20140106.0717

Today does not mark the beginning of classes, but it does mark the beginning of work for me.  Buildings and offices are opening again, and meetings have already been scheduled.  So I will be trudging in despite the biting cold, and I will do what I can to set up for the coming term in the time I have to do it.  (I am further ahead than I usually am on this, but not so far ahead as I ought to be.  As ever, I should have gotten more done than I did.  I do not want to be only a day or two ahead of my students as I go through the term; they deserve more and I deserve better performance.)

Although I do in part lament the end of the quiet and peace I have had for much of the past month, I am not displeased to be getting back to work.  I appreciate having some imposed structure to guide and shape my time (and, in truth, I need to have something about which to complain--as I think most do).  And I do look forward every term to working with new sets of minds; I hope each time that I go into a new set of classes that I will once again have the kind of teaching experience I had in my early work, that the uncovering of knowledge and development of understanding will be fresh and rapid, exhilarating in its breadth and depth.

It has been so too rarely for me.  Some of the lack has been because of external forces for which none are to blame but with which we all contended poorly.  Some has come from budgetary and administrative conditions, for which there are people to blame, as I have suggested from time to time and as I know but do not report.  Some has come from student resistance; to some, I know that I embody the oppressive forces that have trodden them down and their forebears across generations, and to others, I am part of "the help" that refuses to be ordered about despite taking the salary offered.  And I know that there are ways, many ways, in which I can improve upon my performance in the classroom; I could be more sympathetic to my pupils, more lenient, more giving.  Or so I have been told, and not only by students variously disgruntled.

Whatever the reason, though, my teaching experience has not been as I would have it as often as I would have it be so.  (Parse the sentence; it makes sense.)  As I prepare for the new term throughout this week, while offices are open and between the meetings already scheduled, I do so in the hope that this time will be one of the better ones.  I do so in the hope that I will not come out of it as battered as I have been by earlier semesters, and that the students and I will be better for it.