Week Ten

I have two calendars on the wall in my home office.

One of them is a regular ol' month-by-month calendar and features big rigs*--I got it for free when I had my taxes done back in March.

The other calendar is paper-clipped to the the bottom of the big-rig calendar and has a week-by-week outline of my teaching schedule. Since I technically teach only on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, the homemade calendar has only the dates for those days. Next to each week, I have, in parentheses, the week of the term.

And this week is week ten. The last one. As I say on here every now and then, I do love teaching, but I can't wait for this summer. I have a stack of books to read and I stack of stories to write, and the time to do all of that is just around the corner.
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On a related note: I'm thinking about getting myself an end-of-the-term present--an AlphaSmart Neo. Has anyone ever tried one? I've been reading pretty solid reviews of the product online, and then this morning, I was meeting with a student and said I was thinking about getting this little "gadget," and I named it, and he said he'd just gotten one. His review was positive as well. He even offered to let me test-drive it if I'd like.

The only thing keeping me from ordering one right now is remembering all of the baseball-related gadgets I used to buy when my primary goal in life was to play Major League Baseball. I used to scan the ads in the back of Baseball America for all of the latest products--forearm-building devices, thumb pads, pitching machines. Anything that would add a little variety to my training, get me that much closer to my goal.

And I suppose I'd be using the Neo for fairly similar purposes. I even found out about the thing from an ad in Poets & Writers.

*The old calendar I had on the wall came from my mom, who works for a neurologist; it featured seeing-eye dogs. I was really sad to see that one go.