Marching to the beat of a different semester

Today I accidentally kept a class about five minutes over time and nobody told me to stop. Apparently I'm capable of talking about Zora Neale Hurston at great length without being aware of the passage of time. I didn't even see anyone packing up and getting ready to leave. "Next time, make me stop," I told my students, but we'll see how well they comply.

Today feels like Monday since we didn't have classes yesterday but it can't be Monday because I'm already done teaching for the day at lunchtime. On Mondays I have an afternoon class and frequent late-afternoon meetings, but Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm done at 12:15 (or 12:20 if I lose track of time). Kind of a different schedule for me this semester: no 8 a.m. classes; no morning classes on MWF; no first-year composition; back-to-back 75-minute classes Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I haven't yet internalized the rhythm of the week but so far I'm managing well enough.

It feels strange to have no teaching-free days, but even stranger to be teaching only three classes. For years I've taught four classes (and four different preps!) every semester, but this time I'm teaching American Lit Survey, Creative Nonfiction, and an upper-level special topics literature class I'm calling Between Fact and Fiction in which we'll read works that skirt the line between genres. Today we discussed a couple of chapters from Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, juxtaposed with chapters covering the same information from Valerie Boyd's biography, Wrapped in Rainbows. Fun reading and interesting discussion about the sometimes murky relationship between "truth" and "fact."

The course release provides time to work on a special project for the provost--designing resources and training events for department chairs and providing mentoring for new chairs. This will mean more meetings and lots of paperwork, but it's nice to have a new challenge and a break from teaching composition. Nothing against composition, but: I've paid my dues. Everyone needs a break sometimes, and this one came at just the right time for me. If I pace myself and keep an eye on the clock, I may make it to the end of the semester with my sanity mostly intact.