I’d be lying if I said that the world didn’t seem a little more bright today. Everyone I talked to was saying the same thing – for the first time in our lives, us 20-somethings feel proud to be American, and hopeful of the days ahead. I can’t believe what a difference a day makes, but there you have it. I wish we could inaugurate him now and just go forward at break-neck locomotive speed. But I suppose a few months to get the troops and the plans in order isn’t too much to ask.
Wasn’t much of a day today, as is true every Wednesday. Got up really early (for a sleep-in day) and got the work I needed to do out of the way pretty quickly. Class went alright, and I had two whole students come by my office hours! Was able to help both out, I think. We’re doing phonetics right now and a lot of learning your places and manners of articulation I think is just practice. You need to become hyperaware of your tongue and what it’s doing to be able to figure out what sound, technically, you’re even making. So sections went sort of crappily because we had to spend the whole time covering the chart and the nitty gritty details of terminology. Didn’t even have time to play around at the end, and I ended up aborting a little fun exercise right in the middle. I had no idea how much time we had eaten up… usually sessions sort of plod along at a reasonable pace, but all of the sudden my time was completely gone and I hadn’t looked once at my clock. Geesh.
Came home and got some transcription done for my 260 project. I’m really not sure what’s going on with my variables… I hope they’re varying properly! It’s almost impossible to hear these things while simultaneously broadly transcribing your interview, but I have at least found a handful of neat syntactic and semantic variables I never could have thought to elicit. I’m all primed for 2nd language speaker data for when we take that class! Woot! Other triumphs tonight… Lewis did the laundry, and made a roast! It was so delicious! And I got the ironing (from… three weeks ago? four? I don’t even remember!) finally done.
It’s been a good day. Tomorrow… adult beverages with fellow TA to work our grading rubric and possible complaining session. Yay!