Drive by spring post

1. I opened the door yesterday, stepped outside, took a big whiff, and there it was. The smell of spring. That sweet, doo-doo stench of Bradford pear trees that permeates the South every April. Every time the odor of floral turds gently assaults my nostrils, I call to mind the image of Janie having her sexual awakening underneath that Bradford pear, and I'm all, "Zora, for the love of all that is holy, WHY? Why this tree? Why this olfactory dung bomb? What about sugared feces with a soupcon of semen says pivotal erotic moment to you?"

ETA: The Bradford pear tree is a purely ornamental tree; no pears grow on the tree. It only flowers.

2. My colleague and I wrote an IRB proposal yesterday that will get expedited IRB approval (because it's just adminstering a survey to our students about a teaching method that we're using) so that we can co-author an article about Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TiLT)--a course design framework that we've been implementing for the past two years. This colleague, who has become a good friend (this is the colleague who I emailed like a dork and asked to be my friend LOL), led a Faculty Learning Community I was part of that was about TiLT; she is a Governor's Teaching Fellow this year, and one of her cohort is editing a special edition of a journal that's about TiLT, so we're going to submit an article. It's due July 1; I've never written an academic article collaboratively, so this will be an interesting experience.

I would like to go on record, though, that I think it should not be necessary to get IRB approval to write about what you're doing in your classroom (for values of like assignments and course design). It kinda blows that you can't write about your courses in any meaningful way without an IRB, and they're not retroactive, so it's very aggravating. /whine

3. Grading grading grading grading; so tired; grading grading grading; so tired; LOL