Month: August 2009

For my course on reading selected biblical texts, I’ve indicated that we’ll read excerpts from the Mishnah, the whole of the Didache, the Epistle of James, and the Gospel of Matthew. We’ll read the Pirkê Aboth as part of the Mishnah reading, and I’m inclined to read tractates Berachoth and Yadaim — unless someone has a better idea. (That’s an invitation.)

I may be teaching a course on method in interpretation this coming year (I still don’t quite know), and I’ve been cogitating about how to teach such a course in a way that both coordinates with what students may leearn and practice in other people’s courses, and also coheres with my theoretical interests. I think I may be able to do it by taking a little time away from teaching “how-to” and devoting that time to understanding the background rationale of the approach — how it fits into the hermeneutical ecology, as it were. If that works, it would contribute to articulating my own thinking for the students, and would also help students see how various modes of reading relate to one another (and to their starting intuitions about reading and interpreting).
 
Still, I expect I’ll feel like a Latourian teaching Physics 1.

Today I finally paid my August rent for the Glasgow flat I’m yet to occupy, and now I’m ensconced at the Hatter, trying to gear up for curricular planning. The difficulty I’m experiencing clarified for me one reason I wanted to get to Scotland by now: having spent only scant time in the environment in which I’ll (Home Office willing) be working, I have a hard time doing the imaginative work of envisioning and planning the courses I’ll be teaching. It would help if I could sit down with colleagues and talk through similarities/differences relative to teaching in Glasgow, but it would make an even greater difference if I had a sense of the place and atmosphere within which to frame my course plans.
 
Of course, I can go ahead and make course plans regardless — that’s what I’ll do — but to the extent that there‘s something like craft in planning, it surely involves knowing the setting and audience of teaching, both of which are opaque to me in my current situation.

This morning I woke up promptly, hopped in the car I borrowed from Clay and Sarah (thanks, Clay and Sarah!), drove two and a half hours to Charlotte, walked into Biometrics Central, gave my fingerprints (again), walked out ten minutes later (maybe less), drove two and a half hours back to Durham, picked up my pay records from Duke’s Payroll Central, came back to Clay and Sarah’s house, and collapsed into a heap. Plus, I took a shower, which impelled me to think that when I finally get through this visa madness and have a place of my own, I’m going to go on a showerpalooza, practicing comprehensive hygiene with a ferocity hitherto unknown to people not affected by obsessive-compulsive disorder — it’ll be that satisfying to have access to a regular shower.

I like the tenor of Dean Dad’s ideas about evaluation in his IHE column today. The keys are evidence and locating energies and incentives in the right places. Dean Dad is right, that it might be hard to reassign grading to other faculty for certain courses, and at higher levels — but enlisting the teacher on the students’ side over against the grader, and assessing outcomes based on well-shaped, well-aggregated evidence, that sound very promising indeed.

Right after I blogged about Diesel Sweeties‘ CC-licensed back issues 1-10, R Stevens released Volume 11 (links are awkward at the moment, will add them later).
 
I’m heading back to North Carolina to complete my second visa application. I’ll probably be reunited with Margaret and Pippa there, but I said goodbye to my mother this morning. All this protracted departing wears on the heart.
 

I greatly appreciated the force and candor of my lawyer’s advice relative to applying for a visa. “Do not,” he said, “suppose that you can use common sense in satisfying the requirements of section 141. Do not think that something must be obvious or rational; supply precisely what the guidance stipulates and nothing else. Common sense has nothing to do with it.”

Does anyone know of a downloadable, editable translation of the Mishnah — or even just the Pirkê Aboth — that I can excerpt for a course this fall? I have the Blackman translation, but only as jpegs/poorly-recognized OCR.

Well, at last I got through to a lawyer, and he indicated that all the materials I have been gathering relative to my visa pplication won’t do. There are two very specific things I can submit, I don’t have either, so now I’m back to start and seeking the correct versions. Departure now sometime toward the end of August, if all goes according to plan.

I’ve been enjoying catching up on the webcomic Diesel Sweeties via the ten volumes of collected strips available for free as ebooks. It’s very R-rated, and R Stevens is not an artist in the style of Hergé or Paul Duffield (but more varied than Dinosaur Comics), but the characters are engaging and the banter can hit intensely witty heights.

So, what’s going on now in the saga of my immigration struggles? Well, yesterday I learned that Duke University’s official payroll system would not release any information about my pay without an actual physical signature on a form, which they would then process for several days, and then would send me to arrive sometime next week. That would be great information, but later than ideal, and they would brook no shortcuts. So I called the Div School directly, where the staff recognized my voice, and leapt into action on my behalf. Now, they don’t have records of my precise deductions and all, but they can send a letter from the payroll office of the school stating that I was in fact paid what my contract says I was paid. I’m thinking that that will suffice, when combined with my bank attesting that Duke made direct deposits of the (lower, post-deductions) proportion of my salary, and the contract that indicates what my salary was destined to be.
 
If anyone knows that these will not suffice to persuade the Home Office, please let me know before I send in my application Thursday!
 

I don’t think I’m on the job market any more (I sure don’t want to be), so I’m calling your-all’s attention to this. Frankly, considering the functions and effectiveness of many institutional presidents, it’s tough to see how T-Pain would be less plausible a candidate than one of the same old white guys.
 
Moreover, the prospect for collaboration (“guest spots on each other’s papers and projects”) sounds appealing, and I’d be all about the “on a boat” events. And as far as the country-western taste of the out-going president and his concern that T-Pain might not be able to lobby the legislature, I think T-Pain would be ideal to charm one constituency, intimidate another, and baffle a third.