Filling the Day: Good Stuff to Eat, College Classes, Universities

So by the beginning of next week the mythology class — students and new instructor — should be caught up with the week and a half they missed when the full-time faculty member who usually teaches the course fell ill. Yesterday I spent the whole day reading their papers and their textbook. Then it was off to choir.

And at the crack of dawn, off to the east side for a meeting, and then a race to the campus to meet the class. Then back to the Funny Farm via Whole Paycheck, there to grab some tomatoes that allegedly have some flavor. Wanna make some gazpacho, something I’ve been craving for awhile.

Highly Dietetic Amazingly Delicious Gringo Gazpacho

You need…

a small red onion (about 3/4 cup chopped)
1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced
2½ cups diced tomatoes (peel if you feel fastidious — I don’t, though)
1½ cups finely chopped bell pepper
salt & pepper to taste
1 tsp paprika or chili pepper flakes
1 Tbs. chopped chives (or use a scallion)
1/3 cup olive oil
½ cup lemon juice
2 cups tomato juice
1/2 cup shredded, pared cucumber
about 1/8 cup chopped cilantro or parsley
1 Tbsp dry sherry (or a splash of white or red wine)

The original recipe calls for 2½ teaspoons of salt and ½ teaspoon of sugar. IMHO, there’s no need for sugar. And almost a tablespoon of salt(!) is a little much, especially since canned or bottled tomato juice has more salt than you need — just one cup of the fancy organic juice I bought this afternoon contains 16 percent of your RDA. So…hold the salt until the soup is concocted, and then add some to taste, if necessary.

Otherwise, it’s pretty self-evident: cut up the veggies, mix all the ingredients in a nice, large bowl, and chill for a couple of hours. Serve cold.

It looks like the college will officially get me hired on as the mythology course’s instructor along about next Monday. That would be good…so far because they don’t have me as the official instructor, I haven’t been able to get a Canvas shell or get into the District’s grade records. This weekend I’ll have to create an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of grades and attendance, since it’s beginning to look unclear whether I’ll ever be able to get into Canvas.

The class has 27 students, but it looks like a bunch of them have given up. Only about half that many showed up today. Pretty typical of a community college, where students often are trying to support themselves with full-time jobs or with two or three part-time jobs and may have to deal with children, too. When something has to go, the class is the easiest one to drop.

From the classroom it was over to the Honors Department with a kid who had only a few hours left before the deadline to get himself enrolled for honors credit. Then to the library, there to try to track down — with no luck — the videos mentioned in the syllabus. We figure the exiting instructor must own the videos. The humanities librarian unearthed some great links and clues to other videos, which I’ll also have to track down this weekend and then work into…well, I guess, a new syllabus, eventually.

The chair suggests we drop the two fairly lengthy papers called for in the syllabus, since it has classmates turning in an amazing seventeen short squibs. I’d like them to do some kind of sourced paper, though…for crying out loud, it is supposed to be a college course, after all. What seems reasonable is to drop the first one, which in theory is due in the next week or 10 days, and then turn the other one into a take-home final exam. That will make the course fairly simple to handle.

I was entertained to discover that said chair, who also is teaching a section of the mythology course (it must fill some requirement…), also is puzzled at the out-of-date textbook that promulgates its own myth, disguised as fact. He also is telling his students to take that stuff with a grain of salt.

The stoont papers are significantly easier to grade than freshman comp horrors, mostly because you have fewer characteristics to have to assess. Really, all I’m going here is checking to see if they did the assignment with some degree of competence.

The instructor seems to have the students doing presentations almost every day. It’s unclear whether she planned to lecture at all. If she did, she must have kept the lecture time mercifully brief. The class sessions are almost an hour and a half long, so it wouldn’t be wise to try to fill that much time with instructor yakking. Make them yak, instead. 😀

In other precincts, SDXB is headed to Colorado, there to rejoin New Girlfriend, who has a home in Boulder. Mercifully, NG’s place is out of the flood zone. He says that despite the unholy amount of rain, she hasn’t had any water damage.

The weather is cooling here after two days of steady rain in the low desert. I expect we’ll have one more blast of hot weather — selfishly I hope so, since the pool is already cooling to the point of being a bit chilly. That pool is what’s keeping me mobile these days. And no, I can’t afford to install a heater and I don’t want to install a big ugly rolling cover (something else for me to take care of!).

Our honored chair at the Heavenly Gardens Department of English is a graduate of Grand Canyon University. Since his time there, the place was purchased by a corporation whose business is building proprietary schools. Interestingly, GCU’s development officer has surfaced at the Scottsdale Business Association, and he’s a very interesting fellow.

Among several things that came up at today’s meeting was the observation that since Arizona State has raised its tuition beyond reason, Grand Canyon is now competitive with said third-rate public school, where students get beat up by fraternity brothers emulating gangs of thugs and every time you turn around you hear about another murder or rape out there. Engaged in a mammoth building campaign, Grand Canyon now can provide dormitory space for its students, and because it’s a religious school the administration actually rides herd on the students and tries to take some responsibility for their safety and behavior. Quaint, huh?

One of our members just sent her son off to the Great Desert University (which, if you haven’t figured it out, is my sobriquet for Arizona State). She said that between the tuition and the room & board, it’s costing twenty grand a year to put the kid in school at that zoo. He’s enrolled in the honors college, which has its own special, elite dormitory and classrooms, so those kids in effect go to a sequestered, semi-private school in the midst of the vast, chaotic campus, pretty much sheltered from the rowdy hoi polloi.

Given all the things that have happened at ASU over the past several years, from the apparently deliberate driving of faculty morale into the sub-sub-basement to the out-of-control student body, I’d be darned if I’d put a kid of mine out there, even if they cloistered him inside a concertina-wire fence. If he or she couldn’t get into a decent school like U.C. Berkeley, Michigan, or Stanford with scholarship funding, or if sending him out of state was financially impossible, I’d send the kid to the University of Arizona in Tucson or Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Neither is what you’d call a great school (although the U of A has some highly ranked departments and colleges), but at least they’re relatively quiet.

And just now it’s getting pretty late at night, i yam totally done. Bye!