Back into the swing of things

Going to school in the morning was an odd, and slightly disorienting experience after all the movement of travelling halfway across the country and back.

The morning started well - I was psyched about the class I was teaching, looking forward to the possibility of shadowing and working with the new prof in the department, and just really sailing through on the aftereffects of several days of no work (not to say I didn't get tired during the trip - I'm exhausted - but I didn't do anything intellectual, which was a nice break!)

Unfortunately, things started going downhill pretty much as soon as I arrived at school. I had an immediate disappointment in not being able to shadow, but it was countered by a kind of schadenfreude-relief of finding out in a non-annoying kind of way that it wasn't going to happen. Then I had some bad/worrying news that I need to follow up on to try and correct. Then I went to the department meeting... though that was kind of a neutral event.

My biggest disappointment came the moment I walked into my classroom. I walked in to the tiniest classroom I've ever seen (the functional part of it is probably the size of my bedroom... which has never had thirteen people in it before) and announced "I'm here for English 111 - Constructing Narratives across Media. I hope you all are here for that too". I was rewarded by nothing but blank looks.

Apparently, the twelve people in the class who I thought had all signed up because they were psyched about studying multiple media for their comp class didn't exist. What did exist were twelve nursing students whose advisors had just scheduled them into the class - they had not selected my class because they were interested in the topic - they just ended up in my class.

That threw me for a loop, because I felt like I needed to explain what the class was about and how it was different from the regular class and how it was the same. I almost cried in frustration - if I have to teach the freshman comp, I wanted to teach students who were excited about the concept of this special topic course and motivated to talk about it and write neat papers about it.

So I'm very disappointed... and worried... I guess I just have to wait and see if the class warms up to the material and if I can fix the problem I learnt about in the morning. Wish me luck