Jamie checks in....

Jamie here. As long promised, I'm posting.

I've had my first day of class, and everything seems fine. Last week was a grueling orientation. From what I can tell, orientations are always grueling. You spend you time sitting through lectures that manage to be somehow both redundant and incomplete. I'm not bashing Iowa State's performance by the way. I'd say that there orientation for new TA's is actually rather remarkable. ISU is a very different kind of university from anything I've personally experienced. I've spent a lot of time in the academic world, and all of it has been as small liberal arts universities. A big, technically oriented place like Iowa State is a pretty different place from a Baptist liberal arts University like Mercer. After a week, I feel like I kind of understand the mentality of Iowa State, which speaks to the success of the orientation, but lordy, that was a long week. I'm happy to be WORKING now and not getting information stuffed into my head. That's just the nature of the beast I'm afraid. I'm afraid that was about as painless as it could have reasonably been.

As I reported, class went fine today. I've got 26 very earnest Midwestern kids to deal with now, which should be fun. They seemed to have the right attitude today, so it's up to me to keep 'em busy and focused. Iowa State uses a rhetorically oriented composition program that stresses multi modal communication. When you are in grad school you have to talk like that. This means that they teach composition by asking students to think a lot about genres of writing and speech, and that they stress getting students to be conscious of written, oral, visual, and electronic communication. The class I'm teaching is mostly a composition class, but we will also be talking a bit about communication through things like web pages and graphic design. We want to stress the connections between all types of communication. A presentation or a group discussion is not absolutely different from an essay or a web page. I like the theoretical foundation of the program, although I'll miss hearing students deal with the difficult reading assignments I used to like to throw at 'em. The ISU approach will be lot less work than what I was doing at Georgia College, which is good because I'll be busy as hell trying to earn a P.H.D. so somebody might someday give me an adult level job someday. Such is academia.

I'm excited about one of the classes I'm taking. It's about gender theory and the "post-human" world. From what I can tell it's about postmodern gender issues. If biology and culture no longer define sex, what does? I figure I'll have some kind of answer by Christmas. I'll let you know. I saw the word "dildo" used in several of the textbooks, which seems perfectly reasonable if you think about it.

What else am I responsible for posting about here.....oh yeah, the fair....it's a big ole damn fair, I tell ya. They got gourmet quality pork chops on sticks and very decent beer for sale (that big cultural difference again....they don't sell beer at "family events" like fairs in Georgia), and apparently Garrison Keillor was wandering around there at some point. (He did a show from there on the last night, which we neither saw nor hear on the radio, although I read an essay on salon.com that he wrote about being there.) Good stuff. Like the Georgia National Fair but bigger and with better food and more of a street party atmosphere. There was lots of live music also, and I'm pretty sure we saw a few minutes of a performance by a guy my brother knows. Country singers get around these days, eh?

What else, what else.....I'm feeling more at home here now that I've got stuff to do. Being a part of a community means having stuff to do that connects you to the community. Being on an extended vacation in a community where you don't know anybody with gets depressing after a while. It's nice to be busy.