A recommendation

 I meant to post something, anything, before the end of August, but here is September, arriving bright and cool this morning on the West Coast. It will warm up by noon, but today a sweatshirt is needed to sit and drink coffee on the porch.

Not that I am drinking coffee on the porch, although I did carry my coffee out back to watch the puppy do his business and to ensure he did it completely.  He has been a good little guy about going to his space most days and has even rung the jingle bell I hung by the back door just for the purpose of letting us know he has to go out without using his voice. He has found his voice now, but he doesn't bark unnecessarily, just at large dogs he wants to warn away, at small, active boys he wants to run and join, and at me when he wants food or attention.  He also will bark at sleeping teenagers if they forget to close their doors at night. In the morning, if I am being boring and grading papers at the computer, he will look to see if a bedroom door open, so he can go in and ask loudly to be let into someone else's cozy bed. The six year old loves this; the sixteen year does not.

Now that it is September 1st, I have been teaching online for three weeks. If I have not posted in this space recently, it is because I have been researching essays to assign, crafting engaging discussion posts, recording boring and fuzzy grammar videos, and trying to make up quizzes and reading questions that are challenging but not too hard.  None of these are for my military class, which is already completely designed and runs with minimal revisions from me, other than grading, writing announcements, and commenting on discussion posts. But this term, only 4 students signed up and 3 didn't get funding, so that class was cancelled. 

Meanwhile, the three composition courses, one a research writing course, are full semester courses, so the course I have designed for my military students doesn't translate.  In addition, these students are just out of high school and have different abilities.  All of this is to say, planning has taken more time than I thought it would.

I accepted the third class because another teacher left and because I was pretty confident we'd be online this term, which we are, but now that Covid numbers are down in San Diego, we may return to in-person teaching. This will interrupt my home schooling schedule with the youngest. The two high schoolers are doing distance learning, but I don't like to leave them unattended too long, either, because they quickly are distracted and lose track of time during their media breaks - during which they mostly turn to other forms of media. So I partly wish to remain online this semester, even though planning needs to be more detailed.

I went to a home schooling social last night for Catholic moms, and it was heartening until talk turned to vaccines and overreaching government interventions, as well as the anticipated violence no matter who wins the election in November.  That was all disheartening, and I stayed up too late contemplating the end of the world.

But this morning my spirits were lifted, not just by the cool weather that makes my coffee taste better even though I'm drinking it in front of the computer, but because I started reading Brian Doyle essays again. I have been reading his work in preparation to write another paper that I really need to start, and because I assigned "Joyas Voladoras" to my students, and because his writing is beautiful and heartening. He was a genius at illustrating small miracles, until the tragedy of his death at age 60 in 2017.  You can read some of his short essays he called epiphanies, which are more prose poems, here at The American Scholar, and also at the University of Portland magazine, which is more difficult to navigate, and at America Magazine and Orion and The Sun.  Go read now, and have your heart enlarged, also.