Students
You probably know that I teach, but I haven't revealed much more than that. Let's just say that I teach writing (you might not approve of my own writing, but compared with some of the writing I have to grade, you should be informed that my students have a long way to go before they're at the point where I can't help them), and one has to have an amazingly optimistic disposition to avoid falling into deep despair in the teaching world!
I have begun a story about an English teacher, but it has foundered on the threshold of the middle section of the story. Anyway, once I get that published, you'll know a lot more about how I feel in regard to teaching.
Animals
I don't have pets of my own, but I have made the acquaintance of several animals that belong to friends. I have few friends, but I sneak up and make friends with animals though I'm not supposed to!
One of these is a lovely dog, advanced in age, and with a grave disposition, but somehow I love her dearly. She isn't very demonstrative, but she has a wag of the tail and a welcoming look every time we meet. There are a couple of other dogs --wildly different in personality from the first one-- an all of them great characters. Of late, I haven't met a single dog I don't like. Oh, maybe one; it's more a matter of not understanding him than disliking him.
Another pet is a cat. For some reasons, growing up we never had cats, but I had thought I knew all there was to know about them. I was wrong; being around this cat, in the last year or so, I'm beginning to appreciate how entertaining they are!
A Facebook friend of a friend (most of the posts I see are from other people's friends) expressed the opinion that cats are very intelligent. I don't know from where that opinion could possibly come. Cats do the few cat things they have to do extremely well, but it is all instinct, not true intelligence. Since they do not waste any energy on thinking about their environment, they can spend it all in pure play, which looks like intelligence, but is just practicing skills.
Human attitudes toward intelligence are naive and contradictory, and I suppose I'm as open to the accusation about jumping to conclusions about animal intelligence as anyone else. But I'm convinced that cats are not as intelligent as dogs, for whatever that's worth, and whatever that might mean.
Books
Just this morning, I went to a book sale by a library supplier. This company specializes in servicing libraries: supplying books, materials, processing, cataloging, everything. Among other things, they help with cleaning out books that aren't seeing a lot of circulation, and selling them off, essentially wholesale.
I'm getting the distinct impression that there are consultants who think up titles for books. We know for a fact that an attractive sexy cover gets people to pick up a book that would otherwise be ignored. But the same must go for titles. A clever title like
The Bourne Identity could attract attention to a piece of workmanlike fiction. (I'm sure there are those who would call my writing
workmanlike, and who am I to contradict that?) Since
The Bourne Whatever has received so much critical attention, and has been made into a movie, titles of that sort are fashionable:
The Hipster Proclamation, or
The Terrified Turtle.
Anyway, there is such intense competition for display space in any bookstore that it is amazing that people want to write books at all! I just don't understand the phenomenon, especially that people who can't put two words together to make a sentence are driven to write! I don't feel bad about my own writing, since it is only published as e-Books, and do not contribute to the landfills in any way.
This same company which supplies libraries also sells off their wholesale library de-accessioned books to actual bookstores. Even if the bookstore sells the books for $2 each, to make a profit of $0.50, I still feel that I ought to have a greater obligation to support the bookstore than to support the wholesaler.
Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble and Amazon have edged out almost all other book retailers, which is something that makes me very sad. But I am annoyed when Barnes and Noble flood my e-mail with advertising. But once Barnes and Noble are driven to bankruptcy, that leaves Amazon as almost the only source of books, which is a very dangerous situation. So now, where should our allegiance be: to Barnes and Noble and Nook, or Amazon and Kindle? Amazon already gets far more of my discretionary income than they should.
Fund-raising and Cookies
In a strange twist of fate, I was approached by a student club at our school to be their faculty advisor. A lot of what they do is raise money for one project or another. One project is to make T-Shirts for their volleyball team. It seems crazy that the club should have to raise money to create a T-Shirt for a volleyball team, which will probably be worn only once, for the Homecoming Volleyball Tournament. But that's what the kids do, and I don't have the energy to argue with them, so I'm playing along. But I have to buy the cookies and the other junk that they want to sell to make their fund-raising target!
But if you've ever taught a crazy bunch of freshmen, or advised a College club, you realize that the sheer energy and intensity of the kids is like a drug. I just sit there and listen to their carrying on, and it is annoying, and it is also insanely pleasurable. I wonder how long I can stand it!
K.
