"Go Time," Part I

Countdown to Spring Semester: one day

24 hours from now, my first day of classes will be half-over, and I will be in the department on the main campus for the first time in over a month. Structure will return to my life. I'll have things to do again, places to be, tasks to handle which I will, finally, get paid for (in eleven more days, of course). My life will return to the standard of "normal" that I've become accustomed to over the course of the past several years -- me being a college instructor and taking care of everything that entails.

As an aside, even though I'm an adjunct, and even though my apparently-official title is "lecturer," I take great pride in being able to call myself a professor. It may be a superficial title compared to the Director or any of the tenured or near-tenured faculty, but it's important to me and it's something that gains me respect outside of the field of academia. It makes my chest swell with a little pride when someone asks me what I do, and I can truthfully answer that I'm an English professor. There are no other professors in my family, and nobody else holds the same level of degree I do (with the exception of my dad, who also has a Master's but doesn't teach with it), so I'm unique in that respect. I'm sure my extended family is proud of me, somehow, though they'd never say it -- they're not that sort of people. My grandmother is about the only one who ever openly says she's proud of me, and she says it often.

My work for tomorrow is mostly done. When I put away my laundry last night, I set out two different outfits for this week. Neither of them are "super dressy," but they'll serve the purpose just fine. I had to use some foresight on them as, even though it was nearly 70 yesterday and it's 55 today, tomorrow's high is supposed to be 35, and by Thursday the high is supposed to be 20. Because, of course, that's what happens in Kansas when the weather gods realize that I have to be outside for extended periods of time. All I really have to do between now and the morning is put my books into my bag before I leave the house at 8:10 or so.

Make no mistake, it's probably going to be a bear to get back into the swing of things, so to speak, of the semester. As I told Daisy, I do look forward to the structure and keep-me-busy work that the semester of teaching provides me, though the shift from having no responsibilities to taking care of everything at once can be somewhat of an obstacle to overcome. I am lucky that my schedule this semester provides a much easier transition into working again, with only one long day per week. It's not so much the workload, but the grind and the repetition of that work that really bogs me down and tires me once the semester gets going. I have enough free time and enough of a lapse between classes this time around to where that grind should be a softer one than usual.

I'm actually excited to see my old 101 students again, this time around for 102. I'm excited to hold sway over classrooms of students again in general, honestly. Kevin Smith (yes, that Kevin Smith) always says that there are three basic human needs -- sex, food, and to be heard. I agree with him. Obviously, my need to be heard is satisfied by my writing and this blog, but primarily through my teaching. I've never made it a secret that I feel what I do is important, and that I feel I have the power to change lives for the better and make a difference in the world. Therefore, each new semester excites me in ways that some people don't understand unless they've been there themselves.

Now that I've said that, watch my car not want to start tomorrow morning, or something.

I still have some little things to do around the house and for myself over the course of the next nine or ten hours before I go to bed tonight. I need to shower again and trim up the beard so that I don't look like a hobo, for example. I need to gather the trash and take it down to the road (because trash pickup was delayed by a day since today's a holiday). I need to make spaghetti and garlic bread for dinner, as that will also provide me with leftovers for a few days for me to eat when I get home from teaching. Stuff like that. Nothing major, just little things that need to be taken care of. Daisy is sleeping right now, of course; she works tonight and will probably work tomorrow night as well, meaning that this evening may be the only time I get to talk to her for any length of time before, say, Thursday (as she has Wednesday off, but I'll be teaching Wednesday night when she wakes up). I teach Thursday morning too, obviously, so our schedules will once more (sadly) be in opposition again -- like ships passing in the night.

My classes tomorrow will be extremely short -- for my 102, I don't even have the books to show them, as I'll have to get copies of the new 102 textbooks from the main office that afternoon. We'll basically cover the syllabus and then leave. My 011 class tomorrow night will be a bit longer, as they only meet once a week and will therefore be doing their diagnostics that night. I had to completely rewrite the timeline and lesson plan for that class, as keeping it as it was would not allow me to have enough time for all of the paper assignments to come due (as it's a once-a-week class with six different papers), not even with the way I'd crammed all the lectures together in the first month or so. I've now reorganized it to where they have at least two weeks for each paper, and they'll actually get a fair shake when it comes to not having a whole lot of busywork shit to do over Spring Break (which also helps me as well, of course).

On that note, it's time to go take care of my stuff this evening so that I can actually get some sleep tonight. Tomorrow...it begins.