“I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
I’ve just been reading a student paper when I came across the phrase “It would be remise to say…” [emphasis added]. I know the student meant “remiss,” but it was curious to me that this didn’t trigger spell check. (I am reading the paper in my word processor.) So I decided to use my handy electronic tools to look up the word.
The Oxford American Dictionary says the following:
remise |rɪˈmiːz|Fencingverb [ no obj. ]make a second thrust after the first has failed.nouna second thrust made after the first has failed.ORIGIN French, past participle of remettre ‘put back’.
Perhaps I should send the paper back for the student to revise, you know, to make a second thrust. Of course, this makes the invocation of the character of Inigo Montoya in “The Princess Bride” that much more comical, as fencing was his forté. We can’t seem to escape these fencing references, can we?
But it is this time of year that I think of reaching for my copy of Herrings Go About the Sea in Shawls, Alexander Abingdon’s compilation of classic howlers from student papers and exams, illustrated by Dr. Suess (New York: Viking, 1997; 1959; 1931). Oh, the things we teachers do to preserve our sanity.
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Deer Tick Tuesday
As one of the institutions at which I teach has no classes scheduled today, I have the day open. Originally I had planned to use it to get caught up on grading. That’s still in the works. I do have to play a fair amount of Dad’s Taxi. But the first order of business is to see my doctor about this deer tick that bit me on Sunday. The fourth grade science geek in me actually saved it in a sandwich baggie, where it crawled around, intact, for a while. That is how I was able to determine that it was indeed a deer tick, and that while it had bitten me, it hadn’t attached. It’s in attaching that the real magic occurs of transferring the parasite that causes Lyme disease. Again, all very fourth grade stuff.
So while I don’t think I’ll get Lyme disease, I’d rather leave that determination in the hands of trained professionals, so off to the MD I go. Wish me luck!
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Last spring I published some reflections to my course blog that included some reflections on a talk by Leymah Gbowee, one of three women who won the Nobel Peace Prize today.
icancstructures:
Discussion not facilitated by me broke out in The Sociology of War and Peace today, in consideration of Alex Morrison’s contribution to Patterns of Conflict, Paths to Peace, (Ch. 3), on conflict resolution in the international arena. It seems that this topic has been waiting to break out all…
My students already don’t understand the gesture….
And they’re off!
I’ve just completed my first two classes of the Fall 2011 semester at UMass Lowell. There’s always a breathtaking sense of the new, the freshly scrubbed and of new possibility. I’ve forgotten how much I treasure the inquisitiveness of students at this juncture in the semester, and what a toll projecting to a large group can take on one’s voice. But despite a few technical glitches, we are most certainly off to a good start.
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A Maze of Twisty Little Passages
I am in the throes of writing syllabi for my Fall semester courses. I’ve got two down, and three to go. Right now I am working on the syllabus for Internet, Society and Everyday life, my theme for two of many sections of first year “Seminar in Academic Inquiry” at Endicott College. Partly because I’m a little bleary-eyed about now, for not having done as intensive computing in a while, and partly because the subject matter has me spelunking deep in the dark underbelly of internet history, I’m reminded of that little game “Colossal Caves” or “Adventure” as some of us may have known it.
A Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike
I’m not dating myself, for I only have a dim memory of playing this on a mainframe at somebody’s dad’s work, while I was in the Boy Scouts and high school. Rather, I’m more likely to have read about this in the now-classic Soul of A New Machine (1981) by Tracy Kidder. Either way, the sense of attention to detail and long hours seem reminiscent this early variant of addiction to silicon, which is to say, what people did to fritter away the hours before Tumblr. Also, Steve Jobs’s resignation also recalls for us this longer view of computing history.
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Fall Course Planning on Flickr.
Via Flickr:
Dept of “If you knew how sausage was made”
This is a screenshot of my Bento record for the first day of one of my classes at UMass Lowell.
Uploaded with Skitch
I love this post, not only because I get some of this all the time, but because I teach sociology, not even “social studies,” to college students (not all of whom are bored) and who have fairly broad job prospects. Indeed, most people in education and human services tell me “I loved that course.”
theatlantic:
bbo13 writes:
I am a teacher. And I could easily write volumes about the variety of things about teaching in general that many people (particularly parents and politicians) just don’t seem to understand. For example, those couple of “free” months many (though certainly not all) of us might…
Ridin’ Dirty
I don’t mean the song by Chamillionaire (though that was a favorite of the teens on the “Gallop to Gallup” service learning trip). Rather, I thought it was curious that the word “riding” kept popping into my head when I considered the waves of weather here. First it rains, and is cooler and breezy, then the sun comes out and it gets positively steamy. I think a cold front is descending on us from Canada.
Then I realized that I’m teaching tonight about Mancur Olson’s “free rider problem.” “Beware of economists bearing gifts,” my professor William Gamson and his colleague Bruce Fireman wrote, providing examples of places actual people depart from the assumptions of rational choice. I have to teach this to the night class.
So today I’m riding heat and storms without and within.
