It's August.....already?

So here I am, on August 8, starting to plan for the new semester, which will be my last one as a full-time (well, full-time sort of, part-time/full-time) professor. Retirement, here I come! I met today with Rob Mundy, a professor of English and director of the Writing Enhanced Course program.  So I'm starting to think about syllabi, books, assignments, stuff like that.

Whiteboard class notes

And next week I'll be in my office, going through registrations and finding my way back.
So
I'm guessing that for me, in a way, summer is over. What about you?

A new semester begins!

Before Labor Day, no less. But we all got through it, my students are wonderful, and I'm glad to be back.
I'll be experimenting with Poll Everywhere and I'm pretty excited about that.
And I'm teaching three learning communities; two with a business course, same professor, and one with an economics course.
So it will be a busy semester, in this, the fall semester of my penultimate year of teaching.

Summer!

Ah yes, a life geared to the academic calendar.

I survived the spring semester, my first teaching semester in four and one half years.  I forgot 1) how much work teaching is and 2) how much I love it (the work and the teaching).

And now the summer.  My "to do" list is incredibly long.  In addition to taking two courses towards my education to become a Commissioned Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church, USA (more about that here) I'm taking fiddle lessons AND I promised myself that this would be the summer that I finally got my website up.  So I'm taking a class from Tom Antion on-line that will teach me how to use Wordpress.

Oh, and I'm going to learn Evernote, and I'm taking Meggin McIntosh's Workshop Business 101 four month course to get myself set up to deliver workshops.

You should see the piles of books in my office at home.  In fact, you are seeing the piles of books. 

They are arranged into meaningful piles, but perhaps only for me.  There's the meditation pile, the workshop 101 pile, the CIS 101 pile (did I mention that another summer project is reworking our gen ed computing course, the one that every student has to take and hates?).

They are piled on the floor because there is no room in the bookcases, which leads me to another (perpetual) project which is to CLEAN UP THIS OFFICE!  Sorry, I didn't mean to shout.

Hope everyone is enjoying the summer-time to go back to whatever important thing it was that I was doing.

Sabbatical!

Sabbatical!  What a wonderful sound that word has, doesn't it?  The root is "sabbath" which literally means "ceasing."  And in this case, it means that I will cease being an interim dean, take a brief rest, and then go back and teach.

I have learned much during these last four years; I've learned to see the world through the eyes of others, I've learned to say "no" more frequently (but still not often enough), I've learned to be a bit more patient, and I've learned that I can't do everything myself.  I'm still not a great delegater but I've learned to delegate a little more.

Perhaps the strongest things that I've learned is that I am "called" to teach, that I miss teaching, that my work life is diminished without student interaction, and that I see teaching as a vocation.  Parker Palmer puts it so beautifully in The Courage to Teach
 

“If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.”
― Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life 

 

That might sound kind of abstract but even in teaching something as practical as database design I have learned that unless I am completely present the class doesn't "work" - I need to get into what

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a state of flow, that feeling of total absorption.  And in doing so I think/hope that I share something of myself, of my love for my material.

Somehow that doesn't happen when I'm in a meeting.