The Promise of Posts

I only have 15 minutes of internet time left, so I can only offer a very short post, to promise future posts, some of which may or may not ever get written, so tell me which ones you want to see for sure.

• The Tower of London and the Portrait Gallery, primarily with Nick, my burgeoning radical
• Equus and Harry Potter's bum
• The Theatre Museum and the walking tour of Bloomsbury
• Willow's story
• The sick kids (notmuch to post, except that they are home sick with Willow, and I miss them all)
  
• My shoes and my poor, poor feet
  
• On traveling with 11 people a decade younger

That'll have to do for now, but I promise pics and posts galore when I return!

Landed

In all of the talk of the capacity of college students to do high level work in the classroom, I sometimes forget about college students being, well, everything that college students are. Like, for example, the sorts who like to play small practical jokes on their professor, like taking photos of him asleep while on a very uncomfortable transatlantic flight. To my knowledge the shot was never taken, but there was some debate as to whether it should be.

At any rate, after lots of time in zero time and zero space, we've landed in London, and out little townhouse hotel now houses 11 giddy American students and their exhausted professor. I may stop by this here internet cafe to post occasionally as things happen, but if not, you know where I am. Tonight fish and chips, and an early bedtime. Tomorrow, the Tower, some free time, and Equus. The excitement is palpable. Some of it is even mine.

Wanted: Your Advice

On three completely different issues:

1. I need a resource for basic historical info on the period I am teaching: Does anyone know of a good, fairly concise 20th century history of England? or a good history of England that substantially covers the 19th/ 20th centuries? I have a good history on England and Empire during this period: I need England/ the UK proper. Suggestions welcome.
2. I've just (I know, I know) discovered the joy of podcasts, and have been getting them on iTunes, but don't know how to get them from iTunes to my non-Apple mp3 player (a Creative Zen 40 GB). Any ideas?
3. Any good recommendations on where to eat next week in London? I'll be staying near Paddington Station, and like vegetables (though not exclusively). A range of international cuisines is desireable.
   

Cat Herding

I've been fretting publicly about the upcoming trip to London with my students for weeks now, and it is full of all of the attendant anxieties--10 young ladies, and one young man; a tardy passport, did I mention I've never been to London?

But as the trip itself comes up, I'm actually reaching a sort of calm...it'll be a good trip, the students are all generally pretty responsible yadda yadda yadda.

The problem is no longer the trip, it's the class. See the thing is, the class had objectives, goals, material, that is just completely lost in the excitement of the trip. Try as I might, I've had a really hard time making this a class and not just a club.

Part of the problem is that the class is scheduled for only fifty minutes a week: the other classroom hours are supposedly being spent in London on tours, in theatres, etc.

Part of the problem, though, is that many of these students I've had before, and so even on the first day, there was a familiarity that made for an eroded teacher student boundary. And I think I've not helped this. For the most part, the courses I've taught (many of them first year writing, non-major gen ed courses, or required surveys) have been populated by students who didn't necessarily want to be there. My evaluations often say something like "Made a boring subject interesting" so a lot of my pedagogical bag of tricks are focused around eliciting talk, getting the wheels going, etc.

In this class, things have been much less formal, and the talking has been incessant--often devolving multiple times into off-topic chatter. We have been able to stay on topic in maybe half of the classes: two or three of the play discussions, the day we talked about some of the prominent theatres in London history, the day I gave them the Adorno-Horkheimer-Bourdieu smackdown. So it hasn't been completely futile.

but these students have to come back and write papers, potentially sophisticated ones, and I'm worried that they're going to come back from their trip, refreshed, exuberant, and find that the funfunfun of the London trip has just morphed into a nightmare about wresting their experience into a cultural studies framework that they don't get or don't want to get, and they'll feel completely cheated.

But anyway, on to London. We leave Saturday.

Equinox

There is a reason why, in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the birth of a child and the dawn of the 20th century are announced on the same page. That it is dated March the 20th is no coincidence either.

One senses something newish in the air, even if it is a newness we hope for again and again every year. In the vernal equinox, we find a heady mixture of constancy and change--the reliable expectation of new growth, new life, that which connects us to past springs and to future summers.

After a long, cold winter (although, technically, today is the last day of winter: the equinox is tonight), the sun is shining and spring is decidedly on its way . I couldn't be happier.

Catching Up, Falling Behind

For any number of straws-that-broke-the-camel's-back reasons, I have been behind most of the semester, so much so that I was actually a week late in meeting one writing deadline, something that is quite unlike me. Bu at this point, I'm caught up on my teaching until into April, I am on track in prepping the London tour, I have no imminent writing deadlines, and most of the committees I'm on (most) have finished their work for the year. What I have to do is a lot of reading, much of it with deadlines:

• two essays to read for Monday for our faculty research group, one on disability studies and composition (10 pages), one on women in the Irish Independence movement (30 pages).
• a book chapter that my dissertation partner from grad school has asked me to read--theoretically we're exchenging work, though I've had little on the book project to show him lately. The chapter is on Rushdie and is almost 60 pages long.
• five essays submitted for our annual department prize for research excellence on topics from early American lit to classical rhetoric to, you, know, other stuff.
  
• a book I'm reviewing that I'd like to get a head start on since I'm seeing the work of the playwright in question while I'm in London.
• several submissions to read from the collection I'm editing.
• Plus, several back issues of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the most recent The American Scholar to catch up on.

Good thing I like to read.

But seriously, while all of this reading will take time, but needs to be done quickly, what I really love about it is how wide ranging it is. Some of it is right smack dab in my field, other stuff is material I'd never happen across on my own. This is really one of the great joys of academic community: that my colleagues and friends keep having these great ideas about books, and writing them down, and sharing them. Oftentimes, because of time pressure, this will really feel like work, but truth be told, it's the closest thing to the life of the mind that many of us dreamed about when we sent in our first graduate school applications those many years ago.

Pasaporte

Yay! it arrived! And the database I finally found yesterday said it wouldn't be here until Monday. Now I can go in peace to London. Except for the fact that I'm going with 11 undergrads all atwitter about Harry Potter's arse. And the fact that my passport picture makes me look like a serial killer.