Fragments From Floyd

I suffer terribly from holiday inertia, here at the end of a whole week off, plus a weekend on both sides. Today, like my students, I have to go back and try to jump back on that moving agenda that is the semester in motion. After the next two weeks, we'll all be back up to speed, just in time for the whole contraption to grind to a halt in exam week.

And for holiday fun, just so I didn't suffer from too much holiday freedom, I toted home fifteen pounds of research papers (more than 100 of them, each of them ostensibly 2500 words) to 'grade.' Did I read every word of every paper? Well, no, as that would have sent me off red-penning things like "this is not a word / sentence / complete thought / thought of any kind." Basically, I checked word count (heck, that was the easiest part of this assignment a all their topics suffered from too much rather than too little material). I looked at the sources and citing of their references and whether those "works cited" were actually cited in the body of the paper in ANY kind of understandable way at all. I was easy on that. Except that perhaps a third of this class of freshmen gave no citations at all, even though they had a bibliography of sorts. They'll know better next time. Maybe. Today and Wednesday, they present their papers during lab. Should be interesting to see their public speaking personas.

I don't think I've told you: I may never teach this intro environmental bio class again, now that recent vacancies for full time faculty at RU have been filled. I'm surprised at how disappointed this makes me. I've learned so much and have a passion for both the general biology and natural history I can share in this class and for the very real, urgent ecological-environmental issues that need to be known by young people who will inherit them in the world of coming decades. I'll be teaching Human Anatomy and Physiology next fall--interesting and relevant, especially for the nursing students in the class. But it won't push my buttons (and you won't have to suffer my environmental rants) like the class that is now about to end.

Along the lines of professional future (not that anybody asked:) I will decide this week if I want to put back on my physical therapist hat again. I never would have thought so, but an opportunity has presented itself 'out of the blue' (hmmm...one wonders about the interplay between Chance and Purpose, but that's for another time.) It would be a part time responsibility, and would leave space for other projects I hope to finish before the next academic year.

What to use for an image for this ramble? Here's a slice of light--a still life, an object a rest, yes?--that I walk past dozens of times a day. It is Ann's grandmother's old Singer treadle sewing machine that sits not five feet from my desk, just the other side of the wall that divides the hallway from the room where the woodstove and my new favorite desk lives. Only in a certain propitious period of days each year and moments in those days does the sun crest the ridge and glance deeply into the entry way. On such a rare day last week, the red glass lights either side of the door tinted this machinery of another age in a eerie red glow. (I didn't touch color at all.) It's an odd image, and I didn't expect to use it anywhere. But it seems to fit just now.