And the semester begins

Though I look forward to the fall weather (such as it is!), I am a little sad that my stay-at-home-mom summer is over. We don't have daycare for Henry yet, but we have him on waiting lists all over town. Some of the places don't take babies until they're six months old or a year old. Right now we're taking turns doing childcare, as we have alternating teaching/office hours schedules. We live very close to campus, so this is workable for the time being.

As one would expect, I didn't get as much research done over the summer as I'd hoped, but I did a decent amount of work. I had intended to do the following:

* submit book proposal
* write an article (from scratch, not based on a diss chapter)
* write a proposal for another article
* write a book review

What I actually did was:

* wrote an article (from scratch, not based on a diss chapter)
* wrote a proposal for another article
* wrote part of a book review

I also reviewed two manuscripts for journals, though that's not my research.

Now my research goals for fall:

* submit book proposal
* write an article (from scratch, not based on a diss chapter)
* finish the book review
* compose a conference presentation for LACC

And administrative goals:

* start a mentoring program pairing up new and experienced TAs
* create a web site for the first-year writing program here -- nothing fancy, just a page of text using the department's style sheet.

And teaching goals:

* find interesting and unexpected ways to teach Classical rhetoric and connect the theory to contemporary life
* use the experience teaching Classical rhetoric (a split undergraduate/graduate course) in the service of my research so that I produce something as a result of teaching it, even just a conference presentation