After my long absence, I come to you with more tales of tutoring.

On Wednesday, I was working in the ESL lab. One of the students was on the part of her paper where we discuss grammar. Note, I am a tutor, not a proofreader, so I don't actually get to tell people how to fix their grammar. Instead, I get to use a variety of teaching tools that hopefully only occasionally make the student feel like I am purposely withholding my grammatical wisdom by making them guess. They have, thus far, been remarkably restrained in not beating me about the head and shoulders with a keyboard for my obstinacy. However, this particular student might have been perfectly justified if she had decided to smack me a few times.

I should also add that I had one of our new(er) tutors shadowing me at this time, as part of his training. I have notoriously bad luck when it comes to conferencing with students while others watch. I have no idea why, since I'm not exactly shy and I do perfectly fine the rest of the time. The time when a student stood up, demanded a new tutor, and complained about my insensitivity to my supervisor? I had a student shadowing me.

So, we're trucking along, and doing pretty well. The student didn't click as well with my normal method of tutoring grammar (modeling the issue by creating a sentence with a similar grammatical problem) as well as some of the student I worked with, but I tried a few other methods and we were managing. Then we came to the following sentence:

"My family is not educated and hard to find work."

I squinted at it for a bit, and created the following sentence as a model:

"I am clumsy and hard to walk."

To the native speaker, it's going to be pretty obvious that both sentences are missing the words "it is" after the word "and." Not so to an ESL student, because a)her native language probably does not contain this kind of structure, and b) English is a stupid, stupid language. No, really. I tried a few different ways of explaining it, to no avail. Take a moment, and try to explain what the word "it" refers to in sentences like, "it is raining." You'll see what I mean. I promised to ask my boss about it and come back to her with an explanation next class.

My boss' response? "Oh, it's idiomatic. There's absolutely no way to explain it in such a way that it makes sense."

As the head of the ESL lab is fond of saying, notice how very close the word "idiomatic" is the the word "idiotic."

On the bright side, modeling works so very well, and sticks in the mind to such a great extent that the trainee tutor has taken to chuckling and saying "I am clumsy and hard to walk" every time he sees me.

I spent about ten minutes today trying to figure out a delicate way to explain to an ESL student that the term 'Cupid's love shaft' might be best avoided.

I love my job.

Dear f-list,

Ya'll are awesome. For serious. Thank you so much.

Bleaaaargh.

So looking forward to going away this weekend.

Browsing yelp, I realized that the only retail context in which I think "crusty" is an acceptable mode of behavior for the staff is in bookstores. I've done both service and retail and, much as it sucks, you do have to be "on" all the time so, while I do have a great deal of sympathy for why someone might be crusty while, say, trying to sell things to the masses, I have a pretty low tolerance. But I noticed that the owners of two of my favorite bookstores have been called "crusty" or "rude," and found myself thinking, "you know, that's actually totally true, but... it really doesn't bother me."

Wonder why that is.

Hrm. So, someone sent me a documentary she made, and I wish I remembered who she is and how I know her. Since my boss was also in the e-mail, I suspect that I know her through work. Since I looked her up and she's 17, I suspect she's one of my students. I also suspect she was a student in one of the classes I TA, since I almost never give my e-mail out to students in the tutoring center. Probably the writing workshop or Shakespeare, because she sent it to my personal e-mail instead of my Cal e-mail, and I started using that e-mail for students when I TAed this 1A this semester. Otherwise, I have no clue.

In any case, the documentary is short and kind of cool, so I thought I'd post it.

Anyone on my f-list who knows me in real life may have heard me, in the past few months, babble like a deranged chipmunk about the awesomeness that is Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage. It's a musical. About Beowulf. Kind of. It played at the Ashby Stage for a while, and they're doing one last show at the Roda in Berkeley before heading out to New York. I noticed today that they had posted a few of the numbers on You Tube.


Grendel and his mother share an, er, touching moment.


King Hrothgar. With an accordion.


The battle between Beowulf and Grendel.

Department: ANTHRO
Course Number: 160AC
Course Title: FORMS OF FOLKLORE
Units: 4.0
Grade: P
Credit Code: PN

I passed my Folklore class. I fucking well passed! I am extremely pleased about this, since I failed the midterm, wrote crazy caffeine-and-sleep-deprivation-induced things in my folklore project, took the final while sick (I have NO recollection of what I wrote), and was unable to complete part of the short-answer section.

...actually, taking all that into consideration, I'm not sure how I passed. Perhaps the GSI made a typo while entering my grade. Perhaps he was moved by the Christmas spirit. Perhaps he was very happily drunk. I have no clue. I hadn't intended to go look at the scores for my final and my folklore project (mostly because I was 99% sure I wasn't going to pass this class, and looking would just depress me), but now I might.

A- in Greek Drama, and B+ for Biblical Poetry. One more grade to go, for my Narrative Poetry class, but I'm not as worried about that one. All in all, not bad for my first semester after transfer.

Trader Joe's baked thai tofu sliced up and eaten cold is delicious beyond all reason.

I love the break between semesters so much. I always end of being almost as busy as I am during the semester, because I get bored if I sit around the house for a month, but I'm busy doing stuff that I want to do. I also take a perverse amount of pleasure in reading the books that I want to read -- much as I love the stuff I read for my major, a great deal of it isn't necessarily what I'd choose to read in my spare time.

( Cut to avoid boring people with a long and involved description of what I've been doing since school let out. )

Including the gentleman from Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog, unless I'm mistaken. Isn't that him in the white button-down shirt, towards the end?

EDIT: And Margret Cho! Ha, just noticed her in the background there.

I am so freaking moody tonight. I have no idea why - I'm in a good mood - but every fucking thing is making me weepy. For no reason! What the hell is up with this?

I had a sword out in the living room this evening, and the cat tried to bat at the end of it while I practiced. I feel this is a testament to how completely incapable I am of looking intimidating, even while armed. Also, possibly a testament to how many brain cells my poor little darling is lacking, since long + shiny + sharp = good toy!

Oy.

Muahaha, almost all of my shopping for the holidays is done. It was rather limited this year... when I left the elementary school, I also took a three dollar pay cut, and I've had to be pretty careful with the money since. It doesn't help that the elementary school, for all its faults, was always timely about paying its employees, which the community college is... not.

I am currently addicted to the BBC's Merlin, which is odd, because I'm a snob and I usually get into a royal snit when a show or movie chucks its source material out the window (and oh my god, have they ever). In spite of that, I find myself oddly charmed by how adorkable Merlin is and what a complete and utter jerk Arthur is while still remaining a decent person. Also, Anthony Head plays Uther, which probably would have won me over in any case. All hail King Giles!

My other current fixation is Shaw's "The Devil's Disciple." I saw a production of it about a month ago, and picked up a copy of the text today. I'm sort of a sucker when it comes to fictional characters who are basically complete asses doing something stupid and self-sacrificing, and doing so in a believable way. It's much less interesting when the person sacrificing themself is already pretty much a saint. Actually, that sort of might explain why I find Merlin so entertaining.

All my recent posts have been school related. I promise, I'll be more interesting once the semester is out, but for now it's geek city and snippets of whatever project I'm currently working on. This, for instance, is a chunk of my final paper for Geek Greek Drama:

"In spite of the central roles played by kings in Agamemnon and the Oedipus cycle, they remain relatively one-dimensional characters; they are arrogant, stubborn, proud of their own power, and rarely motivated by personal attachments or softer emotions. Each is the idea of a king, larger than life despite his flaws. The kings portrayed by Euripides, while retaining the characteristics of their predecessors, are also motivated by a love of their wives and children; they are fully-developed, intrinsically human characters, and act as such, mirroring the overall shift in Euripides’ plays away from the archetypical, and towards the individual."

I wish that spellcheck would stop telling me that 'archetypical' isn't a word. It only does it to hurt me.

Just finished signing up for next semester's classes, after a bit of a scare when I thought that they had, for some reason, canceled both of the classes that I wanted to snag during the second part of sign ups. (It, er, turns out that I was looking at the fall '08 classes at the time, which is why I couldn't find them scheduled.)

Shakespeare in Theater (taught by a professor I have this semester, who is absolutely batshit crazy, but quite likable)
Milton
Gilgamesh: King, Hero, and God
Elementary Biblical Hebrew (at 8:30 in the freaking morning, which means leaving the house at 6:30)

I'm going to hell, and my GPA is going with me.

Analysis: This joke could be interpreted as a kind of adult fairy tale. Within the psychoanalytic perspective on fairytales, there is the idea that the stories act as a kind of catharsis for children, allowing them to confront their hidden anxieties and subconscious urges. The kid in this joke is an example of what might happen if a child doesn’t read up on their fairytales; he becomes an evil stepson for the adults in the audience, instead of the evil stepmother that children hear stories about. Throughout the course of the joke, he indulges in all kinds of taboo behavior, consorting with loose women, pursuing incest, and eventually plotting to destroy the adults in his life. This is a child who has not had a chance to confront his anxieties about adults or his urge to commit the forbidden. The joke’s foray into generally off-limit topics might be one of the reasons why the contributor finds it so effective for breaking down conversational walls; once these topics have been broached, even in humorous form, there’s not much chance than anyone will be overstepping the social boundaries – it's already been done.

It should be noted that I hate Freudian analysis. Hate hate hate it. Ah, well, at least I have a nice hand basket picked out.

So tired. So much left to do.

Why does my coffee taste like soap? It didn't taste like soap a moment ago. There is no logical reason for it to taste like soap. And yet, it does. So, why?

I'm working on a folklore project due Tuesday, and have been doing so for most of this past weekend. Right now, I'm using an example of legend from my time at as a tour guide at the Winchester Mystery House. I also suspect that I may be getting a bit punch-drunk after beating my head into this thing all weekend (and for much of the past month).

Text:
This is how I told in on tour:
"Mr. and Mrs. Winchester only had one child, a daughter named Anne, in 1866. Tragically, Anne only lived for about six weeks, before she died of a rare childhood illness called marasmus. In 1881, Mr. Winchester died of tuberculosis. Legend has it that after these deaths, Mrs. Winchester went to see a Boston psychic, who told her that her husband and daughter had been murdered by the vengeful spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle. The psychic told her that if she wanted to escape death herself, the only way to appease these spirits would be to build a house, and never stop building. As long as the house remained uncompleted, Mrs. Winchester would live forever."

Texture: Conversational, save that it was usually delivered in the cheery tones used by anyone working in the service industry who is hoping for a tip when their job has been completed.

I feel that my ability to maintain a scholarly, analytical tone may have been compromised somewhere along the way.

Obama won. I sat at work, refreshing the page every few minutes to see the results. A friend texted me the news while I rode BART home. I was, and am, overjoyed. Don't get me wrong.

But now I'm watching the numbers on Prop 8, and I'm so angry I could spit. There's a four percent gap and closing, but the "yes" vote is still winning, and I'm scared. How can anyone, in this day and age, think that it's okay to legalize difference?

EDIT: Back to 6%, with 46% reporting so far.

My kitty Pan, who I've had since I was about ten, is having kidney function issues. They're not filtering the way they ought to; nor are they holding on to potassium. I'm supposed to go in today and have the vet train me on injecting fluids under his skin. Won't know how much this is going to alter his survival time until we see how he reacts to the treatment.