Wrapping Up

Not a lot to report today. I finished up a pair of stripey socks last night.

Capacitor 1

Dulce did a careful inspection and said they were satisfactory.

Capacitor 2

I’ve also been knitting on the Travel Shawl. Here’s a little section of the middle. It’s not going to look like much until I can get it off the needles and spread it out, but I like the pattern a lot.

Travel Shawl

The knitting has all happened on breaks from paper grading this weekend. The course I’m teaching this term is fairly small, but even with just a handful of students, there have been a couple who have blown my mind. One student is a disabled veteran with brain trauma. Just before I met with him earlier this week, he’d learned he has three tumors on his spine. This student has been working hard, harder than most because of the particular challenges he faces. And now he’s got this devastating diagnosis to make sense of. I asked him if he wanted to take an incomplete in the course and come back to it once he’s got his medical situation figured out, and he told me no—he needs the course to move forward with a plan he has for working with other disabled vets, and he doesn’t want to quit just because he’s got turmoil happening in his own life. Wow.

Another student is stationed in Korea where he does his Army thing and bides his time. And gardens. I was going through responses to last week’s discussion questions and happened upon his account of why the Army “isn’t all that bad.” He explains that he has on-post housing with a garden. He loves this garden and talks about it as “an incredible ecosystem with all of life’s greatest drama from death and deceit, to passion and incredible devotion.” He talks about how he witnesses “complex emotional concepts physically happening” right there in his little plot of earth. He worries about pollution. He follows the life cycle of grass hoppers. Absolutely fascinating.

Teaching composition can be tedious at times, but students like these make it worth it.

Hope you’ve had a good weekend where you are. I’m about ready to wrap mine up with a glass of wine, some Travel Shawl knitting, and this week’s episode of Homeland. Lola’s got a crush on Mandy Patinkin, so we can’t be late tuning in.

Lola

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