There's something singularly irritating about coming in to campus on a rainy Saturday, hoping to get some work done, only to discover that you no longer have after-hours key-card access to your building. We've sorted it out, finally--it looks like my building access was accidentally listed as expiring at the end of fall semester, even though my teaching appointment runs through spring semester--but it was frustrating at the time.
Frustrating, but somehow not surprising. I've had a very rough time with the start of my semester. For a quick timeline: Matt and I went on a short vacation, the week before classes started. We got back in town on Thursday night, and then my parents were visiting Friday and Saturday. Both the vacation and the visit were great, except that by mid-day on Saturday it was clear that I was coming down with some kind of sick. From Saturday evening until Wednesday morning, I was almost completely incapacitated by what I'm pretty sure was the flu. Either the flu or just the worst cold of my entire life--it was miserable either way, with violent coughing fits and severe exhaustion and general all-around ick. I'm extremely fortunate that I had the option of basically spending four whole days in bed, sleeping whenever I wasn't coughing, and even so it was miserable. (The pettiest complaint of the whole illness? How -boring- it all was. I couldn't even -read-, because my head was so foggy that I couldn't follow anything, even when I could focus my eyes on it. And all the while, the ever-present frustrating knowledge that I was falling further and further behind on work that needed doing.)
Wednesday was the first day of classes for spring semester, and I managed to drag myself out of the house and up to campus. In retrospect, I'm not sure this was the best idea--as much as it seemed pathetic to have to cancel the very first class of the semester, it was probably equally pathetic to start class with an instructor who's barely managing to stand up, much less think clearly and answer questions.
That was a week and a half ago, and I'm pretty much over the flu/cold, so that's good. I can't shake the feeling that there's still a lingering effect on my teaching. The first week was so off-balance that I'm only just now starting to feel really comfortable with the material. Clearly this isn't how it's supposed to work.
It's a shame, too. This semester, I'm teaching "Science in the United States", and it's a course with a lot of potential. I'm trying to focus the course around the relationship between science and society in the US, starting back in the colonial period and stretching more-or-less to the present day. Major highlights along the way include the debates about evolution in the schools, the history of American eugenics programs and scientific racism, the development of conservation movements (and, later, environmentalist movements), the growth of the research university, the development of the military-industrial complex, the Army Alpha tests and the birth of intelligence testing, the Manhattan Project, Sputnik and the space race, and a lot of other things. It's great, because there are a lot of complex issues at stake, and never really any clear answers. On the first day of class, we had a little bit of discussion in class about the role that the government plays in funding science, and how it's affected scientific work (both in positive and negative ways). I have great students, great historical material to work with, and a lot of enthusiasm for this topic. And yet I still don't feel like I'm on track.
It's kind of like--this is an awkward analogy, but bear with me. It's kind of like when you start to tell a story, or maybe a long joke, but right when you're starting you get distracted by something, and you start the story all wrong. Maybe you forget to mention something important, or you get off on some boring tangent, or something. When you have a bad start, it's hard to get the narrative back on track. It's an awkward analogy because a teaching semester-long lecture course is, of course, not exactly like telling a story. A good course will have a rhythm to it, though, and a couple of thematic through-lines, nested story arcs. Because I had the flu, or maybe just a bad cold, my semester got off to a rough start, and I haven't quite found that rhythm yet.
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