Welcome Back into My Life, Carroll!

I’m sitting in my office going through the usual re-entry rituals at the beginning of my almost 39th year of teaching here. My friend and colleague, Phil Krejcarek teasingly reminded me yesterday that he started a semester before me. Our esteemed colleague Gary Olsen started here in 1975.

I smile at the usual beginning of semester chaos. Passwords that don’t work (or I have forgotten); printers that need to be reconfigured because of upgrades; a necessary visit to the book store to make sure that my texts are in.

Today is Move-in Day for freshmen. I read in the Waukesha Freeman that Carroll is expecting 58 international students from 25 different countries bringing the total of international students to 97.

I choose to exclude Carroll from my summer life as much as I can responsibly can and devote my time to family relationships, reading, and being outdoors. Among my favorite “good reads” this year were the following:

• Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
• Paul Silvia’s How to Write a Lot.
• Evan Kindley’s Questionnaire
• Julie Lindsay’s The Global Educator
• J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
• Jeff VanderMer’s The Big Book of Science Fiction
• Neal T. Jones’ A Book of Days for the Literary Year.
• The Annotated Alice
• Viet Than Nguyen’s The Sympathizer
• Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish
• Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
• Ethan Canin’s A Doubter’s Almanac
• Sharon Guskin’s The Forgetting Time
• Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
• Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky
• Brian Crane’s 25 Years of Pickles
• Ivan Doig’s Last Bus to Wisdom

I’ll be giving away all these books to interested students. What books would you recommend?

I also have seriously explored this summer some software tools to facilitate my goals for writing more and giving students opportunities to publish.

This will be an interesting transition year. A nationwide search for a new Carroll President; a Psychology Program Review; personal decisions. But for today, a few meetings and then still time to play at North Lake and continue learning from Leo the Great.

Learning from Leo

D.