It’s been four months since I last wrote. My youngest child was starting Kindergarten in September, and I accepted a job offer teaching Ethics at a nearby university. I figured I’d have so much free time on my hands with all four kids in school from 8-3 every day that I’d be bored and down if I didn’t find something meaningful to fill those hours in addition to jotting down my near-daily blog post, which I usually finish before the kids are even up. It sounded simple enough. To start: one undergraduate course with three 70-minute lectures weekly, office hours, grading, a 20-minute commute.
As with most things in life, nothing is as simple as it seems. This, for sure, was not. For starters, I hadn’t taught a course in 15 years, so the amount of re-reading and lecture-writing I had to do was monumental. I’m not talking about “Fifty Shades”! I was sitting in my kitchen at 5:30am morning after morning, slogging through Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Kant. It was like being in graduate school again–only worse because I’m dumber now!
