Project Ideas

I've been spending a good deal of time over the last week trying to generate ideas for the final projects in my classes and make a decision about which idea to run with. This has been both time consuming and frustrating. When I started thinking about it, I realized that it's always been hard to make up my mind about assignments that were pretty unstructured--it's easier when I'm told specifically what to do and then just have to do it. Of course, I find myself giving my own students lots of freedom when I can because it seems like assignments will be both more useful and more interesting to them if they have the ability to choose topics that interest them. Especially at the graduate level, it makes sense for the instructors to allow a lot of leeway--they certainly don't want to read a bunch of papers on identical topics, and we should be eager to explore our own interests.

But, as I said, I'm having trouble both generating ideas and choosing an idea to pursue further. This seems to be something I have trouble with across the board, since I'm usually an indecisive person (as many of you know, it's hard for me to decide what to order at a restaurant!). The good news is that I have decided on the topic for my final paper in Dr. Troike's class (the meaning and use of prepositions in Spanish and English). I plan to visit another professor's office hours on Tuesday to talk with her about options for the Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) class. The other class is the one with the very laid-back professor. I think I'm going to keep waiting to see what exactly he's expecting from us.

I'm also having to make some choices for a short assignment in CR, but I think I've settled on an idea, if she approves it, that will analyze and compare the same passage in two different Bible translations. (The assignment is basically to compare/contrast two texts of the same genre looking for differences in linguistic structure and content, and how those differences influence the audience's interpretation of the text.) As I was doing some reading online about translations and translation methods, I came across this site about scripture memorization, which seems to be based on a really good idea, but is actually a little cheesy. Well, now I'm off on a tangent...I hope to have decided on topics by the end of the week, at least for CR, since a preliminary project proposal is due next Wednesday!

Other than that, we're looking forward to a visit from Mom, Dad, and Katie at the end of the month--what would you all like to do while you're here? (Besides go back to Magpie's, that is.)