This Morning

It is now 8:30 am and I have been at work for one hour and twenty minutes. During that time I have accomplished three things. Two of them are routine matters relating to teaching. The third thing was revising a syllabus for a proposed course on the history of the USSR. This is proving to take a lot longer and a lot more revision than I initially anticipated. Fortunately, I haven't had to take anything out yet. I have just had to add stuff. Everybody else so far seems to want me to put more emphasis on international relations and geopolitics. I suspect this is because history itself as a discipline is extremely devalued in the region compared to IR.