(Academic) Recommendations

I am now in my third week of teaching. I'm not entirely sure how I got here. I remember the past two weeks as an eternity of stressing over my classes and spending sleepless nights grading papers. I must also acknowledge that they flew by. I feel as if I have been teaching for at least a month yet know little more than I did on my first day. It's been almost three hours since my last "performance" as a teacher, and my heart just now has begun to beat at a normal pace. I shall get my first review from my dept. chair today. Let's hope that it goes well.

Anxieties about my proficiencies aside, I do find that gravitating toward an academic community was the right move for me. I love that the faculty room comes alive with informed political discussion (not much debate: everyone's on the left) at random points during the day. I love that I can sit down to lunch or dinner and always be sure that I will come away from the table having learned something, regardless of my eating companions' interests. I love that a (well-respected) admissions officer from Williams just came to teach the faculty here how to write impressive academic recommendations for our students and was given the ol' slice-and-dice: her listeners refused to accept anything she said as gospel, without first being critical of the warrants her statements implied. Half of it was hubris—we feel ourselves good writers, as well as bastions against grade inflation and hyperbolic, inflated recommendation language—the other half was what I respected: we refuse to take life at face value. We are questioners.

I felt badly for the presenter: we've all had our bad days teaching (I've had a bunch already!) and we were not complaisant, well-behaved students. On the other hand, she should have known better than to begin by praising an overly-long (2 page), oleaginous letter written by an English Dept. Chair who clearly had missed the memo that "great" and "unique" have been overused so much that they have lost almost all significance. Unique means that there is only one, not that an object is special, or even rare. Can you honestly say that "great" communicates anything more specific than its grammatical sense as a comparative of "good"? I use "great" all the time in colloquial speak and writing but I would never write "great" three times in two sentences in a formal letter of recommendation; I've banned my students from using the word in their papers. Anything less would be hypocrisy.

Gotta prepare for my next class, so I shall sign off now. In short, life is good/challenging. Here we go.

Love,
Katherine