First days

[gogmagog]

Well, just finished my first day teaching Gen Ed Lit and am sitting in my new office holding office hours (which I'm sure no one will come to the first day). My students all seem like nice kids, and the class in general went as well as I could really have hoped. Though I would have been pissed if it hadn't, since I dressed up for today - even wore a freakin' tie! Because this is me we're talking about, my clothes were in the ever-so-subtle shades of lime green and lilac (shirt and tie, respectively), making me look vaguely like a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure character, but I think it totally worked in the end. (Purple and green are my favorite colors, FWIW.)

It's very odd being back in EPB, though, post-flooding. My basement classroom is totally sweet - not only does it have all the tech it had before and more, but I've got a freaking WHITEBOARD, it's awesome! - but my new office is in the emergency stairwell (literally; I suppose it'll come in handy in case of fire). I can't complain about my office at all, though, since I'm only sharing it with two other folks, and most people I know are sharing offices the same size with five or six (my co-presidency of our grad student organization apparently hath its privileges). The building is still under heavy construction in the basement, where the flooding was worst, and the entire floor smells ridiculously chemicalish from the new linoleum (and presumably from the numerous mildew-killing chemicals they must have used). But the building in general smells a lot less chemical than it did when I came in on Thursday, which is good!

I also checked out the new Speaking Center, which is in the old M/MLA offices. It's actually probably nicer than the old basement space (which has been converted into a classroom to meet the desperate need for classroom space, with so many buildings still closed due to flood damage), though I guess we're going to have to move again at the end of this semester.

In other news, my syllabus is TOTALLY AWESOME, and the only thing I regret is that I can only put so much awesome stuff into one fifteen-week semester. I'm even doing some issues of Sandman! (If you're wondering, I'm doing "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "Ramadan," and I'm pairing the latter with Shelley's "Ozymandias," which I'll totally be using next semester to tie into Watchmen...SO AWESOME.)

Edit: Whoa, putting in the JoJo Wikipedia link made me wonder...what if I could teach some JoJo one of these days? FRAGILE LITTLE MINDS, THEY WOULD BE BLOWN

Comments

[tastystirfry.livejournal.com]

Does your curriculum call for a section on Vaguely Homoerotic Japanese Comics of the 90s?

[eikitty.livejournal.com]

When I was an undergrad at Yosi's school, I took a class with a teacher who would have taught that class if she could. She actually dismissed a certain yaoi anime because in her opinion, the sex wasn't hardcore enough.

[yoshitsune.livejournal.com]

Haha, which one? (Hopefully not Boku no Sexual Harassment, because if the corn scene wasn't hardcore enough I DON'T KNOW WHAT WOULD BE.)

Also was this one of the Japanese instructors? Would she still be around? (I do know a few of the teachers there from my own class, though I'm not sure how many would be the same as when you were majoring in it.)

[yoshitsune.livejournal.com]

If not, it should!

[sergiekins.livejournal.com]

All I can think of is this somehow coming up and it being the most awesome thing ever.

"Now, can anyone tell us how Dio freezing time and dropping a steamroller on someone is actually an allusion to the vanities of life?" (Or something equally non-sensical/awesome)

[yoshitsune.livejournal.com]

No, see, Dio - who, as a vampire, is associated with the aristocracy, in spite of his own low birth - co-opts a symbol of blue-collar workers (steamroller, associated with construction), which signifies his repression of his own base roots and subsequent privileging of the aristocracy over the lower classes. But even that is not enough to help him prevail against a truly wealthy aristocrat, in the person of Jotaro, who not only comes from a noble British lineage but who has the wealth embodied by the Speedwagon Foundation. Therefore, Dio represents the eternal but vain struggle by the proletariat to join the aristocracy by repressing their brethren.

Hirohiko Araki...like Karl Marx, in a way.

[eikitty.livejournal.com]

Were you there when they had the temporary auditorium (or whatever) built for orientation? One of our salespeople sold that job. I don't know much about it other than it was kind of a clusterfuck.

[yoshitsune.livejournal.com]

I wasn't, thank God...the only orientation I had to go to was our department one, which was held in the public library (since our building had just unofficially reopened like two days before and still had gigantic air hoses blocking the main entrance to pump fresh air in).

I'm not surprised it turned into a clusterfuck, though - a lot of space issues around here are just completely fucked up, and probably will be for a while. :(

[jantalaimon.livejournal.com]

Though I would have been pissed if it hadn't, since I dressed up for today - even wore a freakin' tie! Because this is me we're talking about, my clothes were in the ever-so-subtle shades of lime green and lilac (shirt and tie, respectively), making me look vaguely like a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure character, but I think it totally worked in the end. (Purple and green are my favorite colors, FWIW.)

Now you just need to totally freak out your class by stalking around menacingly one day and timing your words very, very carefully and delivering them in an exceptionally flat, measured way. And then asking them why they're so serious. >3

[yoshitsune.livejournal.com]

Haha, that would be awesome...except I'd be afraid someone would complain, because there's a large group of people out there who are all ZOMG YOU MUST NOT DO ANYTHING THAT COULD CONCEIVABLY BE TAKEN AS MOCKING SAINT HEATHUS CHRIST, and with my luck one of my students would be one of them. XD;;;;;

And believe me, students get het up about the weirdest things...one of my friends heard on her end-of-year surveys that one of her students was apparently offended that they had to read Toni Morrison's "Sula," because it was "pornography," lol. XD

Also, I need to see The Dark Knight. D: