Beavers

I made a beaver joke in class today. In all fairness, it wasn't totally out of context, but since I left section I'm been wondering if I traumatized anyone, alienated anyone, or if I crossed that line of teach/student/grad student/person who stands up in front of class jumps around grades our papers but is really the same as us.

Last winter I created a web page about the Beaver trade for my World History class. I really struggled with that course and in my bouts of hysteria in which I thought I was never going to get through the quarter in one piece, (I was also TAing for the first time, in German II, and taking a class on some of my favourite dictators: Stalin and Hitler), the thought of being able to do an entire research project on our industrious friend the beaver really got me through. Our professor gave us what I at the time thought was an insane, but later turned out to be a lot of fun, "non-term paper term paper" assignment that made me want to bash my head against the wall repeatedly. I generally think of myself as a creative person, but not when under pressure. I dance, for example, but struggle to no end with choreography. In reference to Chris's academic v. struggling artist post, I'm actually going the history route b/c it seemed slightly more stable that pursuing dance professionally, but I digress...

So I'm in my last week or two of the quarter, I'm trying to do a commodity history of the beaver trade, connecting the North American side of the story with the Muscovite furriers in Russia and the gendered division of labour in the hat trade in France... and I sort of get there, but it's boring. Dry, dull, why would anyone want to read this sort of history. My grand tapestry of world history connecting the continents and women's position in totally different "professions" on totally different continents connected by one fuzzy dead animal... just didn't take off in quite the way I envisioned. Yes, we historians do have heroic dreams about writing history - hey, we take what we can get :) My prof recommended doing something with pictures, and trying to restructure to make it more fun, less boring. So I have a week, my term paper is too term papery and I'm fresh out of ideas when I turn to my husband and say, "how about a website?" He takes off his headphones, looks up from Neverwinter Nights and asks, "what?" Which I of course took as a tacit agreement to help me in my website endeavour (I had little idea what I was doing).

Thanks to Google Image search, some quick re-writing and the saint-like patience of Luke and my brother-in-law, Erik, I got the thing done and I'm actually quite proud of it. What can I say, beavers make me happy and in this field you get your joy where you can. Here's the site. The medium actually allowed me to take the history I wanted to write in a different angle, splitting my subject up into 3 related parts that I could not get to flow together in a formal essay.

But once again, I digress. I'm in class and we're discussing the 17th century memior of Glükel of Hamlen. Glükel's memior was written in the last 40 years of her life for her children. For those not familiar with Glükelchen, her writings are the only autobiographical material we have from a Jewish woman at this time, and one of the few, complete surviving women's memiors from the Early Modern period. Long story, short: she's important and reads like your Jewish grandmother, may she live in Blessed memory. Glükel mentions her business with Jewish Muscovite traders and the class is looking at me with the specific blank so-what stare you get with undergrads when you think you've made a big connection but in reality your historical train has left them at the station. I blurted out something about my research, my page and how happy it made me to have a project surrounding beavers, and that the double entendre that sprung to everyone's mind made me happy.

Not too bad, right?

I'll let you know if someone complains of me sexually harassing them or making the classroom an uncomfortable place. Sheesh.
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