Can it be Thursday?

With summer session running four days a week, the end of teaching comes on Thursday. leaving us with one day to catch up on writing new syllabi, preparing new inserts for the online Blackboard, and reading articles. This is the penultimate week of the term, so students are rushing to finish papers. In the 8-week version, students get the same number of class sessions but fewer days between to complete the reading and writing. "A Modest Proposal" has been postponed to Tuesday. Wednesday's last day of class will feature the documentary film What It Means to be Free with Oregon Poet Laureate Lawson Inada reading poems from his book Legends from Campabout his experience as a child in the Japanese internment camps. ON Friday, no students came and I had time to catch up on ordering textbooks, memos for incoming graduate students, reading more wonderful work by Gerald Graff - you must read Clueless in Academe and apparently I must read Culture Clash his book from 1994.

What books to take on my trip? I bought Anne Lamott's new (in paper) Plan B, plus Billy Collins' new (in paper) Nine Horses. What will airlines ban next? No water - but hopefully they don't consider books inflamatory, though of course they are - hence why did Plato's Republic say, "First, kill all the poets" -- [I really should find the exact quote one day]. Pen is mightier than sword - especially if we now read "pen" as any "text" which means not only anything written (even on blogs) but visual rhetoric as well.

I think another post is coming on.