coming round the bend

The snow is falling fast and heavy. I’m scrambling to write a mini-lecture on Republican Motherhood and Benjamin Rush. I need to send off my readings (Whitman’s “There was a Child Went Forth” and “A Death in the School-Room”) for my on-campus interview next week. But I feel compelled to pause, if only for a minute. Something is definitely afoot. Something is changing. Something is, dare I say it, growing.

Oh rats, that sounds prenatal. And this is decidedly not that. Instead, it’s a shifting in my own head over the last few weeks. With the start of the semester has come this wonderful sense of peacefulness, this perfectly clear reminder that I’m so much happier when I’m teaching. The chocolate letters went over well on Monday, but so did the 17th-century hornbook I dug up in Special Collections and brought to class. Don’t tell anyone, but I even let everyone hold it and imagine themselves as Puritan children with the little wooden paddle attached to their belts. I asked my students to write about these technologies of learning and in fifteen minutes, they reminded me why I work on the questions that I do.

My exuberance after Monday’s class compelled me to dash off a proposal for ASA in the fall. Instead of feeling tortured by this process, plagued by doubt, and desperate for J’s help, I just wrote up a proposal about something that has long interested about my hometown and sent it off immediately. Done and done. And then this morning I got news of its acceptance. After so many years of feeling utterly without hope about my work, I’m starting to—though I don’t want to jinx it—take the possibility of my own ability seriously. This is a sea-change.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to develop an ego. I’m not going to become one of those academics who believes that their microscopic slice of research rules the world. But I’m trying on the idea that I might just become an a truly-honest-to-god-teacher-scholar. For once it doesn’t feel utterly impossible.

All of this could change. It probably will. But for now, I’m going to ride it out...and enjoy that ride. Things are afoot and I’m headed out for a jog.