I am not dead, nor do I sleep. I am teaching two work-intensive, fast-paced classes this summer. One I have taught several times before, so I am familiar with the material, textbook, etc., but it's a writing class and there's a lot of work coming in very quickly. It entails a lot of paper-reading for me. The other class is brand-new to me, and requires learning the equipment in our also brand-new language lab. The class is a kind of guinea pig all the way around, and I often end up feeling like an idiot. It's called "Advanced Listening-Speaking" and no one knows what it's supposed to be. The woman who has been teaching it turned it into a prep class for students who will be going on to take academic classes in the college, basically taking notes on lectures, and also learning to give presentations in front of a class. And that's the texts I'm using. The head of the dept, who will be teaching it next semester, doesn't like this focus and keeps giving me all kinds of other stuff she wants me to do. Not knowing the equipment means I often have to run to find someone to help me out of a jam - I hate doing this sort of thing in front of students. All in all I wind up with a massive tension headache every Tues and Thurs afternoon. Feels like a steel rod is running from the top of my head through my neck.
So, I'm teaching five hours four days a week, staying afterwards to fool around with the language lab stuff, get used to what I'm trying to do. This is an amazing, state-of-the-art system, but we've had no training, won't have any until September. The system is far smarter than I am.
Then there's TheBlueVoice, the new political group blog you have possibly heard about already. Seven other AOL political bloggers (as I often have been in my other AOL Journal, thewindmills) and I got together and decided to take our show on the road. It's turning out to be a very worthwhile and enjoyable project, but it's The Big Time, and I have been doing a lot of research for the things I write over there, which are mostly pieces on the environment.
So, where does that leave "real" reading? By which I usually mean novels. Kind of in the dirt, for the present time I'm afraid. I read a couple of Ian McEwan books, not the new one yet. They were okay, but I wasn't really swept off my feet. All my library books are so overdue I expect the Library Police to arrive at the door any day now. I started Mary Doria Russell's new book, A Thread of Grace (If you never read The Sparrow and Children of God I have to say go get them and begin immediately. They are probably categorized as Science Fiction, but oh, they are so much more than that. But isn't most Sci Fi more than that, really? It's why it's one of my favorite forms of fiction.) a week or so ago, and haven't gotten very far into it. Gail read it almost without stopping and loved it, so I know I need to stop this obsessing with climate disruption and species extinction, etc, and get back to reading.
As for movies, we haven't seen any recently because we are watching the first season of "The West Wing" on DVD. Somehow we didn't gear into this show until it won all those Emmies its first year. We don't watch much TV, and just had no idea how addictively wonderful this was, especially when Aaron Sorkin was its mastermind. We have two more first season discs to go, then we'll start on last season's "Six Feet Under" on DVD.
Three more weeks and summer classes will be over. We'll have a lot of company at the beginning of the month, maybe even all through the month. I'd love to get to Texas before the fall semester begins, but it may not happen. In any case, I'll get back to reading in the brief weeks between summer and fall semesters. Don't give up on me, please!
