Welcome

As most of you may know, I've been working as an part-time professor at Augusta State University this semester, bringing in a little money and beefing up the resume with some teaching experience. A host of things have surprised and entertained me about teaching: how much you start to care about the little bastards and how well they do in your class; that lecturing in front of teenagers is a relatively nerve-free activity; that my students seem to like me despite the fact that I really stick it to them at quiz time; how hard they're willing to work to do well in my class; how much they relate a bad test grade in my class to their overall worth as college students and human beings; how disappointed I get when they don't do well; that fact that I really can tell when they cheat; how much I'm learning about grammar as I undergo my own cram sessions before I have to teach it to my students; and the relative worthlessness of a high school education in Georgia.

What is perhaps not so surprising is my recent realization that I am hopelessly out of date when it comes to internet facebooking/blogging/my spacing/etc. I'll be honest; I just don't get all that shit. However, in an effort to overcome my fuddy-duddiness and become more "with it" and "hip" (I suppose my use of these words automatically excludes me from the realm of the "with it" and "hip," but whatever), I am inaugurating this blog. It represents my effort to simultaneously immerse myself in the world of my students and in the world of internet opinion-generating in an attempt to figure out what the hell the fuss is all about.

I'll let you know when I figure it out.

Update: Why does this welcome post come long after the first postings listed here? Allow me to explain the chronology. This is my third incarnation of this blog. It began on Yahoo 360 in 2006 when my husband and I were living in Germany. I created a new blog when we moved back to the States (to Georgia) - the source of the measly few posts from 2007, including this welcome post. Then I abandoned it utterly until early 2008 when we moved to Washington State, at which point I took up blogging serious-like. Got that? Good.