Glory Days: 1995 and Now

Yesterday was the kind of teaching day that made me so grateful to have a chance to do some of this again, to do some of it for the first time.

I got to my office and sent an e-mail to my English Dep't colleagues to let them know that I had volunteered to be the faculty sponsor for the Poetry Club.  Lo and behold, another colleague had also volunteered, so we strategized about how to move forward.  We're both relatively new to Spartanburg Methodist College, so we're both grateful not to be going it alone.  Later, we talked to the student who is taking leadership too; she's in my Creative Writing class, and I like her energy.  As an added bonus, she's got visual art skills, so she'll be making the posters and flyers for the Involvement Fair on Monday.

I got grading done, so I'm caught up until Monday, and I've strategized my classes for next week.  The two classes that I teach on MWF went well.  In fact, after my Brit Lit survey class, one of my students said, "This is the only class where I wish it could go longer."  I think he was being sincere, not giving me empty flattery; he had been engaged for the whole class.

Yesterday we talked about Dorothy Wordsworth in all her Grasmere Journal glory.  She's now in the Norton Anthology of British Literature.  When I first started teaching her in the early 90's, I was bringing in handouts to augment the mostly male anthology.

As I drove home, I wasn't as interested in the NPR stations, so I listened to a station that was in the middle of a 90 minute "rock block"--and several songs in a row were from 1995, when I would have been driving back and forth from my home base near Charleston, SC, where I had a full-time teaching job at Trident Tech, to Columbia, SC, where my spouse was back in grad school.  As I listened to Seven Mary Three's "Cumbersome," I had that time wrinkle disconnect:  here I am in a tiny, fuel efficient car, driving on I-26, after having taught Dorothy Wordsworth to a group of students who were incredulous/aghast at the idea of Mary Hutchinson being willing to marry into the William-Dorothy dyad.

As I said, I am so grateful to be having a chance to relive some of my glory days, while at the same time wondering if I should be sad that my glory days don't involve something more transgressive (spoiler alert--I'm not sad).  Most people have glory days that revolve around ill-fated but glorious love affairs or some sort of sports/athletic achievement or some other advancement.  And mine revolves around a time when I was teaching literature I loved while writing poetry that amazed me.

We settled into our Friday night routine.  I bought the series Back to the Frontier only to find out that we would be getting it episode by episode, with each episode available early on Friday.  It's been another kind of time wrinkle, discovering that the whole series did not drop at once.  And I've enjoyed tuning in each week, just like we would have in 1995.

The show owes a HUGE debt to the PBS show Frontier House, which we watched in 2002, when it was on the air.  Three families see if they could live like Homestead Act settlers did in the late nineteenth century.  It's compelling, even as we realize that they are living a much safer variation:  no other humans attacking them and no animals attacking them and if the weather turned really ugly, they'd be rescued.

I discovered that we could watch Frontier House on YouTube, and so we watched about half of it last night.  It's not as compelling as when we first watched it, perhaps because we've had so many variations of reality TV since this early pioneer of reality TV aired.

My spouse and I always try to analyze how we'd do things differently.  We would not make for good reality TV--we would know what we signed up for and not whine constantly.  Of course, I'm not sure whining makes for good reality TV.

I do know that if I viewed my morning by way of some camera, this morning would make me long for such a life:  a good week teaching and pumpkin cinnamon rolls rising on the kitchen counter, my spouse sleeping while I'm writing.  Perhaps I have died and gone to Heaven, where I get to keep reliving these glory days.