I'm substitute-teaching for one of the instructors in our summer program tomorrow. I'm really pleased. It'll be my last class at the University of Basketball, and I do want to say goodbye, especially since I was a writing tutor with this program for five years. It was a lovely job -- sixty incoming freshmen here for seven weeks, usually their first time away from home, most of them first-generation college students. You get to see them grow up right in front of your eyes, and that's magic. Tutors spend evenings in the dorm, and everybody pitches in and helps the kids move in on the first day, so you get to see a lot of the students. I don't want to lose touch with that; I remember wondering, when I was an undergrad, whether any of my professors had ever been inside any of the dorms on campus, and it's nice to be able to say that I have been, and I've even carried TVs and microwave ovens up the stairs in 90-degree heat. And the closing ceremony is lovely, with all the parents coming down to collect their long-lost children.

Apparently I'm supposed to be teaching about gender and advertising, which should be ... interesting. (I've spent most of the afternoon trying to educate myself about gender and advertising. Oh well, sometimes the best classes are the ones where I don't have a clue. Incidentally, I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that YouTube is the best teaching tool ever, and I'm looking forward to using it more often. There are even 11,200 Shakespeare videos on it, although some of them are very weird. Oh, and a little searching on YouTube reveals that the current crop of undergraduates at my alma mater have recently written and staged a musical-comedy version of Titus Andronicus. I can scarcely express how proud this makes me.)

Right, that has nothing whatsoever to do with gender and advertising, does it? Back to planning.