Drawing Breath

It's been all work all the time this week as I scurried and flurried to get things ready for my four classes - three sections of 160, one online, and 286 online. All look pretty good. 286 online seems particularly promising, as there's a jolly crew of familiar faces from previous classes, including my friend superfoo, which will be fun. An online lit class is always a somewhat risky venture as you never know how well the discussion fora will work, but I've got them in both discussion boards in WebCt and in LJ, so hopefully that gives them lots of opportunity for reflection and sharing ideas. Hopefully.

Somewhat ironically following up on a filtered conversation on owlfish's blog about discipline, I had to sit down - hard - on a group of giggly girls in the very first of one of my 160 "real life" classes. Then there were two girls with laptops, one of whom was reading her MySpace while in class. I called her on it (in a relatively nice way) and she had the grace to email me later and apologize. It's actually a while since I've taught 1st year students in "real life" so to speak, and I notice the difference in maturity level and attitude. sigh. Oh well. This year has been all about returning to form with preparation and energy and ideas and dynamism, so let's pull out all the bells and whistles and blow those little slackers away, ha ha.

But this week has been working till ten or later at night and getting up at six in the morning, AND it snowed yesterday, so, like Eveline, I'm tired. But I'm all prepped for today, and apart from a deadly department meet thing tomorrow I've got the weekend to get caught up then it should be more plain sailing. Term Ho!

Sometimes Teaching can be Very Surreal

There's a line in Margaret Atwood somewhere, I think in The Robber Bride, where a university instructor says "students are like sniffer dogs; they hunt you down, and find you whereever you are hiding" or something to that effect. That happened to me today, and more.

I was having a printer crisis. Trying to get an overhead transparency copied and some handouts, and the copier in the department was having the vapours. And it seemed that every time I turned around, or every five minutes, someone came to my office asking to be let in to one course or another. So then I went to the library to do some copying and from there over to what I thought was my classroom.

I have one of those nasty split schedules, where I have a class in one classroom on one day and another one on another. Except I have two of them: one in the afternoon and one in the morning. And guess what. I went to the afternoon classroom in the morning. So I realized that I was in the wrong classroom and it was too late to go back to my office to find out where I was supposed to be, but also that I had absolutely no idea where I was supposed to be. There is, however, a big bulletin board listing of all the courses and rooms in one building which was somewhere in the neighbourhood of where I thought my real classroom was. So I headed over there.

When I was about 2/3 of the way there, yet another student approached me. In retrospect, I have NO idea how he knew who I was. Anyway, he said "I am interested in getting into your course." Aha, I thought. Maybe he knows where I'm supposed to be! So I said - do you want my English 160 section blah blah blah, because I'm late for it, but I'm heading there now. No, he said, I want your online course. *shit* I thought. So I said, well, I'm sorry, but I'm late for another class and I can't talk to you right now, come to my office at 1:00 when I'll be free. ...
well... he says. ... can you tell me ... I've been trying to get into ... blah blah blah... *FUCK OFF* (I think) and "I'm sorry. I CAN'T TALK TO YOU RIGHT NOW" (*fuck off*) and I sped off into the distance feeling peculiarly guilty and stressed and leaving the poor student forlornly holding his "permission to register" form.

Anyway. I made my class only about 5 minutes late. And some of my students came in AFTER me, having also gone to the wrong classroom, ha ha ha. And after all that it was actually a good class.

Sigh.