Doing It at Last

My new semester started on Monday. The transition back to teaching went smoothly. As much as I hate to see the summer end, I really don't feel the loss of it once I'm actually in front of a class again. My presentation last Friday was well-received, so that gave me a nice little confidence boost as I go back to gradgrinding. Getting a paycheck again is inspiring too.

I'm pretty excited about the nonfiction course I'm teaching, which will have students exploring, writing about, and taking part in cleanup and monitoring efforts on local rivers. So far, the students seem pretty interested, even though the course wasn't at all what they expected. No one had warned them I was going to inflict my river obsession on them.

While I prepared for this class last night, a pleasant thought took me by surprise. I was planning a discussion of Scott Russell Sanders' essay "Buckeyes," about his experiences growing up on a river in Northern Ohio that was eventually lost to a dam. I sketched out some standard questions one would ask about a piece of nature writing: How does the author represent this place, what is his connection to it, how does he balance observation and interpretation. As I worked with these, it occurred to me that I was finally doing the work I had prepared to do as a graduate student. For the most part, I teach college composition course, and while I try to make those interesting, my heart isn't always in them. My focus of study in my graduate program was literature of the environment, and while I have snuck a few examples of that into my comp courses, I haven't been able to pursue it in any depth in the classroom. While I recognized I would be getting back to this subject as I planned the course, the pleasure of actually working at it crept up on me unawares, and gave me deeper appreciation of my job, and its possibilities.

I'll report back on this course from time to time. Hopefully this experiment will end as happily as it's begun.

Tags: Education; Higher Education; Writing; Rivers