It’s been quite the stressful week. Teaching three different subjects means having three different lesson plans. Kinda hard to put together lesson plans when you’re grading papers until midnight, or later. But, next week should be better. I was able to get a little tiny bit ahead of the curve today in the planning.

Because of the weather and the late grade posting from last semester, this was my first week with all three of my classes.
The science fiction class is going well. These were supposed to be my problem kids, but they’re really pretty good. We’ve watched Them!, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (original, of course!) and today we watched James Whale’s The Invisible Man. They’ve stayed interested in all the films. We’ll start The War of the Worlds on Monday. I’ve been rereading that over the past few days. It’s actually better than I remembered, but I wonder how the kids will take to the pre-1900 writing.

Creative writing has finally come to life. I went from six kids the first day to 15 now. There are a few who show some early glimpses of talent. Some are there because it was the only class available, and one or two because they want to be funny. For a while, I couldn’t get a conversation going in that class for anything. The past couple of days have been pretty good, though.

School, grading, and doing lesson plans has been my life for the past week. Mostly. There’s been a flood of HWA e-mail as ideas are batted around. I really think the organization is finally moving in (mostly) the right direction, but man, keeping up with all that e-mail is at least a part-time job some days.

Well, Sara and her friend, Tessa, want me to go rent them a movie. Maybe I’ll see just how bad the new Wicker Man movie sucks. I can usually watch Nick Cage movies, even predictable action crap like ConAir, and, though it may be blasphemy, the musical elements of the original Wicker Man were almost enough to put me off. The ending was enough to save it. The naked chick dancing in the inn room didn’t hurt anything, though. That part of the musical was okay.