Month: November 2006

Since we moved to Massachusetts Lowell and I have been looking for a dessert and coffee shop to replace Baked Expectations, I think we might have finally found it. The Black Sheep does not offer cheesecake but I have found nothing wrong with the other sweets that they offer. Last night I had a Chocolate Eruption (rich and melt in your mouth) with a Vanilla Almond tea (I didn’t realize that they would be so enjoyable together) and to top it all off I finished reading C.S. Lewis’s “Till We Have Faces”. This is one of those times when I need a book club. “Till We Have Faces” is described as Lewis’s adult novel, it reads very simply, the story itself is nothing dramatic. However I picked it up looking for Lewis’s themes in keeping with “The Chronicles of Narnia” and I was not disappointed, maybe I wasn’t perceptive enough to find it earlier in the story, but it is impossible to miss it at the end. I still have some questions that I would love to discuss, but I have enough food for thought to percolate for awhile. I am not sure who to recommend this book to, I could see people not liking it and yet I think that it is worth the read. So to anyone wanting to read a rich book here is one for you, since I am not recommending it to you personally I take no ownership if you do not like it.

“The times, they are a changin.” These days I’ve been agreeing with Bob Dylan. The due date is now less than a month away, and various unusual items have begun to appear in my house. For instance, I now own several baby toys. (Pam came home from work the other day with a gift bag from one of her co-workers. In it was a collection of little rattles and dodads that you can attach to carriers and cribs.) When I saw the toys, I had a vision of my entire living room cluttered with brightly coloured toys. Good thing we had those colours in mind when we recently bought new living room furniture; the toys will match the colours perfectly–not! It was one of those moments when you realize, ready or not, for better or worse, that things will never be quite the same again.

So I am 8 months pregnant and I look it. As one of the doctors asked recently “Is it safe now to ask if you are pregnant?” I realize that I am as big as a house, so people can’t help but notice me, but what gives perfect strangers the right to touch and talk to me? Some examples: I am walking down the street and a 20 something boy with dreadlocks is walking towards me as we pass he smiles and says “It’s a girl” and walks on. I am in a fitting room and the sales lady asks “Can I rub your belly for luck? (Did I suddenly become Buddha?) An older lady sitting on a park bench asks me “Are you feeling alright?” A man waiting to board the subway points rubs his belly and gives me the thumbs up. Alright, I could go on and on, you get the picture. Is there some primal instinct to care for the continuation of the species that comes out in people or are these people just weird? What is the appropriate response when a stranger in the grocery store comes up and says “Oh you’re pregnant” and touches my belly? I am not opposed to physical connections between people, I don’t mind being touched by people I know, but it is a little uncomfortable to draw this much attention. Thankfully I have always been able to smile and walk away and be thankful that this pregnancy is almost over.

So I’m now about three-quarters through my first stint as a teaching assistant, and I’ve had some amazing experiences. Let me recount a few of them.

1) About a month into the semester, during a review session for the mid-term exam, one of the students in one of my discussion sections raised his hand and said something like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” I asked him, “Is there anything in particular I can help you with?” He said something like, “Well, I haven’t understood anything.” I then proceeded to say, as kindly as I could, that I would better be able to help him out if he had a specific question and that I wasn’t going to be able to re-teach all of the previous lectures in the span of the next fifty minutes. And when I asked him, along with the rest of the class, how many of them had done the readings that week, only about ten percent of the students raised their hands. He wasn’t one of them. After class I checked his attendance record. Not good. Now I can certainly empathize with anyone who finds him/herself in the position of not having a hot clue as to what is going on in the course, but isn’t it understood that, until you’ve bothered to struggle with the material on your own, which is what you would be doing if you were bothering to look at the assigned readings and were troubling yourself enough to get to class at ten o’clock on Friday mornings, your teachers will not feel particularly inclined to take pity on you?

2) Around the same point in the semester, I had several students come up to me and ask me if there were any assignments or readings that they were supposed to do. Some even asked me where the readings were posted. At which point I thought to myself, “This would be a good question to ask in the first or second week of the semester, but it’s a bad question to be asking in the seventh or eighth week with a few days remaining before the exam. What have you been doing with your semester?”

3) Another bad question. The course I assist for has almost three hundred students in it. About a third of them attend my discussion sections; the others are split between the other two teaching assistants. One question on the exam was meant to test the material that was presented in the exam-taker’s discussion section. The instruction for the question was to answer the sub-question that corresponded to the exam-taker’s particular teaching assistant. During the exam one of the students raised his hand. When I walked over to where he was, he asked me what my name was. I could hardly believe my ears. Who, at the time of the mid-term exam, doesn’t even know the name of his/her professor enough to pick it out of a list that has only three names on it?

Now, I admit that I wasn’t much of a keener during my first year or two at college. And I’m perfectly happy to concede that not everyone ought to be a keener during their college years. But please tell me that I wasn’t this clueless when I was eighteen.

So today I went to a memorial service for one of my co-workers who was killed in a car accident. I had not known him long enough to count him as one of my friends, but in many ways he was like some of the men that I am proud to call my friends, including my own husband. He was born in 1975, calm, confident, brillant, a lover of learning, who worked and played hard; one of the first conversations that I had with Jason was about WOW (an online computer game), in fact most of the conversations that we had were about World of Warcraft, he was a self confessed addict of the game. He and his wife (who I also work with) have a 2 and 4 year old. After the service I went to my midwife appointment and listened to the heartbeat of my unborn child. Two extremes, and yet are they really? Jason could have been me, he could have been Lowell; just starting to get a handle on the life plan. I must confess that my thoughts rarely dwell on the eternal and how long we have here on earth. Have I used my time wisely? In case my life is short what things do I value that I want my child to value and how do I teach my child these things.

Manitoba will always be home, but Massachusetts has a few things going for it. Take the weather, for instance. It’s now nearly the middle of November and we’ve had only 2 or 3 nights of significant frost. The trees have just finished losing their leaves, and there are still days when it is nearly too warm in the afternoon to wear a jacket outside. Gotta love it. I love it even more when I hear that Manitoba has already had several significant dumps of snow. (Get this. I found out about the “Halloween snow” while browsing the CBC website. Apparently, that snowfall was significant enough to be frontpage, national news. Go figure!) There’s been no snow in Massachusetts. I’ll welcome the snow when it comes–after all, what would winter be without snow–but I’ll enjoy the mild weather for as long as it stays.