Back from the Dead/ Back to Death

Hi everyone! As you know, I'm back in Tally already- hence the second part of this post's title. It certainly is bittersweet being here. On one hand I feel like I'm doing something for myself and my professional betterment, but on the other I feel like I'm the most masochistic person on Earth for doing this. You only have to see how many books I bought yesterday for my classes to understand this. So yes, this blog is back from the dead and I'm back to slowly killing my brain cells through work overload : (

Well, what better way to bring my blog back to life than by sharing one of my anecdotes with you? So here it goes:
I was in the classroom waiting for my Post-Colonial Lit class to start (which I'm very excited about) when these two classmates of mine engage in a conversation about teaching their respective classes. Conversations like this abound in a place where everyone in the classroom is either a TA, a teacher or a professor. So you can imagine more or less how these conversations go. If you don't, its not hard. They're usually about the person bitching about their students or about teaching (and then everyone chiming in with their own complaints, of course) or about the person expressing some kind of frustration, or frustrations(ssssssss...) about the class in question (and then everyone chiming in, obviously). Well, this one person was complaining about how his students are not up to date in pop-culture issues. He was talking about "The Matrix" in his class and found out, to his surprise, that most of his students had not seen the movie. "What?! Not seen "The Matrix"?!" you may ask yourself. "How can that be possible?!" Well, easy (and this is where the juicy part of the story is). The students that he was talking about are freshmen which means that they are about 18 or 19 years old which in turn means that they were 10years old when "The Matrix" came out. Yes, this movie came out in 1999 and by then today's college freshmen were 9, 10 or 11 years old at the most. Incredible!! I had not realized
1.how young my students really are
2. how old I am
3. how incredibly fast time goes by
4. how unrealistic many of the expectations that we have of our students really are

What was I doing in 1999? Graduating from high school and getting ready to start college. What were my students doing in 1999? Completing 4th grade and watching Pokemon. The generation gap widens...

So here it is: the 1st post of 2008. Welcome to the new year!
Next up: Viv's Spring 2008 trend predictions