I have literally hundreds, maybe thousands of pages to wade through between now and December 17. My first exam is Oct 17. OCTOBER 17!!! I have been busy teaching college writing and the history of Jerusalem and doing laundry and watching baseball and taking language exams and hosing down our apartment when it gets too filthy for me to bear any longer. Comps???
I occasionally run into a colleague of mine whose opinion I hold dear and whose company I really enjoy. While I was still pregnant, he casually mentioned that he didn't sleep at all during his third year until he took his comps. Those words have come back to haunt me. When I mentioned this to him recently, he laughed long and loud. I asked him if he'd ever felt prepared for his exams, and he scoffed and said that "the words 'ready' and 'comps' don't go together. You just get through it." When I saw my advisor on the street yesterday on campus, he squeezed my forearm affectionately and asked me if I was ready for my exams.
I told him I was trying to be. I'll never, ever get through even part of what I need to in order to be ready. It's time to pick Isabella up at daycare.
2 comments:
bunny,
maybe you'll be kinda busy on oct. 11...? hey check out the rant i posted on my class blog today:
Hateful, immoral, entitled, hypocritical oppressors who are POOR VICTIMS:
Core Tension of the Week (my first weekly rant)
Brief disclaimer: I do realize that the situation is not as simplistic ("oppressor" vs. "oppressed") as I’ve naively put it here, and I do acknowledge that the Constitution exists to protect all citizens.
“The imposing of subhuman status, within the slave context, required the denial of any recognition of the human rights of the slaves” (Smedley, 1999). Smedley wrote that the American slave owners “…never came to accept fully the concept of slaves having natural rights that might supersede the property rights of the master” (1999, p. 141). This insanely morally skewed justification of the “rights” of the murderous oppressors overriding those of another—as if you could use this same word, rights, for both natural-born human rights and property rights--reminds me of the 2007 Supreme Court’s decision to un-desegregate two school districts because “race-conscious voluntary desegregation policies denied white students opportunities to enroll in their schools of choice” (Pollack, 2008, p.2). The poor, deprived privileged class…! “Citing the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Brown v Board of Education, four of the justices turned the focus of analysis away from whether segregated schools still harmed students of color” due to continuing to limit their educational and thus life opportunities, and actually harmed white students by reducing their historically disproportionately vast array of opportunities and privileges on principle (Pollack, 2008, p.2). Harmed? Rights? Can these words be used to describe both privileged and underprivileged classes? African Americans finally broke the bondage of two centuries of slavery through powerful activism born of reclaimed dignity and empowerment, along with the help of inspired, moral members of the historically oppressing group. They began to reculturalize, to claim long-denied, long-owed civil rights by working through the highly evolved US legal and judicial system. One of these hard-fought rights is quality education for African American children—in desegregated (and functional and fully resourced) schools. Now, in 2007, the privileged group—historically the limiter of the oppressed group’s rights—feels victimized when its expected entitlements are slightly hemmed in. It self-righteously feels fully entitled to the same hard-fought legal “remedy” awarded to the oppressed group to redress egregious and inhuman treatment. How can jurists accept and validate this application of “equal rights”? How can the term be considered in the same context?
love #14, formerly #20
I completely agree with your thoughts on this...all I can say is that sometimes people pretend they are deprived, or believe that they are when in fact they aren't, as a means of relieving themselves of guilt, of pretending the playing field is even, etc.
I will NOT be busy on Oct 11--I will desperately need to have fun on the 11th! But thanks for asking...
Post a Comment