Quick Catch Up

It has been an extremely busy couple of weeks. For those of my readers who don't know, I was laid off from my position at Case New Holland. Friday, August 8th was my last day. The higher HIGHER ups made some radical decisions, and one of those was to let all contract employees go, so I was not the only one who ended up leaving. I enjoyed my time there and will miss most of the people I worked with, but I am excited to move in a new direction.

For my next step, I'll be stepping back into teaching. I've gotten positions at two schools as an English and Humanities adjunct instructor. I'll be teaching The Search For Meaning in a Changing World at Friends University, and two sections of Fundamentals of English at Butler Community College. Classes start next week. After I finish this brief update, I will continue working on figuring out what exactly I'm going to do in those Fundamentals of English classes! They provide us a book and a general idea of what the students must be able to achieve by the end of the semester, but that's all!

The Search for Meaning class is a little different than the classes I've taught in the past. It is in a five week format, and it is continuing adult students. It is also a four hour long class. FOUR HOURS. Luckily, Friends has already provided the entire course to me so I just have to teach it. (Of course, "just having to teach it" is not as carefree as it sounds!)

All of my classes are night classes. It will be nice to have my days free again and to do a large portion of my work at home. One of the things I liked best about teaching was the fact that I only had to be someplace a few hours a week. Everything else could be done anywhere. I'm hoping that it will be less overwhelming this time, but I'm thinking it should be. The last time I taught I was taking a full load of graduate level classes. Nothing is more horrible than grading 60 essays while you're trying to finish a couple of 20 page papers.

I'll get some pictures up of the garden soon. Our tomatoes are doing great, the zucchini is slowing down, and we were disappointed by our cucumbers this year. Kirk's dream of having rhubarb is dead- the plant died for the second year in a row. Our eggplant has flowers on it, but I'm not sure if we're going to get any eggplants yet. I'm already thinking about what we may try next year.