Friday, Oct. 14, 2005 - 7:44 a.m.

I don't know what it is with me these days, but I keep waking up at 2:30-3:30 in the morning and staying wide awake till, oh, say 5, before going back to sleep long enough to feel like crap when I have to get up at 6. Wide awake at 4am, but there just isn't anything I especially want to DO at 4am. Except sleep. Grr.

Class went well yesterday, even though I defied the wishes of the prof and gave them *gasp* extra practice exercises. We're not supposed to do that, because it might, like, teach them something, and we wouldn't want my class to learn something that another section doesn't. Never mind that it's over the same material that we've been doing, and never mind that he introduced wh-movement, D- and S- structure in lecture Tuesday and is planning to test them on it next Tuesday with only one homework intervening which they won't even be able to get back before the test. Oh yeah, I so gave them practice exercises. They may have even learned things. I hope I don't get fired. (tongue planted firmly in cheek)

My frustration with this professor grows every semester. He's the one that uses the fill-in-the-blank workbooks. He's totally happy if students memorize how to draw certain tree stuctures without knowing the why of it at all (as long as they remember to fill in the little lines between the category labels and the lexical items at the bottom of the tree! That's very important!)--this semester, he was a little short of time, so what did he cut? Constituency tests. !!!

At least it's all helping me to develop a coherent opinion about what the pedagogical goals of introductory linguistics classes ought to be. And to my mind, that list of goals does NOT include "always draw little lines between the lexical category label and the lexical item".

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