Happy Birthday, America

You know what this is?

Bacon in a glass of Wild Turkey bourbon.

I don't think I need to say anything else.

Seriously? An entourage?

The Girlfriend and I went out to dinner at one of our favorite Chinese places only to find a line of people waiting to talk to the hostess that stretched out the door.

We figured there was just a minor hangup and things would clear up fairly quickly, so we hopped in line. A number of other people come up behind us and look with puzzled expressions inside before fixing us with their looks of, "Are you really in line, or can I just walk in front of you?" And we in turn fix them with our looks of "Of course we're in line. Do you think we just enjoy standing by the door?"

Then a loud group of thirty-somethings waltzes up and elbows their way around with boasts of, "Just pull your magic and get us a table." "Yeah, let them know who are and we'll be up there in no time."

I look up to see Mario Lopez and his entourage of Class-A Douches fawning after him. They decide to "play it cool" and wait around with the plebs, loudly informing the world of just how incredible they are, and what vast political clout their star has.

Minutes later, the Girlfriend and I are walking off to another restaurant.

One with a strict "No Sycophantic Pricks Allowed" policy.

Day 7 Update

I spend five and a half to six hours every day in the same room.

Normally that's not so bad, but I've started dreaming that I'm back in the class. It's not an anxiety dream, it's not good or bad in any way - I'm just there. Teaching. More.

Lucy and I also found out that we're expected to host review sessions on the weekends. And Liam informed us that we will be not be observing the July 4th holiday this Friday, but will instead be holding a day-long review session. We'll get to take a day off in a couple weeks to make up for it.

So yeah. Things are a bit intense.

Of exams and food stuff.

It turns out that while taking a three hour exam is pretty draining, it's pretty damned exhausting to grade all twenty of those exams and get them passed back to the students by the early afternoon.

In other news, the Girlfriend and I are hosting Lucy & Boston for dinner tonight. They recently treated us to a fine meal of caprese (with Bufala Mozzarella!!), pesto pasta with russet potatoes and a dessert of strawberries and cream, so we've whipped up a wild rice & mango salad, there's an Irish salmon sauteing in teriyaki sauce, and we'll follow it all with peaches baked with a stuffing of crushed almond cookies soaked in peach brandy.

It should be awesome, but we've never made any of this before, so it could be a horrible, horrible experience.

P.S. The workshop has taken over my liiiiife.

Day 5 report

I'll update this more fully at a later time, but I'd like to say one thing.

When over 75% of the class fails a quiz, morale for the rest of the day is pretty damned low. The highest score was a 9.5 out of 10. The lowest was a .25 .

Spirits were downtrodden. Crests fell. Grey skies did not clear up.

And it is really, really hard to teach a class of depressed kids. They cheered up a bit toward the afternoon, but man, it was not a good day.

Then again, they were given over 130 new verb forms yesterday. That might have something to do with it.

Day 2 Report

Now that I've had more than a cursory interaction with some of the students, I've got more of a feel for the group.

We went around the room yesterday and everyone explained why the hell they opted to spend ten weeks reading Latin. Some needed it for their programs (Medieval Studies, Musicology, Ancient History), some needed it to fulfill a basic graduation requirement. One moon-eyed youth simply said, "I think Latin is a beautiful language." He was not back in class today, nor do I expect to see him again anytime soon. That's not to say I'm not pleased at a genuine enthusiasm and appreciation for the language, but he struck me as someone more interested in the idea of studying Latin than the actual studying itself.

Another student professed a desire to read Harry Potter in Latin. Again, I applaud this. I've got Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis on my bookshelf right now. But this is a like taking Japanese to read a kanji translation of Dickens. Sure, you can - but if you're going to read Japanese, why not read something originally written in fucking Japanese?

We've got a blend of graduates and undergraduates, too. It's mostly undergrads, which is unusual for the course, but Liam insists that we keep the bar as high as we would for a class of grad students. This means that we're keeping a brisk pace and some students need to ask a few questions here and there for clarification. Not a problem.

Except for Mr. Awesome, who needs everyone to know that he is Awesome and does not appreciate the fact that you are Not Awesome. He rolls his eyes when students need help, answers questions directed to Lucy, interrupts slower students to give answers himself, etc. These things, I am sure, let us know how truly Awesome Mr. Awesome is.

I haven't had to deal with him just yet (he was in Lucy's section today), but I will do my utmost to redefine Awesome. Swiftly.

Overall they're a good crew, though. They're enthusiastic and have a great sense of community even on the second day. Usually classes take a few weeks to warm up, but a number of the students know each other from other classes, so there's been plenty of chatter and joking to break the ice and get people talking to each other.

Logistically, things have been cleared up immensely. Afternoons are spent listening to Liam. He makes copies during lunch so Lucy and I are available to answer questions and give private tutorials if need be. Mornings are spent giving (and grading) quizzes and going over homework.

There was a slight snafu this morning, though...

I was to go over the quiz with the students while Lucy graded them in the back. Liam was sitting in to make sure I'm not a complete fuck-up. I figured the plan was to cover the quiz, then split up into sections, so I went over the quiz in twenty minutes and started splitting up the class only to have Liam gesture frantically from the sidelines that I was to keep talking for another forty minutes.

"Another forty minutes?! About what?"
Liam waves the textbook wildly.
"What? What am I supposed to do with that?!"
"Go over the homework!"
"Oh. Sure. We can do that."

And so I did. Awkward for a minute there, but I got it under control. It would have helped had Liam told us that we'd be in class for an hour before we split up but hey, what's teaching without a healthy dose of improv?

Day 1 Report

Nothing exploded. No one cried. Everything is a-okay.

The first day was rather dull for us TAs, to be honest. Lucy and I sat in the back of the class and didn't say a damned word while Liam lectured for five hours. No students emailed (or phoned) with questions about homework - even though we're "on call" until 11pm - and while there were several wide eyes throughout the day, it was a fairly standard first day.

Except for that whole notion of content. That was not standard. Our book throws a metric shit-ton of information at these students in remarkably little time. As Liam put it, "By Thursday afternoon, you will be learning your 219th verb permutation." Next Monday sees the first of their weekly three hour exams. "These exams are three hours long because most everyone will take all three hours. The only way you can make it through a year of Latin in 5 weeks is to have a final exam every week - because that's what it amounts to."

Back at the Berkeley program, Liam informed us, out-of-state participants with spouses were encouraged not to bring them along. Their presence could only be a drain of valuable time and attention, and that ultimately put too much strain on the students' studies and relationships.

He also mentioned that the Berkeley program liked to boast how at least one marriage and one divorce sprang from each session.

Daily attendance in a class like this is, of course, mandatory. Liam made it perfectly clear that anyone expecting to skip three or four classes shouldn't even bother, that after one day they'd have to work phenomenally hard to catch up and after two it would be a near-disaster.

"My father died while I was teaching the workshop one year," he said. The room got noticeably quieter at that. "I went home for the funeral and came back the next day. And my mother never forgave me." He paused to rub his chin, then smiled. "And my students didn't, either."

Then they were off learning about how inflected languages work, the concepts of different declensions for nouns and different conjugations for verbs, the necessity of learning principal parts and the need to master all of these ideas along with forty vocabulary words that evening.