My hair, y'all
Jul. 28th, 2023 06:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunabee341. Since I last posted about my hair, it has gone from 2A waves to 2B-2C waves/curls. This is so wild.
I went to the hairdresser on Tuesday and got a lot of the length cut off and some waves put in to support the curls and OMG it is so curly now. It's very curly at the roots/crown with lots of genuine ringlets and curls/waves on the sides. It's less so in the back, but my stylist says that since the roots are curly all over, she expects that it will continue to get curlier everywhere over the next couple years. She predicts I am headed for genuine 3A-C hair in the near future.
I am having so much fun playing around with my new curly hair. I finally have a diffuser, so I had a go at styling it myself with heat yesterday, and I think I did alright. I need a stronger hold styling gel which I am picking up today, and then I will have all my curly girl accessories and accoutrement. It's just going to take practice. My stylist was so proud of me, though. She said I was very informed and had done my research and had my facts about how to care for and style my new hair correct. I told her I only know how to do one thing and that's research. LOL
I'm still just in shock that this could even be a thing that happens. So wild.
2. My summer class is over, and it was truly a joy. Poets of color often get left out of courses about nature poetry, so it was important to me that the course included them. One of the poets I included that was new to me is LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. We read her poem My First Black Nature Poem, which is about the struggle to have positive interactions with nature (in this case, natural bodies of water) when it's the site of generational trauma. The poem references Goree, Senegal, the largest hub of Atlantic slave trading from the 15th-19th centuries, and Lake Champlain, which was part of the route of the Underground Railroad. It evokes the practice of drowning black towns to form lakes (like Lake Lanier in GA), and although the poem suggests that African Americans prefer swimming in pools to swimming in natural bodies of water, it evokes the legacy of racism that prevented them access to public pools after desegregation. Many towns closed public pools or turned the public pool into the country club pool to avoid having to allow African Americans to swim with white people. This happened in the town I live in. There's still not a public swimming pool. This has had serious consequences for public safety in that African Americans are still less likely to know how to swim than white people because of historic lack of access to places to learn how to swim.
3. The graduate class I am constructing is going to be really good I think. I feel so much pressure and responsibility for this class to be good because I didn't get any proper instruction about teaching in graduate school, and I think about how much easier my first years of teaching would have gone if I had. I think once the headache and tedium of constructing the class are over, I am going to be very proud of it. I hope to be finished with it this weekend. *crosses fingers*
I think teaching it will be truly delightful, and I'll be posting about it as I teach it.
I went to the hairdresser on Tuesday and got a lot of the length cut off and some waves put in to support the curls and OMG it is so curly now. It's very curly at the roots/crown with lots of genuine ringlets and curls/waves on the sides. It's less so in the back, but my stylist says that since the roots are curly all over, she expects that it will continue to get curlier everywhere over the next couple years. She predicts I am headed for genuine 3A-C hair in the near future.
I am having so much fun playing around with my new curly hair. I finally have a diffuser, so I had a go at styling it myself with heat yesterday, and I think I did alright. I need a stronger hold styling gel which I am picking up today, and then I will have all my curly girl accessories and accoutrement. It's just going to take practice. My stylist was so proud of me, though. She said I was very informed and had done my research and had my facts about how to care for and style my new hair correct. I told her I only know how to do one thing and that's research. LOL
I'm still just in shock that this could even be a thing that happens. So wild.
2. My summer class is over, and it was truly a joy. Poets of color often get left out of courses about nature poetry, so it was important to me that the course included them. One of the poets I included that was new to me is LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. We read her poem My First Black Nature Poem, which is about the struggle to have positive interactions with nature (in this case, natural bodies of water) when it's the site of generational trauma. The poem references Goree, Senegal, the largest hub of Atlantic slave trading from the 15th-19th centuries, and Lake Champlain, which was part of the route of the Underground Railroad. It evokes the practice of drowning black towns to form lakes (like Lake Lanier in GA), and although the poem suggests that African Americans prefer swimming in pools to swimming in natural bodies of water, it evokes the legacy of racism that prevented them access to public pools after desegregation. Many towns closed public pools or turned the public pool into the country club pool to avoid having to allow African Americans to swim with white people. This happened in the town I live in. There's still not a public swimming pool. This has had serious consequences for public safety in that African Americans are still less likely to know how to swim than white people because of historic lack of access to places to learn how to swim.
3. The graduate class I am constructing is going to be really good I think. I feel so much pressure and responsibility for this class to be good because I didn't get any proper instruction about teaching in graduate school, and I think about how much easier my first years of teaching would have gone if I had. I think once the headache and tedium of constructing the class are over, I am going to be very proud of it. I hope to be finished with it this weekend. *crosses fingers*
I think teaching it will be truly delightful, and I'll be posting about it as I teach it.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-30 10:15 am (UTC)I don't honestly know what's up with that, but I have some guesses. I had to take one pedagogy class and it was a joke. It was basically a venting session about how the classes we were teaching were going. I did participate in a Summer Institute of the National Writing Project that got me 6 hours of grad credit that was focused on writing across the curriculum, but I was the only graduate student in English to do so; the rest of the participants were K-12 teachers getting their masters in education. That experience was incredibly useful, but it wasn't required or encouraged by the department; I just lucked into finding out about it.
I think it's not required because the scholarship of teaching and learning is not valued at many institutions, so finding professors to teach these courses is hard. There's also the whole assholey hazing aspect at a lot of places--I learned how to do this on the job or I made it through fine so you sink or swim, too attitude. Also, at many R1s, teaching itself just isn't valued (which is bullshit), so I don't think it occurs to the faculty to do the pedagogy training; they're focused on scholarship training because that's what they value.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-30 10:26 am (UTC)You're totally right about devaluing teaching, too. That's one of the reasons I decided early on that I wanted to work at a teaching rather than research institution.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-30 10:42 am (UTC)There haven't been RCP programs at any of the institutions where I've learned or taught.
I'm in the unique position of the teaching institution where I was hired slowly morphing into a research institution, but because of our original mission and so many of us being hired under that original mission, we're retaining our teaching focus and original values. It's really nice.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-30 11:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-30 11:14 am (UTC)We have a blended access mission still, and our graduate programs are still in their infancy, so it's very, very early days. We are enshrining things in curricula and promotion and tenure policies and annual evaluation so that I think that even as those of us who were part of the original cohort of faculty eventually retire, teaching will remain a priority.