Category Archives: Teaching

Exit Facebook. Fat Festivities. Little Bit of Runnin’.

Posted on 14 April 2010 | 5 comments

I made a bold move last night and deactivated my Facebook account. I decided to delete myself because I have spent too much time on the computer lately, choosing to talk to people through a keyboard and a screen instead of simply calling them or going to do something with them. I could have spent the weekend playing disc golf with Ed, but instead I stayed inside on the computer. I didn’t get any of my grading finished, nor did I get my dissertation proposal finished like I should have. I haven’t been writing here as frequently as I should, and I haven’t written anything creative either. All of this happened because I was compulsively checking Facebook. So, I decided to be more intentional and more mindful about my friendships. The only thing I regret is the fact that I won’t have contact with my cousins, but I figure that I can get their phone numbers or email addresses from my brother.

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My friends, Sarah and Elizabeth, and I are going to submit a proposal to another fat studies conference. Sarah is possibly going to talk about pedagogy, Elizabeth is going to discuss pieces of a graphic novel about 18th century fat-guys, and I am going to talk about my high school students’ perceptions of fat and the ways we work to overcome their stereotypes/misunderstandings of fat. I am excited because if we get into the conference, it means that we get to spend several days with each other after just seeing each other for a week during the summer. And, I am looking forward to possibly meeting a friend of hers from Nebraska.

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This morning I ran five miles, which seemed like an eternity. I kept thinking that a marathon is five times as long as what I ran this morning. I got a little discouraged, but then I thought about the fact that I am running 13.1 miles in a few weeks, which is 13.1 times as far as I could run a year ago. Surely, in six months I can double that distance. Right?

I ran past the two cutest older women. They moved over as I ran past, and I said, “That isn’t necessary. I am really slow. I promise I won’t run over you!” The one lady smiled and said, “It’s her first time out here walking, so I’m trying to teach her the rules.” I loved it, and I wanted to ask her if she could please explain the rules to other people who use the trail. It would be so nice if people in Muncie knew the rules of trail usage.

Small things like saying. “Bike on your left!” from far enough away for people to move their three cantankerous dogs off  to the right side of the trail would be amazing. Runners who don’t have their headphones turned up so high that they can’t hear bikers who actually yell, “Bike on the left!” would be an amazing addition to the Greenway as well. I mean there are common courtesies (rules) that users of trails should follow. I suppose it’s too much to ask for people who move under their own power to follow rules when people who drive lethal weapons everyday can’t follow the rules. Ugh.

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I am thankful for freedom.

Food: banana, juice, almonds, fruit snacks, chai latte, two pieces of pizza, rock ‘n’ rye, salad with garbonzo beans, cheese quesadilla

Exercise: ran five miles, walked from Burris to Irving Gym, walked the dogs 1.5 miles, one hour of racquetball

5 Comments

Posted in Disc golf, Dissertation, Fat, Relationships, School, Teaching, Writing

I Am Buried in Grading…

Posted on 12 April 2010 | 5 comments

but I don’t want to do it, so I keep finding means of procrastination. I have all of the papers sorted, and I already know what their grades are for the most part. I simply have to write out grade sheets explaining their grades, what they did well, and what they could improve on for next time.

The problem that I am running into is that one of my classes is so fantastic that I think all of them deserve As or Bs. How do you explain to a faculty who is used to seeing multiple students fail this class that your particular mix of students is talented? There are at least ten students in my five o’clock class who could step into a classroom tomorrow with little or no difficulty. They’d, of course, have the usual getting used to teaching blips, but for the most part, if I had a child in school, I would want any one of them to be my kid’s teacher! My other class is just as smart, and just as talented, but in more subtle ways. However, I am still fairly certain that there will be mostly As and Bs in that class, too. Essentially, these two groups of students have done everything I have asked with excellence, and in most cases they have done more. Well, if anyone doubts their awesomeness, I can just show them their genre presentations or text-sets, and I have a feeling that their text-sets may be the deciding factor for several of their grades.

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Last Saturday, Bec and I completed the last training run for the Indy-Mini. The race was 9.3 miles long or 15K, and we both finished right at 2 hours. She walked and I ran. It must be nice to have such long legs that you can walk as fast as a short, fat kid can run! I don’t begrudge her the fantastic time. She was moving! And, I am so proud of her.

I am proud of myself, too. I learned that I can run a 10:30 for a mile. In fact, I can run that speed for two miles. What it ends up getting me, though, is a very slow last couple of miles, as in 13:30 slow. My goal for the 13.1 mile race is to keep my mile splits for the first half right at 12:30, then I can work a little harder for the last six miles, trying to get negative splits for them. We’ll see if it will work. I may end up walking! 🙂 Slowly. Not as fast as Rebecca.

I am still trying to decide about this marathon thing. I feel good running, but I was pretty sore after the run on Saturday. Can I do 26.2 miles, almost three times what I did Saturday? Both Sarah and Kathy have said they are considering running at the same time as I am. Kathy may run the half-marathon, and Sarah, I hope, is resigned for the whole shoot and match. I am still trying to decide between these two races: The Indianapolis Marathon, The Indianapolis Monumental Marathon. The first one falls at a better time as far as long training runs go because of school, but the second one looks like a more fun course and would allow me an extra month of training. I am so torn between the two. Can anyone offer any words of wisdom or advice?

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Next weekend, I get to play disc golf with Ed. He ordered us some discs off of Ebay. We won a set of ten for something like $50. It’s a good thing they are on the way, because my dog decided to chew my purple disc yesterday afternoon. She shredded one edge of it, but it took her a bit longer than she shreds a regular Frisbee. I consider that a bonus. She now has a new toy, and I am getting new discs. It’s a win, win situation.

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I am thankful for outlets.

5 Comments

Posted in Disc golf, Running, School, Teaching

I Suppose I Can Say This

Posted on 7 April 2010 | 4 comments

I suppose I can say without any negative repercussions, except possibly admitting later that I didn’t get either  job, that I have applied for two jobs at Burris: a middle school language arts position and an elementary position. I am torn as I try to decide which one I want more.

I love small children because they are wide-eyed with wonder at the world. They haven’t had a chance to become cynical. They still rely on you to present information to them and then to challenge them to think critically about it, and they don’t approach everything you ask them to do with suspicion or incredulity. For the most part they are eager and interested in what’s going on around them. Also, when you teach elementary school, you have the option of teaching everything together. There is no distinct line drawn in the sand between English and Social Studies and Science; they all blend together and one subject supplements the other, like they do in real life.

However, I would also love the middle school job. Middle schoolers are in this amazing in-between place where they aren’t quite grown-ups and they aren’t quite children. Or they are clumsily trying to navigate between the two. I would love this job because there are so many fundamentals in language arts that happen in middle school. In fact, they have released a new study, which says that what students learn in middle school is more of a determinant of their future success than what they learn in high school. That makes sense. A good base is the key to any educational endeavor. Besides, even though they are sometimes snarky and hateful, middle schoolers need teachers who love them unconditionally, but who also enforce the rules and challenge their intellectual abilities. I think the early teenage years, more than most would like to admit, are THE most important years of human development. Children are either made or broken in grades six through eight.

I do know that I grow tired of the drama surrounding the selection process for the jobs. I have an incredibly low tolerance for drama, and my threshold has been reached. I appreciate it when people are honest. For the most part, when people find they have to manipulate others, their desire to do so comes from their own insecurities. I know this, but sometimes it doesn’t make it any better. I will never get why we can’t just be honest with each other and why people need to play games. I simply will never understand it.

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My training for the Indy-Mini, which is coming up one month from tomorrow, is going better than I had anticipated. Last week was the best training week so far. I ran 28 miles, and felt amazing at the end of the week. This week is a “rest” week in which I will only run 17 miles. It should have been 21, but I took today off. I woke up late and have just been exhausted. I have probably been exhausted because I haven’t been eating well, and I am overwhelmed with life right now. Teaching, working on my dissertation proposal, and worrying about all the job stuff wears on my body and it comes out in my physical exhaustion and inability to run hard. I have also started playing racquetball, which contributes to my body’s weariness.

Maybe that’s the best word for my state of being right now: I am weary.Weary.

On a more exciting note, I have almost committed to training for my first marathon. I think I have chosen the 15th Annual Indianapolis Marathon. I am looking for volunteers to run this race at the same time I run it. I say run at the same time because I am so slow (I move at about a 12:30 to 13:00 mile); I would hate to inflict anyone with the burden of actually running with me. Running with me as opposed to running at the same time implies that we would have to stay together while running. We would not. Any takers? The race takes place on Saturday, October 16 and it only costs $50 until July 31.

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I am thankful for rest.

Exercise: racquetball for an hour, walking around campus a bit, walking the dogs

Food: banana, orange juice, tall dark cherry mocha frappucino, Puerto vegetarian D and chips and salsa, two pretzels, seven mini Cadbury eggs, medium cherry/grape Artic Rush

4 Comments

Posted in Just Random Stuff, Politics, Running, School, Teaching

Another Spring Break is Gone

Posted on 14 March 2010 | 3 comments

One of these years, I am going to actually take a Spring Break, one where I go somewhere and do something different than what I have been doing for the other 51 weeks of the year. If BSU’s spring break came a little later, I’d go on a motorcycle trip, but I am afraid I will leave and then it will snow. Then I wouldn’t be able to come home, because I am not riding in the snow. As it is, I never accomplish everything I wish to accomplish in the week anyway, so why don’t I learn to take a break. This year, for example, I had a list a mile long, but I did not complete the most important thing on that list. Because I had been putting off grading and my teaching related concerns to put out other little forest fires, I spent the entire break grading and planning for the rest of the school year and not working on my dissertation proposal.

I had every good intention of sitting down for a long spell with the thing and really hashing through it. That will have to happen in the evenings of this week. I have to get this thing finished and turned in as soon as possible. I am tired of looking at it. The part that sucks about having to do it this week is that Bec is leaving for Minnesota on Saturday, so I won’t be able to spend any quality time with her before she goes. I hate that. At least she’ll be back on Wednesday (?), and I should have everything finished by then.

However, I will have my lifeguarding class all weekend next weekend, so I won’t get to spend any time with her then either. When I say all weekend, I am not exaggerating. It meets on Friday from 6pm to 10pm and Saturday and Sunday from 8am to 2pm. I guess I will be running in the evenings for the next two weekends. And, they are long runs, too. Eight and nine miles for the next two Saturdays.

Yesterday I ran seven miles at a 12:30 to 12:45 minute per mile pace, but I still had difficulty sleeping last night. I think it was a combination of all the life-stress I am experiencing right now, the stupid daylight savings time change, and the fact that I drank a tall regular bold coffee. I haven’t had that much caffeine in a long while. At least I didn’t get heart palpitations this time. I did it because Starbucks is doing a bold coffee promotion in which you get a little card that has all their bold coffees listed. If you drink a tall of all eight of them, you get your choice of a free pound of bold coffee. In the end, you pay as much for the eight tall coffees as you would for the pound of coffee, but since you end up with both in your belly, it sounds like a deal to me.

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I am thankful for time well-spent and weird Lily Tomlin movies.

Food:
Breakfast: banana, juice, pop tart, chocolate milk
Running: shortbread
Lunch: almonds, Pure bar, coffee with honey and soy milk
Dinner: onion rings, Scotty’s French Quarter Quesadilla, 23 oz. Guinness
Snack: small bag of Cadbury eggs

Exercise: walked the dogs two miles, ran 7 miles

3 Comments

Posted in Beer, Coffee, Dissertation, Food, Insomnia, Running, School, Teaching

So Many Things I Want to Write About

Posted on 23 February 2010 | Leave a comment

There are so many things I want to write about today, but because of a few people who read things here, take them out of context, and spread them around, I am going to censor myself today. It’s a hard thing for me to do, but it’s probably in my best interest. There are so many exciting things going on in my life right now, that I have a nervous, throwing up feeling every time I think of some of them and I don’t want anyone to steal that joy.

One thing I have to say is that I love my education majors! We had an excellent discussion tonight about one of my favorite children’s books Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. We talked about race and ethnicity, class, land and money, power, gender, education, hegemony, Emmett Till and the Jim Crow south. The discussion was a far cry from the one we had when we talked about book awards that are given strictly on the basis of race. The next time I teach this class, I think I will make sure we discuss those awards after we read this book because I think it helps the students to see why it is important to have book awards like the Coretta Scott King award. After reading Mildred Taylor‘s book, they seemed to have a much better understanding of the racial and ethnic inequalities in our culture that have been and  still are present, though they did point out that the book seemed to be almost tilted the opposite direction. Well, yeah, she’s writing on the heels of the Black Arts Movement.

Tomorrow, I will return to writing Lent entries, but I have had a weird beginning to the week, so I haven’t had a chance to work on my memorization and consideration of the fifth chapter of Matthew. Tomorrow’s text involves adultery, divorce, and oaths, Oh my!

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I am thankful for great days and hopefulness.

Food: banana, juice, chocolate milk, almonds and M&Ms, two grape pop tarts, vegan lasagna, apple, grapefruit, pure bar, green tea

Exercise: ran 3 miles, walked the dogs, walked from Burris to RB

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Posted in Food, Lent, Reading, Running, Teaching