Monday, December 27, 2010

Freaking the Heck Out, As Per Usual

So the time has come, once again, to freak out about the upcoming semester.  I start teaching next Wednesday, so that give me 8 days to get things in order.  As of right now, my brain is convinced that this is impossible.  “Didn’t you just teach this class?” you ask.  Well, yes, but I felt like a moderate failure in some aspects of the courses I taught and I completely blew it on the “no text” thing.  See, I thought that meant that the majority of the material would be covered by a combination of lecture and discussion without a lot of outside reading, except at the beginning.  Well, it turns out that it’s hard to have a discussion when you are dealing with cold fish first thing in the morning, and it is even hard to have a discussion when I am introducing new and foreign material to said fish.  Also, my boss assumed I was having them do readings when I was not, which scotched my peer review a little bit.  So while I have enough material to fill a semester, I don’t have enough appropriate material to facilitate classroom discussion.

My job, then, for the next 8 days, is to cobble together a series of outlines/quotes/short readings/discussion questions/short assignments that I can present to my students before they come to class so that we all have something to talk about.  This means scouring my files, the interwebs, and the collaborative 1010 site so that I can create this wonderful thing.  I also have to craft assignments to be turned in before class so that I can be a classroom autocrat and demand participation, while at the same time remaining benevolent and likable.  Top all this with my seasonal mood death and you have a bad combination.  Also I am fat and unattractive (according to my seasonally warped brain).

And to think this is my dream job (teaching).  Imagine if I was employed doing something else.

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