I am nearing the end of my second week of classes here, and although I have been teaching for seven years now, I am encountering a number of firsts--some coming surprisingly late in my career:

--This is the first time I have more than one prep. And while I have only two, I recognize that there's going to be a bit of juggling I'd never had to count on before. Granted, one is a writing and one is a literature course, so they are in some ways falling under different disciplinary conventions with different pedagogical demands (a point I know I should be pressing on as I get a bit more comfortable here), but that's going to likely often be true of my course loads.

--This is the first time I've ever taught more than 70 students. With enrollments clocking in at just under 100 students (right now, it's about 93), I am still struggling to learn names, something I've always been very very good at. Part of this is that with sections of 40 students, learning names is tricky at all, but this is the least diverse set mof students I've ever taught, so even in my sections of 35 as a grad student, there were way fewer Ashleys, Jessicas and Brians. One one section in particular, I'm having a very hard time remembering the names of the white women, something I've worked very hard to avoid in the past.

--This is my first time teaching most of the texts on the Brit Lit II survey. What's surprising here is that my appoinbtment is in 20th C. Brit lit, but I never taught the survey course as a grad student, since I had at that point primarily cast myself as a genre specialist. Now with the national tenor of my course assignments, I'm finding that I'm teaching Shelley, Blake, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Browning, Kipling: all white men from the 19th century whom I thought I might never have to read again, let along teach. And let me tell you, right now it seems that teaching "Tintern Abbey" is about as dry as learing it was 12 years ago (suggestions welcome).

Fortunately, because this is my eighth year teaching, none of this has me too out of sorts. I can hardly imagine, though, what this would be like if I had come out of grad school with no teaching experience.