And Now It's October

Another busy week, full of classes and students, getting things done just in time.

Monday evening I was able to come home at a reasonable time and attend the POGIL book club on Zoom. We are reading The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching by Jonathan Zimmerman. For the first meeting, we discussed the first two chapters, but I had not finished yet so I felt a bit out of the loop. I have been reading this book in bed at night and falling asleep after two or three pages, so it's slow going. The book is interesting, I am just too tired to read much. I am supposed to read the next three chapters by the end of October; I hope I can do that. I learned that "recitation" used to actually be students reciting their texts from memory (sounds awful). The focus of the book is on the way professors have resisted professionalizing their craft for at least the past three hundred years. They/we have always insisted that teaching is an individual, personal art and not something that can be measured or improved scientifically. Intellectual freedom has been used as a shield to prevent anyone telling professors how to teach. There has also been some interesting history about when professors' jobs made the switch from prioritizing teaching (in Germany, students paid fees directly to the instructor, so there was an incentive to have the most popular classes, for example) to prioritizing scholarship (in the U.S. and elsewhere, a prevailing belief was that good researchers, productive scholars, should somehow automatically be good teachers).

Tuesday I played cribbage. I won three games this time. I'm hoping for better luck in October.

Wednesday I went to the monthly board game meetup at Red's. I was the first person there, and only three other people showed up. I was able to play Thebes with the first person, and when she had to leave, the other two and I played Scout. 

Thursday evening my sci-fi book club met to discuss Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson. I thought the book was fine, but not particularly great. The magic system was interesting: based on Breath, a kind of life force that can be accumulated by taking other people's from them. Breath can be used to animate objects and it imparts some extra sensory information to its holders. There are also the Returned - people who have died and returned to life - who are considered gods, but must be "fed" Breath at least once a week. I was irritated by one of the other members who talked too much, in my opinion. It didn't help that Sanderson is one of his favorite authors, so he had a lot to say. For October we are reading Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury and I'm looking forward to it because I haven't read it before.

Friday I actually came home at a reasonable time and was able to relax after dinner. I finished weaving in ends for my On the Spice Market shawl while watching the first episode of The Lazarus Project on Netflix. Friends  J & J recommended it to me. I enjoyed it enough to watch two more episodes on Saturday evening, while beginning the next knitting project, Olivia's Cape. I planned this and bought yarn for it back in January, during the week of "start all the things"!

Finished and blocked shawl.

Starting the cape.

On Saturday, I went for a three mile walk on Path 400 with Sunday Assembly. It was seasonably cool in the morning; I wore jeans. It turned out to be only two of us this month, but the walk was still nice. We traveled the newly opened section between Old Ivy Park and Loridans Park, including the spur down to Mountain Way Common, which is where I went by mistake last month and got shouted at by the construction workers. 

On Path 400.

After the walk, I went to Atlanta Photography Group (a little gallery in a mall on Piedmont Avenue) to pick up my cousin's photo. He had entered it in a show in August and asked me to collect it for him when he wasn't able to come to Atlanta this week. 

At the Atlanta Photography Group gallery.

Today I have been working on school stuff mostly. I made soup in the crockpot and did some house cleaning tasks. In the afternoon I went to the Fall Festival hosted by my realtor (actually her realty group). It was in a posh neighborhood in Roswell. Supposed to be outdoors, everyone stayed inside because there was drizzly rain all afternoon today. I stayed a couple of hours, ate some treats and talked to people, especially my actual realtor, Casey and her friends. I forgot my phone in the car, so I didn't take any photos of the cute Halloween-themed cookies or the many Halloween decorations around the house and yard, unfortunately. After I'd had enough socializing, I came home and worked some more.