Settling down a bit.

I was so out of sorts yesterday with the whole book order thing, that as soon as I finished it, I got this massive headache. Like bringing tears to my eyes, damn near crying headache.

I mean, I was sort of cranky when I woke up yesterday, too. Annoyed and pissy. When I got to campus, the internet in my office was jacked up. The building's wireless wasn't working. My email wasn't working.* And had the system been shut down in my classroom, then my plan for the day would have been over. That didn't happen though. Thankfully. But I was pissed when I got in to go teach. That changed a bit once I started teaching, but damn. I was cranky.

On top of it all, my hair sucked yesterday. And that had me grumpy, too.

Anyway, I talked to senior prof who teaches the 20th century version of the class I'm teaching in the fall, and ze helped me out quite a bit. The one course description line made it sound like it was an upper division survey class, and it is not. So I've got a good list of things I think. About half of it is stuff that I've taught before and feel comfortable teaching. The other half is stuff I want to read and stuff that I've long been wanting to teach. I've been teaching the first half of the century for soooooo long, my entire grad school career and then some, that I'm just sorta burnt out on it. My research interests are elsewhere now, and I'm trying to teach more in that area. But now that other person in my field didn't get tenure, then all of that falls on me. Which is fine. But it's not the ONLY thing I want to do here.

I guess one way to do that is to propose some courses. That's something I'll work on this summer.

Summer. Hmmmm. That's a problem. If I get offered teaching, I have to take it. We need the money. But it will interfere with my summer research plans. And that's a problem.

You know what? I can't even think about summer right now. I can't. I'll start to cry.

I tell you what though. Tomorrow can't be here soon e-fucking-nough. Seriously. I'm going to let the class out early (as I will today), and even though I have office hours, I'll just get the mid-terms copied and all that jazz. Grade any lit analyses that have come in. And since this is long, I'll do a separate post on the plan for the weekend.

Letting the class out early today might not make any freaking difference, actually. I have a handful of students who stay after every class to talk to me. Which is fine. I love it actually. I'm glad that they're engaged enough to want to keep talking about the text, to keep asking questions, to further the discussion. In Fancy Town, the students couldn't get out of the classroom soon enough. It's nice, don't get me wrong. But seriously, on a Friday afternoon, at 1:45, I so don't want to hang around until 2:00, 2:15 continuing the conversation. I don't. Today's the last day of the week for that class before break. I don't want to let class out at 1:30 and still be there at 2:00. But I don't want the stus to think that I don't want to talk with them. That's only the MWF class. The TR class--those students don't hang around at all. So I'm not complaining, really. I'm just ready for the break.
 

*which is totally awesome you know? Because we're an engineering school, but our technology is worse than the SLAC I came from. We still have freaking WEBMAIL for crying out loud! And our email CRASHES! Hello?! 1996 called and wants its technology back. I feel lucky that I don't have a rotary phone in my office for Pete's sake. And lo and behold! It's not working this morning! Oh wait, my internet at home was out. Craptastic.