Some quick notes at the beginning of week 3 of the semester

I've gotten through two weeks of the semester already, and I'm not too far behind on my teaching-related work. Amazingly, I have been able to keep them in class and active for the whole 100 minutes so far. (I'm always afraid we will run out of things to do after about 15 minutes, and I'll have to let them go 85 minutes early...) So far we've had some interesting discussions about developing confidence writing in your L2/3/4/n (Maybe it should be called Ln writing...) Also the possible roles of translation in writing in English. For this, I was even able to talk a little about my 2013 (2014?) paper about Google Translate and EFL writing. 

I've also done most of the interviews of undergraduate Fulbright applicants whom I'm trying to help revise their applications. I have a meeting this week with the members of my subcommittee to go over the applications and share our suggestions about them. I hope these students will be able to get a chance to go abroad for a year and do some intercultural exchange. I know it changed my life.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to try to join my virtual writing group. We'll meet (virtually, of course) at 9:00 and share what we plan to work on for the next two hours, then go away and do it. Then come back at 10:55 and share what we did. My plan is to work on an application for the Rhetoric Society of American 2023 Summer Institute. I'm interested in a seminar on "Decolonizing Comparative Global Rhetorics." I think it could be very relevant to a paper I'm working on, but I'm not sure yet because I need to know more about what it means to decolonize comparative global rhetorics and how I might fit (if at all) into such an effort. (That's basically what my application narrative says so far...)

I'm also enjoying finally reading Ming-cheng M. Lo's Doctors Within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (University of California Press, 2002). I've picked around in it before, but now I'm reading it from beginning to end. Lo had two recent interviews (part one, part two) related to this topic that reminded me that I hadn't actually read the book yet!