How To Be A Good Teacher | 01/26/04
This might sound a little shocking, so brace yourself. I am officially, undeniably sick of being a student at FSU. I love teaching my classes but my role as a student here is honestly about as boring as you can get. This was readily apparent as I sat in Dr. Clendinning's office discussing my thesis. There are already four translations of this particular treatise and no one cares to read them. In three of the instances, there is only one copy buried the University of Michigan archives of graduate works. In the fourth instance, there are three copies. Two of them are at FSU because the "author" was a Ph.D student here and the last copy is at UM. It's not that I don't like theory or find it interesting because on the whole it is interesting to discover how music works. At the same time, though, I'm not going to be another Schenker or even Lewin. I just don't have what it takes to infuriate fellow scholars or even baffled graduate students with words I made up but I act as though they're in the dictionary (I use words that don't mean nothing, like loopdid). I did get an A on my Atonal quiz. Hooray. I would like that class if the non-theory/comp kids were unceremoniously kicked out. I'd even volunteer to do it. This one kid, let's call him...Generic-Music-Ed-Student-With-No-Talent-In-Any-Discipline (herein GMESWNTIAD -Anagram for "Sting me, wad"). He wasted a perfectly good presentation by Adam and a HUGE fight I was going to battle against Alex so he (GMESWNTIAD) could ask questions along the lines of: "What's that note in treble clef?--I only read bass clef. *I'm* a euphonium player". After class I broke the news to Dr. Clendinning that I was slightly changing my thesis topic. Somehow my old one has to be included, effectively doubling my workload. Once done for the day, I redid a bunch of pages for the Mas N' Steel site but I haven't uploaded them yet. I'll probably do it on Wednesday. I finally finished transcribing and arranging the first draft of Hey Ya for steel pan "orchestra". If you want to take a look at it, it's here. It's a Finale 2003 file because I didn't want little kids running around stealing my MIDI version after the 37.25 hours it's taken me to reach this point. I'm sure there are a plethora of mistakes but it's enough that I can bring it to rehearsal tomorrow night and give my buddies at least a glimpse of what it's like. Onto some sad news, I went into my bedroom today and saw all the fish in my bedroom tank floating at the top gasping for air. Apparently both the underground and the biowheel filters decided to stop working (from my closest estimates about 2 weeks ago). I quickly tried to siphon water out and replace it but it wouldn't take so I had to suck start it. Bleh, I still have the taste of that mud (but instead of the normal 1pt dirt + 1pt water it was 1pt fish poo+ 1pt water) in my mouth. I tried to refill the tank with fresh(er) water from the bathtub but my drain wasn't working so I couldn't run it on the risk of an overflow. I quickly set up the new hospital tank on my kitchen counter and moved the sickest fish there first. The first group to move were the silver dollars, arguably my favorites of the tank. One of them couldn't be revived but the other two are doing ok. Jamie moved all but about six of them into the small hospital tank tonight. The biggest ones are still in the old tank and will hopefully live long enough for me to buy a new filter. Still in the big tank is my favorite, Dr. Suck. He is so big the only place he could be moved is the cichlid tank and I'm afraid they would kill him. If push comes to shove, though, I'll plunk him in there. He is about six inches long, though and could probably put up enough of a fight to at least live. I have no clean clothes to teach in tomorrow and that's no good. I also did not study for my stupid bibliography quiz as I had planned. I guess I should do it before I go to sleep so I can give those German words a chance to sink in. If I was smart, though, I would just go to bed. Unfortunately, staying up until 4am got me an A on the Atonal quiz so the precedent is set. Tomorrow is too busy to actually do anything but on Wednesday I'll be selling a kidney to PetCo for some new supplies to keep my fish friends happy. I had a bunch of fun links but I can't remember any of them now. Think of some good jokes, fellow TAs, because your classes will love a good joke.
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