Thursday, June 18, 2009

reviving the blog

one might think i DIDN'T survive that grading i posted about just over a year ago, but i survived that and worse. i'm back after one of the most challenging years of my life; i moved to a new home back in the city (!), i moved to a new school, learned the community and the curriculum, and said a very, very sad goodbye to my dear, dear grandfather who died just a week after being diagnosed with leukemia. he is the man pictured in an earlier post called "family (this is not a metaphor)". i think that photo captures the essence of our relationship: we were at once tender and antagonistic. he raised me first in the absence of my father and then in the absence of my mother after her death when i was 18 and i am heartbroken that he will not get to walk me down the aisle next summer. i was able to be with him in his last hours and then with my family for the week following his passing, only to return to five classes of term papers and plenty of assignments i had put off and left behind, all of which threatened to drown me. but i swam, tread water, and kicked my pinky toe there at the end to make it through.

i'm now a few days into another summer which isn't feeling at all like i expected it to. i am planning the aforementioned wedding for the summer of 2010 and preparing myself to make some major revisions to my curriculum. next year i will be teaching the same two courses that i taught this year: sophomore american lit & comp and sophomore introduction to expository comp. (yes, all sophs!) the new wrinkle is that next year our frosh and soph classes will be 1:1, hence part of my motivation (mandate?) in making changes in the way i teach.

i'd like to rededicate this space to all things teaching related and invite conversation about teaching lit, about the trials and victories of being 1:1, and about teaching lit and comp in a 1:1 environment. welcome aboard! thanks for joining me.

1 comment:

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