Let 'er Rip

Drop/Add period ended at midnight last night, and the semester proper is under way.

We did get-to-know-each-other stuff today, mainly so we could get into the texts with a little less tension in the air. Monday we begin Joseph, and I've already forgotten my Harper-Collins Study Bible in my office for the first time this semester. For this text that's no big deal; I can plan my lesson with just the text in front of me, and the narrative is long enough that we'll only be able to discuss a couple episodes in depth anyway.

In the final hours of drop/add, my class numbers dropped to 20 for 8:00 and remained at 22 for 9:00. I imagine I'll lose some to brown-bottle flu (those early Friday mornings will do that), but at least I begin with fewer than the maximum 44-paper sets to grade. Once again I've got a preponderance of sophomores in my classes; I never got that many for "regular" ENGL 1102, but both times I've tried special sections, the sophomores (and juniors) have showed up. I just hope that they can remember that the class is for freshmen and not infect my younger students with boredom (as my juniors last spring did).

Beowulf is going to be interesting; in our first week, we translated ten of the fifty-two assigned lines of poetry as a class. Next week we have another sixty to take on; I wonder whether we'll dip into the first week or start where the syllabus starts on Wednesday or just do the good episodes. Dr. Evans also assigned critical articles that we're to present to the class, and I drew the one on medieval poetry and patristics, so that part should be fun.

Now I must settle in to the task of reading two hundred pages of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for Wednesday night. The first chunk (that is to say, seven pages) hasn't been nearly as painful as I remember Hegel being when I was a senior in college. I suppose I've grown in my reading ability since then.