Listening to Billy Collins' poem "Forgetfulness"

Teaching - doesn't that take place in the classroom, with the students?

Sometimes...actually a lot of the time it is not easy to be a teacher.  If what we did in the classroom was our only responsibility, how good life would be.  But now more and more time is taken up with additional tasks.  Too much paperwork and not enough student interaction time.  September, my favourite month of the year, usually passes by in a blur, a flurry of activity.  We race ahead, trying to get somewhere, but often I feel like Alice Through the Looking Glass, running but getting nowhere, while expending all of my energy.

September flies by...

It is the autumn, in which a new year should be said to start. Summer is over now, the fall equinox was yesterday.  It is the time when I always think of making major changes, and of new things I want to try.  Spring brings thoughts of new ideas for the garden, and summer of holiday getaways from the real world.  But autumn is the time to truly broaden one's horizons in a life-changing way, or at least to start planning.
It's probably best to not make a very sudden decision. I think of the Water Rat, from The Wind in the Willows, and his strong urge to leave everything familiar, and to sail away for new lands and adventures.  In the end, he stays where he has always been.  But where could the wind have taken him, I wonder?


There is nothing like a fall day, for feeling uplifted and alive.