gotta be the shoes

bought new running shoes last week, and have been running on flat ground since then. no more naggging shins! i had a really great run today--ran 5 miles, felt really smooth the whole time.

school starts wednesday. back to teaching...wondering what my crop of students will be like this quarter. my class is capped at 40 and it's completely full--mostly sophomores and juniors, with a few seniors and a couple of first-years. i'm glad not to be teaching a first-year composition class this fall (i'm teaching a 200-level lit class)--it's amazing how much first-year students learn in that first quarter away from home. they are like a completely different species when they get to winter quarter. i think it's the shock of fall quarter, both the workload and the grades at the end. they all come here expecting to continue getting the 4.0's they were used to getting in high school; but of course we grade much harder here, so...they have to either work a lot harder or get used to lower grades. it's a rude awakening, i guess, to go from the top 10% of a graduating high school class, to the average student of over 10,000 incoming frosh. poor babies. just wait till they hit 30. ;-)

so wish me luck...and hopefully the first couple of days will go ok.