The Teaching, Day One

I was very tired after last night's blog post, but was unable to really get any quality sleep. When I was finally able to sleep, I only got between two and three hours of rest at most before that alarm clock went off at 5AM. Knowing I had to get up and start consuming large quantities of caffeine if I didn't want to be functionally retarded during my teaching this morning, I trudged upstairs, looked at myself in the mirror and decided I looked good enough/was too tired to shower, and began the liberal abuse of coffee. I left the house around 7, and fought through what seemed like a lot more interstate traffic than usual to get to campus.

Once there I spent the morning hours before class printing out a makeshift class roster, filled with the students who, as of last night, were enrolled in the class, drank even more coffee, and socialized with the ladies (and a few guys) of the department who were there as early as I was. I told a few people around the department about the book -- those of them who didn't know about it already, anyhow -- and mentally prepared for class.

My two science writing classes are in a different building (but both in the same room), about 150 yards or more from the English department and on the opposite side of the street. I've never taught in this building before, but it seems to be one of the newer, as well as most technologically-advanced, buildings on campus. I have what is considered a "smart classroom," which is really just jargon for a classroom that has a built-in projector, computer terminal podium, and a screen with light-pen capabilities. It's also very small, and humid/stuffy compared to some of the other rooms I've taught in before.

At around 9:15, my students began filing in for my first class. My first class is populated -- solely and completely -- by men. Nerdy men. Fourteen nerdy men.

My kind of students, I thought. They'll get all my references, and won't bat an eyelash when I say something like "Kneel before Zod" or when I wear my Fantastic Four t-shirts.

My second class, at least, has two females. And fourteen more nerdy men.

Both classes sort of went the same way, to be honest. I introduced myself, handed out the syllabus and covered the basics of it -- like the grading scale, the papers that we'll be writing in the class, my office hours and email address, and the books we'll be using. After that point, I performed what has become my customary first day of class ritual.

For classes of rough crowds as well as easygoing folk alike, I devised a plan during my first semester of teaching a year ago -- at the end of the lesson on the first day, I ask each student to introduce him/herself, and tell the class two things about him/herself that can't be where they're from or what their major is. This tends to get the entire class relaxed and vocal, and usually leads to at least a few amusing facts from some people. After the class has finished introducing themselves, I introduce myself in a more informal way, just as they did. It ends the first class on a positive note, and helps them realize that even if the syllabus and coursework looks daunting, at least they have a friendly instructor who will be social with them and willing to help.

Each of my classes today lasted about forty minutes -- first days are always short, of course, and at the end I told them to make sure they brought their workbooks with them on Thursday, as we'll be covering the more important sections of that as well as filling out some forms, and then taking care of the diagnostic essay (as per my supervisor's instructions).

For those of you who have never taught an English course before, the diagnostic essay I speak of is a sort of test that the students don't get graded for. They're given a choice of several topics and asked to take about 40-50 minutes to write a standard five-paragraph essay with a thesis and conclusion, and it's scored on a scale of 1-5. Those essays are kept for records and then compared with the final exams at the end of the course (which are also graded on a 1-5 scale) to see if there's been marked improvement in a student's writing over the course of the semester. I'm sure Flat State University isn't the only school that does this sort of exercise; it's probably pretty standard across the country. In classes like 101, which I taught my first full year there, the diagnostic also serves as the trial-by-fire litmus test of whether a student should be in that class or should be taking a remedial or ESL course.

So, after my classes were over, I was done for the day -- I've set up my Tuesdays to where, if needed, after I'm done teaching I can get the hell off campus and go home. By the way it looks, Tuesday afternoons will be the days I'll run errands and do shopping, as once the semester gets into full swing, my weekends will be consumed by reading, writing and grading. Not to mention watching football of both the college and NFL varieties. If by some weird and wholly-implausible stroke of luck I end up taking some girl on a date or two this semester, I have to clear some weekend time for that, as well.

After returning to my office and chitchatting with my fellow English men, I packed up the stuff I'd need before tomorrow and came back home. The temperature had shot up twenty degrees from what it had been when I'd arrived on campus around 7:30, and was already getting very hot. The car drove great though, powering through the heat and traffic. Due to a long line of semi trucks on the interstate (like, five in a row, back-to-back, with just enough space between them to make passing them one at a time a futile maneuver) driving around 60mph in a 75 zone, I scanned the area for cops. With none around, I was actually able to kick the Monte Carlo into high gear and get it up around 88-90 or so to pass all of them. It was thrilling, and the highest speed I've ever driven the car up to this point. It still only hit around 400o R.p.m. even at that speed. The tachometer goes up to 8500 or so, and it was like the car was craving more once I passed the trucks and slowed back down to normal.

Never let it be said that a Monte Carlo Z34 with 217k miles and counting (and with two misfiring engine cylinders due to old spark plugs) can't haul some ass when needed. Even with its problems and its age, for the most part that car runs like a champ.

I got home around 1, which means during the time I was driving home from school is when the east coast earthquake struck. I first heard about it from my friend Donna, who wrote a blog post about it, and by around 2 the internet was swamped with news about the quake. It was strong enough to be felt in my hometown of Morgantown, WV, and on the mountain outside of town where I grew up. I have friends and family all around the area, from DC to Baltimore to Pittsburgh, who all felt the quake. My own mother emailed me this afternoon to tell me that she felt it in her office on WVU's campus, and their entire building shook, prompting a 20-minute evacuation.

Crazy shit, really. I may be missing something here, but since when does the eastern seaboard have earthquakes, let alone earthquakes that are close to 6.0?

I live in Kansas. We get no earthquakes here. I'm jealous.

I said that this afternoon to have not one, but two of my friends reply "Tornadoes aren't good enough for you?"

"We don't get hurricanes either," I said in reply. "This place sucks."

I mean that in jest, of course. As for the tornadoes, Newton hasn't had one around the city since '07 or so.

After catching up on the earthquake news, I did what I had originally planned to do: I ate a quick lunch before dozing off on the couch until around 4:30 or so. When I got up, I came back to my room to see that the internet was still abuzz with stories about the earthquake. Yeah, it's a big deal. But no one was hurt, and there was minimal damage. Unless this stuff starts happening every week, I'm pretty sure it's not the endtimes.

In other news, my officemate was the first person to purchase a copy of my book this afternoon, by searching for it in the Amazon Marketplace. Why Amazon would make it available for purchase before it's considered to be "live" and on sale even to me, as the author, is beyond me. According to my own administrative page there as an author, the book still says "publishing," which is the term they use for "it's not ready yet, we're still trying to convert it to Kindle format to be ready for the sale." This is probably true, as the copy my officemate purchased this afternoon is full of formatting errors; line/page breaks were screwed up, pages/chapters running together, etc. This is not my fault, obviously -- I spent weeks and months perfectly formatting that manuscript and making sure everything was on each page I intended it to be on, lined up correctly, and making it look like, well, a book.

This is part of the reason I've told you folks not to search for it and purchase it early before I give you the go-ahead and link once it's "live" on the site -- I'm not sure what formatting they do to it in the process between "publishing" and "live," so it's possible that my officemate purchased a not-completely-processed version of the book -- though through no fault of mine or his. Either that, or he may be reading his Kindle on a higher aspect ratio (read: to make the text bigger), which may change around the way the words look on the "page." I don't know, I don't own a Kindle -- I just write books for them. Believe me, once it goes "live," as much work as I can do on my end will be done, and I will certainly encourage you to purchase the book. Until then, though, you should probably wait. It shouldn't take too long.

What's really amusing, though, is the response I've gotten from the people who have known about the book for some time, including my officemate.

"Why haven't you told anybody about it?" he asked me this afternoon. "I mean, you could be setting up readings on campus, publicizing it, getting more sales and attention."

While this is all certainly true, I've not made a big deal of it because I don't like to count my chickens before they hatch, as they say. If I'd run into a big snag or snafu (such as, for example, if my computer decided to die/lock up and I lost 100 pages of the book's text while writing/editing it, or something along those lines) and I couldn't finish/publish it for several more weeks or months, if at all, then I'd rather keep it mostly under wraps until it's ready and only risk disappointing a few people, including readers of this blog, instead of a much larger and wider group.

The other reason, frankly, is because for a while the book itself was in jeopardy. With the breakup between me and the former girlfriend, I wasn't sure whether or not I would even finish what I had of it, as for about two weeks a lot of variables about where each of us would be living was in the air, as well as all of the monetary issues surrounding those things, combined with the headlong rush of returning to school this semester. All of it was a bit overwhelming at the time, and I briefly considered shelving the book (yet again) for another year or so. I figured, however, if I did that it would remain shelved forever and I'd never come back to it. As fortune favors the bold, I just needed to get it done.

Still, it's not like I'm going to mention it in every casual conversation I have with everyone. Yeah, I wrote a book. It's funny. Lots of people have written funny books. Mine's no more special than theirs are. I may be vain and narcissistic about a lot of different things, but for some reason, I've found that this hasn't extended to the book. I'm not sure why, really.

For the rest of the night -- for as long as I'm awake, anyhow (I don't have to get up early in the morning; I just have to be on campus between 1:30 and 10PM or so for class), I will be languidly reading the Naguib Mahfouz novel Sugar Street for my Asian/Middle Eastern Lit class I'm taking this semester (first class is Thursday night), and I've currently got a large tray of jerky baking at low temperature in the oven. Overall, things could be worse.