Running a Little Behind (teaching week 6)
Well, it was a good teaching semester.
Silly Amy, dilligence is for real adults.
The actual teaching is going fine. I think the students are getting a lot out of it. I, however, feel like I am falling further behind my goals. Not that I can articulate those.
I guess by "goals" I mean "plan"--fifty minutes is just not enough. And shaving off a few minutes here and there, then catching up eventually adds up to a whole day of missed stuff that I wanted to get across. And I'm just now feeling it.
Looking over the next unit, I keep getting nervous, wondering how this is all going to come together. And I'm just not sure how to get it all to come together. I feel like I need to spend less time on "teaching fieldworking" or "going over rhetorical terms" and more time peer reviewing and actually writing. Um. Yeah. When?
The conferences are just not long enough to do a suitable review--with five students, each student doesn't get enough attention; with two or three, they have to be spread out over such a long period of time that the unit takes forever.
And I'm behind in my own work, exhausting myself over midterm essays. When is all this research supposed to happen? Or sleep? My own health?
So now I am sitting here at 8 pm, one eye on the Sox, one eye on the computer, feeling guilty for taking an hour break. The sum of the amount of time is exactly the same as when I was in Boston. The pacing is all off, and I can't keep up.
Tomorrow I'm meeting to figure out my Burke mid-term, schedule classes, and plan the next unit. And Thursday is my "rest" day.
I've been further behind before, and the key was to stop sleeping. But I've never been so far behind so early in the semester. And I've never tried to be this on top of my lesson plans. Which is better? Why should I have to sacrifice something?
Is it just me?
1 comment:
Ames, I'm sorry, I know all about being behind. Case in point: that thesis that was going to be done in August...
Have you ever taught a 50 minute class before? I had the same problem the first semester I made the switch (not my choice, of course). Meeting three days a week instead of two doesn't seem to help - it's better to have the kiddies for a longer period of time so you can maybe finish one thing and go on to another. One of my strategies is to do multiple activities in each class so they get less bored, but 50 minutes just doesn't allow for that.
Do you have Blackboard or something else that allows for discussion boards? One way I dealt with it was to move some of the discussion we would normally do in class to an online environment. I still touched on the smarter things that were said in class, just so they knew I was reading everything, and I required that they make so many *valuable* (read: somewhat thought out) posts per semester or unit. It's not a huge burden on them, and it cuts down on those awkward silences in class when everyone is either half asleep still or thinking things through. Just a thought.
Post a Comment