1. Oh, you guys, it's a glorious day. The sun is shining brightly and I don't have to teach today!
2. Teaching 4 days a week is going to be an adjustment.
3. This semester I have two classes, one grad and one upper-level undergrad. Their content is pretty similar, which means that lecture prep overlaps -- more detail for the grads, more explanation for the undergrads. But still-- I had forgotten how long it takes to prep a lecture. I think it was like forgetting about childbirth pain. You think to yourself, "It can't really be that bad, can it?" And then -- surprise! -- it is.
4. Luckily I have left behind much of the angst that attended lecture prep in the early weeks of last semester. I knew that it would take me a lot of hours to pull together six anatomy/physiology classes, but I also knew that I could handle it. And I know too that the prep load will lighten a bit when we get into the clinical portion of the course.
5. I'd been feeling more confident until Wednesday afternoon, when the chair sent out an email saying that course evals were ready to review. Reading them was something I'd been dreading, so I decided I'd just bite the bullet and look at them right away. There was a lot of grumbling about my standards for writing assignments -- a whole lot.
6. I have been thinking a lot about this. (Read: waking up in the middle of the night with student comments on the brain.) On the one hand, I don't want to be the Usage Nazi, nitpicking meaningless distinctions. On the other, they're heading into a profession that requires more writing than the average job, and I want them to be prepared for that. If I give them four weeks to write a short paper, and post my grading rubric in advance, and steer them to the writing center if they're uncertain and review first drafts on request and STILL they turn in papers with mistakes on every page -- then, yeah, I'm going to dock their grades. I will not apologize for expecting grad students to use semicolons correctly.
Doesn't mean it didn't smart, reading those comments.
7. I'm going to have a chat with my chair this morning about the whole thing, to get her take on whether it's typical grumbling from students who aren't used to getting Bs, or whether there's a kernel of truth I should take to heart. Here's hoping I can let it go afterward.
More quick takes at Jen's.
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