Saturday, November 22, 2003

Breathe In, Breathe Out

Thanksgiving break is finally here, and I slept until 11:41 and am just now getting to the coffee; thankfully Darcie has given me the day off to lie around the house while she takes Willow up to see her grandparents. It's a sad commentary on our society that you need a day off at the beginning of vacation, but if you're like me, what with the usual travel-and-relations looming ahead, you really need it.

The social calendar this week begins with a family overnight tomorrow into Monday, first to meet up with Darcie's sister Alicia and her fiancee Matt at Mystic Aquarium, then an overnight in Darcie's brother's girlfriend's house down on the Rhode Island coast. If it's not too cold, we'll take the baby to the beach on Monday morning. She's going to love the concept of sand. A day or two writing past-term progress reports, and visiting up in Brattleboro, surely. Then it's off to Newton, to my parent's house, for the holiday itself and beyond; we're hoping to get Darcie's parents in town as well; there's a good Rembrandt exhibit, supposedly, at the MFA. The following Monday there's a professional day here at school, and then the kids arrive, the classes start, the papers pile up, and it's full speed ahead for the next four weeks.

If that wasn't enough, of course, I have a lot of work to do in my own head between now and then. In nine days, I will be teaching Modern American Culture, a full year-equivalent class that I have never taught before, and will need to do so in just eleven weeks; although I have the rough syllabus and curriculum in my head, have ordered books and read most of them, went ahead and created the online enviornment for the class, and even wrote up the two-page assignment for the major project, I am not truly ready; there's a big difference between knowing what you want to talk about each day and knowing how best to deliver it to support the best possible learning for the class as a whole, and I want to do this right.

So...wait a minute. I was going to catch up all you blogreaders out there on my last three days of unblogging, but I've just realized something: I need this day off. The couch is calling; I'm out of here. Why not give yourself a day off, too?

posted by boyhowdy | 12:25 PM |

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