I had planned to finish my grading yesterday, but that has to happen today. I was just too exhausted. Looking at the wreckage around me that is my apartment, I wondered why. I also wondered about the incredibly fast passage of time. Ten weeks of a daily intensive history course in the afternoon (in two consecutive parts) and two four-week evening courses, three hours per evening, three evenings per week, with a three-hour minimum round trip commute on top of that help to explain both my exhaustion and temporal dislocation. But that came on top of twenty weeks non-stop ESL teaching at another place, sixteen of those weeks including morning and evening work. And I have continued my Saturday ESL. In other words, I have just finished thirty six-day weeks of teaching, with the exception of two days off over Memorial Day weekend and three days for the Fourth.

If this actually amounted to a living income in the DC area, I could be happy. Instead, it just lets me almost get by, sort of, because it is all paid by the course (history) or hour (ESL). Of course, in these economic times, survival is a pretty good achievement too. And I do like what I do.

There is a ton of planning to do for Mason this fall, because I will have three sections of Western Civ with fifty-five students each. I am supposed to have a grader for ten hours per week, which will lighten the burden, but I have to plan in such a way that I can survive if the grader doesn’t come through. The early morning section will be a killer, because of the commute, but I am looking forward to a semester with all the teaching in the same part of the day, in this case from morning until early afternoon. Putting that aside, though, I have three whole weeks where I can work but not commute or manage a classroom. I really need that.