he is very comfortable there. She likes it there. She belongs there.
he met
 early in her college career, and he inspired her to aspire to the high calling of professordom. This dream captured Scheherazade's imagination. She dreamt of wearing whatever she liked in the name of academic freedom. She dreamt of telling funny stories (of which there are many in her chosen field of History) and shaping young minds. She dreamt of three months off every summer.
ut: between the dream and its realization lay at least five years of graduate school, and three or four more languages to learn.
 oor Scheherazade!
he secured a teaching assistantship with the state's premiere Arts & Sciences university. She was granted full creative and substantive control. And teaching was a blast! It was incredibly fun and gratifying! And Scheherazade was a natural ~ she loved the soapbox. She loved the stage. And she loved her students, except for that guy in the back who just sat there and glared at her for four months.
 eaching sustained Scheherazade through an otherwise thoroughly unpleasant grad school experience, in a thoroughly unpleasant little town -- that, and making many photographic portraits of herself (several of which appear throughout this site).
nyhow: Scheherazade loved teaching, but she was handed a tough crowd. Her task was to teach the dreaded, state-mandated American Institutional History, and to teach it at 7:30 in the morning. The course name alone was enough to send a shudder rippling through Scheherazade the first time she heard it.
ut she persevered, and thinks she succeeded somewhat in engaging the groggy minds of her early morning students. She waved her arms around a lot. She pounded the desk for emphasis. She taught the grimy underbelly of American constitutional history, and did all the voices, too. She re-enacted the Constitutional Convention and the war for Kansas.
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