I'm old hat at the first day of class. I haven't taken a break from school, ever; which means that for the last 20 years I have had a constant stream of "first days." And three years ago, I started teaching, giving me a new type of "first day of class." So I had a pretty good idea about what was going to happen on the first day of our class.

My expectations were mostly fulfilled, except for the fact that I've not had to really think about things on the first day of class for awhile. If I've had to think, it's been about the work of the course specifically, and not on larger issues like the interconnectedness of every item, action, or idea. So this is what I want to remember from our first class. It's not that I was unaware of the (somewhat hidden) systems or journeys of things we use everyday; it's that articulating them so specifically and precisely makes them more evident, and gives them a new weight. That is, at least for me, when I articulated the things I'd have to know to use a glue stick, for example, it changes my relationship to objects and the world around me, since it puts these knowledges and behaviors I --- and I'm sure most of us -- take for granted. To me, it makes these knowledges, behaviors, and actions obviously and blatantly discursive, embedded in an ideology that lets us have these realizations but enforces their implicitness. Since I'm interested in the everyday, and how our everyday behaviors, etc, influence, and are influenced by, writing, this activity gave me something to grab on to in terms of the work we'll be doing in class. (And, I must confess, I'm probably going to "steal" this exercise for use in my 101 class).

Another thing I want to remember from class is the wonderful insight about how books and digitality assume two different relationships/positions of the reader/viewer. Anne explained how books, by their very materiality, assume solitary, quiet contemplation and require a certain expectation: time. Even the parts of books are named according to the relationship with the body: spine, exterior, interior, earmark, etc. Further, they structure a taste for simplicity, regularity, uniformity. Digitality, on the other hand, wreaks havoc on many, if not all, of these notions, since it requires an entirely different relationship to the media. No, we cannot pick up a text on the computer screen and write all over it (at least not yet), but we can play with how it looks and in so doing delivers its message. We can revise our relationship to information and the ways in which this information becomes a part of us. Maybe we do not need, after all, to be able to write on books (though, as I say this, my already curly hair is starting to curl even tighter, for I haven't been able to read without a pen/pencil in hand for years); maybe we need, instead, to learn to make sense of texts without the 1-to-1 conversation that writing in the margins presupposes and proscribes.

Finally, I want to keep reminding myself of the reasons why I'm here. Why am I teaching, exactly, and why am I spending so much time, energy, and money (relatively speaking) to sit and contemplate questions that I'm positive a lot of people already think/know about, without having had to come to class? What kind of world is out there, and how do I want to change it? Most importantly, since I'm devoting my life to reading and writing (and teaching those things), how is writing going to make anything different, let alone better? These are questions for which there are no "real" answers, and the answers that are there change often. But I guess this is a textbook case of how what we tell our students comes back to haunt us: If you keep asking questions, you'll get there eventually. I just want my students to learn to always ask questions, and that's something I often forget to do.

Ah, teachable moments. This is what's it's all about, I think.