work tomorrow

Sunday wanes, and I'm back to work tomorrow. The month of vacation went by quickly, despite my not having gone anywhere, but at least I begin the term with better aerobic capacity than I had a month ago. My resting heart rate has shown a dramatic drop of about 10 beats per minute to a (still-high) rate of 78. yeah, my resting rate was near 90 before. Shame on me. I may also have lost a tiny bit of weight, as seen by my newfound ability to tighten my belt a notch further, but a lot of that weight is probably water, not fat. I still look about the same, and won't see much difference for months (compare this with Joel's charted progress).

I'm looking forward to the new semester: intensive courses are my favorite, because the students often seem more focused and on-task. I'll be teaching some standard, beginner-level conversation courses as well, and they'll manifest the usual precipitous drop in attendance over the term, but I'm very much looking forward to teaching the advanced-level intensive course.

Calendars have been written up, as have some lesson plans for the coming week. There's little more for me to do this evening except continue to slave away at the book, which, I regret to inform my audience, will probably not be ready by July 4th, this blog's third anniversary-- an anniversary that will once again be quietly celebrated, as my fellow Yanks will be partying and not blog-reading).

I confess that I underestimated the sheer amount of work that goes into a 350-page manuscript. My previous book was only around 240 pages, and many of those pages weren't even filled: they contained short poems or cartoons. Water from a Skull, by contrast, is almost pure content. Yikes.

So-- now we look forward to a new term. I'm happy to be slipping back into the old routine. Even though I'm a vampire while on vacation, I always feel guilty about sleeping late. I don't sleep more than seven hours a night, so it's a standard night's sleep, but there's something about waking up in mid-afternoon that screams "LAZY ASS!" Then again, my summer teaching schedule begins at 9:30am, so I won't be getting up before 8am-- not exactly early by many people's standards. During the fall, of course, that will change back to my 6:30am grind.

This term, I'm starting a Friday English circle for low-level speakers. Fridays are normally class-free during intensives, but there was so much interest in starting a circle that I decided, Why not? We'll see how that goes. The circle is mainly for people who truly want to improve their English, so I'm hoping we'll see a lot of attendees.

I'm also giving my students blogging for homework in an effort to bolster active vocabulary, the area where most low-level Korean students are weakest. I'll direct you to their blogs once they're up and running, and I hope you'll leave civil, constructive, and encouraging comments on them.

En avant!


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