It is Thursday noon and this is like Friday—thank goodness it is Thursday, except that I have a 5:30-8:00 class. Can you imagine having a Friday night class? Anyway, I have taught two already this morning—both went rather well—and the one tonight will be to the ten MA candidates in American Studies. I am looking forward to meeting these students. The course is Social Systems and described thus:
“This interdisciplinary seminar examines the evolution of American Society from its beginnings, focusing on broad patterns of change and continuity in American social structures and mores. Important areas of inquiry will include family life, women's history and gender relationships, age relationships and gerontology, social and economic class, social mobility, migration, regional variations, community studies, and the social implications of urbanization and industrialization.”
Patrick, my sociologist friend and adviser (at USC), describes this as several courses, maybe more than several! Anyway, I’ll do my best. Tonight, I’m taking a copy of the Declaration of Independence that has the pictures of the signers—all white men. And, a copy of a poem by Alice Walker called “Revolutionary Petunias” about a “backwoods woman” who kills her husband’s murderer with a hoe and is taken off to the electric chair. It is a poem that invites discussion about class, race, gender as well as bits of American history. So I’m hoping to begin with these two documents that show the complexities, contradictions, and richness found in
My one big mishap this week was on Tuesday, the second day of class, when I went to Poetry. The buildings here are connected and circular and maze-like. In addition, classrooms have no numbers. A colleague, Enas, had escorted me to my poetry class on the first day and I thought I knew where it was. So I went to where I thought it was. I went in and saw a sea of faces and asked, “Is this the poetry class?” “Yes, yes,” they answered.
So I began writing the poem for the day, “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” with a black marker that Hadiya, the department secretary, had given me when I asked for a whiteboard marker. I was almost finished when I realized that it was not a whiteboard marker but a regular one and would not erase. It was too late so I continued. And, then, I heard,
“Professor Becky, this is not your class. This is my class.”
I turned around and it was Professor Hani who teaches another section of Poetry. You can imagine my embarrassment and especially as I had messed up his white board with a poem that he probably had not planned to teach.
He had a student escort me to the right classroom which turned out to be in another connecting building and on a different floor!
....
Kevin's notes: Hanni is a very pleasant, soft-spoken guy, who has recently returned from I think five years of graduate study in the States, At Carbondale, IL. Twice now he has driven us back from Becky’s Monday-Wednesday evening class to our flat on the hill. (I go down there with her as an escort and use the computer in her office until the janitor kicks me out of the building to go wait for her outside her classroom.) He’s married to a student, Aida, who is currently taking B.’s Novels course. (She also works full-time in an office that doles out all Queen Raina’s obligatory favors to family and tribe. Did B. write about this?
I have something like an elephantiasis condition in my left leg below the knee down through the foot. Interesting news, huh? I take Naproxin to reduce the swelling. Today I have the bandage Samia loaned me wound around it. I think I pulled a muscle but I don’t know how—climbing or descending. No problem.
I’ve switched from pita bread and butter (peanut butter, mango jam, Nutella) to sliced bread and sandwiches from left-overs. Yesterday it did me good to buy a big jar of mayonnaise at the Western super-grocery store a short taxi ride from her, a place called “C-Town.” Also, sandwich meat.
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