Back to Work

Well school starts next week. That means tomorrow we have meeting day. Yikes! I'm not ready yet. I still had things to do over break that didn't get finished. Eh, such is life.

This whole getting back to work after break thing is totally kicking my butt. I do like my job, I do like my students, and I am excited about the new textbook. I'm not, however, excited about putting together new class preps. That's why I'm starting them early--tonight.

I haven't technically started them yet, but I plan to very soon. Fortunately, my cousin just happens to have a copy of the textbook I requested for my Rhetoric class. Thisaway I can take a look at it before I get my own copy. Problem is, I've been traveling all day and I'm a little worn out. I took a nap before eating (I probably wouldn't have even eaten except that I was starting to feel sick), but I'm still really tired. I think after a break we should get another week or so to recover from the break. (Yeah, yeah, I know we get a week before school starts, but I'm talking a week before the meetings and the planning and all that).

Well, I suppose I could've come back sooner.

Anyway, I'm going to need all the support and positive reinforcement I can get here. One of my goals for 2010 is not to put things off. In other words, I want to get in and get things done. I'm not really a procrastinator, but I want to get even better about getting things wrapped up soon, thus freeing up larger chunks of free time to maximize the amount of stuff I can get done in any given day.

Whew! Just read back over that last one. Makes me tired. Maybe I should take a second nap.

End of the Semester

Today was my first final as a college instructor. It went pretty well. I'm going to miss my students. I'll probably see most of them again next semester, but some of them won't be in my class anymore. They wrote such sweet things to me on their finals.

I'm grading those finals now. Well, not right now. Right now I'm updating my blog, but I just took a quick break from grading. I have a Grateful Dead concert playing, courtesy of www.archive.org. I hope to get through all these finals tonight and calculate a few grades. Then, I'll get to do it all again tomorrow.

Except tomorrow I shouldn't have as much paperwork to do. Today, I had a tremendous amount of paperwork to do. I think I have a form to sign tomorrow, but for the most part, I got that type of thing taken care of today. Maybe that means that tomorrow I can start getting ahead of schedule. Well, we can always hope, anyway. Gonna get back to the grading now. Peace out.

Musings Musing From the Last Day of September, 2009

Today may not have been my best day ever, but the way I have it figured, if I can work the Grateful Dead and the Beatles into one class period, it can't be all bad.

My Students Are Awesome!

I've been teaching for just over a week now. I guess you could say a week and a half, though I had Labor Day off. In this period of time, I have already had students refer to me as "Professor" (even though I only have a Master's degree), a student who asked to call me "Master," (though he never decided to actually call me that--which leads me to wonder: if a PhD is a doctor, is a person with an MA a master???), a student say I was cool, a student say he enjoyed coming to my class, and a whole class that wants to celebrate my birthday.

I have four groups right now, but will be adding a fifth in October. The students are a riot! They really know how to make me laugh and have a good time. Fortunately, I can make them laugh too, usually.

If the classes get loud and I have to quiet them down, many of the students will shush the noisy ones. It's amazing. I don't want to jinx anything, but it's like they're really "on my side."

I know you're not really supposed to apologize for lack of bloggage, but I just wanted to let everybody know what's up. I'm teaching full-time now, so I'll still try to blog when I can, but I haven't been able to do memes for a while now. Peace out, y'all!