check-in
It's been an eventful month, getting back to another semester and trying to stay ahead of the endless grading. I'm only one set behind now. Well, three-quarters of a set behind.
In the meantime, though, I managed to get in a motorcycle ride this past Sunday with Maggie, up to the Friendly Store for breakfast and a three(ish)-mile hike out toward the Gap Lakes in Med Bow.
The day before, I facilitated a session at the fall literacy conference, two-and-a-half hours of really excellent information and discussion about the gap between high school and college writing expectations. My brilliant idea for the relatively long session was to assemble smart people from a range of disciplines, who then said smart things about the struggles and gaps they discover in working with first- and second-year students.
A few weeks ago, Maggie and I made a trip down to Ikea to find a new bed, since hers got recalled by the friend-of-a-friend who'd originally given/loaned it to her. Additionally, I've (mostly) finished the cork floor project in the kitchen, and Maggie repainted some of the cupboards, which means the kitchen is much prettier than perpetually-dirty-white-stick-down-tiles-with-ugly-flowers now.
Tonight I got to have dinner with Stephen Prothero, with a colleague and grad students from our program. We talked about rocks a bit (since he was out to the local rockpile today with Joyce, apparently since this is the most exciting thing there is to do 'round these parts) and mostly about the things I guess he probably always gets to talk about when he travels: religion and being on tee-vee. My favorite part of the night was back at the formal talk on campus, though, when he fielded a student question about his spirituality. Though he eventually gave an answer (currently he attends Quaker meetings), he first asked the student why he (the student) wanted to know. Prothero says he always gets asked this at college campus visits, and he believes that most students want to know the answer in order to know whether they should believe/agree with him. He explained that the rationale is something like this: "If you turn out to be a relativist and I'm not a relativist, then I should discount you," or "If you turn out to be a Christian and I'm not, then I don't have to be troubled by anything you've said." I thought it was a smart move on his part, and maybe hopefully (hopefully!) a few students understood the bigger point he was trying to make.
In the meantime, though, I managed to get in a motorcycle ride this past Sunday with Maggie, up to the Friendly Store for breakfast and a three(ish)-mile hike out toward the Gap Lakes in Med Bow.
The day before, I facilitated a session at the fall literacy conference, two-and-a-half hours of really excellent information and discussion about the gap between high school and college writing expectations. My brilliant idea for the relatively long session was to assemble smart people from a range of disciplines, who then said smart things about the struggles and gaps they discover in working with first- and second-year students.
A few weeks ago, Maggie and I made a trip down to Ikea to find a new bed, since hers got recalled by the friend-of-a-friend who'd originally given/loaned it to her. Additionally, I've (mostly) finished the cork floor project in the kitchen, and Maggie repainted some of the cupboards, which means the kitchen is much prettier than perpetually-dirty-white-stick-down-tiles-with-ugly-flowers now.
Tonight I got to have dinner with Stephen Prothero, with a colleague and grad students from our program. We talked about rocks a bit (since he was out to the local rockpile today with Joyce, apparently since this is the most exciting thing there is to do 'round these parts) and mostly about the things I guess he probably always gets to talk about when he travels: religion and being on tee-vee. My favorite part of the night was back at the formal talk on campus, though, when he fielded a student question about his spirituality. Though he eventually gave an answer (currently he attends Quaker meetings), he first asked the student why he (the student) wanted to know. Prothero says he always gets asked this at college campus visits, and he believes that most students want to know the answer in order to know whether they should believe/agree with him. He explained that the rationale is something like this: "If you turn out to be a relativist and I'm not a relativist, then I should discount you," or "If you turn out to be a Christian and I'm not, then I don't have to be troubled by anything you've said." I thought it was a smart move on his part, and maybe hopefully (hopefully!) a few students understood the bigger point he was trying to make.
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