Well, as I walked out of my second class yesterday at 4:00, I've realized that with the Tuesday-Thursday classes, I've reached That Point. Every semester, if things are going well, you reach a point where everything just clicks, and you know that you and the students (in the aggregate) are On the Same Side. This is an enormous comfort; up until now we were paddling willy-nilly, in all sorts of different directions, but now our shared class time has the feel of a common event. Generally they listen when I talk. They do the in-class exercises purposefully. Now we can get down to business.

Yesterday, I even had a student tell me he thinks I'm a good teacher, and he feels really comfortable in my class. Wow! I told him he'd made my day . . .

I suppose today I'll discover whether the same thing is true of the Monday-Wednesday crowd. They're a tougher audience; we didn't start off on the same splendid footing, and it has taken longer to recover from that. Plus, at least with the FY writing class, the room works against us: It's got long tables, so it's hard to move around and reconfigure everything, which in a writing class, can be very difficult indeed. (I always try to mix 'em up on a regular basis - get people talking to different people and such.)

And then, too, the first drafts of the first papers are rolling in . . . there's always a danger that I'll kill the momentum with my comments, especially if the papers aren't any good.

Speaking of which: I've answered all my email, organized my desk, drunk my coffee, and sharpened my pencils 654645643 times . . . I suppose it's time to read those papers . . . sigh . . .