My exchange students and I had our last class together today, although they will be around town on internships until the end of August. We watched Eagle vs. Shark
.
I suspect my end to the session was a bit perfunctory (pretty much “thank you and goodbye”) but I did not want any emotions to run too high. This is the fourth year in which I have contributed to this programme and regular readers know a little of what it means to me, particularly in terms of the friendships and experiences it has brought me abroad.
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There’s always plagiarism in my courses, usually from people who are running out of time, or who anticipate gaps in their knowledge of what they want to cover with their writing, or who don’t believe in their ability to turn a phrase of their own on the topic at hand. I’m more-or-less confident, these days, that I always catch it. Many students expect to get caught, but feel it’s the only chance they’ve got at creating something that might pass.
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The exploration of Orientalism that the students and I conduct typically ends with a partial examination of this film, which is difficult to say the least. I present it as an example of the ways in which Orientalism can work inside territories to which Orientalism is also applied.
Thus you get a film made in an Orientalising manner about people–young, would-be suicide bombers–who describe the world in similarly essentialised, dichotomous and hierarchical terms. While the ideology within the film is relatively easy to pinpoint, the ideologies that shape the film are more slippery. It’s quite a challenging task.
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I have non-teaching time, at this, the sweetest time of year. Most of Concrete University, and much of Sockburn too, is heavy with blossom. Individual petals blow in drifts across lawns, adhering to my clothes and hair, the north face of the house and in the ears and up the noses of unsuspecting puppies. A few days of rain at the end of last week made the gutters run with lemon-coloured pollen water. The return of the sunshine is such that, though eyes stream and grow puffy on people and animals alike, the whole of the western suburbs seems to be strolling about, amiably, in short sleeves, asking itself how nice it is to see the sunshine.
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This has been a weekend full of many things, diverse and diverting, and I feel as if I’m still letting the experiences and the thoughts they generate sink into memory and brew there awhile. At the same time, I’m fired up with that desire to make a post that I’m sure many of you recognise. What can I pull together from pausing, midstream, in experience?
The inner transformation that I feel knowing my teaching load is now officially lighter is hard to describe. I still have the usual Monday morning early start to attend to tomorrow, but I feel as if in the interim I have reclaimed some of my mental energy, my ability to think slowly and in a leisured way, rather than simply schedule, schedule, schedule.
Even though I achieved my goal for this intake of not bringing significant amounts of work home over the weekend, I felt as if my working responsibilities followed me most minutes of the day. Tasks recently completed left a trace, those immediately to hand loomed large and those that needed to be dealt with at a slightly longer remove made their presence felt too. All required an effort, an expenditure, of thought; the best of my thinking really. This is the feature of teaching that’s both ineffable and essential, the constant considering and reconsidering, always pushing classroom practice through the sieve of reflection in order to smooth, refine and ready for reuse. It whittles away the functioning attention span for a perfectionist like me, to the extent that often though I had my weekend I was too caught up in my professional loop-track to do the very things that would help me relax. My next year’s goal will be to push on through these symptoms too, as creatively as I can.
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Posterous
Table of the Elements
12 May, 2009
in commentatrix,teaching & learning
There’s always plagiarism in my courses, usually from people who are running out of time, or who anticipate gaps in their knowledge of what they want to cover with their writing, or who don’t believe in their ability to turn a phrase of their own on the topic at hand. I’m more-or-less confident, these days, that I always catch it. Many students expect to get caught, but feel it’s the only chance they’ve got at creating something that might pass.
[click to continue…]
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