Writing sucks

No, I'm not going on a rant about the dissertation - it's actually progressing along fairly well, given my heavy work schedule.

Perhaps a more accurate title would be that teaching writing sucks. Evaluating student progress in a writing intensive course - like composition - involves great amounts of time. Marking student papers by making useful comments on them, providing suggestions for improvement and solutions to problems just feels really overwhelming sometimes. It takes so very long. It's one of the downsides of teaching in a discipline that emphasizes writing.

I've come to this realization because of the course I took over last week. It's a psychology course - yes, it's a bit of a stretch for me, but I have studied the discipline, so most of my challenge is remembering what I studied many years ago.

The instructor for whom I'm taking over had scheduled 2 quizzes over the next several weeks, and I've been writing the first one. It's a nice change of pace from designing writing assignments. In fact, it's quite enjoyable making up the wrong answers for the multiple choice! Some of them are quite sneaky, while for others, I've thrown in options that are way out in left field. I'm intensely curious to know how well the students will perform on it, and whether the questions will trip up any who don't know the material well enough.

I'm sure that writing quizzes eventually gets quite dull. And there's probably an art to it that I'm missing the finer points of, but overall, I'm having a great time!

Top that off with the fact that the marking will be a breeze, and you can see why I'm loving it. Too bad it's just a one semester experiment...