It's amazing how little it takes sometimes to improve my mood. I was feeling stagnant, tired of teaching the same texts over and over, wondering whether it's time to pack up the office and call it a career, when suddenly, out of the blue, I was offered a chance to teach a special topics literature course, and now I'm all excited about choosing a theme and picking out texts and designing meaningful assignments--for a class I'll be teaching in Spring 2023.
You know what this means, right? It means I can't retire for at least two more years and I also have an excellent response for all the people who keep asking me when I'm planning to retire: I'm too busy designing a new course to think about retirement.
It's a small thing, really, but thinking about this course has reminded me that I haven't used up all my good ideas and that I still have something to offer students. Sure, I teach a lot of the same texts over and over, but I'm not teaching the same students, and each new group brings something a little different to the table. And in 2023, I'll bring something new to the table too--and if I'm not quite certain right now what that something will be, at least it's giving me a reason to believe in a bright future.
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