So while working on the book, I have sadly neglected . . . well, pretty much everything.  There are dust dinosaurs everywhere and let's not talk about the drifts of stuff that has accumulated on most every available space.   So today, after swimming lessons in the a.m., and arranging my housesitter and going to the doctor (another thing I've been putting off), I began cleaning.  Tomorrow I keep going with the bathrooms, maybe even dig in the dirt. 

So last spring I taught two freshman classes where I thought thing pretty much were horrible.  Now, I thought they learned things.  I put them through a lot of hard work, but most of them really rose to the occasion and seriously improved.  But.  On the day to day level, I felt like they were deeply resistant and mostly really bored and annoyed with me.  Read my evaluations today.  Turned out they loved the classes, had little but praise to say, and were more than a little aware that when they didn't do well, they had neglected to put in the work.  It was shocking.  But more than that, I felt better because i'd put a lot of planning into those classes.  It was the first time I'd taught them on the block.  And working with freshmen can be difficult.  On the block system, when you've got 3 hours a day, five days a week, three and a half weeks, freshmen get really tired about 2 hours in each day, and then they get really really tired by the end of the third week.  So even with breaks, it becomes hard to keep them going down the path of learning to write an essay or make a speech or what have you.

So it makes me more excited about the fall.  I had one of those spring semesters that make me feel like I completely lost my ability to teach, and mostly because of the resistance level in the classroom.  Maybe I'm wrong.

Di