I’ve noticed that, since I started my students using this very site for their blogging activities, I’ve been suspiciously absent from the site myself. There’s always that weird under-current of paranoia, that someday someone will stumble upon this and think EGADS, IT’S MY VERY OWN PROFESSOR AND HER PRIVATE, SADISTIC THOUGHTS ON TEACHING. But really, honestly, I know that’s not going to happen. So I need to just calm it down and use this site for its intended compartment in my life…. talk about teaching.

Lately I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I really, really REALLY need to make sure that this is the last year I’m doing this adjunct teaching shit. I’ve been in a holding pattern for five years, 3 of which have been full-time adjunct teaching. I need to get the fuck out, to get into a REAL job with real benefits and real vacation time, real salary and real responsibilities. But it won’t happen on its own, it won’t even happen if I just half-heartedly attempt to make it happen… I have to give myself over completely to this search and self-advertisement. That’s a little scary, to be honest. But I have to do it.

I have a laundry list a mile long of shit I need to do to make all this happen, and it matches very nicely in frenzied pace to my laundry list of things to do to make sure my semester continues to run smoothly with my students. It doesn’t help that I had to call off and reschedule an entire week of conferences because I caught the fucking SWINE FLU. *sigh* So now I’m recooped, or at least as much as I’m going to be before I have to get back into the thick of things, and the looming burden of all I have to do to make my life happen is rather scary at this point.

Teaching, the actual teaching this semester, has gone really well. I’ve done narrative essays for the first time ever, and I’m doing group conferences also for the first time ever… and of the 6 papers I’ve heard read aloud so far I’m really impressed. Guaranteed A, I think. It’s hard to mess up arguing something in a story format, because every one of us practices telling stories so often. The researched proposal paper will be more of a challenge, I believe.

I’m acting like I don’t have 88 rhetorical analysis papers left to grade. Ha, I so do.

Fuck my life, at least at the moment.

So yes, that’s what I’ve returned to say. My teaching seems to be going really well, but honestly I’m not sure how it’s happening. I feel like I’m flying by the seat of my pants most days, and it just happens to slap-dash together correctly. *shrugs* I’m not knocking it, as long as it works.

How are things out there for you, internet?