Spring 2008 by the numbers

Weeks in the semester: 14
Total students: 19
Courses taught: 2
Total class meetings: 69
Times I was mistaken for a student in the library: 2
Times I told them I was actually faculty: 1
Corncob pipes gifted to me with the express purpose of demonstrating my advanced age to library staff: 1
Dinners eaten at the student dining hall, and approximate time of meal: 1; 5 p.m.
Packed lunches eaten in office: 3
Packed lunches eaten in department lounge: 24
Lunches at the faculty dining hall I was dragged to because the French department found my lunch-eating habits too pathetic: 1
Swings to piñata at end-of-year department party: 3
Direct hits: 2
Papers graded: 114
Oral presentations attentively listened to: 37
Novels taught: 5
Films taught: 13
Evening film screenings: 4
Evening film screenings canceled for lack of an audience: 1
Spanish majors who chose me as their adviser for next year: 4
Percentage of them named Sara(h): 25%
Theses read: 4
Combined total pages of theses: approx. 433
Performances of Don Quijote involving shadow puppets and trapeze artists seen: 1
Faculty meetings: 3
Faculty meetings that ran over the 2 allotted hours: 3
Faculty meetings scheduled during key Tuesday primary contests: 3
Tears shed in my office: 0 (whoo-hoo!)
Total F'07-S'08 regalia wearings: 3
Academic years as Assistant Professor down: 1
Academic years as Assistant Professor to go: TBD

John McCain to Josh Lyman: No Way!

My favorite political alternate reality has finally infiltrated actual political reality, according to this article in today's NY Times. Channeling their roles as White House Communications Director Toby Zeigler and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman on "The West Wing," Richard Schiff and Bradley Whitford told the Times that they heard John McCain say he didn't vote for Bush in 2000 while having dinner at Candice Bergen's house. So even media icon Murphy Brown is implicated in this dinner party scandal, which the McCain people have discounted as merely actors acting.

I'm mostly just hoping that somehow Aaron Sorkin picks up the story and decides to run with it in some kind of real-life guerrilla/hybrid season of "The West Wing/Murphy Brown."

Diagnosis: Senioritis

The scene: a student wrapping up a 25-minute discussion of his final paper, due in one week
Where: Seated around a seminar table, in a classroom on campus
When: 5 minutes before the end of class on the Monday of the last week of classes
Who: a notorious senior, witnessed by five classmates and the professor

[Translated from the original Spanish by SJB]

Profa SJB: And, by the way, "fall in love" is English usage. It's "enamorarse" in Spanish.
student: Oh, really? "Caer enamorado" is all over my paper.
Profa: Right. So you should fix it before you turn it in.
student: Really? But it's already finished!
Profa: No, actually, it's not. That's why we've been doing this workshop. I highly recommend that you edit your paper taking into account what we've talked about in class today.
student: But there's so much to do this week... there's the Senior Cocktail party!

Leisure for All

SJBlog reader and avowed friend of the working person Ms. Mattsie sent along his traditional May Day call for solidarity today, this time in the form of what he describes as "Walter Crane's quite famous maypole cut, from 1894. A very important icon from the English -- and world -- labor movement." I'd never seen it before, but thought it was worth sharing.