Week One, a Work in Progress

We're on (mostly) a four day teaching schedule here, with three day weekends. That way, students (and faculty) can travel without interfering with coursework. So today, I have my last classes of the week, then I will call a taxi and head to the train station and on to York for the weekend.

Most folks are heading to London, but since I'm sort of Londoned out, I'm going to York.

So far, classes are mixed. One is really good, one is very good, and one is a struggle. I hope things will get better in the struggle class and keep good in the others. In the struggle class, we started with Utopia, which can be a bit of a slog if you're not into reading lit; I think that was the case for these students. But I hope as they read the second part, it will be more fun.

In the other classes, well, at first the one class wouldn't admit that "The Dream of the Rood" was darned strange, but I finally got them to acknowledge that they'd never read anything from the point of view of a piece of wood before, and then they got more into it. We're starting Beowulf today, and that's just a grand piece in so many ways. I got an email from a student who'd told me s/he had trouble with Beowulf before, but was finding this translation a joy. S/he sounded excited, and that's generally a good sign.

In other good news: I've been trying to play outside regularly and it's going well. To give you an idea of the size of this place, from the house to the gate, it's .8 miles (longer in kilometers!), so a run to the gate and back is 1.6 miles. You can slip outside the gate or go other places, but I'm just getting there.

My goal by the time I leave is to comfortably (well, as comfortable as I get playing outside) run 5k without stopping. I'm halfway there, about.