Summer is Definitely Over

Well, I'm a little late to jump on this end-of-summer bandwagon thing. I've been noticing Karen and Jael write about how the end of summer has affected them by shocking them out of blissful summer complacency and into fall preparedness. I, on the other hand, am exceptionally good at denial. I have denied the fact that summer is almost over until very recently. So recently that I left myself one week to write a 25-page paper for my dissertation proposal independent study. I was supposedly "researching" all summer long. But, no...I wasn't. So now I have managed to resurrect a paper that I wrote during my short-lived stint as a project coordinator. As I looked back through my documents, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of work done by one who did not know what she was doing. It made me feel better about my current predicament for about 2 seconds. Then I realized that the resurrected paper covered only one topic in my "survey" of "issues" about my "dissertation topic." Back to the drawing board.

Alas, while the proposal research is one thing weighing heavily on my mind (as looming deadlines will do) there are plenty of other things that I could have been spending my time on over the course of the summer that would have made things much easier right about now. One major thing I can think of is teaching. I don't know about you, but I didn't go into this field because I wanted to teach. But, teaching is one of those things you can't just place on a lower rung of importance. And for some people, including myself, it is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Therefore, I think the one thing that is contributing most to my end-of-summer angst is the concept that I'm going to have to fly by the seat of my pants in teaching this fall instead of having a nicely planned course built from the ground up prior to the start of the semester. Wouldn't that have been nice. Oh, well.

I suppose I should get back to that "paper" I'm supposedly "writing."