Et al.

Week 1 report

My daughter loves kindergarten. She has gone off happily every morning, said goodbye without tears, and come home in a good mood (if more than a little tired) every day. She loves her teachers (a funny pair, and wonderful), the playground (spiffy new climbing structure), her Spanish lessons (common words), her PE class (fitness and spatial sense), her art class (color theory [!]), music (quarternotes and beating out a tempo), computers (including keyboarding [!!]), and pretty much everything else.

After a rough few days where I despaired of the commute and my foreshortened work day, I am loving it again, too. The commute is a pain: not far (22 minutes, about 13 miles), but with very erratic traffic. It's seldom really bad, but can be very stop and start. And it's in a sort of rural/suburban area (we have a lot of them here, and they give me hives), so we get stuck behind retired folks with all the time in the world, frazzled moms ferrying kids all over the place (it's inconceivable that anyone really walks much around here--there are almost no sidewalks), horse trailers, heavy equipment, and...well...slowpokes.

We start our carpool on Monday, which is what's keeping me sane. I started teaching this week, too, and between the freshman comp refusenik (won't share writing, won't revise, doesn't like to plan or organize essays, which pretty much negates our entire pedagogy) and a few lame students of the "there was a teensy bit of inconvenience involved in acquiring the reading so I just didn't bother" variety, things look pretty good.


I left a key date off one syllabus and got the course ID number wrong on another. Sabbatical is somewhat debilitating.

Labels: kindergarten, the perils of academia

posted by Unknown @ 4:50 PM