Miss me?

The past week and a half or so have been awfully busy. This past Sunday, the choir I'm in had its spring concert--we were coming down to the wire getting everything ready and head two 2 1/4 hour rehearsals last Tuesday and Wednesday (add in about a half hour each way to get to the rehearsals and they made some long nights) plus a 3 1/4 hour rehearsal on Saturday (same drive time) and then finally the concert on Sunday. The concert went well. I had a very tiny solo (all of 2 measures) and, the bigger deal for me, we performed two pieces that I wrote. They were pieces that had seen performance before, but they'd also been edited since then, so this was the first performance in their new form. Although I haven't heard the recordings that were made of the concert, I'm sure that I like the interpretation of the second of these pieces better than the last recording (plus it underwent more changes than the first).

Anyway, on top of all this, I collected rough drafts of a big research paper from my 29 sophomores which needed my studious attention in order to give them, as quickly and thoroughly as possible, comments to improve for their final draft. Then there were the essays of theirs that weren't entirely graded but needed to be put on the back burner in favor of these rough drafts, not to mention the assignments I collected from my juniors. And, of course, the daily work of preparing for classes went on, as my juniors started Dickinson's poetry (and slogged through a forced march of learning to scan the poetry for its metrical qualities) and Neil Postman's Technopoly with my sophomores (which is proving difficult for them, but some, at least, seem to see the book's relevance and those students are doing most of the work of defending Postman's ideas. It's a challenging book not so much because the writing is difficult (indeed, Postman is often cited for his clarity) but because he has an academic style and, more to the point, he is attempting to lay bare ways of thinking that our culture takes for granted as "the way things are" despite the fact that they are completely culturally conditioned. The subtitle of Technopoly is "The Surrender of Culture to Technology," which should at least give you some idea of the shape of what we're doing.

Anyway, that is, roughly speaking, where I've been for the last week. I'll see about getting a Think 'n' Share posted later today and try to make the rounds to my usual haunts in the blog-o-sphere soon as well. 

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