Saturday, June 16, 2007

tandem tedium

I talked with my husband about the kind of work I'm doing right now, review literature, writing scant notes and annotations, reviewing literature annotations, making glossaries and scant notes. Sometimes sending out pleading emails explaining the project and begging for information or ideas.

He said he feels like he could do a PhD with his project. Except that right now he doesn't have to take exams for his project, and he gets paid lots of money to do his thing.

I may get to do my thing, too. But they only pay me when I do things for them. I don't regret taking a break from that. He's not doing a PhD yet.

My sometimes roommate and classmate just read my pre-proposal. She love's my topic and said she had a "teencrush." I've been repeating that to myself as I prepare to write more in response to her awesome notes and a few points of WJT Mitchell that I just made yellow.

I never used highlighters until this year. I've always had them around, pesky things, hard to avoid. That used to be the case with overhead markers, which thankfully seem to be out of fashion.

Oh, what a smelly digression. Thinking about pens puts me in mind of teaching in Halifax. I do a six week ESL gig every summer. Once I showed up with suitcases and some lesson materials, but no pens. I still had a chalk holder from the previous summer, but I had a new whiteboard classroom. Back at my old student bookstore I stocked with pens, and I was supplied with whiteboard markers by my supervisor. It seems she had raided the clearance bin at an office supply store. All of the teachers' markers smelled like cheap pipe tobacco or melted peppermint ice cream, depending on who you asked.

They were, in fact, dark brown, choco-mint scented dry-erase markers.
Some teachers don't use the board so much. If you teach a language, you do.
You really do use a lot of dark brown, choco-mint scent to convey the nuances of spoken English to a humid classroom of late adolescent francophone Canadians.
I'll get markers on my next trip to staples.

Good school supplies are essential to my projects. My husband needs good hardware.

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