1) Teaching in the morning is much different than teaching around lunchtime or in the afternoon. My 9 o’clock students still seem sleepy. My 10 o’clock students have woken up. Maybe their energy will fade as the semester continues. I am not a morning person.

2) Freshmen are idealistic and delusional. I don’t want to kill their idealism or delusions, but I do worry about them. For example, yesterday I found out that there is a program where guys drive around in golf carts and pick up girls who are walking by themselves on campus. Don’t these poor cute Southern sorority girls realize that they can’t trust the guys in golf carts either?

3) I have to memorize two poems this semester. I’m going to try to complete one by mid-October and one by the end of the semester. The last class I memorized a poem for was a completely horrible fever-inducing mess. I worked SO hard on memorizing this awful little eight line poem as requested by my instructor. I showed up on the day assigned, ready to recite, and I was the only person in class who completed the assignment. I recited it okay, with a few messups, and the instructor said we’d come back to it next week when everyone else could recite it. We never came back to it.

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