Scheduling woes

I am having a hard time adjusting to my teaching schedule this term. Okay, no, I'm doing fine; I get to all of my classes, and I even manage to be ready for them. So, that's all fine, but I don't like teaching sort of every other hour in the first half of the day. That's not long enough to do much in between (e.g., hold office hours), and it means that what used to be a lunch hour is now a teaching hour.

I had formed the habit of reading for relaxation over lunch because I function better when I do something like that in the middle of the day, but when I'm scrambling to eat a little mini-lunch before class and maybe another one after class, I never do any leisure reading. This isn't the end of the world, but I had really enjoyed being able to make progress at least through, say, frivolous but cosy mystery novels during the school year. That doesn't look so likely this term, though I am not quite ready to give up hope.

The other problem with having smaller gaps between classes is that I have to work a little more consciously in order to get a sufficient amount of food at sufficiently close intervals. One of the early signs of low blood sugar for me is that I struggle to find words for even fairly basic concepts. Another is that I sometimes mix up parts of my sentences. A few weeks ago, I said this at a moment of waning energy: "Oh, look, they have painted trains that you can wood." Well, almost. You can see that neither of these effects would be desirable in a classroom setting.

I have also had to schedule some office hours on non-teaching days in order to avoid what I fear would be uselessly small segments of time in between classes, particularly by the time I allow for at least a brief lunchtime. (Remember that I need to eat fairly regularly.) This addition of office hours to a non-teaching day may actually be good for students, who may or may not find it convenient for all of my office hours to be held on the same days as my classes, but it does mean that I sometimes forget that I'm going to need to be in my office on a non-teaching day. Luckily, my habit is to work out of my office every day, so I have yet to miss office hours, other than while I was hiding at home yesterday, trying to sleep off a bug. The big victory is that I remembered to phone and ask the departmental secretary to put a sign on my door to warn any would-be visitors.

So, I'm still battling to find the rhythm of my week this term. I look forward to the time when (I trust) it will no longer be a battle.

Post-Conquest English

Yes, it existed. Here's a video of a friend of mine being clever on the topic of English as spoken and written after the Norman Conquest. This is such a fascinating period, and I'm always glad to see it get a little more attention.

Optimal language use?

This is not a post about why we should be sticklers for mechanical errors, but I have been thinking a lot about a pair of interesting radio stories I heard around the same time. In neither case have I done any additional research, nor do I have very coherent thoughts to add. I would like, for the time being, to bookmark these and to share them with others who may be interested.

So, in the worst of blogging cop-outs, I offer you first an account of the ways that language may in fact strengthen (or even enable?) the brain's ability to grasp the concept of large but specified numbers. The old joke about the Anglo-Saxons is that they counted "one, two, ... er, a lot!" They had language (or else I'm living in some kind of weird other dimension), so I will obviously have to think more about this topic.

Secondly, here is a defense of writing by hand. I adore writing letters and postcards, but I wonder just what size of a minority I am in on this one. I need to listen to this piece again, and I wish that they had offered a transcript or slightly fuller summary, but the gist is that writing by hand might be good for your brain! So, keep on sending those notes to Grandma!

Climb Every Gehu?

While working on the final chapter of my dissertation (speaking in terms of the table of contents, not in terms of my work schedule), I concurred with academics who had previously goggled over a seemingly inexplicable gloss by the Tremulous Hand, but my "internal external" examiner (as opposed to the external external examiner, you see) made a point at my defense that led me to a possible explanation of this gloss. I am planning to write this up, but I'd been afraid that it would be nothing more than the merest, barest note. At this stage of my career, to be frank, I'd prefer a nice, meaty treatise. As I was listening to a lively MLA discussion on editing Old English, I saw another way that I could fit this merest, barest note on the Tremulous Hand into the context of some of the larger editorial questions we are facing today. This is not going to become my magnum opus, but I think that it will be a little more substantial now, for which I am very thankful.

We tend to see a divide between two styles of editing, and this editing dilemma could be posited as a tension between the maintenance of standards, on the one hand, and the cultivation of storytelling, on the other hand. How do we tell the story of the stages in a textual history without removing our regard for a deep knowledge of, in this case, the Old English language? Similarly, we wonder how to take advantage of the openness that the internet and digital tools make available to us without sacrificing the benefit of long experience with the language and materials, as offered by traditional academic study. For the Tremulous Hand, the trick is to tell the story of the layers of accretion in the manuscripts and printed texts without losing sight of the fact that we believe some of the glosses to be inaccurate. In fact, this is the same problem faced by parents who hope that their children will meet the world with confidence but who shrink from a culture in which we all seem to believe ourselves to be Very Special. That last bit probably won't be in my article.