In My Blogging Era: The Manuscript

Siena is hot, hot, hot! And there is not, not, not any air conditioning! It's even warmer than usual this year, so we're doing what we can to stay hydrated and sit in front of the fan as much as possible. Cold showers are the name of the game these days. Classes have resumed now that we're settled in Siena, and with classes on Wednesday came a fun little visit from my Harvard Romance Languages and Literatures department friend, Louise! Louise is from Milan and is such a delight of a human. She popped into Siena Wednesday morning and stayed with me before leaving again Thursday afternoon. She came to class at the university (which used to be an insane asylum... now where they put us Harvard kids when we come to town!) and then joined us for the afternoon Savor Siena food tour of the city. We visited many of the same spots as last year, tasting wines, breads, tomatoes, olive oil, ciaccini (the local focaccia/pizza specialty), ricciarelli (delicious, soft powdered sugar-covere...

Our two weeks in Trento kept us busy enough that they seemed to fly by, and I'm writing to you now from the third and last leg of our trip: Siena! The weekend brought with it our students' many worries and questions about the midterm exam. Try as I might to hide from them on Saturdays and Sundays, their messages somehow find me! "What does cognitive dissonance mean?" "What is Kant talking about here?" "Can I have extra time for the exam?" Enough of them voiced concern in the group chat that Professor Erspamer finally spoke up and said "terms that are in red font on the list won't be on the midterm but could be useful for the final, not to mention for your BRAIN and consequently your LIFE" (caps lock is my emphatic addition). A strong message about the purpose of academia, not to mention a hilarious thing to write to 28 panicking students. Monday morning: exam day! The exam is nine pages long, single-sided to give them enough space to ...

This was a good exercise week and a difficult program week for me, so we take from the lyrics "darling, let's run, run from it all, we can go where our eyes can take us, go where no one else is." Last Sunday was run day, so I ran around five miles on the trail that follows the Adige river. It was hot and sunny but felt so nice to get away from the city (and my students) for a bit. I ran halfway and then sat in a park and photosynthesized for a while and then ran back. A nice break! Monday brought the TA-run midterm review session, which went pretty smoothly. The kids are a bit spastic about the exam, so they had lots of questions. Eventually we cut them off and made them to the exercises that Finlay and I had prepared on the bus a few days before, which proved helpful to them. That afternoon, we had language class, which went super well! I pulled one of the students in the beginning-level class since she has an unprecedented rate of language learning, and she's alread...

It's me, hi! I'm the foolish one! Silly me, to think that everything would get easier upon moving to Trento... To start the week, Monday brought our first discussion section in Trento, which I dedicated to starting to get the kids thinking about the midterm, which takes place just before we leave for Siena. In standard form, just the word "midterm" was enough to freak them out, so I spent the class trying to get them to focus on our review-based discussion. After lunch break, we had language class, in which I did a culture lesson on Trento, teaching my students some fun things about the region (which they loved) and getting them to practice their subjunctive verb conjugations (which they hated). Our other activity of the day was a trip to a local vineyard for our first wine tasting. The guy who owns the vineyard, Giuliano, remembered me from last year and was just as kind as I remembered him being. He doesn't speak much English, so I interpreted for him while he t...

Hello from a place that is not Milan! We’ve officially made it to the second leg of the program, and Trento is welcoming us nicely once again. The number one thing I’m looking forward to for these two weeks: thunderstorms rolling over the mountain range. The number one thing I’m dreading: grading midterms. Let’s see how that pans out.   Friday morning started off rather wildly, with a mad dash to get all the kids (and members of the teaching staff) out of their rooms with all of their belongings to turn in all of their keys and get on the bus. I managed to accomplish this and we left at 9:36, only six minutes later than we were supposed to. This was a huge win since I was handling all 33 of us on my own. After a stop for lunch, we got to Molveno around 2:30pm and were reunited with Professor Erspamer. I was so relieved to see him that I hugged him, which was probably alarming to him… We dropped our things in our rooms and changed into swimsuits to go take our lake jump. This is an ...