Scheduling

So I'm prepping for the summer course I'm teaching - Modern Poetry - which is pretty exciting because it's a lit course which I've never gotten to teach before. Closest I'd come is a guest lecture on Gawain in my supervisor's Medieval Lit during my MA.

I'm feeling pretty good about the material. I know which artists, poems, movements I want to talk about, but the schedule is what's giving me trouble.

I'm teaching twice a week, 210 minutes per class. Yes, 210 minutes - that's three and a half hours twice a week that we meet. Yikes! I know I've done classes that long, but they're hard! The only time I did that as an undergrad was a block week course in Canadian art. We met twice a day for two and a half hours for a full week. But in that class, half the day was spent on lit, and the other half on visual art, so it was really only like sitting through two different - albeit still long - lectures.

Here, we're talking about poetry the whole time. I want to keep their attention for both halves of the course, and don't want students deciding to ditch the second half at the break - which I know will be a temptation 'cause I've fallen victim to it myself before.

I've decided to treat each day as if they were two different classes, with two different topics, two different lectures, and possibly even two different poets to focus on. I think that will be the way to combat the weariness that I'm sure we'll all feel by the end of 210 minutes. Let's hope that does the trick.