Back from Palm Springs

I’m finally back, after a month away and a month coming to terms with a new semester and a revamp of my syllabi. As our program is small, I’m teaching an extra course that didn’t “make,” so that our upper level students will have a chance to take multiple courses. So I’m teaching a first year, a second year, a third year, and a fourth year course! But I’ve streamlined the one that didn’t make and had to be reclassified, as we say here, a composition and culture course, by making it a hybrid course. Students meet with me once a week, and during the other two hours that they would normally meet with me, they write. I think that is a good compromise, don’t you? That way I don’t have to meet for four a.m. class hours three times a week. It gives me a break, and I don’t really think they are suffering that much. The few who wish are able to come see me during the other two class hours, as I hold office hours then. Anyway, enough of my very boring news.

But what I AM excited about is the renewed enthusiasm I have for teaching. It happens every semester. (Isn’t that a take-off on the movie title “It happens every spring”?) And I’m excited about writing again. I’ve given myself permission NOT to publish, which has freed me to write and publish in new ways. At the moment I’m moving over from peer-reviewed publishing in second language pedagogy and applied linguistics to editor-reviewed publishing in methods – small how-to articles. It’s not prestigious, it won’t get me marks towards full professor, but – it is a venue for things I want to say, things that are pertinent to today’s profession, and things that actually are grounded in my reading and thinking about discourse analysis, applied linguistics, etc., etc. – AND the audience is a group of 5,000 Texas high school and college language teachers. (As Texas and California go, so goes the nation!) If I make a habit of this, it could be a way to have a conversation with people who have the power to choose textbooks and who educate the students that we see in our college classrooms. This kind of writing comes easily to me, and it comes quickly. For it is the culmination of hours of thinking and writing – and conversations held -- that I do in an ongoing way and have done for 25 years. There is not just one way to write and reach the world, correct?