One of my students had to mention that we only have 13 days until classes start again.
I am not ready.
Next week, I have to get my syllabi ready and figure out this brand new courseware they’re forcing us to switch to, at the same time when my granddaughter Iliana is visiting. This is going to be impossible. Unless Ily is ready to help? She’s what, 10 months old?
Yeah, she’s ready. Looks eager, even. I’m sure she can hammer out a syllabus in no time.
That would be a massive underutilization of resources.
Obviously, she should be representing you in meetings and preparing reports.
And teaching my classes!
I wonder if Skatje would mind leaving her with us for the school year?
Well, classes started on Monday, but not for me as I’m home sick
She will be a great help to you! Whaking away on the keyboard linke TV-hackers :) (My godchild does the same thing)
Well, you’ll have to teach her Mad Scientist™ skills sometime, so might as well start now, when there are a fresh batch of new
studentssubjects to experiment on…At least you’re not working on a PC tower circa 1994 with a bright red button in the front that goes “BOING!” when it’s pushed. My 2 year old son found that irresistible and daddy’s reaction made it even better.
13 days! Good god, it’s the middle of August
I live in Canada where the academic year will probably start about the 10th of September, all going well, and ends at the last of April. We have short academic years.
This may explain why my first (US produced) Russian Language text was so bad. The US assumption seemed to be that given enough time the ideas would percolate through. They did not. The idea seemed to be if one repeated phrases enough then one would learn the language. Does not work in a Canadian context.
Given that I and most of my classmates had already studied two or three languages it was an amazingly maddening book. It really had no academic/linguistic structure that I could see.
After about 2 months, we convinced the professor ( a Russian refugee from the University of Chicago) that we actually understood the principles of grammar and syntax.
Things got amazingly better when the prof realized that we understood what a declension was.
You could quite literally hear the sighs of relief when he began discussing the grammatical forms of a declension. I do not mean we were dancing in the isles or anything but the relief was palpable and audible. We finally started to understand Russian language structure.
Genitive form, okay got that and so on….
Awww! That child is so bright and beautiful. She looks like she is enjoying life so much!
Of course, PZ would hire a young, cute, blond girl (showing a lot of leg!) as his assistant. I figure the chances of a hire just like this were on the order of 50%.
Cool. We share an operating system.
Maybe you can require all your students to wear the same shirt as Iliana??? ….on Mondays, as a way to gently nudge their brains back into a new week of rigorous study.