What I'm Up To Today

1. Ate breakfast (two eggs over easy plus two pieces of toast)
2. Played on the computer
3. Went for a nice long power walk
4. Showered and listened to NPR
5. Went to the library and returned to the Pulitzer-prize-winning novel I should* be reading in order to check out a new chick-lit-esque novel by a former classmate.
6. Visited Target, my home-away-from-home, to pick up prescriptions, yard sale signage materials, and buy a new pair of shorts. (Okay, the last one wasn't essential, but I look damn cute in 'em.)
7. Shopped for groceries--stuff to whet my appetite. Like chips and dip. (I had 'em with a salad, so back off!)
8. Ate lunch and began reading said novel.
7. Emailed my fall textbook orders.
9. Spoke to my presumptive future landlord about my presumptive new home up North.
10. Played on the computer
11. Got my ass away from the computer to work on academic writerly crap.

*Note: I have decided to avoid the word "should" as much as possible from now on. I often do what I want to anywho, so why am I wasting time feeling guilty about what I should be doing?

Not Sure What I Think

Like that's anything new, really, but I'm particularly unsure about this case. Trying to learn more, I (of course) Googled her, and found this piece from the Dartmouth college paper, as well as a note from the Gawker indicating that she has dropped her threatened lawsuit.

So, what I gather is that Dr. Priya Venkatesan has a PhD in literature and works to combine science and narrative in her work, which sounds fascinating. What I also gather is that she was hired to teach writing at Dartmouth as a postdoctoral fellow--not as a writing specialist. There is no mention anywhere of any particular training in composition pedagogy, or rhetoric, or anything that might suggest she was well prepared for this kind of teaching.

Which reminded me of a recent blog post by this inimitable observer of all things academia, regarding the use of post-docs to sidestep writing programs and/or labor concerns. While Dr. Venkatesan doesn't come off as someone I particularly want to work with, I have to wonder whether Dartmouth did her, the students, or the goals of writing courses any justice by hiring her to teach these courses.

I just don't know.

Malapropisms

So, they're not really malapropisms, but you know when students don't get an idiom quite right? But somehow, it makes sense? I'm not talking about the student who spelled segue "segway," and misunderstood my oral correction, so that it showed up in the next draft as "segueway." No, these are the ones that really kinda work. Maybe these are the idioms of tomorrow.

So, today's: in a description of the big Buffalo snowstorm of October 2006, as branches cascaded down on his mother's flower beds, all "were destroyed in one foul swoop."

No, doesn't that just make sense?