thinking ahead to teaching

Two (+) months into my sabbatical, I've not given much thought at all to teaching. But three things have happened in the last few days that have me thinking ahead to next year. First, my 2011-12 course schedule was confirmed on Thursday; so now I know exactly when and what I'll be teaching. Then, the edited volume I've been reading these past few days  has a couple chapters that struck me as really valuable for students to read in order to understand and think critically about the time and work that goes into building relationships of trust (however fragile and fraught with the politics of research) w/cultural collaborators/consultants. Admittedly, there are now thousands of post-1980s articles out there that touch on this general topic, but these chronicle mid-century projects that were clearly very much shaped and controlled by the collaborators, who dedicated themselves to getting what they needed out of the research. And then this morning, MFW wrote about a book she's reading in a grad seminar, which then reminded me of another book that would be good for my grad seminar next spring. So, I've just created a new onenote binder with tabs for each of my upcoming courses. I can now save these ideas by dumping them into a semi-organized format without getting too distracted from the task at hand. So far, I've got a tab for each course, and then pages and subpages dedicated to readings, possible assignments, films, etc. I do love onenote. Okay. Time for coffee and work before the marine layer burns off and distractions beckon.

*Finished it yesterday at noon--at which point I did go shopping.   Then got Thai takeout for dinner and  spent the night entering the individual chpts/contributions into endnote, while also watching Law & Violence. This morning, I have to go back and write the summaries into onenote. AND, I just  realized I can use some of that for teaching notes. Nice.