The Life of a Troubadour Academic Can Be Troubling and Dour

Tho' I still have final papers to grade, yesterday was the last day for one of the three intensives I am teaching over twelve weeks this summer. Of course, as one six week course ends, another begins Tuesday. I'm feeling a bit worse for wear already caught up in the storm churn of these intensives, but soon enough the whole thing will be behind me. Since I taught two courses in the Spring and will take on another two in the Fall, this means that in 2011 I will have taught nearly as much material in just three months of summer sessions as in the nine months of the rest of the academic year. It's very strange. I've enjoyed teaching the rhetoric of narrative selfhood in the graphic novel at Berkeley, the topic was great fun, and by the end there was a dependable likeable core group of students with interesting things to say each day (I can only guess what kind of community would have consolidated itself in the fullness of a conventional term), and I have a lot of passion for the nonviolent politics I am surveying in the next session, too, and expect the teaching will be gratifying. It's just that when there is so much of it things get a little wearying. Of course, regular readers will have noticed that the last few weeks I have been posting little snarky comments about tee vee and random Wildicisms during the week when actual teaching is happening since I feared the alternative to such amuses bouches would be posting daily testimonials to exhaustion and stage fright and grading resentment which are pretty much my overwhelming preoccupations these days -- and I daresay great fun to read about endlessly. Anyway, I've got a long week-end in which to recover and grade lackadaisically ahead of me, and the halfway point in my can't say no to work summer teaching travails has arrived and finds me more or less intact, so there you go.