Joys and Concerns of Teaching

I have decided on two research topics that are interrelated, which I need to pursue. Through my five years of teaching here, I have developed a great concern about my students’ health. They seem to get ill at a greater statistical rate than U.S. students. Each semester, I have at least one hospitalized, but many others suffer with major illnesses that seem to manifest just at the time that an essay is due. An allergy to research or writing perhaps, I am not sure.

Strangely, this poor gene pool must be heredity, directly from the grandparents. This leads me to the second piece of research into Hungarian genealogy. It seems that many of my students have as many as ten different grandparents. The way I discovered this is, each time a paper is due, a grandparent is being buried, and the student needs to rush back to their hometown for the burial. When you have the same students for 4 semesters or more, you begin to realize that they have run out of the customary four grandparents, exceeded possible step-grandparents, and are now working on borrowed grandparents for their funeral get-out-of-Budapest escapades. Further research into these matters will be something of an avocation, but keeping an Excel database of family tragedies would help also.

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