I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 47 is the week of 2024-11-18/2024-11-24. (And I’m publishing this a full week later than I usually aspire to for a weekly round-up like this!)
The biggest update this week is that I’ll be doing my second teaching internship next semester! My PhD program requires two supervised teaching internships (or externships, although internships seem more common).1
This internship will let me work with Dr. Curt Whitaker on teaching an asynchronous online Gen Ed course on ecocriticism, or how human relationships to the natural world have been represented through literature. My pedagogy-related readings with him will also focus on how instructors can adapt their assessment strategies in light of GenAI.2 I’m really looking forward to it!
Perhaps it was because I had ecocriticism on my mind, or perhaps it was because we actually decided to start watching a movie early enough to choose a long one, but we finally watched Interstellar for the first time.
Although it’s not already on my exam reading lists, there’s a strong chance I’ll end up writing about it in my dissertation or somewhere else, as it’s a very clear example of framing “information” in deeply humanistic ways.
We also managed to watch both the original Mean Girls (2004) and the 2024 movie musical version. It’s fascinating to see who returns from the original cast (hey, Tim Meadows! yep, Tina Fey, too!), as well as how much more inclusive the writing and casting have become. Thankfully, there are far fewer fat-shaming jokes. The songs, performances, and choreography are all wonderful additions as well. And—omg—because we’ve been living under a large boulder the size of a small boulder, I did not realize who Auli’i Cravalho is until after we finished it. Such a delight to see the voice of Moana in a live-action production!
Inspired by Thomas Rigby’s It’s Hard to Give Recognition blog post, I’ve added Tinylytics to my site.
It’s taken a bit of tweaking with Liquid code logic and page layouts to get the “kudos” feature to show up appropriately, but it feels well worth the time.
We also put together proposals for each internship, giving us authentic experience writing in the “academic proposal” genre that’s otherwise quite rare to come by for humanities scholars. ↩
I’ll likely make a separate note for my internship reading list soon enough. I’ll try to remember to update this post if I do. ↩