I can’t decide if my online students a) didn’t read Chuck and have no way of figuring out how to mimic him (EVEN with my list of ten items in the Chuck Packet!), b) don’t care to write one last paper arguing something, c) just didn’t want to “get him” and “how he writes in an outside-the-box manner, or d) really do think they are imitating him by just ranting… which isn’t exactly what I had in the Chuck Packet. Yeah. Talk about frustration. And, as expected to some teachers, my on-campus students did well – I assessed their P5s yesterday. Yet, I gotta say that, I didn’t give them much more than the same freaking Chuck Packet that the onliners have and read it ALOUD. Jeezus Pete.

Do I have to read it to my online students too?
Should I even be giving them a list to follow – shouldn’t they ALL have read, by now, the things he does? Name-dropping and odd metaphors and large words?

Ugh.
I have to stop spoon-feeding. Somehow.
However, that means more complaints.
Yikes.

Back to the show.

I wrote recently, in an email to a friend, that I couldn’t wait to be done grading after next week. Because then, like, I’ll have 2-3 weeks of non-grading bliss before… yeah… before summer school. But I cherish those weeks of non-grading-ness. I’ll have to pack and run instead, but still. A brain break, people. A break for the brain – no evaluations, no charts, no points to add up or delete. And, yes, once again, I think I’ll revise my grading strategies with some assignments (if not all) so that it’s a win-win situation. Easy for students to understand, easy for me to complete. Yay.

I’m always super hopeful pre-summer time. I’m going to do this and this and this and this. Ah, I’m such an optimist.

Right now, I’m in the middle of assessing P5s in English 120. I have my on-campus class finished; I have the two online to get to. We have Agawasie Day tomorrow, and then I have my 9am/3pm schedule on Friday; therefore, I should wrap up one online class per day. Totally do-able. Then the final stuff comes in next week. Yep.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27788478/Sex-Drugs-And-Cocoa-Puffs
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3503667/Pop-Goes-the-Culture-613
http://www.scribd.com/doc/34449983/Mixture-of-Quotes

Two Days Late and Half Off.
[our trivia name last night]
The bf gave me The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy last night as my Valentine’s gift (among chocolates, etc.)…
that got us/me thinking of other “classics” I’d like to read:
The Grapes of Wrath
A Wrinkle in Time
Lord of the Flies
War of the Worlds
Slaughterhouse 5
Him = The 3rd Policeman

I told him that I’ll start on Hitchhiker’s once I wrap up David’s book.
Then I may have to read Klosterman’s other fictional piece – Eating the Dinosaur.
p.s. We talked about the TV show Lost and how they used a lot of stuff from Alice In Wonderland; that got me thinking = what if I assigned that book in English 110. Students could dig into the pop culture pieces that use that book?

The Syllabus Quiz (especially on-campus) should not be multiple choice, but short answer-based. I’m thinking specifically of the question: “How long will it take the instructor to grade major projects and papers?” Instead of multiple choice answers ranging from 2 weeks (correct answer) to 5 seconds (yeah, right), I would ask them WHY they think that is placed in the syllabus and WHY it would take 2 weeks. I think that takes them beyond just memorizing a piece of the syllabus; it makes them think of why that’s there and maybe they’ll be more likely to remember and less likely to ask me when a paper will be graded. I’m not superwoman, and they aren’t my only class. It’s not a bitchy move on my part; it’s critical thinking, isn’t it?

Oh, and another radical thought… I’d like to use the “Dear Me At ___” Letter idea. In fact, maybe I should use it on the second day or third day of classes. Like, write a letter to yourself at the completion of this course. What will you want to have accomplished in the class and outside of the class. It doesn’t have to focus on our course, but the time span of a semester – how much will you change? How much will happen?

p.s. Eating the Dinosaur is at Leach Public Library (Wahpeton’s library; our campus library is called Mildred Johnson Library); I need to finish I’m Down first… then maybe I could put aside Jenny McCarthy’s until I tackle Eating the Dinosaur and David Sedaris’ new one?

So… before I send my Chuck Klosterman IV back to the library, I’d better plop down some of my favorite lines.
-”[...] Where’s the conflict? What is the problem? I mean, you said it yourself: technically, you are the hero of the story.” “Yes,” he said in response. “Technically, I am. But isn’t that always the problem?” (8)
-”[...] There is this cliche that artists are pure and businesspeople can’t be trusted. Well, in my life I’ve met a lot of artists who were real assholes, and I’ve met a lot of businessmen who walk their dogs. So these things aren’t true. We need new thinking.” Bono, page 26.
-”We are all lead by instinct, and our intellect catches up later.” Bono, page 28.
-Listen to the song “There is a Light that Never Goes Out”?
-Use Morrisey’s songs as teaching tools? “Reader Meets Author” is a good song to use?
-”But if you give of yourself, you do get things back. Sometimes that’s tangible, and sometimes that’s intangible. It’s more like gambling: when you gamble, you try to give yourself the best possible odds of success.” (70)
-Read “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” but David Foster Wallace?
-”Being a fan of Metallica in the ’80s was not supposed to be fun. Loving Metallica was like being Catholic: if you truly believed, it was supposed to inform every aspect of your life. I could not relate to this.” (101)
-”[...] and the possibility that just about everyone is a little damaged.” (104)
-”But sometimes the difference between self-actualization and self-amusement is less than you think.” (112)
-”[...] it wasn’t that goth kids weren’t considered violent; prior to that tragedy, goth kids weren’t even considered scary. They were just the kids who listened during English class.” (121)
-”It’s impossible to understand the present if you cannot see the future.” (156)
-”What’s weirder: admitting that you’re crazy, or always pretending that you’re not? I do not know.” (181)
-”[...] but he thinks too many Americans exist in a ‘culture of intellectual laziness.’” Word. Dude, that is so true. Said by Mike Skinner, a white rapper. (204)
-”The things that matter to normal people are not supposed to matter to smart people.” (209)
-”Choice makes us depressed. We just don’t realize it.” = “Barry Schwartz suggests [...] ‘the culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction.’” (216) = “In the present tense, we always want the maximum number of alternatives; in the short term, choice improves our lives, and we’re completely aware of that. The problematic rub is that – over time – choice isolates us. We have fewer shared experiences, and that makes us feel alone.” (218)
-“If you ask any single man if he’d prefer to (a) have sex with a thousand different women or (b) have sex with one woman a thousand times, he will always take option ‘a,’ even though he knows this decision is virtually guaranteed to make him feel awkward and alone. In the present tense, we always want as much individual choice as possible; once that present has passed, we’re happier if we’ve experienced the same limited options as everyone else.” (219) This connects to many things… Chuck’s example brings up how if you’re at a pub and a guy says he likes Beck (and you do too!); then you run into someone who just watched Glee (and you did too!). These shared experiences bring people together. Johnny Carson was the last guy to do that (which is the point of this essay).
-QUESTION: Think about your life. Think about the greatest thing you have ever done, and think about the worst thing you have ever done. Try to remember what motivated you to do the former, and try to remember what motivated you to do the latter. How similar are these two motives?
-Women are more likely to hate people and men are more likely to hate things that can’t hate them back. (245)
-”Every so often, I look at the condition of the world and I suspect that the most widespread problem we have is the growing sentiment of anti-intellectualism that seems to infiltrate everything, particularly politics (where intelligent candidates are attacked for being intelligent) and advertising (where everything is designed to convince smart people they’ll be happier once they agree to become dumb).” (277)
-”It never matter what you like; what matters is why you like it.” (280)
-“Voltaire once argued that every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do, and I suppose he had a point: if I spent as much time analyzing al Qaeda as I’ve spent deconstructing Toby Keith’s video for ‘Whiskey Girl,’ we probably would have won the war on terrorism last April.” (281)
-“They [Americans?] don’t merely want to hold their values; they want their values to win.” (285) = “You’re not wrong, and neither is the rest of the world. But you need to accept that those two things aren’t really connected.” (287)
-”It is very easy to be underrated, because all you need to do is nothing. Everyone wants to be underrated. It’s harder to become overrated, because that means someone had to think you were awesome before they thought you sucked. Nobody wants to be overrated, except for people who live in big houses.” (296)
-”We seem to have no qualms about making postbirth improvements to our feeble selves. Why are we so uncomfortable with prebirth improvement? What’s the difference? Just because something isn’t natural doesn’t mean it isn’t good.” (316)

Lastly, I really didn’t know what to expect once Chuck attempted FICTION. I had heard, from KB, that he “didn’t want to write nonfiction anymore because he didn’t want to talk about himself so much, but then he’s obviously a character in his fiction.” Well, it’s true, but it’s a “good” truth. I feel him in each of the three characters, and I’m okay with it. It’s almost how I’d do fiction. IF I ever did. Yeah. I don’t think Downtown Owl will surpass how I feel about Killing Yourself to Live, but it’s close. I couldn’t put it down last night, and when I did, I dreamt about it. Or dreamt about meeting him, and we got along super well. Then suddenly, I was watching my youthful self with bushy eyebrows wishing I could play football (powder puff)? Then there was a contraption at St. John’s that they were building; then we had a house that was odd, and lastly, I thought two of my front teeth were going to wiggle themselves out of my head. I had about 5 million dreams. That’s a rough estimate.

Should I comment on the image? Na. You’re all smart enough to figure it out, right?

I rearranged THINGS today before my advisees  came pouring in. Okay, there were like four advisees and I wrapped up meeting with all of them within an hour (still, 15min per advisee is a nice time), but that’s not my point. The point is that I kind of cleaned up my office. That’s HUGE for me. And I probably did because it wasn’t DEATHLY hot in there today. Gawd bless Ma Nature and her ability to chill out once in awhile, eh? Totally.

I was an UBER crabby pants today. First, it was a JOINT VENTING session with my officemate about certain students (ya know, that 20% that skipped the second day of class and/or didn’t read the first simple, tiny reading) and then it was a mini-bitch session AT the campus police chief about my apt’s parking lot. I realized my crabby state, however, and said aloud to Anne that I needed to let it all go. It’s overwhelming to go from NOTHING – no physical students or classroom or weather issues – to ALL KINDS OF CHAOS. I blame it all on Ma Nature. Yes, 85% of it because if I’m able to NOT SWEAT in class or my office, I tend to have a 85% increase in attitude. True freakin’ story. (I just used a phrase by Megan and a statistic by Chuck Klosterman; I give credit where credit’s due, man). Yeah. So, if we can keep the sweating to a MINIMUM for the rest of the semester, I’ll be okay. Students will skip and not read, but I don’t HAVE TO SWEAT JUST BY SITTING do I? No. Let’s leave that for when I finally start exercising, okay? Okay. Great. Wonderful. Fantastic. Peachy keen.

So, food food food…
FJ: (b) cereal + brownie? (l) pb&j sammie + D.Coke + a few almonds&raisins + a small Babe Ruth bar. (d) 6 buffalo wings (bone-in) & about 3-4 pieces (some were corner pieces) of Vinny’s Hawaiian ‘za. Mm mm. Oh, and for dessert = brownie w/maple nut icecream. Water as the liquid. Yep.

So, I just totally pulled a teacher move on my own essay. Printed off what I have to say about Chuck so far, and then circled and made arrows and notes. It ends up looking like a basketball coach’s sketch of what the next play should contain. You go here and do this, you need more spit to fly out of your mouth before you get the ball from Nimrod, etc. Oddly, I’ve started writing like Chuck, I think, in order to write about him. I don’t sound very academic, and that was one of the big warnings we got from the editor of this book. Don’t sound too academic. Check mark that, yo.

But I’m hoping that that’s cool; that he’s infiltrated my writing style. He sucked me in, drenched me in Chuck goo, and then sent me on my merry way to spread the Good Word of Chuck. Basically. Yeah.

I just want it to be good. And not even, “Oh, I can tell she’s a teacher,” good, but like, “Oh, man, she’s funny and I think she’s right,” good. That probably doesn’t make sense. And I don’t think it has to; I’m writing about Chuck for crying outloud.

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Sidenote: I ran into some former students last night “downtown.” They didn’t totally hate my classes, and I realize they could’ve been lying to my face, and yet they gave me advice on how to make it better. The two pieces of advice? Swear more and come to class hungover. *shakes head* The one was super disappointed that I hadn’t come to class hungover at all; I told him I did that once or twice in grad school and it wasn’t fun, so I told myself no more of that with a “real job.” He didn’t think that was good logic. They never do.
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FJ: (b) watermelon. (l) BK. (s) Snickers. (d) chinese take-out.

cook⋅ing [kook-ing] –noun

3.        throwing random things into a crockpot, then waiting to see what happens.

See, kids, definitions DO change… or rather, evolve. Whatever. If definitions don’t change, then “gay” would still mean “happy” and all those homophobes would be pointing at others, calling them “happy” which just isn’t the case. And, yea, one of my students was correct the other day when he said that “retarded” is the new “n-word.” I still have many issues with the n-word, but I do feel that retarded has changed. That’s a long, drawn-out argument to save for a paper or class discussion. Blog entries, by definition, are supposed to be snippets of love and humor, right? [In that case, I think my last few entries of brainstorming = FAIL.]

Okay, so with that intellectual paragraph out of the way, it occurred to me last night that one can gauge a lot about an evening by how often he/she is in the restroom. Case in point, I had lovely company/conversation last night, so I had no reason to hide in the restroom. Also, I did not drink myself into oblivion (like some people tend to do; that’s my definition of “retarded” by the way), so I wasn’t in there “talking to the dinosaurs” nor was I ridding the bladder of toxins. Once, a friend of mine made like three new best friends in one evening via restroom conversations; it made me wonder (all Carrie Bradshaw-like) if the people she was with, then, were really all that grand or if she’d simply purchased her body weight in vodka that night. I definitely think I am onto something here.

Oddly enough, this blog entry sounds Chuck Klosterman-ish and my English 120 students just handed in their “Chuck Arguments: Project #5″ last night at midnight. It’s a new project; they’ll be interesting to read.