Awesome, darlini, and good luck with your degree! I did a lot of years of comp back in the day, and while I don't remotely miss the PhD I never finished, I still sometimes miss teaching.

My students uniformly either hate their foreign language classes or have given up on them. I think it's pretty easy for them to rationalise that it's not important because they don't want to take them.

(I have my own questions about why they hate them so much, but they certainly do.)

Dubbed Beelzebufo, meaning "frog from hell," the Devil Frog had important differences from today's frogs. To begin with, it was freakin huge. . ."It's not outside the realm of possibility that Beelzebufo took down lizards and mammals and smaller frogs, and even -- considering its size -- possibly hatchling dinosaurs."

I must figure out how to make this my signature because I am one of those people who collect everything frog-related. Frogs are a bit like a totem animal for me--crazy as it sounds. In fact, Beelzebufo is now going into the file of future pet names.

Those playgrounds are largely AWESOME.

I like this one best: [link] Slide down a giant bird's beak!

Slides! Sesaws! None of this icky "series of ramps with a three foot slide" crap.

That's cool, darlini, another academic in our buffista family.

I teach at the University of Oregon here in Eugene Oregon. I am a graduate teaching fellow working on my doctorate in English Lit. I teach lower division composition usually but this term I am teaching the "History of Motion Picture". Well, more precisely I am teaching two discussion sections that compliment the lecture.

My friend and her husband got their doctorates from there! And now they're in, like Oklahoma. Which is sad, because it is far.

I know I am only a child of the 80s-90s but "back in my day" we took geography. . .right?

I totally took geography. And it was hard, what with countries shuffling around their borders and changing their names every five minutes to thumb their noses at the USSR, which is no longer the USSR.

They don't even know how good they have it.

I know I am only a child of the 80s-90s but "back in my day" we took geography. . .right?

I never took geography and it was never offered as a class in my high school.

Thanks Amych! I came to teaching in a long and round about way and I have fallen in love with it. Funny thing is, I miss comp this term. I am doing the structured emphasis in Film Studies through our English dept. but I am a TV/Pop Culture scholar at heart so I have been neglecting my movie watching for TV, song vids, machinima and video games so I find that while I am teaching Film History, I am (re) learning it along with the students which makes it more work than composition sometimes. I do find, however, that the film students are very resistant to foreign language films. The professor who teaches the lecture this term has structured the course around cinema as global throughout its history so we have watched films in Mandarin, Italian, French and Egyptian as well as English. The students response has been less than encouraging.

We had one semester of World Geography in 9th grade. The other half of the history curriculum that year was Alabama History. I remember next to nothing from either class, though I think I've learned geography fairly well on my own.

Actually, the one thing I remember from that class? Getting into a drawn-out argument with the teacher because she insisted A.D. stood for After Death.