From my course blog.

icancstructures:

The new semester starts on Monday at both places I’m teaching this semester: the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Endicott College. As such, I’ve had to update my syllabi. Among other things, I’ve adopted the newest (second) editions of both the textbook and reader I use in my Introductory Sociology classes. It’s funny that one of my friends recently asked “How do you keep it fresh?” Well, that’s one way. It wasn’t exactly a “rototill,” but the updates were substantial enough to give me pause. I’ll leave rototilling to my upper level course. I’ve just become aware of a textbook I may want to adopt for that, replacing the current aging entries. They’re not bad books, it’s just that a lot has happened since they were published, and they haven’t been updated.

But this is but one of the biannual rituals of teaching. Others include closing out incomplete grades from the previous semester, and I have had a few of those. So no, I haven’t really been “off” this week. While it’s been a slower pace than when I’m teaching four or more courses, I have had a single-pointed focus that has not been leisure.

I can think of no better way to observe this ritual than with an internet meme, courtesy of the free meme generator app I got from the Mac App Store.

I’ve just completed my first two classes of the Fall 2011 semester at UMass Lowell. There’s always a breathtaking sense of the new, the freshly scrubbed and of new possibility. I’ve forgotten how much I treasure the inquisitiveness of students at this juncture in the semester, and what a toll projecting to a large group can take on one’s voice. But despite a few technical glitches, we are most certainly off to a good start.

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Winter sky

Pot of chai

Bulky sweater

Stack ‘o’ paper

‘Twill be my day

Hip-hip hooray!

The nights are starting to get nippy hear in Northeastern Massachusetts, even though it’s not quite time to start thinking about snow, it will be. However, this is more a metaphor of where I typically find myself at this point at the semester, especially the fall semester. There are exactly two weeks before Thanksgiving, and once we college students and faculty return from that break, things will be hectic and stressful. The mindful faculty member must be ahead of the curve, because only the most organized students seem to have this capacity. I have learned this “the hard way,” by experience, after the first few semesters of teaching.

At this point in the semester, I often describe myself as being at the top of of a hill, ready to push off. It’s bracing up here, and while I can see the path, the unknown is below, owing to the dim light these dark “winter” days. There is a mixture of excitement and fear, a breathlessness, and if I as a faculty person am not prepared to push off, who will be?

Many of us similarly, find ourselves two weeks out from the official start of the “holiday” season, festivals of light in Western culture. May this metaphor help bring pause to this time, so that you are not overwhelmed by the speed and whirling snow that greets you at the end of the hill. Balanced on our sleds and fully in control of steering, we may find thrill in the ride and its fulfillment.

This is one of those days I’ve woken up feeling like Toothface, the Newbury Comics mascot, all asymmetrical and trying to put one foot in front of the other, one breath after the last. But Toothface is smiling, right? That helps. I’m giving a “panel debate in lieu of a final exam” today, and the second of four classes to end will never pass this way again. Meeting grace, perhaps we too can “fall towards apotheosis.”

Newbury Comics Toothface T-Shirt

This, this part right here in the semester is the part I call “falling towards apotheosis.” (With apologies to J. Michael Straczynski and Christopher Gardner.

As if we were a band of cranky, hot, and tired hikers yet to emerge from the treeline, professors and students alike plummet toward the end of the semester. Can we who lead this hike take them those extra steps to the new vista? We will never pass this way again, all of us together like this. Can we have them spiral back to the excitement of new inquiry? This vista here is the rest of your life. Savor it, and may our paths cross again.