School's Out for Summer

Sunday afternoon. Warm and humid. The wind is pushing around the piles of loose, dead grass from yesterday's mow. We're all just chilling out post-church, post-lunch. Church was hot and, weirdly, crowded, and so everyone is a little worn out.

I turned in my final grades last week, and summer term doesn't begin until the second week of June, so I'm in that strange twilight time of not having my regular routine to dictate what I do with my days. I have plenty to do, of course. My goal is to have a nice, fat, working draft of my dissertation before we leave for the Day family reunion in August. I sat down on Thursday and started mining my old papers and prospectus drafts for useable material. I have an introduction and six chapters to write, each one dedicated to a specific topic. I cut and pasted a bunch of stuff I've written about spiritual film style, film and religion, the LDS church, and Richard Dutcher's various films, and I ended up with about sixty pages of stuff. One suggested guideline I've seen for dissertations is that it should be between a hundred and a hundred twenty pages. Now, while I certainly won't be able to use every bit of what I cut and pasted (there's a fair amount of repetition, I'm sure), it's still nice to have this big hunk of text that I can work with. I'm not starting with a blank document, you know?

Suzy is teaching one class this summer and two in the fall, so she is already losing sleep over attendance policies, schedules, and assignments. She's so much more careful and detail-oriented than I am, and I admire her for how hard she works to get it right.

This last semester was pretty lame as far as my teaching went. I was so distracted by the prospect of Delta College and all of that business that my classes suffered. I managed to remember to show up wearing pants and to not set anything on fire, so that was good. But overall, the semester started off shakily and never really regained much equilibrium or momentum.

So this summer and fall, my goal is to improve on this term. More content, more preparation, and more thought. I've selected new textbooks for each class to necessitate me not just coasting. With new readings, it requires that I pay closer attention, write new assignments and quizzes, and just generally be more mentally present. I don't want to be that useless professor who uses tenure as an excuse to not keep trying and improving.

So we'll see how it goes. I've actually decided I'm going to require that my 1001 students create and keep a weekly blog. The idea is that I want them to get comfortable with both academic writing (the essays I'll assign in class) and personal writing (a weekly blog post) so that by the end of the semester, they will have written pages and pages of both kinds. Nothing cuts down on fear like familiarity, I say. If they're familiar with the writing process, even if they still hate it, they at least won't fear it.

I'm going to have them choose a topic they care about - hunting, sports, family, raising kids, movies, cars, dancing, whatever - and give them a list of prompts like "My best experience was..." or "The first time I..." or "One thing I wish people knew about..." They'll choose from the prompts to write a weekly 300 word blog post. They'll get the familiarity and facility of writing, and I'll get to read something that ISN'T a soul-sucking, partially plagiarized garbage-fest (hopefully). 

In other news, the girls and I saw Iron Man 3 last week and enjoyed it. It's an improvement over the second one which was, in my opinion, a misfire. This one is smarter and certainly funnier, but ultimately it's still just a big summer movie. Nothing earth-shattering - just fun to look at and exciting to watch. Once it's over, there's nothing different in the world because of it.

Also I finished reading Ron Carlson's The Speed of Light. It dragged a little in the middle quarter, but overall, it was quite lovely. It's like an earthy, less mythic version of Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. It's the same arc of boys maturing into young men over the course of a summer. Without a hesitation, I can say Carlson is one of the best American short story writers writing today and probably one of the best from the last century. However, short stories and novels are not the same thing.  I've tried two of his other novels and fizzled out after just a couple of chapters. I'm glad to have finally run across a novel of his that has some of the same punch and pop as his shorter stuff.

Anyway, it's evening now. Dinner is over, and I'm half considering a dusk stroll down the street. I'll go see if anyone wants to join me.