* Today is Pi Day (3/14). I was going to celebrate by making some kind of pie, but meh, I had meetings last night and wound up with about an hour at home before I went to bed, not long enough. Oh well. (There aren't any restaurants around here with good pie - at least not that I can go to after I get out of class, we have a lot of "lunch places" that close up at 2 pm). And there are no bakeries in town.
* The meetings were okay, though. Church board meeting is a lot better when there are things people can laugh over. (And when we're financially in the black for the month....) Also, we're going to get to keep our excellent interim guy for at least a year longer, which gives us a little breathing room to consider what to do in terms of someone permanent. (What we really need, as one person pointed out, is a larger, more active membership. A few Sundays there have not been over 40 people in the service....)
* An interesting thought that struck me from the Elders' meeting devotional that the head elder read - I don't remember the whole thing (though I may get a copy of the book she took it from). It was talking about anxiety and how getting wrapped up in anxiety means you are not paying attention to the bigger picture (to reword it to be less Christian-specific). I never really thought about it that way but there's a lot of truth to it; I know I talk about needing to get out of the one-inch picture frame of my own work because it's too easy for me to get overwhelmed by what's going on and make things that are, globally speaking, small, into large things, because I'm so focused on the issue at hand.
* I also got to talk (briefly) with a colleague in another department here before the meeting. She made me feel better in that I am not the only one who thinks things are crazy-train right now, what with what's going on in the Legislature AND the upcoming accreditation renewal. And she warned me that she saw one of the admins today and he said "More stuff is coming." Ugh. Well, they can't make us do stuff over Spring Break. At least, I don't THINK they can.
* I just want to teach. I am good at teaching, I am (fairly) good at research, I am good at "service" in the sense of serving on committees and doing stuff - but I am NOT good at dealing with the politics. Part of it is that I get stretched to a point where I stop being diplomatic and start using my version of "The Stare" on people. And part of it is that I'm used to my word being good, so when someone else says something I tend to hold them to it, and then when what promised to be a good thing doesn't happen I'm upset, or when something I was bracing for to be bad doesn't happen, I'm confused. I suppose eventually something will break in me just like it did in the fellow villagers of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, but it hasn't happened yet, and I'm sure it's not good for me to keep getting jerked around by whatever panicflail certain highly placed people are telling us we need to engage in this week.
* Flipping around looking at The News late yesterday afternoon, I have to admit that I was charmed by the little graphic EWTN used: the words "Habeamus Papam" ("We have a Pope")*. I vaguely know of some of the conflict among some groups of Catholics in re: bringing back the Latin Mass versus keeping it in the native language of whereever it is being said. But I have to admit I like those few little bits of Latin used here and there in our language. And I would argue, if we really wanted a "universal" world language that every "educated" person was expected to speak, using a language not currently spoken in any country might make more sense...it might seem, I don't know, more fair, and there wouldn't be the same claims of "Such and such country is imposing its culture on us because we use their language."
*(ETA: apparently this is the traditional phrase used, so EWTN was just following longstanding tradition by using the Latin)
I know English has by and large become the default language for much of the world, but that some (the French, especially) work to resist that. (And of course, there's US English, and British English, and Irish English, and Australian English, and South African English, and English-as-it-is-spoken-by-native-Africans, and East Indian English....and all of these have slightly different usage patterns, and sometimes different syntax or grammar (I will say some of the East Indian TAs I had as a student spoke more "correct" English, in the strict sense of being grammatically correct, than I did, and many of them had English as a second language. I've noticed the same with some Black African speakers of English, including some who spoke French first (and have heavy accents)). French USED to be the language of diplomacy; German USED to be the language of science. (Even as recently as the 60s - my parents learned "reading German" for their Ph.D.s. Back then, there was a requirement to learn two languages not your own. When I went through, in the mid 1990s, there was NO language requirement at all any more - there was as undergrad, and my French fulfilled that - but not for an advanced degree)
I know at one time there was a push to "invent" a universal language (Esperanto was an attempt at that), but I suspect we cannot create a language - with syntax and verb tenses and all of that - from scratch; it seems to me that language has to evolve and develop naturally over time.
I don't know. I think there is value in explicitly learning a second (or third, or fourth) language. There were things about English that I understood how to use, but that were not "transparent" to me (as in: I knew how to use them but did not know how or why they "worked") until I took French. (The subjunctive tense - "If I were..." - was a big one.) (If I had more time now? I'd want to learn more German. And maybe Latin, as well.)
And again, I wonder about "what DO they teach them at these schools?" One of my observations after some recent interactions with high school and upper-primary grade kids, is that it seems like teaching-to-the-test has really taken a firm hold, and a lot of things have got pushed out by that. And that makes me kind of sad. I've heard anecdotal stories from people who are parents that their younger grade school kids do much less creative-type writing, and that there's not the exploratory type science stuff as much any more, and history sometimes gets short shrift.
I don't know. I think if school was heavily focused on high-stakes testing, I would have wound up disliking school and disliking learning. Once again, I wonder if I maybe grew up during a sort of Golden Age - where we did experiments in even fairly low-level science classes, and we had free reading time at the end of the day in school, and we did things like make those poetry chapbooks I've talked about. We had testing (the infamous Iowa Tests, where it was rumored if you did badly you'd be held back), but those were only at the end of third grade, and I think fifth grade and seventh grade. And at any rate, I was naive enough and my teachers were low-key about the tests enough that I approached them as a sort of game and didn't get stressed out. (And consequently, wound up doing pretty well every time.)
Maybe I'm just seeing the worst side of things, and maybe I'm only hearing the people complaining. But I am beginning to see a wave of college students who have a different attitude? (maybe) towards things.
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