AHA Day One
And I'm already exhausted. Met up with my students (I brought 4 -- one had to work, but three came today -- at noon and we got our badges. Then we picked up programs for them and went for coffee, playing "spot the historian" and its variations, "name that historian's field," "historians on the road: clothing as an indicator of geographic background," and "what's my rank?". Sat down at a Starbucks with only about 3 historians there, and went over the program. Great divergence of interest ensued. I'm going to one of the only early MA panels, but two of my students are going to this one instead. The other, an Interdisciplinary Studies major with a History minor, is going to something on Existentialism. Better her than me! Anyway, it was so nice to sit there with these young women, all very bright, and listen to them discussing which panels sounded best, and whether they should split up and take notes. They're undergrads, and having a blast so far. I have to say the enthusiasm was infectious; I may have been a bit overebulliant myself ;-)
One of the students has just transferred to Regional U, and we ran into her department head, whom she had not met. She got to talk to him a bit about whether her load was too heavy (it is) and he's setting her up for some proper advising next week. We're going to try to scope out some of the folks from Flagship U for my other transfer student, so she can get off on the right track. I'm wavering between real pleasure that they're getting to network a bit and fear that I've not been a good enough teacher and will be found out when they really get into their upper-division work. I'm not sure why -- at least at this point student one says that one of her profs just repeated what she'd learned about primary sources from me, and that she'd already read some of the ones assigned for her new classes in mine. But I feel all Doktormutter-y, watching them go off into the wide world.
Otherwise, I dropped off 4 CVs at the meat market, was civil to a woman from a college where I applied, and that is interviewing, but hasn't had the courtesy to send out rejection letters, and kibbitzed with some colleagues from here and there.
Now, like Ralph Luker at Cliopatra, I have to take down the tree. It is, after all the Twelfth Day of Christmas today!
6 comments:
You're doing much better blogging the conference than I am!!!
see you at 5:30 in the Sheraton - will look for the person holding coffee - just look for someone about 5'4" who looks like they're from Kansas (and talks like they're from further south) :-)
I'll try to remember the coffee! The gentlemen bloggers will be more difficult. Have you noticed how many of our male colleagues have brown hair, beards, and glasses??? It's like a damned uniform! I actually do look vaguely like my picture below, but not so buff anymore. I'll probably be wearing earth tones, though!
What's Florin Curta like? I read his posts on MedText and wonder. I'm all admiration for folks who do obscure stuff like Bulgaria -- not only for all the cool arcana they know and I don't, but also when they manage to get jobs despite being a fringe element. ("No Chaucer, no dice" is the slogan of too many people hiring in medieval English lit.)
He wasn't there, Meg. One of his students, Jace Stuckey, gave a paper on conversion in 12th and 13th c. literature instead.
I have to laugh b/c I know (of) 3 of the 4 folks on the panel your students went to, which is definitely what I'd have gone to. (Of course, I know who Patrick Geary is, and like Meg, have seen Florin Curta on mediev-l or various venues. Actually, I applied for his job! Obviously didn't get it. ;-D) Glad that you're having fun!
I have the same response about students going on to other people who know stuff - at my last job I got paranoid b/c the Shakespeareanist in the English dept was REALLY good and so whenever I was doing any Tudor kinds of stuff I always got paranoid that my students were going to end up in her class and would say something and she'd say, "Who told you THAT?"
Hey, is anyone going to be at MAP in San Francisco in march?
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