Katia_chan

I will be making more as a PHD student than I make working right now.  So I'm taking what they offer and running with it.  Yes we are getting paid for teaching, but if you think of it, we are also getting paid to *study*.  Where else will someone give you that opportunity?  It may not be much, but someone is still paying you to go to school.
 
My teaching load will be the same as it is right now, as an adjunct, and I will be making more plus being able to go to school.  I'm not saying you shouldn't bargain, but I do think we need to be careful not to lose sight of the fact that we should be a little grateful.  There is no law that they *have* to pay us any more than an adjunct makes per credit hour.  I know it's expected, but it's still a nice opportunity.

Hey, look at it this way: all "real" grad students feel like impostors, so knowing that you feel like an impostor makes you less of an impostor.

I'm pretty well-versed ('okay-versed'?), but by no means an expert--I'm still a lowly undergrad, obviously, but I've taken two semesters of Old English (one intro, one grad Beowulf seminar), and lead my university's Old English reading group. I'll give you some nitty gritty, practical tips first, and then some general thoughts:
 
Go to this website, print out the Magic Sheet you find there, fold it in half, laminate it, and LIVE with it. Keep it in your OE textbook at all times, do your OE readings with it ever by your side, sleep with it underneath your pillow, and stroke it gently when the lonely hours come. From there, on to bibliography. So, your instructor will require whatever book they require, but Peter Baker's Introduction to Old English (make sure to get the most recent edition, there are some egregious typos in earlier ones) is, for my money, the best introduction for people without experience in an inflected language. If you do have that experience, or are looking for greater philological detail, Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English is a great bet, and an excellent reference. There's really only one good student dictionary--the Clark Hall & Meritt, but BE WARNED: Amazon abounds w/ unscrupulous vendors of public-domain OCRd copies based on old editions that are uniformly crappy and to be avoided. You want the 4th edition published in the Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching series, put out by Toronto. It's the one w/ the blue and white cover with OE text in an inset window, and can be found here. Peter Baker's intro textbook is also online, and make sure you check out the links to the left--there are great resources there, exercises, annotated readings, etc. The Dictionary of Old English is online and should be available through your university, but it only runs through G; Bosworth-Toller (the best complete dictionary) is available for free online, as well, but often entails (as does the print version, sigh) having to look through various supplements and addenda to make sure you've done your lexicographical legwork responsibly. Baker says: "Indeed (though some Old English teachers may not approve of our telling you so), you may find it possible to read Old English prose pretty well without having to put in a lot of work on adjectives." This is, to put it gently, litotes. My advice? Do not bother to obsessively learn adjective endings. At all. I say this as someone who adores morphology, fetishizes philological rigor, etc etc etc. The payoff simply isn't there for the complexity of the paradigms, and that time would be better spent working on things like i-mutation, other sound changes, strong verb classes, etc, or even just having a beer or two. It is largely unnecessary in prose since adjectival hyperbaton is rarely an issue, and while there will be moments in poetry where the proper reading will turn on an adjective (usually when dealing with substantives or unexpected weak adjective endings) being correctly parsed, they're pretty rare--and when they do happen, you'll have your Magic sheet to refer to, anyway!  Of course this advice is useless if you'll be tested on them in class, in which case: ugh. Gird your loins. Other than that, though, learn your paradigms, backwards and forwards. Don't learn them as isolated, discrete units; look for connections between them. It's a lot easier (I think) to remember that the feminine accusative singular pronouns/articles are always the same as the plural nominative and accusative pronouns/articles than to try to remember them as three separate things. This is, again, only one of the many moments in which your Magic Sheet will be more than handy. Read real Old English things as soon as possible! The first few weeks of morphological drudgery can be a bit of a slog, but remember that at the end of your road paved with hard-won paradigms are the manifest glories of Anglo-Saxon literature. Since the end of that road can seem a little far off when you're wading through a sea of ðæm and þisses, though, put real Old English in front of your weary eyes as soon as you can. Baker's great about that, Mitchell and Robinson less so. Cambridge publishes a great Old English reader (edited by Marsden) whose marginal glossing is ridiculously complete (and with a full glossary in the back). The Dumbarton Oaks series by Harvard (it's the medieval equivalent of the Loeb Library, and if that isn't enough to make you wet yourself think hard about the choices you've made in your life) publishes a ton of OE stuff in bilingual en face editions, but since the texts aren't normalized or glossed it's probably a choice for when one's a bit surer with the language.  Read aloud! Not only does it sound cool (eventually--you'll feel like embarrassed/like a jackass at first, but there's no avoiding it), but it'll help internalize the rhythm of the language, which will help you internalize the syntax. As far as how to study, I found the process for doing translations/preparing readings outlined here to be enormously helpful (even if a crapton of work), at least during the early stages. More general advice: Hreaðemus is (as usual!) exactly right--Old English is, if not easy, at least considerably easier than a lot of other medieval languages, to say nothing of Latin. I'm about to take what will be the equivalent of my seventh semester of Latin this fall, and while my Latin's not necessarily shabby, I still hobble and stumble and falter my way through it with tons of dictionary support, confusion, and cursing. In comparison, Old English is a breeze. It's funny. I tend to get all needlessly indignant when I tell people I study Old English and they say "like Shakespeare?" and I have to patiently explain that, no, it's an entirely different language--showing them the first few lines of Beowulf usually clears that up. But, at the same time, the following are all sentences of Old English:
 
Harold is swift. His hand is strong and his word grim. Late in life he went to his wife in Rome.
Is his inn open? His corn-binn is full and his song is written. Grind his corn for him and sing me his song.
He is dead. His bed is under him. His lomb is deaf and blind. He sang for me.
 
Those are obviously cherry-picked examples (and they're Mitchell and Robinson's, not mine--they have more of them, too, if you're into that sort of thing), but there's a lot about Old English that will be at least familiar to a speaker of modern English.
 
That doesn't mean, though, that there isn't a lot that isn't familiar, and that will trip you up if you approach it as if it's just funny looking ModE. Aside from lexical differences, Old English is an inflected language, and that means that it preserves grammatical distinctions that ModE doesn't, and that it can be much freer with word order (especially in poetry) and use constructions--bare instrumental datives, for example--that have zero equivalent in ModE. This is where time spent learning morphology and syntax, as boring as they are, really pays off--if you haven't, it's all too easy to just completely miss the sense of an OE text because you aren't able to pick up on the grammatical clues the various inflections might be giving you.
 
I hope some of that helps, and wes þu hal!

Someone I knew did their undergrad there, and is still totally in love with the school.  Their book history program is great, and early Brit, and and and...  Basically all your classes will make me drool.  You will have to let me pick your brain.
 
And yeah, I ended up at SLU.  I'm not positive about the conference thing, but it sort of rings a bell.  And I know they let their grad students set up conferences too, which could be awesome.

Congratulations!!!!!!  I disappear from GC for a month and come back to see this awesome news.  I'm so happy for you!
 
We were almost classmates, too, which would have been awesome (I just couldn't do Texas because I'm a wimp), but I hope to see you at conferences.
 
Congrats again!!!  You've earned this, and you're going to have such a great time there; the school looks amazing.

I got accepted last minute by Texas Tech!!! Full funding! OMG OMG.

They started accepting applications about a month ago for three additional funded positions in their English Department, so I applied on the off chance that I might get in. So excited!

On teaching:
 
Something I have learned (am still learning), is that you do not always have to justify yourself to your students.  If you are doing an activity, and you know why you are doing it, and you have made it clear in some way what the point of the activity is, if they challenge you on it it is sometimes alright just to say "because I said so."
 
I used a novel in one of my freshman comp classes, and I got a lot of (inappropriate) grumbling from a student.  We were supposed to be having conferences, and I expressed some anxiety about making the student understand/accept my reasoning for the novel.  Then a friend reminded me that "you are the teacher. What he thinks does not matter."
 
Maybe this is just a problem for push-overs like me, but it's something I'm still working on.  But realizing that you do, in reality, have authority, makes things easier.

Kzoo stuff is filling my twitter feed and I am really bumming about the fact that I'm not there, even more than I expected.  I haven't properly nerded out in so long...
 
I was hoping to do it this year, but it didn't work out.  But next year--it's happening.  I hope some of you are there, and having a marvelous time.
 
(...pretty sure this is the only place I can go mope about being absent from a conference where I won't get a bunch of raised eyebrows).

Hi, friends! Not that this is terribly important to anyone here, but I've been awarded a fellowship in a program next fall! After having to study this for two years in my off time, I can't wait to be a full-time student again!

Got an e-mail from the graduate director congratulating me on my acceptance!!! I'm so happy. Is there any other UMD-bound students here?

Yikes...dealing with international visas or weddings while trying to do the rest of this sounds awful... I'm stressed out and it's just me and my cats.

I'm stealing this idea from the thread Proflorax posted last spring.  It seems good for everybody moving on to a program this year to have a place to discuss what's next up on the plate.  We're all dealing with learning about new programs and cities, figuring out where we're moving, etc, so it seemed like a good idea to have a place to compare notes and frustrations and anxiety attacks.
 
As for me, I've been spending precious grading time on Craigslist, looking at houses that are most certainly not going to be on the books when I'm actually ready to move, and figuring out exactly how to apartment-hunt from several hundred miles away.  Haven't yet heard anything from my new program, so that aspect of things still seems to be on hold.  But I'm so excited to begin.

Bananas are good. I like Bananas.

I gave a theory book and a fun book to one advisor/letter writer
A new theory book to another advisor/letter writer
a bottle of nice Whisky to the final advisor/letter writer/current instructor

They're grown adults and professionals I suspect they can/do seperate these sort of gifts from any idea of bribery/what-have-you.

For all those Medievalists out there, today is International Hug a Medievalist Day!
 

 
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has been tweeting about it all day.

Annnnnd I just accepted Ohio State's offer!
 
 
 
*Kermit flails*

I just accepted an offer.
 
There is no emoticon for how weird that feels.  4 app seasons paying off, and I'm scared shitless, and ecstatic, and...yeah.
 
Now, I share a video someone posted last year that sums up this whole stupid never-ending anxiety attack...
 
ETA: then I cock up the code and decide to just post a link...
 

Yeah, I was still waiting to see if a waitlist converted, and still technically had one school left to hear from.  But the funding at the WL didn't look good, and the other school sent its acceptances out over 2 weeks ago, soooo...
 
And then I decided that the likelihood of me choosing either school over the acceptance I had was pretty small, and that I just wanted to be able to plan my effing life further than six months in advance, and I took a chance.  There's still the tiny "what-if" in my brain, but it is only about 2%, and is overruled by the other 98 that feels like we made a good call.
 
When March is drawing to a close, the potential grad student must thrust herself into motion.  Or...something.  Basically, I just wanted to make a decision and I went for it.

I just accepted an offer.
 
There is no emoticon for how weird that feels.  4 app seasons paying off, and I'm scared shitless, and ecstatic, and...yeah.
 
Now, I share a video someone posted last year that sums up this whole stupid never-ending anxiety attack...
 
ETA: then I cock up the code and decide to just post a link...
 

I just accepted an offer.
 
There is no emoticon for how weird that feels.  4 app seasons paying off, and I'm scared shitless, and ecstatic, and...yeah.
 
Now, I share a video someone posted last year that sums up this whole stupid never-ending anxiety attack...
 
ETA: then I cock up the code and decide to just post a link...
 

I just accepted an offer.
 
There is no emoticon for how weird that feels.  4 app seasons paying off, and I'm scared shitless, and ecstatic, and...yeah.
 
Now, I share a video someone posted last year that sums up this whole stupid never-ending anxiety attack...
 
ETA: then I cock up the code and decide to just post a link...
 

I just accepted an offer.
 
There is no emoticon for how weird that feels.  4 app seasons paying off, and I'm scared shitless, and ecstatic, and...yeah.
 
Now, I share a video someone posted last year that sums up this whole stupid never-ending anxiety attack...
 
ETA: then I cock up the code and decide to just post a link...
 

I just accepted an offer.
 
There is no emoticon for how weird that feels.  4 app seasons paying off, and I'm scared shitless, and ecstatic, and...yeah.
 
Now, I share a video someone posted last year that sums up this whole stupid never-ending anxiety attack...
 
ETA: then I cock up the code and decide to just post a link...
 

I just accepted an offer.
 
There is no emoticon for how weird that feels.  4 app seasons paying off, and I'm scared shitless, and ecstatic, and...yeah.
 
Now, I share a video someone posted last year that sums up this whole stupid never-ending anxiety attack...
 
ETA: then I cock up the code and decide to just post a link...
 

I finally heard back from GWU. They haven't rejected me yet! Of course, they haven't admitted me either... But I'm still feeling pretty good about it.

Hahahahahhahaha! I’ve edited it now. Oh wow, that’s awkward. That would be an interesting place to find cookie dough.