In an effort to staff our writing center, the dean has asked faculty to serve at least two hours in the writing center. If we volunteer four, we can write off a few hours from our ten required office hours. It’s a good tradeoff, and I’ve decided to put in all my hours on Tuesdays so that I can have Fridays off and can leave earlier on the other days. At the beginning of the semester, there are very few students in the writing center, and I’m pretty much going insane from boredom. I can spend an hour or two prepping for classes, and then I’m done with all I can do. I can read, but none of the chairs are comfortable. Quite frankly, it’s torture. After I volunteer my four hours, I have to teach a night class. For the last three weeks, we’ve been on the Puritans, which is pretty torturous to read. I mean, it’s interesting stuff, in a sense, but page after page of Puritan plain style and stories like Samuel Sewall’s courtship of Madam Winthrop, and I’m ready to bang my head on the wall.

I’ll end this on a positive note. I did come across a neat story last night in Cotton Mather’s biography of John Winthrop in Magnalia Christi Americana:

And there was one passage of his charity that was perhaps a little unusual: in an hard and long winter, when wood was very scarce at Boston, a man gave him a private information that a needy person in the neighbourhood stole wood sometimes from his pile; whereupon the governour in a seeming anger did reply, “Does he so ? I’ll take a course with him; go, call that man to me; I’ll warrant you I’ll cure him of stealing.” When the man came, the governour considering that if he had stolen, it was more out of necessity than disposition, said unto him, “Friend, it is a severe winter, and I doubt you are but meanly provided for wood; wherefore I would have you supply your self at my wood-pile till this cold season be over.” And he then merrily asked his friends, ” Whether he had not effectually cured this man of stealing his wood?”