I just finally went back to teaching. Taught my first class last week. I realized I was really worked up about it. I had been 20 months since I had taught. Long time! i totally procrastinated my lesson plan, and improvised it all day. It was a full day of classes. When I came home I went and rode four laps around the park. I had all this energy. It was like I was waiting for that moment to come and pass, and until then I was stuck.<\/p>\n
I’m three months out of the Interferon treatment. I had a bad third month, largely b\/c I got the dreaded H1N1, but having cleared that, I’m doing pretty damn well. Today I rode to the studio and back. And I am *seriously* considering riding in on weds for a department meeting. I was having bad heat related dysesthesia, but it seems to be easing. Though i am out in fall weather riding with a t-shirt and the lightest shorts i have, and everyone else is all bundled up in pre-winter gear.<\/p>\n
O wanted to give me a surprise gift for my first day back at school. She went through the usual choices (flowers, chocolates, cards, etc) and decided none of them were… well… enough of a… splash! So she came up with this idea for a surprise. She had worked it all out with my department secretary, my office mate who knew my schedule, etc. Then she ran it by PD and GY and a couple of other people, and they started to give her silent responses, or hesitation, and or flat out “um, no that is not a good idea” responses. So she got cold feet, and canceled.<\/p>\n
I found this out the night before I went to teach. She decided to tell me what was *not* going to happen. She kind of figured that I would like the story of what *would* have happened as much as like the experience itself. I think she was right.<\/p>\n
What would have happened is that sometime after the second break in my 9am class a singing telegram man dressed in a pink gorilla costume would come give me a box of chocolates and sing me a song about… how I like chocolate, and dogs, and riding my bike, and stuff. O had to fill out a form with things I liked, from which they created a song. The pink gorilla would sing his song, bestow the chocolates, and then leave me and my students probably a little befuddled, possible overwhelmed and in a state of panic, and most likely laughing at the gorilla, and not with the gorilla, (and hopefully, yet probably, laughing at *me*). LOL.<\/p>\n
Marisa was quite worried it would overwhelm me, which would lead to a freak out dysesthesia attack. Or that it would completely freak my students out, on what was effectively my first day with them, though it is halfway through the semester. I think she was right on both counts.<\/p>\n
So instead, at about the same time the pink gorilla was to show up, I told my students the whole story. As a story they found it absolutely hilarious. They were pretty blank faced the whole day, not laughing at any of my jokes. Not really even reacting to anything I said to try to get a reaction out of them. Pretty blank. But this got a rousing laugh. So in the end, it was a major success, as a story, and not a real event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just finally went back to teaching. Taught my first class last week. I realized I was really worked up about it. I had been 20 months since I had taught. Long time! i totally procrastinated my lesson plan, and improvised it all day. It was a full day of classes. When I came home … Continue reading Month 3 was lackluster… onto Month 4<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[41,59,72,74],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-update","tag-back-to-daily-life","tag-dysesthesia","tag-recovery","tag-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":463,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions\/463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/melanarrative.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}