Summer session 2005

A thrill of foreshadowing tickled the back of my neck this afternoon as I drove onto the island of Montreal and headed down the Decarie expressway towards downtown. Sun was out, spring finally felt present and I was heading to class.

Okay okay so that doesn't sound necessarily special, but to me it was. You see, I had taken the afternoon off to go to the first of my summer session classes. And they aren't night classes. I'm taking classes in the afternoon for the first time in a very very long time. I only have 4 more days of work to do before I turn into a full-time academic with no other gig to support me. But my thoughts yesterday were turned towards the idea of being in class during daylight hours, of feeling the vibes and energy that is so different on campus during the day.

As it turned out, the vibe and energy were definitely missing. Things were quieter than I had expected. Several of the on-campus concessionaires and cafes were closed up for the season and the students I saw all looked relaxed and unharried.

Still, there I was, on campus, in the middle of a weekday.

I have four classes in total during this six week summer semster, but with two of them being online courses, that leaves me to to attend in person. One is a sociology course on Social Change which looks like it will be fun and illuminating (studying Weber and Cooley and Mead - how can it be bad?) and the other is another political science course, this time an introduction to Canadian politics.

That latter course showed me once again how absolute people can be when making arguments. I heard all kinds of wild accusations and theories, which, if they had been presented as possibilities, would have been fine. But when they're presented as an absolute fact, as indisputable and self-evident, there I have problems with it. I tried to help the prof shift the debate to more nuanced areas of power and agency and the Canadian context, but the rest of the class kept dragging the discussion into a binary debate on the "goodness" or "badness" of Canadian politics and politicians vis-a- vis Quebec and the US.

When class ended around 4:00, I exited, climbed down the four flights of stairs from the Hall building to emerge into the sunlight. Wow. Sunlight. After class. What a novel concept.

Sunlight and nothing scheduled for me, other than eating dinner and reading political and social theory.

I could get used to this.