s really going to make me roll philosophically with those punches. If chocolate is all it takes, why would anyone stress about good teaching? But no, I will take the high road.

I do get a chance to make my case; there’s a form I have to fill in that talks about my teaching in the classes that have student evaluations, where I get to complain about the heating system making a sound like a jet taking off, or the fact that the motion sensor attached to the lighting in the room was located too far away from the teacher’s desk, so that halfway through the class, all the lights would go out, and students would need to stand up and wave their arms to make them come back on. There’s a leetle tiny space on that form for comments about student behaviour; just enough room to write, “never have I seen such a group of egregious sloths - these reluctant slugs could not even get it together to read children’s picture books.”

But, let’s face it, this is not enough. The fact that this is not enough is the whole reason Rate Your Students exists, bless their tiny cotton student-loathing socks.

This semester, I am preparing an Instructor Evaluation of Students. Based loosely on my institution’s Student Evaluation, it will have 20 items for me to rate my students on a 5 point scale. Here are the items:

1. The student shows interest (real or feigned) in the subject.
2. The student demonstrates respect for the instructor and classmates.
3. The student’s behaviour is not actively disruptive to the class.
4. The student demonstrates an openness to new concepts.
5. The student makes use of offered opportunities of assistance.
6. The student’s personal hygiene is inoffensive.
7. The student does not actively try to make the instructor’s life harder.
8. The student makes a visible effort to learn (includes grunting).
9. The student responds to instructor’s overtures to promote participation (i.e. will respond to a direct question if eye contact is made).
10. The student comes to class.
11. The student shows an understanding of the duration of the class (is on time, does not leave early).
12. The student does assigned reading.
13. The student attempts to meet deadlines.
14. The student accepts responsibility for handing in his/her work on time.
15. The student demonstrates an ability to follow simple directions.
16. The student gives some priority to fitting this class into his/her life.
17. The student is responsive to instructor requests and/or advice.
18. The student shows an understanding of grading standards.
19. This student shows an awareness of the existence of other individuals.
20. I would recommend this student to others.

That way, I will have hard numbers at which to point and laugh. And I’ll post them here, so others can do the same. I have not decided yet whether to rate all my students, including those who drop the course (skews negatively), or only those who make it to the end of semester and receive a final grade (skews positively), but I have the whole semester to ponder. Suggestions welcome.