back to school

September with its stormy showers has pierced to the root the drought of August, and I’m once again taking a deep procrastinatory breath before diving down, down into the pellucid fonts of academe, from which I hope to return, gasping, nauseous and briny, with the precious pearl of wisdom, although I’m certainly no Thornton Melon. I allude obliquely, dear reader – via the time-honoured and universal language of old Rodney Dangerfield movies – to the commencement of my autumnal online grad classes as I pursue my teaching certification.

Anyhoo, this semester should be a lot different from the last one, because I now know many of my fellow students, having met them face to mano a mano to Face, as they say in Ecuador, over the summer in Virginia. Last semester I really had no desire to respond my fellow online classmates’ posts, or even to read them that carefully, because I had no freaking idea who they were, or if they had senses of humor or were prudes or what. It’s unsurprisingly hard to gauge someone’s personality from posts about pedagogy.

Now I think I’ll probably have the opposite problem, and be too casual and cliquey with the whole discussion board thing. I’ll try to keep a good balance. Either way, I like online classes so far – some of the concepts in last spring’s linguistics class were a little difficult to grasp with only the textbook for help, but otherwise I think I learned about the same amount as I would have on campus, and it’s nice to be able to respond to things on the discussion board at odd hours of the night. It’s sort of like being able to pull an all-nighter writing a paper and then not having to go to class at all. Or something. Hang on. It’s like getting to eat in the cafeteria at any hour of the day or night, without having to stick to certain hours for lunch or dinner. OK never mind the metaphors, online classes are, as Larry David might say, pretty, pretty, pretty good, let’s leave it at that.