I honed my essay writing and editing skills on Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare and Katharine Susannah Pritchard at a time when I didn’t expect to use them for anything except the most esoteric of pursuits. My explanation to my students of these skills’ value has never pushed much beyond these boundaries, except to say that if you are well-trained in writing and editing, you can turn your hand to most writing tasks, including those of future employers that you can’t imagine yet. The primary function for me, however, of the ability to write and edit has been for my own enjoyment, with the latter, more recently, also for sale in the service of others’ work. [Hustler's aside: my business welcomes your recommendations and referrals].
[click to continue…]
So, yes; I’ve been quiet at these pages for several weeks because I’ve been pregnant, and working under a twofold limitation: the physical self-obsession that this generates and the shadow of our July loss. The first shrank my usual range of narrative topics and the second meant that what remained could not be written about anyway. This may not have been such a bad thing, interest-wise, since I’ve been exhausted, emotional and, as Grinderman has it, “so thin and sick“. You may imagine me as a shadow of my bridal self, waking up with groaning and panic attacks, eating desultory handfuls of dry crackers and lacking, in every way, a sense of perspective or humour. I am grateful for the online honesty of others, particularly Brenda, in this regard; their forerunning of my own experience has offered, if not hope, then something like solidarity.
[click to continue…]
My employment in my current position began in June, eight years ago, when I was grateful to have a job, a salary and a desk to call my own. Indeed, I still am. Since then I have taught continuously for anywhere between thirty-six and forty-five weeks a year, running parallel to, but not in sync with, the wider university’s teaching schedule. In the early start-up days, this included teaching from April to October with no non-teaching time, thanks to two overlapping twenty-four week programmes. In October there was one week’s break and then straight on until Christmas. In 2002, my first year full-time on the job, I went more-or-less mad. I had an office to myself behind the covered bike-stands, which was a fairly grim view but offered privacy for when I needed to cry between classes. You get the idea.
[click to continue…]
My reflective time is at the moment constrained by a different range of duties at work. Concerte University, as you may know, has this year a new leader, which inevitably brings restructuring. In my union capacity, I am in the thick of things, to the extent that the university has seconded me to do this work. I still have my teaching, but for the next few months there will be less of it. My days are what I would call surface-busy: lots of meetings, a great deal of planning and strategising, much communication with members, and little time as a result to sit and think.
[click to continue…]
While the commonplace belief that not much ever happens in this city may at times be true, on other occasions the social whirl picks up. The latest of these eddies has had a bittersweet quality. My exchange students completed their internships and yesterday graduated their programme. Some are staying on for skiing and travel, others are returning home to the last of the humid Kanagawa summer immediately.
These young women are modest and tend, I think, to measure themselves by a deficit rather than a credit model. One explained in her farewell speech how she had aimed in coming here to overcome her “weak points”, one of which she identified as speaking in public. I don’t think their teachers see them in the fashion: we notice instead their persistence and resilience, their willingness to take hard knocks and refuse to give up. I hope in their studies and work to come they have time to reflect more hopefully on what they’ve experienced and accomplished here.
[click to continue…]
DandyID
Blogger
Flickr
YouTube
Twitter
Vimeo
Twitpic
Tumblr
Linkedin
LiveJournal
Mobypicture
Facebook
Picasa
Google Profiles
Google Reader
Posterous
Cultural Learnings for Make Benefit
16 January, 2010
in commentatrix,teaching & learning,writing & research
I honed my essay writing and editing skills on Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare and Katharine Susannah Pritchard at a time when I didn’t expect to use them for anything except the most esoteric of pursuits. My explanation to my students of these skills’ value has never pushed much beyond these boundaries, except to say that if you are well-trained in writing and editing, you can turn your hand to most writing tasks, including those of future employers that you can’t imagine yet. The primary function for me, however, of the ability to write and edit has been for my own enjoyment, with the latter, more recently, also for sale in the service of others’ work. [Hustler's aside: my business welcomes your recommendations and referrals].
[click to continue…]
{ 8 comments }