Monday, August 31, 2010

5:39 pm, Bozeman time
 
Today was the first day of teaching for me this semester. Classes started yesterday, but since I teach Tuesdays-Thursdays, I didn't teach until today.

The first day is relatively easy—all you do is discuss the syllabus and then send people on their way—but still I felt a lot calmer than I did last year. Last year, for some reason, I was really nervous when I taught my first class, which surprised me because I had spent so many years teaching English in the 1990s. I had figured that, given my experience speaking in public (even though it was a different kind of job), I'd at least feel calm, even if my lesson was terrible.

But nevertheless, I was really scared at the beginning of last year—I think it probably had something to do with becoming a university professor and "institutionalized" more generally. For decades, I'd basically been a freelancer. In Istanbul I'd pretty much worked when I wanted to with very few responsibilities towards anything other than my own classes, and in graduate school I was basically only responsible for my own work.

Starting last year, though, I suddenly found myself with responsibilities for other things, and it wasn't always an easy adjustment to make. It felt awkward, at times, to be connected to an institution and have a real job and not be able to do pretty much whatever I wanted for basically the first time in my adult life.

(But at least I get to be a university professor)

Anyway, for whatever reason I didn't feel so nervous this year—-though I suppose that's not too surprising. Maybe I just had time to digest things over the summer, I dunno. 

Or maybe I've just become institutionalized!

In any case, folks, I really think it's time you had a little N & P....


Suspected arson, shots fired at Islamic center in Tennessee. Other mosques/Islamic centers hiring security because they're afraid of being attacked. I'm sure most of you have already heard about the Muslim taxi driver getting attacked.

Where are the people who have been egging on these hate crimes? For weeks we've heard a number of people make despicable comments about Muslims in a desperate effort to gain political capital among people who are frightened and, in many cases, ignorant. But folks like Newt Gingrich and Rudolph Giuliani should know better—even a moron like Sarah Palin should know better—than to resort to this sort of attacks on a community of people.

We're on the verge of making things very, very complicated with a large group of American citizens and US residents. We don't need that. This is getting very ugly and dangerous and people on both the left and right need to speak up.

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I belong to a lot of email lists, including a few in regard to Crimean Tatars. Here is something that was sent to me today regarding recent events concerning the Crimean Tatars, about which I wrote a little at the end of my blog entry yesterday.

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Juan Cole to Obama: apologize for Iraq invasion on behalf of US government during speech tonight (Tuesday, 8 pm, ET).

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Essay in Hurriyet Daily News on Azerbaijan's position re Turkey-Russia-Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

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Taraf newspaper interviews (in Turkish) a former soldier who served 16 years in the Turkish Army, including some grisly descriptions of some of his experiences.


Fighting in the SE was apparently not always fun and games

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