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.