Printing accomplished

After a brief meeting with the professor in charge of the MFA GSIs, I hurried to the copy room to print out my syllabus and reading handouts for the second and third lessons. There was already a queue of two people. Seeing as how the copy room is closed on weekends and will be on Monday, I figured I better get my copying done today or tomorrow. I foresee that the room will be pretty packed on Tuesday, the first day of class. I advised my friend Irene, whose syllabus I adapted for my own class, to get there first thing tomrrow morning. Incidentally, Irene won the first prize in the novel category at the Hopwoods this year. Her novel is set during the Korean war, and she spent three months this past summer studying Korean in Seoul.

Last winter, she told me that after the first day of teaching English 125, one of her students, a Korean guy, got the rest of his friends to join her course. I gathered word had gotten round that a very attractive Korean girl was teaching the course. We laughed about it, and then she said she made the class do a diagnostic test, which resulted in almost all those boys requiring English Practicum instead, a course which some students need to take before enrolling in English 125. We'll see if she has more teaching adventures now that she's gotten a one-year lectureship.

The first-years are already prowling the campus. You can tell they're first-years because they move in packs, following their assigned leader or going out together after orientation sessions. Just a few days ago, as I rode the escalator in Media Union, I found myself standing between two separate groups of Singaporeans - they were complaining about the internet connection in their dorm rooms. I smiled to myself, hearing that unmistakable accent and that familiar tone of complaint and thinking, only at Michigan (and maybe Cornell) do you have such high odds of riding an escalator with your countrymen, even though you're thousands of miles from home.