Two weeks ago, on 8 September, after finishing my morning stint my gym, I headed to the Brooklyn College campus. I arrived at 12:20, five minutes after the 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM classes had ended. The campus was overflowing with students: streaming out from classrooms and lecture halls, clogging the corridors, the walkways, theContinue reading “The Rainbow In My Roster”
Tag Archives: students
Stepping Up To The Plate For Another Fall Classic
Around mid-August or so, my normal ‘auto-chattering’–the monologues I have with myself as I walk around the streets of New York City–picked up pace. I began rehearsing dialogues with an imaginary audience, holding forth, declaiming, answering questions, parrying objections–the whole package. The reasons for this are not hard to find. The 2015 fall semester beginsContinue reading “Stepping Up To The Plate For Another Fall Classic”
Writing And The Hundred Book Summer
Shortly after I have returned my student’s writing assignments to them, I start setting up appointments with those students who want to talk about their grades. In these consultations, as I go over the importance of returning to the reading assignments, preparing an early draft, meeting the writing tutor, revising often, having a friend readContinue reading “Writing And The Hundred Book Summer”
The Clock-Watcher’s Punch In The Gut
Last Monday, as I taught my graduate seminar on The Nature of Law, one of the students in attendance turned to look at the clock: we still had some forty-five minutes to go in a two-hour meeting. As I saw this, I experienced a familiar feeling, one that, as usual, temporarily, if not visibly, incapacitatedContinue reading “The Clock-Watcher’s Punch In The Gut”
A Teaching Self-Evaluation
Today is the last day of classes for the fall semester of 2014. Today is the day for reviews, discussing paper plans (and in one class, surprisingly enough, answering questions from students who wanted to know a bit more about my personal background.) A week from today, I will administer finals in two classes andContinue reading “A Teaching Self-Evaluation”
The Unread Reading
In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek says: All too often, when we love somebody, we don’t accept him or her as what the person effectively is. We accept him or her insofar as this person fits the co-ordinates of our fantasy. We misidentify, wrongly identify him or her, which is why, when we discover thatContinue reading “The Unread Reading”
Back to Teaching – II
I returned to teaching today–after a hiatus of three semesters. The first semester’s release from teaching was due to a union-negotiated parental leave; I was exempt from teaching two classes that semester and because I was scheduled to be assigned that workload in any case, I was effectively exempt from teaching altogether. (I was notContinue reading “Back to Teaching – II”
Noam Chomsky, My Palestinian Student, and a Gift
A few years ago, at Brooklyn College, I taught a class on the formal theory of computation. We covered the usual topics: finite state automata, context-free grammars, Turing machines, computational complexity. As we worked through the theory of context-free grammars, I introduced my students to the concept of their Chomsky normal forms. As a quick preliminary,Continue reading “Noam Chomsky, My Palestinian Student, and a Gift”
An Independence Day of Sorts: Beginning a Migration
15 August 1947 is Independence Day in India. It is also my father-in-law’s birthday, a midnight’s child. And it is the day I left India–in 1987, forty years later–to migrate to the US. My ‘migration’–such as it was–consists of pretty standard fare: I began as a graduate student, armed with an admission letter to aContinue reading “An Independence Day of Sorts: Beginning a Migration”
Semester’s End: A Teaching Self-Evaluation
As this semester winds down to its inevitable, slow, painful end, it’s time to reflect just a little on what went right and what went wrong with my teaching. I taught three classes: Philosophical Issues in Literature, Core Philosophy (Honors), and Political Philosophy. These three constituted three ‘new’ preparations for me: I last taught CoreContinue reading “Semester’s End: A Teaching Self-Evaluation”
Samir Chopra 