---
title: 'Day One'
date: '2003-09-03T15:30:37-04:00'
permalink: /day-one/
tags:
    - teaching
---

I guess there’s no denying it, now — the semester has begun. It actually began yesterday, but as I’ve moved, this semester, from my accustomed Tuesday/Thursday afternoon teaching schedule to a bright-and-early Monday/Wednesday/Friday morning one, my only evidence, yesterday, of semester’s onset was attending convocation.

Convocation is a lovely event here, a bookend to commencement, a second annual opportunity to make the purchase of the academic regalia seem cost-efficient. This year’s was particularly momentous, as we greeted our new president, only the ninth in the college’s 116-year history. Aside from the welcomes, however, both to the president and to the class of (gulp) 2007, there was a greater-than-usual dose of back-self-patting this year: not only is the college ranked [fourth](http://www.pomona.edu/events/news/newsitems/082203usnews.shtml) among liberal-arts colleges by the eminent (when we like their results; questionable when we don’t) [U.S. News and World Reports](http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php), but our students are apparently the [second-happiest](http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/rankings/rankingDetails.asp?categoryID=7&topicID=43) in the nation, according to the Princeton Review.

But I don’t know that my students are any happier than anybody else’s, at 9:00 in the morning. Nor, I fear, are their professors. This new schedule is going to take some getting used to.