Is the will to discuss as voluntary as the will to learn? There are always a few students, the same ones, who are uninterested in group discussions. Maybe they are shy. Maybe they don't know peers around them well enough to dare to talk to…

This quarter many student writings show that they don't know where to put commas, or even, how to use them. Does this lack of punctuation have something to do with their text-messaging habit? I'm seeing some sea-changes in their writing pa…

Certainly students don't know how extravagant things they're requesting when they send me drafts in this late morning of the due date, asking quick feedback on them. And they shouldn't know that I'm writing responses in drinking beer and w…

My problem is that I indulge in writing sadistic comments on students' rough drafts, while I can't grade their final papers in the same way. Indeed, I imagine how much lighter the workload would become if I were exempt from giving letter g…

I'm finding that I have no feeling for lazy students who come to a class without finishing the reading and I'm nevertheless compelled to feel that I must explain it for them. This is what occurred to me today. And I did so with passion and…

The first thing I have to learn this quarter is definitely how to decipher students' handwriting.

Maybe the first thing I have to teach this quarter is the difference of texting a message and writing an email.

Everything began to go pretty well now. A month later I might face another problem concerning the work permit extension, and a summer trip to Japan becomes nearly impossible, for I was told to stay in the US until the visa sponsorship tran…

Drinking and reading are perhaps incompatible. But I still try this cocktail every night. And waking up next morning I'm always vexed to find that I have to reread the pages my drunken fingers should have turned.

I'm convinced that in one more week my life would degenerate into one seamless flow of reading/thinking/(trying to start) writing and net-surfing and drinking and falling asleep in a vacant room, alone. This silent asceticism is perfectly …

Why transcripts and verifications are not free? Why we're charged $13 per document? What really doesn't makes sense to me is that the price is the same, whether they will be sent via USP first class mail or picked up in person. Or are shee…

I'm totally confused whether I need a new visa if I'll make a trip to Japan over this summer. The homepage of the US embassy tells that you may re-enter the US, insofar as your visa is still valid (mine is valid by the end of September) an…

I have no word to explain my feeling when I read an email from my foreign adviser at UCI, which reads: thanks for your reply, the transcript confirms that you proceeded to Ph.D candidacy and are now eligible for reduction of the non-reside…

To render "Schuld" as "guilt," it seems to me, makes psycho-analysis more moral(istic). If, as Nietzsche so strongly argued in On the Genealogy of Morals, the origin of what we commonly call "guilt" today can be traced back to the relation…

In attempting to file a Student Deficiency Report form, I noticed that one student's name is missing from the class roster. This is really strange, because I never gave her a drop code and how could you delete your name without that? But t…

How can I be cold to ESL students, when I am an ESL writer too? So, it's literally painful to write on their papers that they clearly show ESL problems. It's almost like reading a paper I might have written, criticizing awkwardly written i…

Do students really believe that by using such easy tricks like switching to a larger font, changing the font size, enlarging the margin, and so on, they can fool their teachers?

Do you know any psychoanalytical theory that explains the reason why students keep forgetting the simplest MLA style rule (italics for book titles, double quotation marks for article titles)? There should be some psychic mechanism of resis…

the more i teach, the more convinced i become that there is little relevance b/w the superficial fluency and the inner deep thinking. indeed it's often esl students who barely speak up in classes but write extremely provocative and stimula…

The five-paragraph essay structure is a straight-jacket students don't know how to shake off. But I often suspect that they don't really want to be free from it, for this ready-made format is so easy to recycle and a still viable strategy …

Student drafts always make me wonder if non-discriminatory opinions about race and gender students frequently boast of aren't anything other than set phrases and ready-made thought patterns, something like a gadget they installed without l…

The more I revise exam questions, the more lengthy and complicated they become. I do this in hopes of clarifying them. But I suspect my students take my desperate effort to be unambiguous quite negatively. They seem to see this is too cons…

an (un)likely dissertation plan written in a cryptic shorthand style at a brush---------- critique of post-anarchism--poli-sci: politics--philo: philosophy--poststructuralism & postmodernism--discursivity, impossible normativity; against e…

Okay, the teaching experiences in these four years have almost proved that it's futile to send long emails to students, for they seem to pay little attention to them. Then why am I still writing such a monstrous text at this silent night t…

it seems that for me sleep is no different from being too drunk to keep awake...

Somewhere I read that Leonard Woolf wrote only about what he ate on the day when Virginia committed suicide. In skimming my journal of these few months, I noticed that I did this empty practice many times: a dry list of what I ate, what I …

I finished commenting on 19 student drafts in 7 hours (including breaks and interruptions). This is not a bad record.

intellectually nomadic, physically sedentary

It's quite a bit consoling to see that some of you're as sleepless at this moment as I am. It seems that I should describe my night state as a conscious effort not to sleep with the aid of alcohol, which will at last surrender to drunkenes…

Why do students write only indicative sentences? Why not use the subjunctive, the hypothetical, the conditional? It seems that they don't know how to do with the uncertainty and fragility of yet weak ideas. They almost always present them …