One down, 59 to go...

Met with two of the four classes today: Native American Lit (herein after 229, for ease of writing) and one of the 102s.

The registration for 229 has been interesting. All weekend, the class count stood at 11: that's a tricky number, as without sufficient critical mass of good minds, it can lead to a class that lies on the floor like a comatose elephant but without the charm. When the critical mass is there, 11 can be great fun: a "senior seminar" more than a sophomore lit class. Today, the numbers suddenly jumped to 14--and then fell back to 13: one young woman sat through most of my discussion of the syllabus, then packed up, returned the syllabus to me, and left. No clue why, but I certainly would rather she made up her mind early about it. One of the remaining young women stayed after class and asked me what MLK meant (um, MLA?). I tried to explain but she was utterly baffled. I finally suggested that before writing her first paper she either see me or get to the Writing Center--but she swears she's never heard anything about it at all, ever. That could be true, or she could just have absorbed so little that even those initials didn't stick in her memory. In any case, given that start, her chances for success in the course are not a good bet. Still, a couple of the other students seem bright, interested, curious--and were making fine contributions to the class discussion. We'll see how this shakes out.

The 102 was interesting in that half the class showed up late--some significantly late. One young man showed up at 4:50 (the class starts at 4) and was puzzled to find only me there, packing up to go. He thought class started at 4:30 (and still would have been 20 minutes late, ahem). Normally his confusion over the start time would give me cause for concern, but he seemed relatively sharp as I quickly went over the syllabus with him. One never knows, of course: I've had high hopes for students who ended up being a lot less on the ball than first impressions would suggest--and vice versa. The mantra arises again: we'll see.

I'm still buried in unsorted/unphotocopied/unfixed assignments of all stripes: I'd hoped to get more done this morning before my class (which wasn't until 2:30), but the scheduling committee had to meet one last time to double-triple-quadruple check the schedules we did last week (and good thing we did, as we found a couple of errors: we always do--and we always miss several more, too). But given what I didn't accomplish before class, I was very happy that the office was open tonight so I could do a little more copying when it's not so busy. But of course I caught several embarrassing blunders on my 102 syllabi--AFTER having copied them. So I'll be doing a fair amount of correcting by hand (rather than wasting all the paper to copy corrected versions)--though I did make the changes before copying the last of the 102 syllabi. Errors haven't cropped up yet on the syllabus for 229, but they're there: trust me, they're there.

Tomorrow I don't have class until 2:00, but I still intend to get up early. I caved a teensy bit this morning: I'd told myself I'd simply get into a routine of getting up at 6, even 5:30 (which will give me a little more gear-up time on Mondays, when my first class starts at 9:30)--but today I let myself sleep until 7. Funny: that used to be my usual time, and I thought of it as riding on the borderline of decency. Now, it seems late. The hard part is getting myself to wind down and get to bed early enough that I can get a reasonable amount of sleep before that 6 (or 5:30) alarm.

And since I'm still worn out and hacking from whatever hurkey-furkey I got over the break, I need my sleep. That said, I'm going to fold my tents for tonight and leave everything in steaming, chaotic piles, to be organized and prioritized tomorrow. I need to organize my bookshelves, too: they're getting frighteningly chaotic, and if I don't sort things out, I may be sucked into a maelstrom of papers and books that have simply been shoved in that general direction, willy-nilly.

But tomorrow, tomorrow. (And Mr. Rogers starts singing in my head: "Tomorrow, tomorrow, we'll start the day tomorrow with a smile for you...." Aaaaaahhhhhhhh! Make it stop! Somebody start reciting from the Scottish Play instead!)