The Swing of Things

The students are coming! The students are coming! They're already here, actually, and my regular life returned today with the beginning of classes at ETSU. I dropped Raleigh off in front of his school at about 7:45, then parked and entered these doors at about 7:50. A lot of administrative this-and-that filled the time until I left to attend my first class meeting at 10:25. When class was over, I met a couple of friends for lunch in the cafeteria. Then more office work until Raleigh was out of school. Once home, we picked up my guitar and took it to a shop downtown to get some work done on it. While there, we picked up Raleigh's guitar that Leesa bought for $6 at a yard sale. It's a Takamine, and after $75 worth of repairs, it has turned out to be a fine little instrument. Leesa brought us pizza from Papa John's for supper, but she made herself a salad. After dozing through a couple of episodes of King of the Hill, I headed out to Willow Springs to do my five miles while darkness fell. It was beautiful. And that's the day that was.

I'm teaching two classes this semester. The first is English 1218: Quest for Meaning and Values I, a course the freshman class of the University Honors Scholars is required to take. Twenty-three students are enrolled, and we meet Mondays and Wednesdays from 10:25 to 11:45. The course is actually two in one, the English section, in which some of the students are enrolled and Philosophy 1218, in which the rest of the students are enrolled. This semester I'm team-teaching with Dr. Leslie MacAvoy from the Department of Philosophy. We decided to do philosophy for the first third (roughly) of the semester, religion in the middle and literature in the final third. The first reading assigned for the coming Wednesday is Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and his dialog "Euthyphro."

My second course is English 4207/5207: Literature of the South, a split-level course including upper-level undergraduates and student from our graduate program. The class meets on Thursday evenings from 5:00 to 7:50. We'll survey Southern literature from its beginning--from writings about the South going all the way back to Englishman John Smith--to contemporary writers, including some songwriters. I'm thinking about beginning this Thursday with some Neil Young ("Southern Man"), some Lynyrd Skynyrd ("Sweet Home, Alabama"), some old spirituals and gospel and storytelling from a CD sampler. It'll be fun.

This weekly schedule carefully blended with Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings at Cherokee will make up much of my life over the next few months. In addition, I'll try to get in some writing, some scholarly work for publication and presentation and some creative work.

Life is good.


NWT 245.0