Just walked out of my World Religions class a few minutes ago, and am preparing for my next one. The first one didn’t go so well, I’m afraid. I didn’t feel adequately prepared. I also had asked students to pick up where we left off Friday and to spend a little time reflecting on some of the issues that were raised by Deep River, but I didn’t have a clear idea of how that ought to happen, so the discussion kind of fell flat. In general I felt my students were suffering from a kind of Monday morning slackness, but it seemed pretty late in the morning (11 a.m.) for that to happen. A lot of non-participants in discussion.

Anyhow … I guess I am going to have to rethink what I’m doing in the afternoon section. I’ve got forty-five minutes to make up my mind how to run that one. I realize in retrospect that one thing that’s very important for me is for students to think through the modernist/fundamentalist distinction as a basic category for the rest of the course. I asked them to think about this for the next class. Better not forget that.