Three layers

     I made three-layer brownies for the departmental end-of-the-year party yesterday. They weren't fully set at the beginning of the party, which prompted the department head and host to ask me at least twice, "Now WHAT are these?"

The finished product, before settling

Three layers

Finally cut and settled, the leftovers are sitting in my kitchen.

     They are good, though, if I do say so myself, and, unfortunately for my waistline, the leftovers are currently sitting on top of my stove. At least I went to kickboxing yesterday, where Jessica, Leslie and I found regular instructor Lesa back in business and seemingly happy out about her return from vacation ("Now I know what a beginner feels like!" she lamented as she effortlessly demonstrated an ab exercise, anyway.).

     Today, I need to finish grading a test, an Internet activity, workbook pages and a second draft of a composition, all of which was turned in to me this last week. Although I only have eight students, I feel I have a bit of a right to complain, since I have to work on my own schoolwork and apparently my pedagogical efforts were fruitless in some cases.

     Take, for instance, that I spent several days explaining and going over the subjunctive, and made a special handout for my students that separated expressions that introduce the subjunctive and those that introduce the indicative, so that they would have all the expressions together (I even made headings detailing what kinds of expressions they were (e.g. expressions of emotion and impersonal expressions) and added a section on how to avoid the subjunctive, reiterated from the textbook, at the end of the handout) and so that they could use it as a study guide for these expressions. I also explicitly told them several times, "Remember, you have to memorize these expressions AND the endings/stems for the subjunctive!" They nodded dutifully as you do at a teacher whether you know what's going on or not, and I figured they would have the sense to take the tools I had given them and study for the exam.

     So why did I get sentences like this: "Je voudrais que proteger les droits civils", "ils veut que preservent l'environnement" and "Il est importante que soit un citoyens bons et recylcé"?

     What?

     Okay, I've picked some of the worst sentences to illustrate my point, and it is clear that these students don't understand things they should have learned in 101, or whatever they took as a beginning French course, and I really did get some other good sentences in the subjunctive (e.g. "Il faut que vous votiez pour moi. Il est essentiel que nous recyclions plus souvent que maintenant")throughout the course of the exam. It's just hard to read some sentences that are barely comprehensible in handwriting that is barely legible.

     I'm also trying to work on my various papers, chopping away at them little-by-little.

     Since my culture paper is intended to discuss the arguments between the ramistes (Rameau fans) and the lullystes (Lully fans) as to what is "French" (vs. Italian) and whether using the words "classique" vs. "baroque" is actually a "political usage" in comparing French to Italian music/styles (yeah, I don't know what I'm talking about.), I'm looking at an Italian text to see if the Italians have a different account of the story. So far, I've found unhelpful quotes such as, "Durante tutto il secolo XVIII l'estetica francese e l'estetica italiana non cessano di fronteggiarsi". Well, duh.

     Back to the grind, I guess.