Blogging: If I Don't Mind

The first week of the summer semester has passed. It’s 17% finished. I prefer to look at it that way. It makes it seem like the semester is going more quickly than it does when I focus only on how busy I am. For being incredibly busy, it’s not so bad. It’s a more difficult subject matter for me than anything I’ve taught previously, and this translates into some awkwardness in my lectures. I’m very interested in the subject, so I want to do a great job teaching it and really inspire some cool thinking on the part of the students. Mostly, I feel like I get blank stares. The classroom dynamic is more … I don’t know, subdued … than it was in either ethics or symbolic logic. Maybe it’s because my current class begins at 9:30am and that’s earlier than most college students want to be somewhere. I don’t know. I try to lighten the mood with jokes, but they don’t seem overly responsive. Oh well. The only good laugh I got had to do with throwing paraplegics into swimming pools to see if they could swim reflexively. It related very directly to one of the readings. Frogs with severed spinal cords who are what you might call volitionally paralyzed (they will just sit there until they starve to death if you don’t bother them) will nevertheless swim if you put them into water. Fascinating, eh?

Well, that’s about all I have time for. I’ve been wanting to blog for two or three weeks, and I’ve even had concrete ideas of what to blog about. Alas, no time. And I’m only blogging now because I’m taking a break from my philosophy of mind studies. (Perhaps now you can appreciate the astonishingly sophisticated wit demonstrated by the title of this post.) I’ve gotten a lot done today, so I feel okay taking three minutes to blog. And that’s that. Break’s over. Bye.