Into David

A busy week it's been.

I presented on Georg Lukacs in our literary theory class and by all accounts did well.

I translated another 150 lines of Beowulf.

I read another book-and-a-half of Milton criticism.

I took Micah to a doctor's appointment and our Matrix for its 15K mile service.

And I started grading another batch of freshman papers.

And that's outside of teaching my class. The last two days we started tackling biblical narratives in some more detail, doing Ruth on Wednesday and David and Goliath today. On both days I relied too heavily on the students' agendas. I think for the next week I'm going to set (for the most part) each discussion's subject matter and try to be open to the students' taking the class away from me. I really ought to spend more time helping them close-read and showing them where paper topics naturally arise out of each narrative, but the last couple days I've been improvising with poor results. I'm not sure it's apathy so much as shell-shock; they seem to be looking for the "right" things to talk about, whereas I just want to talk intellectually about something.

Monday I've got the post-Goliath, pre-Philistine-mercenary stories, so there ought to be plenty of material there. Besides that I've got to work in some writing instruction. There's just not enough time in a semester...