This week's schedule

Today, in about 30 minutes in fact, Angela is driving me to Campina Grande, where I will give a talk to the faculty at the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande tomorrow morning at 8:30 am. It's a several hour drive north, in the state of Paraíba. Here's a nifty map of Brazil that allows you to select the state, region, and city. Follow the bread-crumbs to find different parts of Brazil.

So it will be a busy week, with class on Tuesday, another workshop-presentation to the ESL undergraduates on Wednesday, and class on Thursday.

I have read the dozen student papers that were submitted last week, responding to my request that they describe the probable antecedent genres of some genre with which they were familiar. There were a number of interesting discussions, of chat-room classes, of "asking-for-alms" papers passed out on busses, of fairy tales, the student seminar presentation, the "ping-pong" journalistic interview, and others. Some were difficult to read because of the language problem. Two were submitted in Portuguese, and I ran them through Apple's Sherlock translation, which produced texts that were worse than the worst student attempt at English. But the level of discussion and analysis was generally quite rewarding.