I’m finding it’s taking me a little longer than expected to get into the rhythm of teaching this semester. I have really long days Mondays and Wednesdays (7:30 am to 6:00 pm or so) and long evenings on Tuesdays while I get my prep done, and sometimes it’s about all I can do to stay awake through dinner! I’ve been doing a lot of napping on the couch and have enjoyed some lazy weekends. I think it’s mostly down to becoming quite accustomed to having a lot of time to myself — being fairly introverted, the grad student life of solitude is very rejuvenating. I love everyone I work with and enjoy chatting with people in the office immensely, but it’s a new thing for me to be “on” so much.
On the plus side, my students are all really suite competent writers, and watching them develop is going to be a real treat. The high school system here is clearly doing a passable job of getting students ready for the rigours of university writing expectations. They all have challenges to work on, and the majority will spend the semester trying to move past description and towards analysis, but I’m so excited to see just how much of the basic nuts and bolts they already understand. It will mean a rejigging from my usual thinking about composition instruction.
I am going to post later this week about my experiences using the iPad in the classroom, because I know it’s a piece of instructional technology that a lot of people are wondering about. It has definitely been a real time, space, and energy save for me already this year, and I can’t wait to develop my use of it further. So stay tuned for a discussion of that this week, and hopefully I will settle into a rhythm with blogging as well as teaching in the meantime.