orichalcum

So, Tuesday evening, amidst my feverish wanderings, I was also pretty bummed out about my first day back teaching after six months. My frosh seemed sulky and uncommunicative, my Powerpoint presentation messed up in my film lecture, and I failed to really sell Quo Vadis? to the engineering kids. And then I got home to babysitting negotiations and 36 hours or so of physical misery. And somewhere around there, I wondered, could I do this professor-and-mom thing? Was I capable of having a career and a young child at the same time?

But today, I managed to engage 13 out of 16 frosh in a sophisticated, constant lively discussion about the first three books of Plato's Republic, the nature of justice, absolute versus relative morality, and whether heroes and gods should have faults. I had to cut off the conversation due to lack of time. People were politely but passionately arguing with each other. And then I ran over to lecture on Spartacus and managed to wrangle discussion questions out of them too, and got them to think about the political nature of the film, and Communism, and so forth. Right. This is why I do this. I'm _good_ at this. And I made a bunch of 18-year-olds think about the nature of absolute morality today, and 65 other people think about the relationship between slavery and capitalism.

I may be new to the whole motherhood thing. Our babysitter may be better at feeding Mac carrots than I am, and even at making him giggle. But everyone's got to start somewhere on that front, and you know what? I'm a darn good teacher, and I can work this out. I got home and worked out an arrangement whereby our babysitter will also regularly clean our house. Cuz she's probably a lot better at that than I am. And frankly, the world's better off with me paying her to do that and me spending my time and energy writing, teaching, and spending quality time with my family.

Plus, I feel more like 80% of myself, despite bizarre stomach pains.