New Year's Resolutions

Today’s the first day of classes here at EMU. Since I don’t teach today, my original plan was to actually not be at school today, but it turns out that I have a Faculty Council meeting I need to attend. Oh well; summer is over.

I’ve thought of the beginning of the school year as the beginning of “the year” pretty much my whole life and certainly since I started teaching 17 years ago. Jeesh, 17 years ago. I was a graduate assistant back then. I was 22 years old in an MFA creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University, teaching first year composition about three or four months after I finished my BA. Ah, memories….

Anyway, since I’m at the beginning of the new year, I thought it might be good to make some new year’s resolutions (and I also thought that if I made them here, I might stick to them, too). So here they are, more or less in this order:

• Get into shape. This might seem like the sort of thing I would mention on my unofficial blog, but I mention it here because I have an academic schedule this term that allows me few excuses for getting exercise and I really do want to make losing some weight and being a bit more healthy my top priority this semester.
• Figure out this online teaching stuff. So far, so good, though I haven’t seen any activity on my online class yet. It’s pretty early though. And one of the things I am going to have to figure out for sure this year for my online teaching is podcasting and (possibly) screencasting, too. I just found out my CCCCs proposal was accepted; it’s called (right now) “Broadcast Composition : Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections in Online Writing Classes,” and for the time-being, it’s going to be about using things like podcasting and other “lower-end” multimedia to supplement my online teaching. But that could change and evolve.
• Read. I have mentioned this in the recent past on my blog, but basically, I am (more or less and/or one way or the other) finished with my textbook project, I am (more or less and/or one way or the other) pretty much off of the job market, and I have therefore reached a point in my career where I don’t have to produce scholarship in order to participate in that “academic game.” So, for a while at least, I think I’m going to become mainly a consumer of scholarship and read, both current scholarship and some of the things before.
• Blog. And despite what Ivan Tribble said again, I stand by what I said back in July: While he did have some valid points, I think blogging can help someone on the job market and I think it helps those of us who are more “established” in academic careers too. To read more about Tribble II, I’d suggest reading Collin’s entry about this. By the way: it occurs to me that it is a little– I don’t know, strange/funny/ironic — that Tribble in this article seems to think that blogging under one’s own name can be okay and yet he’s sticking to his pseduonym here. Hmmm…..