First Week of School: The More Things Change

It's an interesting moment in time to be teaching first year students.  I mean that in a broad sense, but I also mean it in a "teaching the first week of classes during this particular week in August of 2026."  Let me unpack that statement a bit:

--Tuesday March 11 was our first day of classes.  It was also my first day as an Associate Professor on the tenure track at Spartanburg Methodist College, which I wrote about in this blog post.  Just before I went to my first class of the Fall 2026 semester, I read this article in The Atlantic about a professor leaving his tenure track job.  His college, Bates College in Maine, is in many ways completely unlike mine.  The beginning of the article made me think I was reading the complaints of an incredibly privileged man who got a teaching job right out of grad school, but it's more nuanced than that.

Here's the 5th paragraph (the nuanced part comes much later):  "When I defended my dissertation on Zoom that spring, one of my advisers joked that seeing me with a tenure-track job in hand was like 'watching the last dinosaur being born.' It was at once a compliment and a grim acknowledgment of reality. I had won the lottery in an apocalypse. I was going off to the kind of secure, prestigious, fairly remunerated academic job that was rapidly going extinct in a world where most people teaching college courses were stuck in the permanent underclass of contingent labor."

Most teachers I know are somewhere in between:  certainly not prestigious institutions, but not adjunct work either.

--As I drove home on Wednesday, I listened to this episode of On Point, which talked about reading, both in light of the state of Texas requirements announced very recently, and in terms of whether or not children are reading whole books at all.  It made me nostalgic for my own days of reading in elementary school and made me think about what we read in high school, where we did read whole books and plays.

I don't assign many whole books these days, and I feel mostly good about it--but the show made me wonder if I'm right.

--My students will be doing more writing, the old-fashioned kind with pens and paper.  Most of my department colleagues are also shifting back to paper.

I came across this Substack post that talked about what writers should be doing to prove that they did their own creative writing, should a publisher feel the need to have a writer justify their work.  As a poet, I'm not too concerned.  The post did point out how much formal writing, the old-fashioned kind that academics learn to write, will be flagged as AI generated.  Here's what the author did:  

"I ran my PhD thesis. Atmospheric physics, submitted in 2010, at a point when the technology being accused of writing it was more than a decade from public release. Running it through a detector in 2026 returns around 70%.

A physics thesis is exactly the careful, formal, low-perplexity register that the Stanford study found classifiers flag.

A detector tells you one thing: that a piece of text resembles a statistical distribution. The question in the room is who wrote it, and no detector has ever answered that one."

--This week is also a week with more articles about AI run amok, a week when at least one more experimental AI agent got out of the boundaries/cage/safeguards.  My apocalyptic brain immediately thought of a future when we look back and laugh/rage/cry at the obsession with student/writer cheating and ignoring the much larger threat.

--It's strange being at a school where most of us haven't seen each other since early May, and I haven't seen students since late April.  It's not strange to me when students return looking different.  They are in late adolescence after all.  But some of my colleagues are notably thinner.  Maybe it's having time off in summer, but one colleague did tell me that she'd been taking a GLP-1 drug (another new technology reshaping our lives), and it was transformative.

I had hoped to be somewhat thinner when I returned to school, but I'm happy with feeling healthier.

Conclusion;  In some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same:  I always want to return as a transformed version of myself--transformed in a good way--if I haven't seen people in awhile.  And yet, I'm seeing changes underway that may completely reshape the world, in the way that the atomic bomb did, and the way the end of the Soviet Union did.

Thirty-Eight Years Married

Today we celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary--38 years! It feels like just a blip.  Here is one of my favorite pictures of us, a picture taken at the March 2026 wedding of our nephew, who was born in 1993:

This morning in 1988, we'd have been in Greenwood, South Carolina. I'd have slept in the house that used to be a parsonage where my grandfather served a congregation for many years. Thirty years ago in that house, my grandmother ironed my wedding dress. Below you'll see my grandmother, with my aunt Joyce helping.




Yes, I had a long, white dress. We got married in the same church in Greenwood, South Carolina where my parents had gotten married in 1962, the same church where my grandfather had been the pastor. We had the ceremony at 11:00 in the morning, so that our out of town guests with long travels home would have plenty of time.  We tried to keep the ceremony and the reception relatively simple. For example, we chose daisies for our bouquet. Our reception included sandwiches, so that our out-of-town guests wouldn't have to buy lunch on their way out of town. We had the best wedding cake I've ever had.

In many ways, we're still that same couple: we try to keep life simple, while at the same time, keeping a commitment to hospitality. We are hyper-aware of our blessings, and the fact that much of the world will never taste the extravagance of a wedding cake. But we don't deprive ourselves--we stop to admire the daisies.

Here you see a picture of us on this day in 1988, and the two of us at our 25th anniversary dinner:

Here's my final thought for an anniversary morning. I'd expand the thought to include not just our spouses but also our friends and colleagues and family members.

Second Day of Fall Semester

Yesterday was a good first day of class at Spartanburg Methodist College, and not just for me.  Everyone I talked to yesterday mentioned the good energy on campus.

Of course, the first day of a semester is usually wonderful--and fall semester is best.  Yesterday was no exception.

My heavy duty teaching days are Mondays and Wednesdays, so today will be a bit more structured.  Yesterday I went to my Creative Writing class and then did some work for today's classes during my office hours.

I was hanging out in my office even beyond office hours while my spouse finished his day working on the fixer-upper house.  We traveled down together, he dropped me off, and then at the end of our separate days, we traveled back to our mountain house.

We are in that time of summer where I don't feel hungry for anything in particular, but I do feel hungry.  We stopped at Publix, the grocery store which makes our favorite fried chicken, and I grabbed the last box of 8 pieces.  We spent the evening watching TV and eating chicken.

Yesterday I didn't have class until 12:15, but today's teaching starts at 9, so I'll need to be on the road by 7:15 or 7:30--so let me get ready for my morning walk.

It's darker than I would like it to be, but I have lights for my shoes, and we'll see how it goes.  MWF will be the days when I stop by the Lutheridge weight room to do some work on the weight machines--at least that's my plan until we've moved into the fixer-upper house.

Let me begin.

First Day as Associate Professor

On my first day of class every year, I'm  always tempted to post a picture, the way that parents post pictures of their kids as they head off to school.  This year, the temptation is especially strong, as today begins a slightly different direction in my teaching life.  Today is the first day that I am teaching as an Associate Professor on a tenure track.

In some ways, not much will change.  I'm at the same school where I've been teaching full-time for 2 years in a year-to-year capacity.  I'm teaching the same classes, and I have the same schedule.  But this year, I have the assurance of being able to do this teaching work for at least the next 5 years.  Being on the tenure track means the school has more of a commitment to me than before.

This year I will have committee work, and we got our assignments yesterday.  I am on the Interdisciplinary Studies Committee.  As I looked at the other possible committees, I felt very seen with my assignment.  I'm not exactly sure what the committee does, but fellow members include the chaplain and the person in charge of co-curricular arts experiences.

Now that I'm on the tenure track, I'll be more meticulous about keeping records and keeping them accessible across years.  I always keep teaching evaluations, for example, but I rarely download them into a separate file.  Now I will, and upon the advice of two colleagues who have just gone up for tenure, I know how to create the master file for the tenure portfolio (class by class, not year by year).

Those of you who have been following my seminary/candidacy journey might be feeling confused and wondering what happened to that.  I continue a Synod Authorized Minister at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  When our fixer-upper is ready for us to move some furniture into, I'll be in Spartanburg for part of the week and Arden at our Lutheridge house for part of the week, driving up and back to Bristol each Sunday.  I hope to spend summers in Arden, which is a much better place to spend summers on a climate change ravaged planet than most other places I could choose.

This morning, I'm thinking about that day in 2023 when I went down for the first day of teaching; I blogged about it here.  It's strange to think about how much has changed since that day.  Back then, I wasn't sure where my office would be or if I would even have a key.  Back then, I taught two classes, both on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I'm going to use the 2023 end to that blog post to end today's post--it still works:

I am thinking back to my first day of teaching, long ago in 1988. I didn't bring water with me everywhere I went. I showed up with syllabi, which I handed out. And then I stationed myself behind a podium, where I kept a death grip for the whole class.

I am lucky--that first class was bright and engaged and wonderful. My life might have taken a very different trajectory had I been assigned a different class. I'm glad that I had the group of students that I did.

Let me go take a walk; I likely won't have a chance later today.

Balancing Work

We had a really good day at church yesterday at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  I say this with some sense of wonder because I arrived in a grumpy mood:  we left ten minutes later than I had requested, which meant I felt frazzled.

I prayed for my grumpy frazzled mood to lift as I waited for my spouse to come downstairs and open the door, and happily it did with the first hymn.  My sermon went well.  I was more pleased with my adult sermon, but I also think what I did with the youth was important, talking about storms as what they might encounter in school (it's their second Monday back today).  Grown ups hear about Peter sinking in stormy waters and immediately think about the chaos in their lives, but most youth are not trained in this kind of interpretation.

We even welcomed a new member, the nephew of one of our current members and his two small (delightful!) children.  I got donuts in Arden, at my newish favorite donut store that's open at 5 a.m., even on Sundays.

You can find the recording of my sermon here.  If you'd like to read along, the manuscript is in this blog post.

I feel such gratitude that I get to do all the work I do:  being the Synod Authorized Minister at Faith Lutheran, being a college English teacher on the tenure track at Spartanburg Methodist College, and all the other work I get to do:  volunteering, coordinating, being a friend, being a partner, being a family member in any number of family constellations.

This morning, on the Florida-Bahamas Synod Facebook Page, I came across this stunning picture of the amazing altar and stained glass of St. Stephen Lutheran in Pompano Beach.  It reminded me of a time that I met there to do some work for the bishop and had to take a vacation day to be able to be absent from my day job in higher ed.  I am glad to be in a time of my work life where I have more flexibility and a schedule that is not as unrelenting.

Shifts for Those with Sense to See

 I am always intrigued by how we can see seasons shifting, long before the calendar would tell us to expect these changes.

We have to learn to see with new eyes, eyes that focus on what's there, not what we're expecting to see. It's more of a shift of imagination than with our literal eyes, our literal sense: 

It's similar to how we can see God at work in the world--but it might mean we need to change our focus. 

Once we see it, the changing of a season, the evidence of God in the world, it's hard to ignore.

In future years, I might see this photo as evidence of a world on fire; I wouldn't be wrong, but it's early morning mist here, not smoke from fires.

One aspect I can't capture:  the way the greenness of the trees is thinning, the way I can see distant lights from roads in ways I couldn't just a month ago.

Friday Fragments: Positive Student Evaluations and Poem Creating

Yesterday was much easier than Thursday--but that's not a surprise.  Yesterday we only had one meeting, so my committed time was only one hour.  Thursday was very scheduled, from 8 a.m. until 3.  Let me capture yesterday:

--Here's the one cool thing that stands out.  We had our Humanities division meeting, and we entered the classroom door that had colored pieces of 8 x 11 paper posted around the door frame.  On each piece of paper was a different student evaluation with a positive statement about teaching.  Our dean told us that she chose a positive evaluation for each one of us and put the comment on the paper.  She wanted us to remember that the work we do is important.  What a great way to start a meeting!

--The meeting was a good one, full of good brainstorming about ways to keep students from leaving us.  We'd like to grow our bachelor degree programs, and we'd like to keep 1st year students from dropping out.  Unlike some administrator meetings I've attended in pre-pandemic days, there was no administrator blame in the discussion of retention.  Refreshing!

--Yesterday morning I was going back through old blog posts trying to remember the pre-first day of class schedules of past years.  I came across this blog post that reminded me of eating ice cream with my parents a year ago and this post about aging bodies and this post about watching the news with my dad a year ago, and a first line for a poem came to me, and I followed it.

--It's not the first time, and it won't be the last time that I've been grateful for my blogging practice.

--This morning, before Saturday sermon writing, I'm trying to finish the rough draft of the poem.  It revolves around three T.V. shows:  Back to the Frontier, a nightly news show, and Little House on the Prairie.  It involves ice cream and habits and the way we may never escape our younger selves in our family constellation.  This bit may be my favorite:

We return to earlier incarnations
of our relationship. My mom
counts the calories in the bowl
and comments on how much thinner
we would be if we dumped
the ice cream down the drain.
Because I am now a grown up,
I resist the temptation
to eat the whole carton.

--I have been making lots of progress on quilting projects.  I've been sewing in the evenings, as we've watched TV--it's a delightful way to end the day.