I was so wrapped up in the rest of last week’s wrap up that I forgot to mention one of the most exciting things. I dreamed about Dan Savage, of the Savage Love Podcast. I tweeted about it, and he mentioned read and responded to my tweet on the show!
This last week, I was busy with UCD starting up; I welcomed classes 301, 302, and 303!
Two bummers this week: I was searching for my documents on the internet (something I do every once in a while to protect my intellectual property). I discovered one of my students last quarter stole 11 documents and put them up on Course Hero.
Think “stole” is too harsh a word? Students uploading to Course Hero have to say THEY are the copyright holder of the work.
So yeah. Stole.
Their code of conduct explicitly forbids sharing our materials, and I make a huge deal about this in class, since I had a student put a draft I shared with them online, which later led to me being accused of plagiarizing my own work when I tried to submit my piece to a journal.
As I was searching, I got sucked into the black hole that is Rate My Professor, which I know I should never read. I’m going to blame my mild OCD on obsessing over this. All I’ve been able to do the past couple of days is to argue with the naysayers in my head (“WTF? All the other students said this course was organized gorgeously! I got unprompted compliments! And if you were having trouble, why didn’t you tell me so we could fix the problem instead of yelling to the universe that I need to be fired?!?”)
Are there good reviews too?
Yes.
Do I know more students like me than hate me?
Yes.
Objectively.
Do I try to fight the negative voices by remembering I won the teaching award?
I do.
Does it help when I’m trying to sleep?
It does not.
In other news, I have indefinitely postponed the back surgery I was going to do this week. I have had many procedures similar to this one, and I’ve never gotten a bad feeling, but intuition says no to this one.
I think it’s because I know they will use this procedure to try to talk me into a nerve burn, which I don’t want.
Thus, intuition is like, “hey, let’s NOT go the medical center for another “this will only rarely paralyze people” thing when it’s just going to lead to an argument you don’t want to have.”
My treadmill came last night. Predictably, the not-quite-English instructions may have had us oil the belt incorrectly. The instructions also don’t include anything about changing the incline or the height of the handlebars, so I’ll have to do some tinkering, but my thighs already hurt from overdoing it.
Or doing it wrong. Not sure.
This week, I also bought the new album by my new favorite band, Tele Novella, I got my oil changed, we survived a flat-tire-on-the-boy’s-car wrench in one of the days, I made my first lohikeitto (Finnish Salmon Soup) of the season, and I tried two new recipes: lemongrass chicken (in the air fryer) and spicy cajun shrimp.
I got my post-Easter ham this morning, which I start playing with tomorrow.
