Oh, Avenue Q

It is an hour before class. And I have "The Internet is for Porn" stuck in my head. And somehow, just somehow, I think it might be hazardous to one's academic health to walk into a classroom humming, "Grab your dick and double-click for porn, porn, porn!"

This certainly wasn't addressed in Teaching at Yale Day . . .

Funny how you slip so far when teachers don't keep track of it

First, the misadventures. My assigned classroom had been changed since last night, but no one cared to inform me of this; so I was sitting until 1:15 in the basement of the Whitney Humanities Center until I realized that there were not only voices in the classroom next door where I intended to teach, they were tallking about Iranian film. Cue a hasty track-down of someone official with a computer, in the middle of a two-hundred-student influx that technically exceeded the building's fire codes and so put the receptionist out of commission while she tried to shoo them all back out the front door before they spontaneously combusted or God knows what, so that I could punch my name into the classes server and realize that, how curious, I had been resettled to the far British reaches of Linsley-Chittenden. I have also the appalling habit of talking very quickly when comfortable with a subject, and more quickly when nervous, so that I ran into my lesson plan for Friday. And only after I left the class did I realize that the bottle of water from which I had been drinking as I taught and talked and wrote all over the chalkboard was . . . not mine. I only hope the student from whom I stole it—theirs was on the tabletop; mine was on a chair—wasn't back-to-school sick.

That said, it was pretty awesome. Other than the fast-forward, I kept to my lesson plan with room to improvise; I think I was reasonably eloquent, and—far more significantly—comprehensible. I talked a little about linguistics. I talked a lot about grammar. I got chalk all over the heels of both hands (because, erasers? Were not so much in evidence). Students did not flee en masse. I saw note-taking taking place. Of all the questions afterward, none of them were, "WTFOMGLATIN?!" One student even came to my office hour. And the various reasons that students listed for enrollment in this class are fascinating: from language requirements to library cataloguing to church to Greek epic (on the theory, I think, that Latin will be easier to start with than Greek). I am even told that my chalkboard handwriting is legible from the back of the classroom. This is all good. Now if I can just learn to speak more slowly, and not get carried away on linguistic tangents, it will all remain good.

And "The Internet is for Porn" is still stuck in my head . . .