Where to from here?

I've survived... so far. I'm now into my second week of classes and haven't broken down yet, though I suspect that's due more to determined denial and simple stubbornness on my part than anything else. Between a full load of classes -- 2 history seminars, plus a 2nd-year Latin reading course I'm taking pass/fail (or so I hope, provided the registration was handled correctly) -- and my TA responsibilities, not to mention the challenge of raising a teenage boy on my own, I suspect by Halloween I will be in full-on Medusa mode. As I told a friend the other day, I anticipate some serious butt-kicking (my butt, that is) this fall.

Good thing I'm a masochist.

I'm really enjoying my classes so far. Latin is always a pleasure, even if my brain is not as elastic as it once was, and rote memorization is increasingly difficult to achieve. More particularly, I'm loving the reading (and reading and reading and...) for the 2 seminars. Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages has been especially delightful; his cynicism and disdain for the Annaliste school had me laughing more than once this weekend.

Today's the first time I've come in for office hours; I'll be here every Tuesday, 8:30-10:30 a.m. Since it's the start of term and I have yet to hold my first discussion section, I don't anticipate any students stopping by. It's been a good time to do one of my seminar assignments for this week, which is to find 10 monographs and review the primary sources they used. I can access the library catalog from here, so I've got a nice long list of books to look at, with titles like England Before the Norman Conquest and The Golden Age of Northumbria and Church and Society in the Medieval North of England.

*wallows in geekiness*

I think my son is enjoying his new school, but since he spent all last week going over policies and procedures until his eyes glazed over, it's hard to say. He does like taking the bus, though we were a bit worried when it never picked him up the first morning. He's signed up for the after-school program, which hopefully will provide him with opportunities for sports and other extracurricular activities.

He told me the other day that many of the other students in his classes tend to talk amongst themselves even while the teacher is talking, so I've had to reinforce the importance of paying attention and not following their lead. I hope the advanced math and English classes I signed him up for will challenge him. I've also registered him to take the Midwestern equivalent of the Johns Hopkins CTY exam he took last winter, in the hopes he will do well enough that I can get him in a program that will encourage his interest in math.

Beyond all that, we still like K'zoo, though the wet weather the past few days has been a bit of a damper. :-)