Peony days

With all Senior Week and Commencement activities finished, grading done, and grades posted, the 2012-13 academic year has finally come to an end. Though I'll be working a lot this summer with the Summer Teaching Institute in June and KEEP in July, I'll still get some non-scripted periods before the 2013-14 academic year begins in late August.

This coming year I'll have the challenge of teaching English Honors for the second time, which I hope will mean I can anticipate the issues before they arise, and plan ahead now that I know what is expected and what needs to be done. Though I'll be teaching two courses in the fall, which will be nice, my spring rears up as a challenging time when I'll be teaching two new courses (a Latin@ literature and film class I'm almost finished designing) and a Poe/Alcott senior seminar on the Gothic that will be next on my list of class plans. The third class will be a class I designed when I was a grad student on American Fear, and which I've taught twice at my small college on the hill, but which can be difficult to teach because I use critical lenses of gender, race, and sexuality to examine horror texts and some students resist the notion that you can actually find some meaning-making in what is supposed to be "entertaining." So we'll have to see how that goes.

But, for now, I'm not going to waste time anticipating what is so far in the future. Instead, I want to focus on the daily enjoyment of my time off after a challenging year of tenure review and directing Honors.

The end-of-term activities with the seniors were bittersweet since I am glad that they are embarking on their after-college life with what I know is a solid preparation. But it was also sad to know that I will no longer see some of them, especially those who have been "with me" (as students or advisees or both) since their first year four years ago. I will most especially miss those few students who took the time to tell me that my teaching had made a difference and how it had made a difference. Sometimes, as teachers, we think we clamor in the desert where no one hears or cares so it's nice when we do get positive and encouraging feedback, instead of the usual gripping about grades, or teaching style, or curricular choices. It's the students who notice that make it all worth while, and energize us for the students-to-come.

Now that one more, but important, year is over, it's time to slow down and smell the peonies, some of which, like the white ones above, are already displaying all their glory, and many of which are still unopened and eager to show us their marvelousness.

Since it's the season of graduations, I leave you with an adaptation of David Foster Wallace's now famous "This is Water" 2005 Commencement speech at my small college on the hill, one that the outgoing president yesterday described as probably the best such speech ever written or given. I hadn't heard it before but NPR did this story and the speech is just as described and more (of course, the saddest of ironies is that Wallace went on to commit suicide). Enjoy!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/05/17/184785020/david-foster-wallace-tells-us-about-freedom