Taking the pledge

No, not that pledge. I am not sure there is ever a good time for temperance and sobriety, but the eve of a new semester isn't it. I refer to the Academic Honesty Pledge, which (as of this semester) all students taking a course in my department are supposed to sign.

I dunno. I do believe in academic honor codes, and I think students should experience rituals that reinforce them every so often. It's how I came up: both the Beloved Alma Mater and the University of Basketball were old-school Southern gentlemen's universities, and as problematic as that heritage is in some respects, they did know how to impress upon students that the honor code was a Big Deal. But I kind of think that a culture of academic integrity has to come from the students, not imposed on them from above; and I doubt that one department, without institutional backing, can do much to create that culture.

I also suspect that to make an honor code really stick, you have to trust your students enough to let them be the enforcers -- and I'm not sure anyone at my institution does. (Misnomer U. began as an old-school Southern ladies' university, you see, a heritage that comes with a strong tradition of in loco parentis. While both of my alma maters have had a student-administered honor court since time out of mind, I can't really imagine the young ladies of prior generations at Misnomer being allowed to run anything of the sort, given everything else I've heard about the Old Days. And the paternalistic attitude still persists, even after coeducation; I was rather shocked, in my first year, to learn that dorms here have curfews.)

And I wonder, too, if we can sustain a culture of anything, considering how many students transfer in or drop out and are only on campus for a year or two. And how many of them live off campus and show up only for classes. So many of our students inhabit a different world from the one where I went to college, and where I taught as a grad student, and I don't know yet what that world looks like.

But it's a start, I guess, and it means that the students in our classes this semester will at least be aware that the university has an honor code. And maybe that's something.

The Small Nephew at One

I haven't really been around babies much. I used to babysit, but only for kids old enough for their parents to trust a youngish teenager with them, which usually meant preschool and up. And on the two previous occasions when I had met the Small Nephew, he was either a newborn or just out of surgery and under heavy sedation.

He's not under sedation now, and he's getting to the age where babies are seriously interesting. One-year-olds can do stuff, like standing up ...



... and vacuuming! (Who knew he was going to be obsessed with vacuum cleaners? He certainly didn't get it from me.)



... and sliding:



... and screeching! (This, unfortunately, is another favorite activity, and he can hit some notes that are positively operatic though not melodious.)



He can also walk -- five or six wobbly steps at a stretch, sometimes, before falling down -- but I was sadly unable to capture this on film. And he's starting to talk, or at least say "Mamama" at sort of appropriate moments. One is a cool age.

Random end-of-semester bullets

-- Final grades are in. I have decided to go to Parentland for three weeks, starting tomorrow, and not to read the evals until I get home in January. I think this will be a healthy and sensible thing to do, in contrast to my previous policy of hanging out in Sleepy Southern Town for days with nothing to do except fret about things my students might say.

-- I started my SAA paper, and then I realized I was trying to find Deep Meaning in a song that goes "John for the King has been in many ballads / John for the king down dino / John for the King has eaten many salads / John for the king sings hey ho." At which point I gave up in despair. Oh dear.

-- On a tangentially related note, I bought the big Richard Scarry book of nursery rhymes, because I had vaguely fond memories of it from my childhood and thought it might make a good first birthday present for the Small Nephew. Who knew there were nursery rhymes about how Welshmen are lying thieves and you should break into their houses and beat them up? I bet my brother and sister-in-law are going to have a fun time explaining that one...

-- Should I teach Love's Labour's or Shrew in the spring Shakespeare class? (Alas, there isn't enough time for both.) I happen to like LLL better, as it has smart spirited women who don't get punished, and it ends with the kind of tonal shift that I have a massive soft spot for, and I can show clips from last year's Globe production, which is fabulous. And it would generally be a better play for teaching students about how Shakespearean language and wordplay works. OTOH, Shrew is an easier read, and it would fit better into this year's lineup of texts since it's pretty much straight-up Roman comedy with a few English twists. (We will be starting the course off with Errors and Plautus's Menaechmi, and I've got Titus, Lucrece, and Julius Caesar lined up for later in the semester.) And the Christopher Sly framework would be really good for talking about metatheater, and there are more film versions, including two different stage productions filmed live, so there would be a ton of nice opportunities to talk about performance choices. Damn, they're both so good, only they're good for such different stuff, and I just can't decide.

I need to learn some more early modern ballad tunes...

... so that I stop humming the songs in plays to music that is totally inappropriate. For example, I'm pretty sure "Pack clouds away" is not actually supposed to go to the tune of "I don't care what they say, I won't stay in a world without love."

Dude, are you TRYING to shoot yourself in the foot?

Dear Ostrich Student,

Sticking your head in the sand so you can't see the deadlines DOESN'T MAKE THEM GO AWAY. The fact that you failed my class last spring, after submitting none of the three papers and not turning up for the final, should have given you a clue that this isn't a successful strategy. So why -- WHY -- have you vanished, nowhere to be seen, on your assigned presentation date for the second semester running?

And what was up with the way you conspicuously failed to hand in the second paper, anyway? First you e-mailed me two days after it was due to ask if you could submit it electronically. Grudgingly, I said OK even though I hate it when students don't give me a hard copy, since it was over the weekend and the late penalty would continue to accrue until you handed it in. Come Monday, you hadn't sent me anything. I asked you about it. You said, "Oh, I thought it would be too late to hand it in." I pointed out that, as the syllabus indicates, you can still get some credit for a five-day-late paper if the grade without the late penalty would have been a C+ or higher. You said OK, you would turn it in immediately. Nada.

Work with me, for God's sake. I want you to get your C- and go away. The presentations are super-informal. If you had shown up and done a half-assed job, you would still have earned partial credit for it. If you show up for the final and make a reasonable attempt to answer the questions, you'll probably earn some credit. But if you pull another disappearing act, I don't have any choice but to flunk you.

Dude.

Stick-Hamlet

This has been a very long and stressful week (and yes, I KNOW it is only Monday; that's the point). But, thanks to a chain of events that I would rather not have had to deal with today, I do have a fancy new printer. With a scanner.

Thus, in lieu of an actual post, have some sketches from the revenge tragedy seminar I took in grad school. (This is the sort of thing that passes for note-taking with me, and I kind of wish I had taken actual notes in that class, but oh well.)

Click to enlarge and behold the Stick-Hamlet in its full glory.

With me grading papers, I have a pet peeve.

AUUGHHH. What is UP with all the unnecessarily roundabout constructions? And why are some students apparently allergic to the word "because"?

"Being that I'm wearing the pope hat, you have to do what I say."

"With me being the one wearing the pope hat, you have to do what I say."

Nonononono. Because I'm wearing the pope hat, you have to do what I say*. Or: I'm wearing the pope hat, so you have to do what I say. What is so difficult about this?

ALSO, why do students always want to write "In the article, they say..." instead of "The article says..."?

* Yes, I'm aware that some K-12 teachers, for some inscrutable reason, tell students that they must never ever begin a sentence with the word "because." Dudes, that's a bogus, made-up rule, but if you MUST follow every silly instruction your high school teacher ever gave you while totally ignoring mine, what's wrong with "You have to do what I say because I'm wearing the pope hat"?