One down, fourteen more to go

As means of gaining closure to my first semester of grad school and teaching, I thought I would put up a few pictures of the University of Oregon. This is Gerlinger Hall where I taught last semester. Gerlinger has a lot of moss growing on it like anything good and established at the U of O. In fact, some of the best professors here are also covered in moss. My classroom is the room at the top left of the building in the first picture. It's a pretty typical looking classroom, except for the boarded up fireplace.

I'm pretty sure that someone was entombed alive behind the fireplace, and I'm pretty sure that I think that because I had to read the Cask of Amontillado in ninth grade. I was able to use the fireplace to my students advantage though. I told them that multiple studies have shown that students do better on exams when they feel more comfortable. In order to make it a more inviting atmosphere, I hung a Christmas stocking on the fireplace before they started the test.

I don't know what this video is from, but I showed it to my students at the beginning of the semester.

What I'm thankful for

I'm well aware that these Thanksgiving pictures are late, but I'm swimming in my finals papers. As if that's not enough, my students had final projects and two tests this week, so I have to get all those graded and uploaded as well. I know: wah, wah, wah.

The absolute best part of Thanksgiving for me is to be able to play football with my brothers. All of my brothers are great athletes, and it makes me very proud in a big-brother sort of way to watch them knock the socks off of somebody. I obviously didn't have brothers to play with, and I drove all over town (in vain) looking for a football game to join. I ended up playing a pretty hardcore game of Ultimate with a bunch of hippies. Ultimate is also called Frisbee football, and the hipsters do frequently refer to each other as bros, so I guess it was logically the next best thing.

Despite the lack of brotherly bonding time, we still had a great Thanksgiving because we had what any good Thanksgiving needs, namely:



twelve layer jello,


the type of listlessness that only tryptophan can provide,



and really big, tasty, turkey legs.

Ummmmm Boy!!!!!