West of the Moon

Archive for August, 2006

visual thinking.

It’s times like this–having spent a lot of the first day of the semester worrying that I’d broken the scanner that a colleague so graciously lent me, and then in the middle of ferrying back and forth to the library in search of a book with a better image of cuneiform tablets, suddenly remembering that [...]

Tags: teaching, technical difficulties

the calm before.

Yesterday was the last lull, the quiet before everything starts moving. The campus was empty, the libraries closed, the lights off in all the classrooms.
Today it’s crowded again. It’s been a couple of years since the first day of classes had anything but a symbolic meaning for me–it’s a nice change.

Tags: berkeley

pod people.

I suppose that I’ll eventually start to take podcasts for granted, but I’m not there yet. Having radio programs come straight to my computer, so that I can listen to them whenever I feel like it, still feels a little bit like magic. I’ve subscribed to so many NPR and BBC shows that [...]

Tags: npr, podcast

“But the kiss in Colin’s eyes…”

I’m starting to consider making up a cardboard sign and carrying it around with me. The sign would read “GET OFF THE PHONE”, and I imagine myself brandishing it at cars whose drivers are talking on cell phones. I’ve been known to actually shout this at passing cars when I’m out walking, but [...]

Tags: movies

choosing your story.

The exam scoring work is done, and it was fascinating. I was scoring short essays, and while I obviously can’t talk about the essay questions and answers, they did get me thinking (again, as always) about the ways that history is used to create worldviews.
For example, by way of an unrelated-to-exam-scoring story: at WorldCon [...]

Tags: economics, history, perspective

off to work.

Oh, and email/webpage responses on my end will be even slower than usual. I’ll be off somewhere all day today and tomorrow, scoring teacher certification exams. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to talk about this job, since they had me sign all sorts of confidentiality agreements, but we’ll see.

Tags: working

outsourcing the household.

The consequence of all the endings this spring (grad school, dissertation, etc) is that I have a lot of beginnings to put together, and it’s kind of scattershot and distracting work. Preparing course outlines for two classes, preparing lectures for one of those classes, putting together updated job application materials, extracting journal articles from [...]

Tags: feminism