My students really wanted to go home early on Thursday. (I think it's because they liked my sub better than me! sniffle sniffle, "She," [they said] "is an unstoppable force of awesome." I know this, but did they have to rub it in?!)
I did have a lesson plan, though, even if I couldn't quite hold it all in my head on a consistent basis. We're trying to sort out the differences among position, argument, and identity.
We used Henry Jenkins' piece, Complete Freedom of Movement, as our example. If I had had more energy, I would have become apoplectic at the perception of half the class that Jenkins' did not include any of "the negatives" of videogaming. Instead, all I could do was tell them I was trying not to lose my mind. The next day, Friday, I met with several students for individual consultations. One of them cracked me up with her description and self-reflection on the discussion: "[One of the students] used misogynistic in a sentence! Do people really talk like that?!" The humor does me as much good as the hugs. :-)
Dude, I gotta play with your gender. I wrote you as a "she" the first time, because I decided some months ago to write everyone as she when I write about interpreting (a site in which I'm professionally obligated to maintain confidentiality). It's a way of obscuring identity AND, I thought - why not? If women can concede that we are included when in people use male identifiers in general, inclusive terms, why can't men do the same?
I had this weirdness, inside, though, because I'm not trying to mask your identity from the students, and I thought, they will be weirded out (or something along those lines). Maybe I wasn't ready to deal with the processing? Or . . . ?
Anyway, its been bugging me and I decided, if I'm gonna do it, then I need to Do It. So you're now a she.
:-)