I Freshman year I inhabited a dormitory filled with graduate students largely in scientific and technical fields. In the first semester I became famous there by helping some of them pass their French reading examinations, and translating some letters from the Niels Bohr archive for another. In the second semester I tackled the first part … More On Fitting In. On Graduating. On Succeeding. On Wives
Bueno, gente, I want to start this meme while it is hot even though I, personally, will have to come back later to do a really good job at it, as it will take some thought. But the meme is, a) what are you actually ashamed of, and b) what have you been shamed for? … More Self-Tagging Shame Meme
I What I am about to propose is considered incomprehensibly unfeminine. If I implement it I may see my enrollments decline and the quality of my student evaluations sink. But what I would like to do in all my classes is get up and lecture, assign a midterm, a paper, and a final, and leave … More Some Students
Now it is time to link to On Shame, the best post ever of all those I have read. Read it at its home, because I am only reproducing the opening riff. After this it gets truly deep. After unabashedly complaining about having an single income family, of which she is not the earner, that … More The Best Post Ever
PROFESSION The reason I do not like being a professor is that it is not like being an intellectual, it is like being a high school teacher, a social worker, a librarian, a secretary, a mother, a sorority girl, an IT person, and a government employee. I saw this in my first week of professordom … More Roads to Perfection III
*Las cabezas bien pensantes is the title of a story by Elena Garro in the collection Andamos huyendo Lola. I spend a lot of time explaining to undergraduates who are the first in their family to attend college how things work and what the possibilities are. The candor of their questions is refreshing and makes … More Unas Cabezas Bien Pensantes
A friend of mine who is a department chair is irritated at one of her assistant professors because he teaches extra courses, sometimes at night and sometimes in summer. This is to finance his professional travel and equipment, which are not provided by the university, and which cannot be financed through grants because granting agencies … More American Illusions
I Long ago someone I knew made a diagram of the graduate programs in which his wife and her friends, of whom I was one, were studying. The diagram drew and explained the parallels between these programs and the branch of the military they most resembled. The military parallel for my program was the Marines, … More On Becoming a Professor
This gossip is ten years old, but I only recently learned it – through Oso Raro. “The experience that matters to me most — it’s why I’m an academic — is this enormous pleasure and intensity of working and thinking with people,” she says in an interview here. “And to me that’s pleasurable, it’s sexy, … More Jane Gallop
I Do you get a huge rush when you realize, in the text you are composing, that the next paragraph will be your last? Is this moment thrilling to you because you are now about to see the work go through its penultimate metamorphosis, break free from the stone from which it has been carved, … More Tao Te Ching
coldhearted scientist وداد 