If you're writing over break . . .

and if you were starting with the Winter Writing Workshop this week, then it's Friday already, and that means that in 3 days we'll be doing the next week's check-in.

If you're still grading, GOOD LUCK! Hang in there! It will get done, the students will go away, time to breathe and write and exercise and eat holiday cookies is right around the corner.

Now, I've been sick all week, and all I've done so far in the way of work is a bunch of conference-related stuff. Well, and about 600 words of notes on a book, plus reading some articles I didn't take notes on and probably should have. But I haven't done any actual MMP-writing, not even the directed free-writing I assigned myself, so I'm thinking that it's time to start.

Right.

Now.

Because though I'm still not all well, at the moment I can breathe, and my eyes don't burn, and so I am going to do a bit of writing. So I'll have something to report on Monday.

And so I am posting this not only for my own accountability, but to point out to anyone else in the WWW who might be in the same position that we still have a few days (and anyone who's buckled down and got way ahead can gloat a little bit—yeah, go ahead, you know you want to).

What we teach when we teach Chaucer

"Chaucer" to most people means the Canterbury Tales. But should it? Over the years, I think I've taught every Chaucerian work in the canon, except for "A Treatise on the Astrolabe" and "Anelida and Arcite," at least once, and yes, I do include the Melibee in that list. For graduate classes, the syllabus has varied more widely than for the undergrads—even though many grads have not had any undergrad Chaucer, or even any undergrad medieval lit, so there is an argument for giving them a "standard" Chaucer, too.

If there is such a thing as a "typical" undergraduate Chaucer course in my repertory, it tends to include several of the Canterbury Tales plus one of the less famous texts, usually either Troilus and Criseyde or the Book of the Duchess. Lately I've just been doing Canterbury Tales and short lyrics.

My recent trawl through other people's syllabi suggests a fairly even division between CT-only courses and CT-plus-Troilus courses. It has been a few years since I last taught Troilus, and I want to bring it back. In fact, I want to make it the main focus of the class, because I think then I could structure the course in a way similar to the way I structure my Arthurian class, which usually goes much more smoothly than the Chaucer classes: begin with a modern translation of an early source (Latin or OF), and only deal with Middle English after the broad outlines of the plot have been digested. This also allows me to introduce close reading through analyzing different translations of a single Latin sentence, along with a representation of that sentence accompanied with a super-literal translation plus parsing; after that, the whole idea of the close reading goes a little better.

But since people seem to think "Chaucer = Canterbury Tales," I suppose I had better include some of them. Let's put it this way: what tales would you be absolutely shocked to learn that an English major didn't know? Channel your inner old fart, and comment.

Or, if you're not amused by fart jokes (some Chaucerian you are, in that case), which tales "go" best with TC? (Your litel tragedie, does it go? Bet it does, bet it does!)

Time is not infinitely elastic

Welcome to the Winter Writing Workshop! Most of you have a clear goal that sounds reachable in 4-6 weeks’ steady work. Some of you may still be doing triage: what absolutely has to be done, now? How much distraction will there be from holiday shopping and parties, or from job market angst and conference-going? How much time do we need for getting back to a good exercise routine, or for excavating the laundry pile, or any other necessary real-life activities?

So let me urge you to Pick One. We all have lists. Give yours the hairy eyeball.

But first, think about your time. How many weeks do you actually have? Where will you be during that time? How much time must you spend on non-work activities? How understanding is your family about your need to work during “vacation”? Winter breaks can be hard to work in, because they’re short, they involve holiday stress, they come at what for most of us is a cold, dark, depressing time of year (Zcat, can all of us with SAD come and visit you down under?), and our libraries and universities may close to save money during at least part of them.

So, can you schedule two hours a day in a coffee shop? Can you put in four hours a day at home? Do you reliably have one hour in the evening, and other less predictable time here and there? Add up that time first; then look at your list again, and figure out which item you can do in that amount of time.

Consider, as well, your longer-term goals and term-time work habits. Will you be better served by getting an ugly rough draft of something that is now only notes, so you can revise it when you go back to teaching? Or would you prefer to get something almost-ready revised and out the door before you go back?

Make a plan, and post a comment about it. And again, welcome. Turn on your broad-spectrum lamps, crank up the space heaters, pour yourself a drink and stick a little paper umbrella in it, and we’ll all pretend we’re writing around the pool at some tropical resort. (If you actually like winter, carry on, but don’t tell me about it.)

My goal is to read/write at least 2 hours a day. Four will be ideal. But if I do two, that's enough. Because, you know, the gym, the excavation, and so on. I'd like to turn this into a game, and see how many days and weeks I can get up to four.

The current participants:

Another Damned Medievalist (hereafter ADM): finish revisions

Contingent Cassandra: finish article

Digger: finish project

Good Enough Woman (hereafter GEW): not come to a standstill

Elizabeth Anne Mitchell (hereafter EAM): lit review

Highly Eccentric (Naked Philologist): either atoning for sins or committing more; I can’t tell.

Ink: fiction?

Matilda: finish draft of paper

nicoleandmaggie: finish draft?

Sapience: article due 15 Jan.

Sisyphus: finish article

Theologoumenathon: hang onto groove

Trapped in Canadia: finish book chapter

Zcat: Finish article

Updated to add:
Luo Lin: finish article

Profacero: resubmit one article (that might be two combined, or two separate)

Vocabulary

I keep saying that I think my students' trouble with ME is not so much ME as small vocabularies in PDE. I'm still working my way through the last batch of translations on the final exam (while wiping my nose, and sneezing, and feeling generally yucky), and I started making a list of perfectly good words that more than one person is having trouble recognizing:

adversity, arse, assent, aught, churl, deem, ere, grisly, haunch, privily, proffer, suffer (in the sense of "allow"), sunder, twain, villainy.

"Arse" keeps coming out as "ears." It's not like we didn't talk about what happens in the Miller's Tale.

Then there are a couple of phrases that I think of as somewhat archaic, but still, I would have expected them to be recognizable to English majors: "must needs" and "plight troth."

I'm thinking next year's exam will have fewer chunks to translate and a very strong insistence on producing grammatically correct sentences that make sense in PDE.

Weekend bullets

• Sir John has had a cold for several days. I think I'm finally getting it. So I'm staying up late to try to finish grading before I feel awful.
• Of course I should have finished already.
  
• Why, with all the "teaching to the test" that presumably happens in schools these days, can my students not manage to read and follow simple instructions?
  
• Grading the outlines of essays (on exams) goes much faster than grading translations.
• I can't believe I made it through the whole semester without getting sick; but then, why now? Why could I not just avoid illness altogether?
• I would much rather be working on the MMP, and this morning I procrastinated for awhile by staring at handwriting snippets trying to decide if one A resembled another. Or not.
• On a related handwriting question, I found a reference to an opinion of Ian Doyle's that was . . . wrong. Not in a major way, but he left out a perfectly legible* letter. My world reeled.
• *Perfectly legible if you read English secretary hands.
• Every time I look at an example of secretary, I panic and think all my skills have fled, or maybe I was deluding myself all along. It takes several minutes to get my eye in and start seeing the shapes again.
• Really I should be thinking big-picture thoughts about the MMP, not tiny-detail thoughts. Have I mentioned that I'm nearsighted?
• Must finish grading translations. Then if I'm sick tomorrow I can spend days lying on the couch watching B5 DVDs and drinking toddies, guilt-free.
  

Winter Writing Workshop with the Dame

In the last ADNWG meeting of the fall term, I proposed a six-week winter intersession group for those of us who are trying to get some writing done over the holidays.

I'm in it because, as long-term readers know, I hate cold, winter, and the December holidays, and since I can't spend the entire month in Morocco or Malaysia, I'm going to distract myself this year with the Macedonian Marginalia Project, an article I had hoped to finish over a year ago.

It seemed so simple when I started; but this week when I was looking up call numbers for books I need to check out for the MMP, in addition to my usual DA, PR and Z suspects, we also have DF, LC, and Q. This probably says something about the complexity of what I'm trying to do.

So, anyway, this post is the invitation, advance warning, whatever you want to call it. Starting Monday, 12 December, when my grades have to be in, I'm going to post weekly goals and progress reports for myself. LRU starts up again the day after MLK Day, so January 16 will be the official end of the intersession. However, I expect I'll still be tinkering (how I hope it's only tinkering) till the end of January, so there will be a couple more "unofficial" Monday posts where late papers can trickle in.

I know we're not all on the same schedule; some of you may still be teaching. So this workshop will be less structured than ADNWG. You can start late and finish late, or drop in for three weeks and then drop out again.

If you're interested in taking part in the Winter Writing Workshop, please leave a comment, and I'll post the starting list of participants and goals on Monday.

Guiding independent research

This is really a question. I've had a couple of independent studies/capstone projects to supervise this fall, and will have a couple more in the spring. It has occurred to me that I would like to assign a book that would help guide students through the research process. The books I'm most familiar with focus more on writing literary essays; I'd like something geared to the humanities a little more generally, and to the "research paper" of 15-20 pages, that might include elements of literature, history, and art history. How to read around a topic and then focus the reading, how to develop research questions, these are more important than details like citation style. Any suggestions?

Thys may wel be rym dogerel

In th’olde dayes of the Teching Kynge,
Who knew best how to manage everythynge,
This land was filled of grading fayerye.
Th’endityng elves, with her compaignye,
Daunced ful ofte on many a scolar’s book,
Esily seen by any that myght look.
This was the olde opinioun, as I rede;
But now the worde is come that elves be dede.
For now the service and utilité
Of Blacke Borde and such futilité
That filleth every classe and every halle
As thikke as leves that in autumn falle,
This maketh that ther ben no fayeryes.

Very bad news from the Chron fora

Not that I've ever got the grading fairy to show up, but I always thought the cats frightened them off. I can't bear to think there just aren't any. And for such a lousy reason, too.

At least I'm making grading progress on my own.

Re: Ask Mended Drum your nagging questions here; get a completely awesome answer. « Reply #220 on: December 02, 2011, 03:02:46 PM »

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Quote from: concordancia on December 02, 2011, 01:52:48 PM

Will the grading and final writing fairy come if I take the afternoon off for beta testing a game?

The last known member of that particular species of fairy was throttled to death during a regional assessment committee visit to a formerly pleasant campus. Rumor says that the murderer was a member of SACS.

Steps in grading

1. Assemble papers.
2. Open Windows Media Player; plug in headphones and un-mute the computer.
3. Find new purple pen.
4. See if anyone has added a comment to ADNWG's end-of-term post.
5. Check to see if anyone else has updated a blog. Consider saving new posts to read during breaks from grading after actually doing some. Read blog entries anyway.
6. Count papers in stack.
7. Check the Chronicle fora, especially the Thread of Grading Despair and Paralysis Analysis, to see who else is grading right now.
8. Eat chocolate.
9. Check current Lexulous game(s).
10. Start music. Read first page of top paper.
11. Worry about unfinished book review.
12. Finish reading first paper.
[13-17: Repeat steps 4-8.]
18. Worry about needing to order ILL books for winter writing project so they'll show up before the library closes over Christmas, and whether it would be better to do that now or keep grading.
19. Grade more papers.
20. Take longer break: cook and eat a meal, say.
[Repeat steps 4-10; expand 5 into checking out blog links never before clicked on and going into the archives of some previously known blogs.]