Well, here it is--July 25th--and you might be wondering (OK, probably not) what I have been doing all summer. Well, the answer is not much and a lot. It all depends on how you measure events.
My travel schedule falls under the "a lot" column:
May Rome and Greece with James Blakeley, a history professor at my college, and 19 freshmen, including 17 girls. (You do the estrogen math.)
June Queretaro, Mexico for the NAACI conference which I organized along with my colleagues Susan Gardner (Canada- the sane country in North America) and Eugenio Echeverria (Mexico.)
July Oxford, England for a Inter-Disciplinary.net conference on Childhood, followed by a visit to Pennine Community up in Wakefield
July-August South Carolina (as if it is not hot enough here in New York) for the AAPT conference on teaching philosophy
OK- so lots of traveling, presenting, listening. learning--all accompanied by packing and unpacking.
In the "not much" category is reading and really digging into new ideas. My colleague, whom I run into occasionally when I appear on campus to deal with various administrative stuff (a technical term, most likely unfamiliar to those of you who do not deal with the esoterics of paper pushing)-- well he is always reporting on having read about five books in the last week and just makes me:
(a) exhausted
(b) guilty as a student who is falling way behind on the homework and has the sinking feeling that there is no way in the known universe that she can ever, ever catch up.
So, in that department I am seriously lagging. But not to worry! Summer stretches luxuriously ahead, right? Oh no! Are fall syllabi due already??? What happened to the summers of my youth that lasted for months? And by "months" I mean psychological periods of long time, not calendar time.
So gather ye rosebuds while ye may. And, perhaps, have another pomegranate martini.
