Pimp My Essay

I'm currently finishing off my first batch of marking for the semester - I know, lucky me, right? As anyone who has marked essays in the past knows, it's always a painful process. Even when the essays are all okay, there are some persistent problems that come up, and your brain gets sore from trying to think how many times you've had to correct them in the past.

What goes "Create New Folder" in the night?

This weekend I've been caught in the crossfire of different aspects of teaching (class preparation and marking), research (thesis and non-related entirely new whizz-bang sparkly article projects), job search and social life (I have one, who knew?).
 
And you know what? I'm loving it.
 
I got home from a party with my own kind, oddly inspired by the general relaxed camaraderie that naturally forms among the overeducated idle poor. I had ideas. I even had to get out of bed at 2.30am to write down a rough plan for an article. I'm now looking at expanding my sights into ghosts, the public sphere, peer learning and volcanoes.

I should go out more often, yes?

On Plan B

Today I direct you towards a blog post by one of my more sparkly and spectaculoriffic conference buddies, Phil. Phil went to the (in?)famous Screen conference in Glasgow, and had an underwhelming time - a neat contrast to another friend who went a couple of years earlier and experienced/witnessed exactly the sort of mean nastiness Phil refers to.

The one where I discover I'm a fox.

So the semester has well and truly started, and my tutorials are going well so far. Rather predictably the teaching has taken up all my thesis writing time, and it has been weeks since I've even opened the document. What I also knew would happen, because it always has done, is that once I start teaching I start gravitating towards doing research in the teaching field. So for the moment my mind buzzes with research projects related to classic fairy tales, or perhaps even Star Wars (because of the monomyth connection). When I taught Kalevala and national romanticism, I was all about that, and I still think I might one day do a bit more of an exploration of the "Kalevala process". When I teach first-year contemporary Europe topics I go all giddy about EU expansion and integration - that at least I've been able to channel into my Eurovision Song Contest project, which I now solemnly swear I will submit by the end of the year. The Communciation& Culture survey unit, with Habermas and medieval processions and whatnot got me going on urban space and nostalgia, censorship and pedagogy.

En Garde!

I'm doing some final preparations for tomorrow's tutorials - I'm teaching again this semester, and following a year's worth of not-teaching it feels a bit weird. The feeling isn't helped by the fact that I'll be teaching in the Social Sciences building. I'll be on unfamiliar terrain, beyond the car park!

Uncluttererising

I'm taking some inspiration from Unclutterer and sorting through the study. It's a mess, with bits and bobs everywhere - even when I  have organised things in the past I tend to end up with a "misc." pile. One misc. pile on top of another, time passes... problems develop. Not all of the clutter is mine, of course (like the computer gadgetry and physics textbooks from the early 1990s...), so I can only really sort through my own stuff, but here's hoping that I can at least clear my workspace, sort out my side of the bookcases and be all super-productive and organised come next semester.

...When I venture back into teaching. Eeep!

A rhizome by any other name...

Danica reminded me today that I had promised to explain where the name "Siberian Ginseng" came from, but had not yet delivered. The shame!