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Back to Skool: Reeding Comprehenshon

First day of school: Once again I'm teaching the second of a two-course writing requirement for all students, and, as usual, my first assignment is to ask them to bring in a piece of writing they love.  Anything at all--books, poems, Maxim.  And, as usual, I have one kid in class who insists he doesn't read anything.  (Why is it always a "he"?)  No magazines, I say?  No.  Sports scores?  No.  Music reviews?  No.  Cereal boxes?  No.  He says he read one book once that wasn't required for school but didn't have a copy.  I told him to bring in the review of the book from Amazon.

Every. Single. Semester.  Where are they coming from?

Last semester I had a kid in my Good Books class tell me he doesn't read and ask if there was any way he could get through the class without reading the books.  I'm thinking, seriously?  If you don't read, you are going to have a lot of trouble getting through college.  And then the clincher--the kid tells me that he's a senior and just needs this class to graduate.  So he SHOULD have had a lot of trouble getting through college, but apparently he hadn't.   I told him I deliberately picked books that didn't have Cliff Notes, and he dropped the class.  The course, I wanted to remind him, was called GOOD BOOKS.  What kind of cojones does it take to ask the teacher such a question?  What I fear is that he found a class that did meet his requirements, because I never saw him again.

Beyond the fact that I'm a writer and these kids make me despair that my profession is a dying one, I fear that the education profession is ultimately churning out students for whom reading is a chore, and intellectual inquiry is not only beside the point, it's to be avoided at all costs.  Luckily I work in a department that's supportive of the professor's position in holding up academic standards, but I'm sorry to say I know of plenty of others that undermine those standards, usually in small ways that may seem innocuous at first glance.

It makes me feel like I'm fighting a losing battle.  And it's only Day One.

Because Pictures Are Worth A Thousand Words, or Are At Least Less Tiring to Post

So we just got back from three weeks of fun and travel with an infant. We did about 18 hours in the car and four in a plane, and Miss Libs handled it much better than her parents did, I have to say. She's even started sleeping longer and longer stretches.  The night we got home, she went 8 hours and would maybe have gone a bit longer if I hadn't woken her up to nurse before certain parts of my anatomy threatened to explode.  She's also been colicky in the evenings, but I'm starting to think that's more tiredness than anything else and have been putting her to bed earlier than usual, which seems to be working, if the last two nights are any indication. Sweet, precious sleep!

I can definitely see how much she's grown just in the past few weeks, and she's smiling and focusing much better.  But don't take my word for it, see for yourself. Here she is at my brother-in-law's wedding in Iowa, with her Aunt Erin and one of her namesakes, her Great-Grandma Adele:

And here she is after the wedding, looking about as hung over as her parents felt:

And here's our little one at the beach in North Carolina, where we go every year with all the aunts, uncles, and cousins, and Ga and Papa:

I'm thinking we're going to keep her.

In other news, I've had to quit taking freelance editing clients, since school's starting up again and I'm worried about having enough time for one job, much less two, and I'm re-reading both David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which I'm teaching this fall, and Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus, just because it's amazing.  It's been nice having enough consciousness left to read anything right now.