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The semester started up this week. I'm back on a TR schedule--the latest I've ever had here. I'm still getting used to teaching the first class of the day an hour past noon. It makes getting up before eight rather unnecessary, or at least that's how my brain feels right about seven-fifty. And then it gives orders to my hand to hit "snooze," and then it is nine-thirty and I wake with a phone under my cheek.

*

Yesterday, as the creative writers were writing, I stepped out into the hall. Sitting directly across the way was a former student of mine. This is a tiny building, with tiny rooms; I had left open the door so that the students packed into the room didn't faint. S waved when he saw me.

Hi, Professor! How was your break? he said. Then: What happened to your hand?

Oh, I said. A few stitches. 

S grinned. Yeah? he said. How'd you get those? Bar fight?

No! I said. Not a bar fight. I was all of three feet from my current class, the one that I'd met not thirty minutes earlier. They heard everything. They started laughing.

Thanks for setting me up for a really great semester, S, I said.

But it's one of the things I love about this job: the blending of the old and the new. In these first few weeks--as I have to establish yet another classroom, lay down of a new set of rules and expectations--these moments carry me through. The former students who drop in. The ones behind the counter at the burrito place. The informal and easy chats. This semester, I have a repeater in every class. It's nice to have that single, familiar face planted among the rows of new ones.

They help remind me, especially as a new group of students are chafing and angry about their essays, that I haven't been a total fuck-up as a teacher. Not entirely, anyway.

Hey, S said. No problem! He slipped his headphones back on, and I went back into my room, where twenty new faces--and a new semester--awaited.  

Bar fight, huh? one of my new students said, and I laughed, and I closed the door, and we got to work.