Light and Momentary

Update

The first day of class was so much fun. I walked home on a puffy cloud, thinking, "I was born to do this."

I'd been feeling pretty nervous about the next two lectures, the one for today and the one for Monday of next week, because they cover a lot of material that I hadn't looked at in a while -- 1994 was the last time I studied some of it. I'd say today was a qualified success. I finished up my slides and answered their questions more quickly than planned; I kept them for 65 minutes instead of 75. They probably weren't complaining about that.

Today I walked home feeling discouraged about how crazy-much time I put into that lecture, wondering how I could possibly sustain that -- expand it, really, since it didn't get me all the way through my allotted time. Part of the problem was that I got excited 40 minutes in when it looked like my pacing was right on target. And what did I do because I was excited? I sped up.

It's going to take me some time to find my voice. Left to my own devices, I speak quickly and quietly. If I'm going to give a talk, I like to pack in lots of food for thought. For lectures, though, slower and louder will be a must. It feels unnatural. It feels like I'm trying to be Garrison Keillor when I'm usually the anti-Garrison Keillor. But hey, a lot of people like to listen to Garrison Keillor.

My husband took three of the kids to the bookstore while two of them were at another activity, so I had a quiet house in which to work this evening. (Huzzah for Elwood! Much appreciated.)

I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to answer all of their questions. I'd been thinking about graceful responses to questions I couldn't answer, ways to say "I'll get back to you" without saying "....uuummmmmm...." as a panicked look spread across my face. I have a couple of minor points to clarify on Monday (I should have said that the diencephalon includes instead of consists of, since I was only talking about a couple of its structures and not giving an exhaustive list).

Anyway, I survived the first week -- the fun lecture and the scary lecture. I like my students. I'm excited. I'm nervous. I'm exhausted. See you later.

Guide my going in

I am teaching my first class this afternoon.

I have guest-lectured a slew of times; I have TA'ed and set assignments and gone over exams with students who wanted my head, platter optional. But this is the first time I've had a class of my own.

They will call me Dr. Gladly. They will expect me to teach them what they need to know to go out into clinical practice. Right this minute it feels like a big responsibility. I'd appreciate your prayers.

Discuss

The pools in town are very different from the pools of my childhood: elaborate water slides, looping "lazy rivers" where inflated tubes are propelled by a slow current, complicated fountains and slowly filling overhead buckets that tip over at regular intervals. It's a little crazy. And yet we go to these pools, so much more elaborate than the concrete rectangles with diving boards that I grew up with, and my kids tell me they're bored. We went to a water park a couple of weeks ago and they told me, "There's nothing to do here." I boggled. I thought, "Kids these days..."

Tonight we had dinner with friends who live about 45 minutes away. They have a little neighborhood pool: small, rectangular, no frills. The kids spent more than an hour swimming happily, with nary a word of complaint.

So maybe the more diversions you attempt to provide, the less effort kids put into diverting themselves. Elaborate entertainment efforts by adults seem to engender ennui on the part of the kids. Agree or disagree?

Perhaps I will throw out all of the toys and give them some nice sticks and dirt to play with in the yard instead.

Seven Quick Takes: End of Summer Edition

1. Best news I've seen all week: my friend Carla held her baby today. This is her seventh baby but her first experience with adoption. Go wish her well!
2. My syllabi are printed up and waiting for the start of classes. I'm so excited. SO SO SO excited.
3. Except I'm a little worried about the part where I said I'd be lecturing on neuroanatomy and cerebral circulation for two and a half hours. That's a lot of neuroanatomy and cerebral circulation.
4. School is back in session for everybody but the preschooler. First and fourth grades are going well, even though we got the first-grade teacher who made me crazy in '06-'07. (The first-grader came home and said, "He wasn't mean at all!" in wondering tones that made me kick myself for not being more circumspect. The issue was never that he was mean, for the record.) Junior high was better on the second day than the first -- the first day left my sweet introvert a little wobbly in the wake of the noise generated by 800+ 11-14-year-olds. Unfortunately, they called me this afternoon to say they'd forgotten something important and they needed to redo his schedule completely, which is a bummer but we'll hope it works out for the best. And high school seems to be going fine thus far. (High school!) My oldest is off to the local Catholic high school, taking two city buses each way to get there and back. He has spent more time this week with his shirt tucked in than in the preceding five years. Or maybe ten.
5. I went to the high school open house earlier this week and I have this observation to offer you: people who have children in high school are OLD. Grizzled. Wrinkled. Balding. Sagging. I wonder at what point in the distant future that will happen to me? [LA LA LA LA I can't hear you.]
6. Thank you for your comments on my last post. I was a little worried about publishing it and it was good to hear from you.
7. Time for me to go get those messy subcortical structures sorted out in my head and then in my lecture notes. Wish me luck.

More quick takes here.

[tap tap] Is this thing on?

I think this is the longest I've gone without blogging since I started this blog almost five years ago. It's been a tough summer and I couldn't seem to write non-whiny posts. I've been intensely frustrated with my marriage but that's not blog material. (Sometimes in the Catholic blogosphere it seems that everybody is in shiny happy marriages where they're jointly striving for heaven and Communicating Effectively and nobody else is fighting unproductively about the same damn thing for ten years. And counting. Am I keeping it real or bringing things down if I say that sometimes it's really ferociously hard to be married?)

I hope the kids have had a good summer. We've taken some fun weekend trips and had some fun local outings. I felt like a rock star yesterday because I took five kids boating (the two oldest in a canoe with the 6yo between them; the 9yo in a paddleboat with me while the 2yo sat between us) and everyone had a grand time. The 14yo said afterward, "We should do this more often," and given his usual views on my ideas about fun stuff to do together (in a word: dim), I'm taking that as a ringing endorsement. We had a picnic afterward featuring pan bagnat and nobody complained. (The two oldest boys enjoy it as much as I do; the younger kids are not fans. Perhaps they'd worked up an appetite paddling around the lake.)

Classes start soon and I'm wildly excited. I have gnawed off all my fingernails in my moments of "I-think-I-can't" (how's that for a bestselling children's book: The Little Engine Who Was Pretty Sure She Would Fail But Persevered Grimly Anyway). I have a string of happy updates about my new job: the chair asked me to co-teach a second class this fall, which accomplished a few really good things: it gave me clear direction about whether to continue my postdoc on a quarter-time basis; it allowed me to ease into planning a syllabus for the first time, using someone else's established framework. And get this: the subject matter for the two classes overlaps slightly, so my co-instructor said, "Here, want to borrow this book? And I've got a bunch of notes posted on the web if you'd like to look them over." Coincidentally (or not), this is the section of the course I'm teaching alone that had me the most worried. How cool is that?

A week or two later, the chair called me back again to ask if I could teach a second course in the spring semester. It all feels so providential to me: a course and a half in the fall, with the hardest part of my solo course out of the way before my half of the co-taught course begins, and then two courses in the spring with a fair degree of overlap (one grad course and one undergrad). Forgive me for repeating myself, but it's exactly the kind of gig I hoped to land when I started this whole undertaking and it still boggles my mind that it plopped into my lap. God is good and I'm feeling optimistic.

Of course, my daughter still sleeps like a wombat (read: badly. Badly badly badly.) and sleep deprivation does bad things to optimism, so I'd better wrap it up. More soon, about summer reading and summer knitting and TICKS SUCKING MY CHILD'S BLOOD and especially the questions I asked you to ask me back at the beginning of July and then was too morose to answer. Soon.