I fear my new schedule has caused me to allow the ol' blog to fall into a state of semi-disrepair. There's a layer of dust covering most surfaces and a spider just strolled by. I am slowly getting adjusted however and am learning to make more efficient use of what little free time I do have. I'm teaching on Wednesday and Friday this semester and working six days a week. Being busy suits me pretty well--forces a certain productivity on me. The downside is that time seems to be careening by at a furious pace. Weeks are going by in a flash. I think I shall choose to forgo any maudlin existential complaining for the time being.
I have been teaching the big stuff thus far this semester: the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, and I've really enjoyed it. I hadn't read it in years and years. Of course we are reading tiny little snippets of larger classic works, but even so, it still manages to be great stuff. The students are harder to read. They clearly find the material difficult, and some of it is not easy, but even when they seem to finally get it, they don't necessarily seem excited by it. But after you've taught for a while you come to realize that as the teacher you may not be privy to their real reactions. So I hope that some of them, shoot...even just one of them, is secretly energized by the reading we're doing.
It may be that teaching is a practical sort of vocation, measurable and quantifiable and such, but it is also ephemeral and mysterious and I am reminded of that anew every semester.
