Tech school saves the day!

I keep thinking up blog posts when I'm in no position to blog (driving, walking to class etc.) but they don't get written because my life is pretty full of being a teacher right now.

Those three new preps are keeping me busy, but I'm also keeping on top of them, so it's good. So far.

But since time's the source of non-blogging, it seems appropriate to blog about saving time.

I have a non-credit upgrading course for students who aren't ready to take university level English. Foolishly, I thought something that looked like a grade 12 curriculum would be fairly easy to organize (not to teach mind you, just to put together) because I'd be able to use a lot of material from different periods, genres, and places. I figured I'd then be able to use nothing but texts with which I'm already familiar.

That of course turned out to not be the case since there are some pretty strict requirements for the structure of the course. But I did figure out how to make the prep for that course easier.

I've discovered that the first year writing course I taught at the tech school I was at is actually at the right level for an upgrading class, which means that at least the assignments and exercises we did will be suitable. Hooray! I fairly danced when I figured out I had a set of in-class exercises that would do what we needed to in this class already prepared from the previous one.

Now, it should be obvious at this point that there's something amiss here. Materials that I first developed for students in a post-secondary first year writing class will be useful in teaching students who perhaps have not even finished high school. But yes, the level of preparedness of the students at that tech school and the one I'm at now are radically different. And what I can expect from my students (even the non-credit ones) here is slightly higher than what I could expect from my students at the other school.

In theory, one would hope that an introductory English class at one school is relatively similar to that at another. But in reality, that's not always the case. On that level, this observation is a sad one.

But, boy, am I glad to have found some ready-made materials that just need a little tweaking to help me prep for this class!