This morning was my son’s first day of school in Windham, and it is his seventh birthday. He seems to be pretty OK with the fact that his birthday falls on or around the first day of school every year. He gets to be the first kid to bring cupcakes to school each year, and that must earn him some credibility among seven-year olds.
His mom had to be out of the house and at her school before he was up, but she left him a nice card. Our daughter is with my mother for the next few days because she doesn’t start preschool till the eighth. I think Cormac kind of liked not having her there this morning. It made for a quieter start to the day. I wrote him a poem for his birthday, as I do every year. He could read it himself but he asked me to read it to him, and he gave me a big hug afterward. Then we went for a walk up to the green by our house, though we couldn’t go for as long a morning walk as we used to because his school’s start time is thirty minutes earlier this year. Then we walked to school, which is only two doors down from our house. He handled the whole thing much better this year. Last year he cried. This year a little girl who had cried with him last year was crying again and being comforted by the same teacher, but Cormac walked right by her and took his seat without incident.
He wore a favorite bug T-shirt and his new sneakers, a baseball cap he knows he will be made to remove, and he smuggled in one lucky silly-band and a drawing pad and colored pencils. We got there and discovered that he had been switched to a different teacher, though we had received no notification from the school. I tried to be understanding since there had been some administrative turnover during the summer. His new teacher is the more experienced of the two, so perhaps the change will turn out to be fortunate. He had two best friends last year. One is in class with him and the other is in the other class. I took a bunch of photos with my phone, got permission to bring in cupcakes tomorrow, introduced myself to the new principal on my way out, and headed home to start my day.
UConn began classes this past Monday but I didn’t meet my new students till Tuesday afternoon. They seem like a good bunch—mostly non-English majors. I have a couple of my own advisees and a former high school student of my wife’s. I overenrolled a couple of students who pleaded desperation. We’re discouraged from overenrolling students in W sections, writing intensive courses, but I always let in a couple. I had a lot of requests for overenrollment this year, but I don’t think it had anything to do with me. It’s because my course is on Evil in American Literature. Seems like many students found that to be an exciting topic. I sort of knew that would be the case when I wrote the course description. The only thing that likely would have sparked more interest is Sex in American Literature. Maybe I’ll offer that next fall. I impressed them by getting all their names right after one round of introductions. It’s a silly dog and pony trick, but it always seems to make a good first impression.
I’m excited about the course. I’m teaching six novels, a play, and a book of poetry—Huck Finn, Sanctuary, A Streetcar Named Desire, Howl, Interview With The Vampire, The Handmaid’s Tale, Beloved, and No Country For Old Men. Four of the works (Sanctuary, Interview, Handmaid, and No Country) I have never taught before, so that will be an exciting challenge for me, though I have taught other works by Faulkner and McCarthy. I spent August re-reading those four novels to get ideas and to refresh my memory of the books. It was a good thing I did that, too, as I found several cool connections I wouldn’t have thought of or noticed otherwise. I forgot all the allusions Lestat makes to Shakespeare plays in Interview. And I found an allusion to the rape scene from Streetcar in The Handmaid’s Tale, and a reference to Mammon in No Country For Old Men that I can pair up with the references to Moloch in Howl, both being false gods mentioned in the Bible. I also took note of the respective whiteness of both Pap Finn and Popeye Vitelli from Sanctuary, and a reference to Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men as a ghost, which can complement the ghost Beloved. It’s good to re-read!
Fortuitously, one of the students took a class this summer with a colleague that focused on Satan in literature. They read things like the Book of Job, Paradise Lost, and Doctor Faustus. So I asked him to give a brief presentation during the second class in order to provide some helpful literary and historical context for the much more contemporary works we will be reading. He was excited by the request.
So while my son is getting ready to dive into second grade and my daughter is about to embark on her second year of preschool, I will be discussing evil and Satan with a bunch of undergraduates. Strikes me as a funny contrast, the relative innocence of elementary school and the lack thereof in college!
I hope everyone has gotten off to a good start and that all the recovered jobs that resulted from the stimulus funds remain in place beyond this year. Please look out for this column every week throughout the school year!
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