total convenience and flowers seven days milk:

So, it's all over but the grading for this semester at my weird but beloved university, and I'm sad about it, because although my graduate class (Modern Cultural History, theory and method) was wretched and the second-year undergraduate class (Latin American History, 1450 to the present) was just so-so, the fourth-year undergraduate class - a seminar on Gender, Sex, and Family in Latin American History - was amazing. Definitely, by far, the best class of my entire teaching career. I was considering flunking them all just so I could see them again next year, but that turns out to be impractical - there would be a lot of paperwork involved. Instead I'm going to write down some of what made the class work so well this time, in case some of it is reproducible:

( What made this seminar turn out so well? )

Mostly it was luck. It was just the right combination of students at the right time. I won't have that kind of luck again. All the rest of this is just what helped that luck along. Here's hoping that the next time I teach the class it turns out half as well.

Spring is coming. I have proof. Yes, it's well below freezing out, and yes, most of the snow that fell on Friday night remains on the ground. But The Kids Who Say Motherfucker are once again roosting in the alley beside our house, trucker caps backwards on their buzzcut heads, looking as menacing as they possibly can be while bundled in puffy down jackets. They chirp out their profanities, slap hands, toss their cigarette butts into the street and spit on the sidewalk. We have entered the mating season of the neighborhood youth once again.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Friday night I went to a concert the various student percussion ensembles of The University with the Name That Rhymes with Spork -- the Brazilian escola de samba, the Korean drummers, the Malian dancer-and-drum group, the ensemble working on chanting and drumming from Ghana, the Afro-Cuban group. It was kind of amazing. The samba school was the best I've heard outside of Bahia. The others weren't quite that brilliant, or else my ear is less atuned to their styles of music. But still, they were awfully good: all the drumming and some of the dancing was at least at professional levels. I went with a couple of colleagues and their two kids, who are two and four years old; dancing with them and watching the kids roll around like puppies under everyone's feet was maybe the best part of the evening.

It reminded me, too, of what's so great about Spork U.: you know, we probably don't have enough serious classical string players on campus to make up a good string quartet, and we probably have a football team but I don't know that anyone has ever seen them play. But two dozen well-trained Korean drummers? Fifty gifted African percussionists? A huge, enthusiastic and knowledgeable audience for parade-style samba music? Sure, no problem; we've got that.

A great university can support all those things -- as salsa dance is not the natural enemy of string quartets -- but Spork doesn't have those kind of resources. What Spork U. does have is a truly amazing group of students. And sometimes that feels like enough.

Today is one of a long series of jampacked and unfun days, hence the long silence. Though I will, I swear, do an AHA report one of these days. (And mincot, are you okay?)

But I have a problem -- well, I have a series of problems, but there is one which I hope you, dear Livejournal Genie, can solve. And that problem is: my laptop, what the hell?! Or to be more precise about it, I came back home at 11:30 today to find that my laptop (a year-old Lenova running Windows) had shut itself down, but would not power back up. Eventually I realized that it was not off but the screen had gone mostly, but not quite, dark -- if I hold it at a certain angle and squint, I can make out the WELCOME screen. But nothing I've tried so far, including rebooting, has restored it to where it was at 9:30 today. The screen is still dark, and also it seems to have reset itself (though it's hard to tell, since it's dark) to defaults as of a year ago, e.g. it offered me the Windows "tour."

I guess I should just haul the fucking thing in to the place where I bought it, but I won't have a minute available to do that until Saturday afternoon and I really need it NOW. No worries about data loss, because everything is backed up three ways from Sunday, but I need my damn computer.

Help me, Livejournal Genie! You're my only hope!