Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Buckling Down ... Time to Get Work DONE!!!

Just spent the entire evening (alright, except a few MSN moments and phone conversations) going through my email mailbox flooded by all the unreplied email to the point of explosion. Can't believe that life can become so chaotic after a week of email laziness.

Had the first lecture for sophomore tutorial today. Great to see old, familiar faces from past semester's history course and excited to see a lot more fresh faces esp. those eager to make EAS their secondary concentrations. Seeing them and esp. some of their enthusiasm shinning across their young, lovely faces, I thought about the Chinese lit class that I took in 2nd sophomore year that in many ways played a big role in my love for East Asian Studies later on.

I really love Prof. C for not only her academic expertise but also her sense of humor (rare for a faculty member in a snobbish academic institution like Harvard) and, most importantly, her keen sense with the latest happenings in the world, in the field, in the literatures/arts, in the film industry, and even mainstream pop culture. Seeing her brings back a flickering hope for academia (that sometimes feels like has been dwindling since day one of my arrival here), for she is someone who demonstrates to me that an academic could be different and live differently, apart from the much ridiculed (at least to some people in the world) culture of the "ivory tower."

This is going to be a great class, I can just feel it. Even though I'm still not too sure how to approach leading a section from 7-9 pm on a mid-week evening (and still don't know how Harvard students could possibly have more energy during that time slot after a full day of activities), but I'm in everyway looking forward to it.

Hopefully this is going to be a remarkable experience for my students as well, though I haven't met them in person or learned their life stories yet. Hopefully one day some of them, if not all, would be able to look back and say - Ah, that sophomore tutorial class ... That was what made all the difference.

梅ちゃん at 4:02:00 PM

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1 Comments

at 2/10/07, 5:50 AM  refresh_daemon said...

I hope your class is great!

 

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