Panic

I have not been very inspired the last few days, as I expect my regular readers (all five of you) have noticed. This is partly because of the cold I've had, which I'm happy to say is almost gone, but also because the new semester is looming. This has sent me into the first stage of panic.

The first stage of panic is where my mind goes blank. Absolutely nothing relevant to reality happens inside my head. I cannot make myself think about work. When I try, my brain skitters around the subject. I get distracted by almost anything.

I am bracing myself for the second stage of panic, which should be starting any day now. This involves running around like a madwoman shouting, "New classes start in four days! What am I going to do? Help! Help! Help!" This is when I will get the spring-cleaning done. I am almost looking forward to this bit, because the only time I enjoy spring-cleaning is when I'm supposed to be doing something else, urgently.

The third stage of panic hits a day or two before I start back. I collect first-lesson plans like crazy, write them all up, prepare all kinds of interesting things, and fall into a black despair because I don't have time to do everything I wanted to do. Two months of inactivity stretch behind me, and I bang my head on the desk a lot and tell myself how stupid I am.

The final stage of panic is an eerie calm, which descends the night before work starts. This is chemically induced.

When I walk into my first class prepared with fifteen new lesson plans, I usually end up discarding them all and using the one I used LAST year, which worked perfectly well and is way better than any of my exciting new ones. Now and again I add something new. It is almost never something new that I prepared in advance. It is something new that occurs to me when I am facing the students. It just pops into my head, and usually works brilliantly, making me feel clever and at the same time stupid for having prepared so much unsuitable material. If I have not prepared a whole bunch of new, unsuitable material, however, nothing pops into my head, which is why I do not dare miss the third stage of panic.

So that is why I have not been blogging much. I have been in the first, blank stage of panic.

While I am waiting for the blankness to go away, here is something to keep you entertained, for, oh, around five seconds. It is a little colour by number project, for coleopterists. Do not be put off if you are not a coleopterist. It doesn't matter. I'm not a coleopterist either, and it made me giggle.