What a week. Kathy’s fall schedule:

Monday
Nothing scheduled. A good thing, too, considering how much reading is expected for the rest of the week.

Tuesday
7:30 am - Be at library to work on online classes in the grad lab with its highspeed; print out any of the week’s readings still needed. Count on downloading and reading 50 – 100 such pages a week, and that’s just articles, not books or sections of books.

9:30: - 10:45 am - English History 1714 - 1840

11:00 am – 12:15 pm - Latin American Film

Have lunch and work in the IPH office computer lab

2:00 – 3:15 - Fear, Identity and Gender in Film and Literature

Back to either computer lab

5:00 - 8:00 pm - Word & Image

Wednesday
4:45 – 5:45 pm - Grad Seminar in English History

6:45 – 9:00 pm - Screening for Latin American Film

Sometime today put up the week’s quiz for Multicultural Film (course I’m teaching)

Thursday
Same as Tuesday without Word & Image

Friday
Read articles and support materials for next week's film, and then attend the 3:30 screening and discussion; make lots of notes.

Sometime over Saturday and Sunday
Create written lecture and questions for Multicultural Film and upload them; start reading and recording assessments for the 80 responses to last week’s questions (I try to post a personal response to about 25 - 30 each week and to be sure each student gets a personal response at least every two to three posts. Impossible to do otherwise, unfortunately!)

And in and around this schedule, do the readings/writings for the four courses I’m taking. Two of them are Grad Seminars (the Wednesday part of English History, and Word & Image), which means that there is a lot of reading and you have to come to each class session (you only miss a grad seminar class if you are dead and have exhausted any possibility of reanimating your corpse through the Dark Arts) thoroughly familiar with the material and ready to expound at length. There are not many students and it would be immediately apparent if anyone came unprepared (I’ve never had the nerve to try it). No faking it here. Plus everyone gets a shot or two at conducting the class. It’s intense but very, very interesting.

I love the English history class. The professor is highly knowledgeable and a great lecturer – I’m pretty much spellbound the whole time. Then I have fifteen minutes to run uphill about two blocks to Latin American Film. I guess I’ll get used to it in a week or two but in this heat (with the backpack full of four courses worth of stuff), it wasn’t much fun this week, especially with the air conditioning not working in the LAF classroom. It makes for a sweaty day.

The director of the program agrees that I have enough courses for an M.A. in English -- a requirement I had to satisfy because my master’s is interdisciplinary. So that’s one more fence taken on the way to the finish line. Huzzah!

Back in the Fray

The good news: I’m halfway there. Five semesters behind me, and five to go. I saw my advisor, Dr. Martinez, after summer classes ended and we worked up a new audit sheet showing the program requirements and which I’ve fulfilled. She agreed that after this fall, I’ll have three courses to go to finish the coursework. I’ll take Latin III and two culture and media classes in the spring; then “read” (study for prelims) over the summer, take the prelims at the beginning of fall of ’07, and then be cleared to start the dissertation. I need 24 dissertation hours, which I reckon as 12 in the fall and 12 the following spring; and hopefully will defend and walk at the end of the spring of ’08.

The other news: to stay on this plan I am taking four courses this fall: English History 1714 – 1870 which will complete my major area of Victorian Studies; Gender in Film and Lit, and Latin American Film as a DIS, which will complete half of my minor area of culture and media; and Word & Image which fulfills my Art History requirement. I’m also slated to teach two more online sections of the American culture in film course. It should be an interesting semester. I feel slightly burnt out, but I know I can handle two more semesters and that once classes start I’ll have the old excitement back; I just plain love being in a classroom (on the student side) and I know I’m going to learn a lot. During the spring I have to decide on a dissertation topic and put together my committee. It’s nice to see a definite end to this endeavor, interesting as it’s been.