Nothing really to say right now--or rather, I should say that I have a lot to say, but no time to write. I hope to have a few things to add to this blog once classes are over in April. Right now I'm up to my ears in grading...
I should mention that I've been adding some new blogs that look interesting to my blog list, like "Translating Taiwanese Literature." I don't want that list to get too long, though, so I might have to weed out a few blogs or narrow the focus. It seems that I have several Asian book- or lit-related blogs. Maybe that can be a focus. Any suggestions for other blogs to link to? (Or ones to delete?)
Friday, March 31, 2017
Saturday, March 11, 2017
End of spring break review
My spring break is almost over--classes will start again on Monday. Ironically, perhaps, there's a possibility that we'll have a snow day on Wednesday due to a Nor'easter that's supposed to hit Tuesday. (I know, I know, Garrison Keillor would say, "Snow is soft!" Well, not when it's being blown into your face by heavy winds.)
I got a few things done over the vacation, though. I finished grading some assignments that I had put on hold because of a couple of lectures that I had to prepare for in late February. One was an invited talk for my friend and former Tunghai colleague John Shufelt, who's teaching a course on American writings about Taiwan at Brown; the other was a talk at a 70th anniversary commemoration of 228 run by the Taiwanese American Association of New York. (Here's an article about the meeting, written by Grace Jackson.) It was a challenge, but a good experience, to take what I had written about Kerr and Sneider and recast it for different kinds of audiences--in the first case, undergraduates, and in the second, survivors of the White Terror and their descendants.
In addition to getting the grading done, I finished my reflective self-criticismevaluation that is required of us every year. Here's an image I used in the document, based on a comment from a student evaluation.
(As you can see, these self-evaluations are not expected to be excessively formal documents. At least I hope they're not!)
I also started reading 一個家族。三個時代:吳拜和子女們, which is looking to be a very interesting book. I hope to write something about it here once I get it done. (Which might take some time--it's over 400 pages. The language isn't too difficult, though, at least so far.) Lately on Facebook I've been seeing a lot of books mentioned that I'd like to read, including a proposed 9-volume set of the writings of 張炎憲, whose oral history about Taiwanese graduate students in the US was very useful for me in my research (see the post below)--if it weren't for that book, I might not have ever known about the debate (I prefer to call it the "battle of the pens") at KSU back in the 1960s between the pro-independence Taiwanese students and their pro-KMT counterparts and the role Formosa Betrayed played in that debate.
Well, now that the break is ending, I have to get back into teaching mode, so much of this will have to go on the back burner until May.
I got a few things done over the vacation, though. I finished grading some assignments that I had put on hold because of a couple of lectures that I had to prepare for in late February. One was an invited talk for my friend and former Tunghai colleague John Shufelt, who's teaching a course on American writings about Taiwan at Brown; the other was a talk at a 70th anniversary commemoration of 228 run by the Taiwanese American Association of New York. (Here's an article about the meeting, written by Grace Jackson.) It was a challenge, but a good experience, to take what I had written about Kerr and Sneider and recast it for different kinds of audiences--in the first case, undergraduates, and in the second, survivors of the White Terror and their descendants.
In addition to getting the grading done, I finished my reflective self-
(As you can see, these self-evaluations are not expected to be excessively formal documents. At least I hope they're not!)
I also started reading 一個家族。三個時代:吳拜和子女們, which is looking to be a very interesting book. I hope to write something about it here once I get it done. (Which might take some time--it's over 400 pages. The language isn't too difficult, though, at least so far.) Lately on Facebook I've been seeing a lot of books mentioned that I'd like to read, including a proposed 9-volume set of the writings of 張炎憲, whose oral history about Taiwanese graduate students in the US was very useful for me in my research (see the post below)--if it weren't for that book, I might not have ever known about the debate (I prefer to call it the "battle of the pens") at KSU back in the 1960s between the pro-independence Taiwanese students and their pro-KMT counterparts and the role Formosa Betrayed played in that debate.
Well, now that the break is ending, I have to get back into teaching mode, so much of this will have to go on the back burner until May.
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