An apple for the teacher?

Good morning! It's the first day of the new semester here, but it barely feels like it. For one, I'm only teaching one class, which is a graduate seminar on qualitative research methods (the "touchy-feely stuff" that social scientists get criticized for, like interviews and archival work and participant observation and such). For another, I have a fellowship for the spring semester, so I won't be teaching then, and I'm planning on taking a year-long sabbatical next year, so I won't be teaching any undergraduates for the next two years. (!) It's very strange. Instead, I will live vicariously through Mr. Z, who will be teaching calculus to 250 freshmen at 8 A.M., and then again at 9 A.M. (!!) He claims to enjoy it, but I just think he's weird. ♥

What's also different about this semester is that I'm going to be on the other side of the lectern! Faculty and staff can take courses for free, and I never had the time for it because, well, tenure. But I've always wanted to take advantage of that perk, and since I'm planning on this study abroad course in Barcelona next spring and know about as much Spanish as your average Sesame Street viewer, I've signed up for Intensive Beginning Spanish. Which also starts today, so I have two ways to be nervous, yay! (Also, damn, textbooks are expensive.)

I still need to post pics from my weeks in the mountains, and from the two baseball games I got to go to in August, including a really fun one with dugindeep. But for now, it's off to school...