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Sep. 3rd, 2005 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainChapter 14 of Mordant is up at Schnoogle. Wherein Sirius punches Snape across his office. (Come on, you know you want to see it.)
First week of classes went OK -- I still haven't learned any of the kids' names properly, and when I made them read the first half of Agamemnon for Thursday, several of them came in looking like Aeschylus had personally clubbed them over the head. (And frankly, with the translation we're using, I can't entirely blame them. Somebody needed to tell Richmond Lattimore that "I ask the gods some respite from the weariness / of this watchtime measured by years I lie awake / elbowed upon the Atreidae's roof dogwise to mark / the grand processionals of all the stars at night / burdened with winter and again with heat for men, / dynasties in their shining blazoned on the air, / these stars, upon their wane and when the rest arise" is not a parseable sentence in English, whatever it may be in Greek.)
On the other hand, teaching the second half of freshman English during the first semester is beyond cool. Granted, I have two sophomores who either started at the lowest level or failed one of their comp classes the first time around, but the rest are either sophomore and junior transfer students, or freshmen who are well ahead of their peers. They pay attention! They ask intelligent questions! One of them e-mailed me to tell me how much she loves writing and was looking forward to the class! I can't believe it took me five years to figure this out.
First week of classes went OK -- I still haven't learned any of the kids' names properly, and when I made them read the first half of Agamemnon for Thursday, several of them came in looking like Aeschylus had personally clubbed them over the head. (And frankly, with the translation we're using, I can't entirely blame them. Somebody needed to tell Richmond Lattimore that "I ask the gods some respite from the weariness / of this watchtime measured by years I lie awake / elbowed upon the Atreidae's roof dogwise to mark / the grand processionals of all the stars at night / burdened with winter and again with heat for men, / dynasties in their shining blazoned on the air, / these stars, upon their wane and when the rest arise" is not a parseable sentence in English, whatever it may be in Greek.)
On the other hand, teaching the second half of freshman English during the first semester is beyond cool. Granted, I have two sophomores who either started at the lowest level or failed one of their comp classes the first time around, but the rest are either sophomore and junior transfer students, or freshmen who are well ahead of their peers. They pay attention! They ask intelligent questions! One of them e-mailed me to tell me how much she loves writing and was looking forward to the class! I can't believe it took me five years to figure this out.
