First Day Update 1-31-05

Just finished my first day of classes on the new schedule, and I have this to say: three preps in four hours is going to kill me. Or maybe it's just the eight-hour non-stop day. Maybe both.

Anyway. Highlights of today: getting to tell the teacher-disappears-to-the-Caribbean story many times; doing the Python Argument Sketch live in class with a student; two moderately productive discussions which got where I needed them to go; two teachers who went out of their way to help me out with my new responsibilities.

"Argument is an intellectual process, contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes."
"No it isn't."

Sometimes life is good; exhausting, but good.

Now to prepare to teach one student ESL for two hours tomorrow...

From Stephen Kings' On Writing, on writing seminars

"And what about those critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter's story, someone may say. It has something... a sense of I don't know... there's a loving kind of you know... I can't exactly describe it...

Other writing-seminar gemmies include I felt like the tone thing was just kind of you know; The character of Polly seemed pretty much stereotypical; I loved the imagery because I could see what he was talking about more or less perfectly.

And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly roasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemnly thoughtful. In too many cases the teachers and writers in residence are nodding, smiling, and looking solemnly thoughtful right along with them. It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class." (last italics added)