Um! I’m a little late with this year’s yearly update. Last year, 2011, was a good year, marked by several notable opportunities, but marked even more by hard work. In the Spring semester, I finally got to teach a literature course during the regular school semester – the first time since I started teaching in the fall of 04 – but with a catch. The catch? I had to teach it in addition to my regular composition courses, with no extra pay. But, hey, I’m a team player – and it paid off; the class has been added to my regular yearly schedule, and this spring I’m teaching it instead of a composition class.

In addition, last summer I taught my first theology class. It was online, but it went well.

Last fall, I got a paper accepted at a conference (which is scheduled for this March). The title: “Pure Religion and Undefiled”: A Wesleyan Analysis of Ibn Tufail’s The Improvement of Human Reason. Basically, I’m writing a whole paper on a castaway comment an 18th-century preacher made about a work of 12th-century Islamic philosophy. This is a great opportunity, and the first conference paper I’ve given in a decade, but it demands a lot of work in research and writing in addition to my normal workload. We’ll see where it leads in 2012!

My odometer reads 212,620. That means I drove 1,715 miles in 2011, which is less than a third what I drove in 2010.