This very serious girl started school when she was four and has never fully left. September means a chance to start again, a chance to keep work neat, to do it right, to find a truly compatible friend, to do well and please her parents and the teachers.

How much has changed?  It's September and I start preparing for a course I have taught before and an entirely new one. I hope to set up my courses well, to create pedagogically sound curricula, to work with compatible colleagues, to teach successfully and have my students learn and grow in communication skill.

I'm excited and anxious. I have one course planned and mostly prepared, and another to plan with a team. I've met my colleagues, some former, some new, and started rich pedagogical conversations with all of them. I meet my students next week and the week after, and start the classes.

It's September and school starts again: the rhythm of my life surging forward again.

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's a link to a trailer for a film by Alfonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Chris Sessums, in his blog post, says:

• This trailer is quite powerful rhetorically, visually, and emotionally. The authors argue that through disasters, both natural and man-made, the immediate reciprocal "shock" caused by the disaster has the power to reduce us collectively into a child-like state making us open to suggestion and manipulation, and more likely to comply with leaders claiming to protect us.
  

I recommend you read his commentary in his post.

 

 

 

 

Like the calendar icon showing repetition - - my Septembers layer back over the years, a new start, a new year, stimulus, change. I swim through my thick impressions, seeking the thread that will lead me through the maze of this semester. Once I find it, I will be able to read and post blogs again, I hope ;->

Despite my prejudice against Will Ferrell and the kind of movies he's usually in, I decided to watch Stranger Than Fiction. What a delight it was, and Ferrell can actually act! I loved Emma Thompson and the rest of the cast, and I just thoroughly enjoyed this postmodern look at the impact of literature, the visual playfullness, and affectionate celebration of ecentricity and quirkiness. What a treat! I recommend it, especially for those who love literature and literary theory.