Three weeks in...

When I really don’t want to do something, I procrastinate.  At this very moment, I should be creating a PowerPoint presentation for my genetics class.  I am really enjoying my class, and have a wonderful, truly wonderful group of students.  I anticipate a very good semester with these young people.  I am enjoying being in front of a class again, refreshing my memory about my beloved subject, and remembering again just what it was that brought me to teaching the first time around.

It wasn’t creating PowerPoint presentations.  

Which is why I am blogging instead of slogging right now.  I will regret it.  I will push myself to the limits of deadline, I will be up until 4 o’clock in the morning, and I will not learn from past experience.

Sigh.

On the one hand, it has been gratifying to see how genuinely I have been missed at the college.  It has been lovely teaching again, and feeling like I have some cachet in the world.  A faculty parking hang tag does wonders for my self-esteem.  I am in the system again; I have an email that ends with .edu; I have access to the faculty web; I have a cubicle with my name on it.  (Actually, the sign reads “Kate Lapczynski, Resident Queen of Genetics”- and I didn’t post it!)  All of this is so seductive to me.

On the other hand, it is  aggravating that after two years away, many of the things that made my going away fairly easy in the first place are basically unchanged.  The administration is still calling students our “customers”… (excuse me, but isn’t the customer always right?  Because my students aren’t.  If they are customers- not clients, even, but customers- doesn’t that make us merchants?  And if we are merchants, just what is it we are selling?  Knowledge, or college credits? )  … there is little to no respect afforded the faculty… attempts to use technology are thwarted by failure of the technology, and the apparent inability of the IT people to make it work consistently… moral is low… pay is low…  

And I gave up scrapbooking for THIS?

Fortunately, one can bear anything for 15 weeks.  Except, maybe, Mother.  I am not sure I will maintain my fragile sanity through 15 uninterrupted weeks with Mother.  It’s me, really. She is what she is and what she has been and is incapable of change, and it is I who needs to maintain an even strain.  Of course, going deaf and blind would help, but what are the odds of that happening?

At least Dave is home for a week or two, just long enough to screw up the dynamics here, but not long enough to settle comfortably into greased grooves.  Soon he’s off to New York and then to San Diego.  

I will be here.