For some reason the topics at conference seemed tired to me this year. That could be an artifact of how tired I am this year, trying to juggle four seminar classes per semester, fit into a new program culture, and relocate across the country by myself. It could also have been the conference venue, which was enough to make us all tired--no place to congregate and lounge and talk, big echoey spaces that defied human-scale interactions, no convenient watering holes, snacks, or coffee that didn't empty the wallet damn fast.

I found it heavily ironic that the conference was relocated to the Moscone Center in support of the hotel workers' strike at the Hilton, but that no particularly new insights were forth coming on our own discipline's employment and compensation dilemmas. [Not that we shouldn't support the hotel workers, and yes, I know there are folks working toward equitable working conditions and living wages for adjunct employees in composition]

But in any case, I realized that something was missing for me in the conversations about first-year writing classrooms and textbook and handbook choices and academic assessment. What were groovy to me were the conversations about community engagement and urban literacy centers, network theory with its centrifugal/centripetal mix, politics of part-time hiring and adjunct exploitation, WPAs and collaborative administrative models, "The Academy" providing its "public goodness" on the undertheorized platform of something we still call service learning.

But perhaps I'm just tired and jet-lagged...