For Class

The New York Times section called "Vows" has a weekly wedding video. This week, it's a great video of a same-sex couple. Enjoy!

Punctuation

I just found this Salon.com article from 2008: "Is the semicolon girly?"

Hmmm. And of course the implication is that "girly" is undesirable, yeah.

The best line in the article is the last one: "Lynn Harris: Wait. And the period is manly?"

Makes me think of Gloria Steinem's 1978 classic "If Men Could Menstruate."

What motivates us

Check out this video, made from a talk by Dan Pink. (Double click on it to see the whole image.)

What if every organization could embrace these ideas?

Where I work

I work at an institution with one of the worse IT infrastructures I've ever seen. Here's the latest weird thing IT cannot do:

When someone changes her name (for example, by getting married) and needs to update her email address, she will miss out on a lot of communication because of this "fact":

"[T]here is no way for IT to forward e-mails going to my old address to my new address (or to make things come to my old address from my new address)"

So we have an IT department that can't figure out how to forward email.

*Sigh*.

Literature students

1. Reading end-of-the-semester work from my American Women Writers class, I've run into two surprises (more to come, I'm sure):
2. One student copied Sparknotes as her "reading journal," which is supposed to be a piece of writing every week before class to jot down some thoughts about the day's writers.
3. One student wrote this run-on sentence about poetry: "Then with [Audre] Lorde and [Adrienne] Rich it was the whole poetry thing, I just don’t understand it, its not that I don’t like poetry, but I think I like the more popular and classic stuff that’s a lot easier to understand, like Dr. Seuss or Shell Silverstine.”

Popular and classic poets: who knew?

Desperate Slacker

Here's an email response I just received (today, first day of finals week) from a student who has missed eight classes -- four weeks of our semester -- and has said, "If I do not pass this class, I do not graduate":

Dear Professor Daniels,

I wanted to bring to your attention, what I believe to be, a discrepancy in the attendance record you sent me in the last email. Although I was late I did attend class on Feb. 18th, I also participated in the on-line class on March 2nd. I’m going to continue working in hopes to finish this course with a passing grade. I know that you are aware of how critical a passing grade in this course is for me, based on our previous conversation. I truly appreciate the guidance you gave me heading into the conclusion of this semester. I know I should have sought a solution to my issues with the online blog earlier in the semester but if there is anything I can do to find my way to a passing grade so that I could graduate at the end of this semester I would be eternally grateful. If you feel there is no way to make up for my lapses this semester, then I look forward to your additional guidance in our future semester as I retake your course.
Thank you very much for your consideration.

Well, I wonder how s/he thinks s/he is going to "continue working in hopes to finish the course with a passing grade" -- the course is already finished. So it looks like s/he won't graduate, doesn't it?
*Sigh*.