Thoughts: a new semester has begun and my classes are terrific. The students seem ever more enthusiastic. I don't know if it is just my feeling or if either I am getting better and introducing things or more of my students are aware ahead of time of how I do things and they look forward to it. Either way, it makes for a nice feeling all around I think. I have the same basic set of courses minus logic this semester. Two Introduction to Philosophy sections, one Truth Beauty and Goodness, and one Introduction to Humanities II. I pushed myself to keep pace instead of falling behind early in the first two classes which often happens and it seemed to work. We are keeping pace with the syllabi in all except TBG where the normal problem of racing through the history of philosophy before starting Quine typically takes more than one session. But we did race through Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas - maybe a little heavy on Aquinas, but it really went well this time. I also gave the pretest this semester for the first time since 2006. So far as I can tell, I did not read them closely, but the results look good with regard to giving me plenty of opportunity to achieve improvements in their scores. Since I also told my classes that I hoped they would do poorly on the pretest and well on the post test they seemed happy to find the questions confusing! They look forward to having an improved post test. And now we have the Labor Day holiday. This is the last chance to read and finish up the summer reading plans.