almost done with my first year

This week and next are relatively stress-free as students write their final papers and I anticipate how long it's going to take me to grade them before I hop on a plane to Massachusetts. And when I get on that plane, I will have officially finished my first year as an assistant professor at ISU. Next year I won't be the newbie anymore.

The year's accomplishments:
1. Awarded summer grant to write an article on "Why Composition Needs Bourdieu."
2. Finished forty-three more revisions to the g.d. s.f. article, and sent it off to a biggie journal. Still waiting to hear on that one.
3. Made two really good friends that I can talk to everyday if I need to--Julie and Julia--and made lots of other friends who are fun to hang out with on the weekends.
4. Taught two graduate courses and loved them because I think I learned as much as the students did--about myself as a teacher, about graduate education, about the field, about authorship and writing.
5. Taught three sections of a junior-level rhetoric course and learned a lot there, too. Case in point: before I taught that course, I had no idea what stasis theory was. Now I'm all about it.
6. Directed my first independent study with one of the students from one of the Fall rhetoric courses. Independent study title: Feminist Rhetorics and Reproductive Rights.
7. Started blogging over Christmas break when I didn't know how to stop working.
8. Adjusted to a department of more than 44 colleagues--this, coming from a department with ten.
9. Presented a damn good paper at C's.
10. Presented a paper on plagiarism at ISU's teaching symposium in January.
11. Moderated the Teaching Composition listserv in February.
12. Pranced around the department with a copy of Authorship in Composition Studies open to my chapter. Humble.
13. Lived to tell.