Thursday, January 25, 2007

New Classes

This week our new semester started. I will be teaching the same class I had last semester, plus a "development of women" class. I am so excited about it. Today, we had a discussion on feminism, feminists, and how students felt about these words. It was great! The students are very open and did a good job of discussing the topics, staying respectful, and expressing themselves. Some were still a little tentative, and one asked whether I was a feminist. I also had them look at the Kia commercial in which the cars salesfolks sing the Sound of Music "So Long" song, and describe the attributes of the performers. If you remember, the four guys are all a little "pudgy," and the girls are rail thin under their "uniform" outfits. To me this emphasize that it's ok for guys to be of all shapes, but the "average Joe" woman is still thin. Or expected to be. Speaking of car dealerships, I loved the link on Spin page and I probably will use it in class too. That should generate a heated discussion. I do have a man in class that is taking the class to better understand his daughter and the challenges she will face as she grows up. What a guy!

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Tag you are it!

I have been tagged by the lovely Karla.

The tag goes as follow:
Find the nearest book.
Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks.

Manana te espero a la misma hora, no se te ocurra dejarme plantado, y no digas ni una sola palabra de esto a nadie. Si tu abuelo lo sabe, me mata, me advirtio al despedirse. Pero al dia siguiente el no acudio a la cita. (Paula, Isabel Allende)

Finding a book next to the computer was somewhat difficult. The closest was my Czech/English dictionary, which does not contain any sentences! The next book was the text for the women studies class I will teach starting later in the month, and page 123 was a photograph. So then I turned to the nearest bookcase, the first shelf of which has also some dictionaries, and this novel in Spanish that I bought a few years back but have not read yet. I found that I could understand the whole passage! Yeah!

Now I will tag Spin, HC, and I guess Lord Bargain, since the mystic seems to have dissapeared again :(.