Aussiehalley - Halley Down Under

I still have all my footwear

so christine and I just finished a morning and afternoon of int'l orientation sessions. most - fine. however, we got guilted into attending a lecture on university-level writing at La Trobe. (basically: Those cocky Americans always think they know everything about university stuff. We had some good Canadians come to the writing session last year and they said they learned a lot. Americans=bad. Canadians=good.) So we were like, fine, we'll go. We're intrigued to find out all of these amazing differences between Australian sentence structure and American.

ohhh gawwwd. so awful. they had us picking out the subjects of the sentences. we had to identify plagiarism. we were told, writing an outline is good. And the woman giving the lecture was actually giving it for someone else (it was on power point) - and was actually defining terms incorrectly. (no, not cultural differences, just wrong.) Since last semester I was teaching students how to do this, I was decently familiar with how this lecture might go. So you can see how frustrating this might have been when the woman said that "voice" is the theorist you are citing. I had my shoe off and I was ready to throw it. Christine stopped me.

We were sitting in the back row of the lecture theatre. Like Statler and Waldorf (the old guys in the balcony from the Muppets) we had quite a good time in our frustration. Christine's solution was to shout out the answers so we didn't have to sit there for longer than necessary. My solution included under-the-breath snide comments, projectile footwear, and gum.

There might have been some covered up giggling as well, but that wasn't entirely our fault. When the slide came up of possible problems students might come up with and feel, one option was, "I'm a little bit slow." I'm slow?! I'm sorry, that's just funny. Yes, giggling may have been innapropriate, but there were better ways of phrasing what she meant. Oh yeah, and maybe giving the right answers/definitions/instructions/explanations might have been good, too.

Off to buy tickets for Circus OZ. No animals were harmed in the making of this post.

posted by Halley @ 1:45 AM