Getting Oriented

Today was a super exciting day: orientation for the PhD program and presentation of classes for the year.  I began the day at 10 AM (I do like academic life so far in that nothing seems to begin before 10 AM) by meeting the professor who I will be TA'ing for this quarter.  She immediately expressed her enthusiasm by calling my name from down the hall upon her arrival, "Sarah?  I'm so excited to meet you!".  I was caught off guard because I was so excited to meet her!

From there, we talked about George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes which is the first work on the syllabus.  I told her that I considered doing my master's thesis on Cable (he is a Louisiana writer), but decided on Octavia Butler...and quickly qualified that by stating how I know that to most people these authors seem completely unrelated.  Her reply?  "Oh yeah, I can see how you could be thinking about them in the same area of study".   All day this kind of excitement of ideas and encouragement was present!  I cannot overstate how awesome it is for a professor to acknowledge and express enthusiasm in your way of thinking; it is critical to being a successful student!

We also had our first pedagogy course today, which will be a weekly meeting with all of the first year TA's where we discuss how we are conducting our sections, etc.  I'm pretty excited about leading my first discussion session on Monday.  I have about 33 students and most of them are seniors with a few juniors and sophomores as well.  My plan for the first week is to get students to introduce themselves and learn about their interest in this course, which is called "The Historical Imaginary," since it isn't a required course.  

After the pedagogy course, I listened to the presentations of the classes for the next year and had a really hard time trying to figure out what I want to take this year because there are so many things that interest me!  After spending some time thinking about it tonight, I think I will be taking a seminar on W.E.B. DuBois called "DuBois in a Global Context".  I figure it is a good course for me to start with (in addition to the required theory-heavy Proseminar and the Pedagogy courses) since it will focus on considering DuBois as the first critical race theorist.  I've never taken a course specifically on critical race theory even though I have been working with many texts in that genre for a while.  I figure this is a good, solid foundation for situating myself within the genre.

Now, my task at hand is preparing the necessary work for the Proseminar on Tuesday which includes a polished 25 page paper and several readings from Marx, Luce Irigaray, Rod Ferguson and Walter Benjamin.  Apparently reading Mimesis was just required as a backdrop to what we will be talking about...which is good because even though it feels like I read that enormous book for nothing, I'm really glad we won't be focusing on that text for an entire class session.  At the end of the book, the author was analyzing Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and actually kept referring to the author as "he"!  I mean, I know the dude was writing in the 1950's...but are you kidding me?!  How patriarchal.

As of today, I am feeling super excited about learning, engaging with students, teaching, etc.; the whole spectrum of responsibilities is extremely motivating!