jumble.

The problem is not, really, that I don't have anything to say.  It's more that I have too much to say.  I've got so many things that I want to write about that they're all getting jumbled up with each other when I try to actually sit down and post. 

Such as: the expected "what I've been up to" update.  It's been surprisingly interesting, this "what I've been up to".

Teaching is going extremely well--the students in my research seminar have all picked interesting topics, and they're all making good progress.  They have rough drafts due at the end of next week, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they've come up with.  We've been having regular meetings, and they've had some preliminary assignments due (annotated bibliographies, progress reports, detailed outlines), but the rough draft is another creature entirely.  I expect I'll be spending most of next weekend editing and writing up comments, and then they'll be doing some group workshopping of the drafts.  I've never done that in these seminars before, the peer critique, but I'm told that it can be very useful, and it seemed worth a try.  The lecture course is also going well, as far as I can tell, but the end of the semester seems to be rushing towards us. 

Non-teaching things are going well, too.  Matt and I have done a surprising amount of travel in the last few months, given our relatively restricted budgets.  Las Vegas for a few days in January, Los Angeles for a few days earlier this month, Sonoma for the first half of my spring break.  We went to see the NCAA Sweet Sixteen games in San Jose, which was a lot of fun.  I've been going to the gym again, I've been reading a lot of really great books (and a few "eh" books), and I have tentatively located a replacement for my much-beloved hairstylist (who moved to Florida, leaving me bereft).  Strange Horizons has stories on both the Hugo and Nebula ballots (Ben Rosenbaum's "The House Beyond Your Sky" and Dora Goss's "Pip and the Fairies", respectively), both SH and Twenty Epics have stories being reprinted in most of the major reprint anthologies, and the brand-new Strange Horizons podcast seems to be moderately popular, judging by the number of people who commented on its recent technical difficulties.   

That explains part of the lack of posting, I suppose--the amount of stuff going on, both professional and personal.  It also comes back to the idea of having too many things I want to post about, all the ideas jumbling around and blocking each other from coming out.  Just writing this little update has queued up a lot of them: the role of major sports teams in the college environment, the purpose of the survey course in undergraduate education, the conflicting and competing expectations for undergraduate education in the first place, more detailed accounts of some of the recent travels, thoughts about teaching strategies and student involvement, and discussions of at least four or five of the books I've read recently.  A lot of it is teaching-centered; teaching takes up the bulk of my time and energy these days, by far, and it's most of what's on my mind.  That may also go some part of the way towards explaining the lack of posting, though--for where I am in my career, and what I'm doing with my days, I think it's only natural to be a little hesitant about engaging publicly in rough-edged speculation about the educational process.  But there's so much I want to talk about, to have a conversation about.  All I can do is keep trying.

Comments

[Benjamin Rosenbaum]

You sound happy.

Yay teaching!

[Jed Hartman]

Like Ben said: yay teaching!

Also, yeah, I think I know what you mean about ideas jumbling around and the difficulty of getting any one thing to the front of the queue to write about it. Also about the difficulty of public engagement in debate/discussion/speculation about stuff that's deeply connected to what you want to do with your life.

But yes, it's worth keeping trying. So: post more! When you can, I mean.