The good and the bad

Given my last post, I realize another personal post like this might be too much. But I still want to say it, so here goes.

Last month a good friend called me up and asked me if I'd be interested in teaching some writing courses at a local technical school. I'd been out of the classroom long enough that I said "sure!" and a little while later, she forwarded sample syllabi for the courses.

The teaching has been fabulous so far! The students are really engaged. For the most part, they're there because they want to be. Of course I do have a few students in each of the two classes I teach who think it is unimportant to come to the English class - they see little value in the class and they've told me so. I'm not making it easy on students like that because we do a lot of in class work, so they're bleeding marks rapidly.

While that may not make them see the use of being able to communicate clearly, it will force them into the classroom and participating - hopefully the incidental result is that they pick up a few things while they're there...

So far I've even enjoyed reading my students' writing. Some of it is predictable, but so much more of it than I thought I'd get is imaginative and plays with the goals of the assignments, and those ones definitely make up for the duller ones. These students aren't afraid to take risks in their writing, and while sometimes it bombs, it also pays off huge dividends for them.

The school is having some serious problems with my electronic access - I have none right now - which was mostly a minor inconvenience until Friday. On that day, I had three different administrative personnel come to ask me for the same thing, which I'm unable to deliver since I can't access any of the drives on the server. (I can access the online learning environment, which is great 'cause I can talk to my students, but I can't use any of the computers at the school to do so.)

It was a little frustrating for me to have three different people come to chew me out for not doing something that I'm unable to do. It was particularly frustrating because I'd made sure I told people about my lack of access, and they said that was fine, I could catch up on administrative paperwork later. Then all of a sudden on Friday it became urgent for me to do this, and I ended up feeling incompetent for not having solved the problem myself. Probably an overreaction, but it still felt like that.

At least this deadline put a fire under a few people's asses and it looks like they might finally get me some network access.... But I'm not holding my breath.

The biggest problem right now is that I've got two (new) class preps on top of my online work and all this moving stuff. So right now it feels like I'm constantly writing a new assignment, or otherwise prepping endlessly. I should be prepping right now instead of blogging...!

The prepping itself isn't hard - I've got lots of good material that I've developed over the years. But it does need to be adapted for the new environment, and because the pedagogical goals are different, some of it needs to be created from scratch.

One thing I'm spending lots of time writing is lab assignments. I've never taught a writing class before that had a lab component, so I have to create all those assignments from scratch.

But I'm also loving having the students sitting in front of computers for two hours a week. It gives us so many opportunities to write, and to write small assignments. It gives the students a sense of accomplishment. It allows me to play with ideas that I've had but never figured out how to work into an essay assignment. And it also gives me a chance to work with them as they write, to identify which students have which problems, so that I can tailor my writing suggestions to addressing their specific problems.

Whenever I'd have a choice about it, I would definitely choose running a writing class with a laboratory component. It's just provides so many more opportunities for the students to write.

Just thinking about writing this post made me think about how much of teaching (or any other job I suppose) consists of both the good and the bad, both inside and outside of the classroom itself.