I love the start of a new term -- when all sorts of learning is still potential rather than actual. Today, I told a student to "just e-mail me your draft and let me look at it; after all, I don't exactly have a backlog of grading tasks." Ah, the start of a new term, when I do not have a backlog of tasks and still have energy and enthusiasm for work!
This term, I'm prepping and teaching a topic I have not worked with (except for Jane Austen's novels) since my first term in graduate school (Ronald Reagan was still president and the Iron Curtain was still in place). It's refreshingly different to be teaching Romantic Era literary works, instead of Medieval and Early Modern texts. Students are finding the language of the texts more transparent, and students are finding that much of their own original poetry was written in the Romantic tradition, even if they had never yet realized this.
No matter which literary period I teach, I find connections to the world in which we live today, and the Romantics are helping me get in touch with the social reformers: those folks who see an injustice or a tragedy, and try to both bring it to our attention, and to arouse us to tackle the problem. Anyone else taking a class that resonates with their world?
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