Life or something like it

I'm surprised I have anything left to say. Between school, family, and friends, I feel like all I do is talk, text, email, Gchat, AIM, Yahoo Chat, Facebook, MySpace, etc. I've never been much for keeping journals or writing down personal thoughts, but here goes nothing.

I start teaching in about three weeks. I will walk into a classroom with 22 students, mostly freshmen, and be expected to teach them how to "write more effectively."

This should be interesting.

I'm not worried about my students liking me, because I honestly don't care. I'm not going to spend time fretting over whether or not they're learning as much as they could or should. And, I'm definitely not going into this with high expectations. Call me a cynic, or a pessimist, or whatever you may, but I know how it works.

For the most part, my students will be there because they have to be there. The majors have most likely tested out of the course, which will leave me with a bunch of business, science, and engineering majors, who don't think writing is important. This is the generation that abbreviates everything. I still text full words, unless I need to save space so I don't go over the 160 character limit. I've recently started to relax a bit about IMing. I no longer need to write full sentences, capitalize or punctuate correctly, and I think I've started down the slippery slope of I'm not sure what...but I am pretty sure it's not a good thing. Regardless, my class will be full of people who are undoubtedly going to say, "I'm never going to need to know how to write a rhetorical argument again." I wish I could get paid every time I hear it, because my paltry graduate student stipend isn't going to pay for all my bad habits...and I'm confident I'll hear it a lot.

So, anyway, in class today we spent about thirty minutes talking about civic engagement. What is civic engagement? Funny you should ask, because I had the exact same question. I'm scrolling through the rolodex of possibilities in my head and finally decide that they must just be talking very generally about knowing what's going on around you. What exactly was the point of this discussion? Another great question, that I, too, sat there and wondered about for a good ten minutes. Civic engagement is what we're supposed to center our class around...it's the class "theme" if you will. I thought to myself, let me get this straight. I'm going to be teaching a bunch of 18 year olds, who don't really want to be there, how to write by talking to them about a term they won't understand or care to understand.

Brilliant!

I've lost them before I walk in the door, and now you're telling me that I'll spend at least the first week trying to explain to them what the hell civic engagement is and why they should care. I don't know about you, but most college freshmen (not that I know many, but I do have a good memory) couldn't care less about anything but what they have to do to pass the class, how they can get alcohol, and getting laid. This is their first foray into the real world, away from the shackles of their parents, and I'm not only supposed to teach them how to write well, but now I'm being required to instill in them a desire to be good citizens and give a shit that Russia is bombing Georgia (the country not the state), that the presidential election is STILL going on, that our economy is tanking, that our health care system desperately needs attention, and that we're still in this ridiculous war with no end in sight.

Thankfully, I'm a smut queen and love to read the gossip blogs and trashy magazines, and watch mind-melting reality television. So, maybe they'll walk away caring about who is on the cover of US Weekly, whether Britney Spears has had another meltdown, who Lindsay Lohan is sleeping with these days, and if Katie Holmes has admitted that her marriage to Tom Cruise is a sham.

But, hey, at least I'm teaching them something.