This is gonna be some ride!

After being yanked rather reluctantly from my own research back into the realization that the semester is soon upon us, I realized that it was high time I started prepping courses since there's lots to do yet. I may be in for quite a ride this semester.

I only have one conference this semester, unlike some when I've had as many as two conference papers to produce, so I've been trying to finish off that paper. It's roughly sketched out, but still needs a really good draft completed before we get to the point where classes start.

Speaking of classes, because I have three new preps in the four courses I'm teaching, I have a lot of new material to develop. I'm teaching the survey class again, which is good and the only thing I changed was the novel. I switched from Doris Lessing's The Antheap to R.L. Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, which I'm much more conversant with, so that's not a big deal. But I also have the poetry course, my gen ed course in "making humans" (which I'm VERY excited about!) and an upgrading course. This means I have to:

• read and develop lectures/discussion activities questions for 4 novels I've read before
• read and develop lecture material/activities for a novel I've never even read before (thank goodness it's a short one)
• read a Shakespeare play - Othello - that I haven't read in years and develop a drama unit for the upgrading class
  
• write 9 new assignments - of these, two will be versions of a research paper, so I only need to tweak existing research assignments, but that still leaves 7 new ones (this doesn't include exams unfortunately)
• prepare about 4 dozen poems for discussion/lecture materials
  
• read and prepare lecture/activities for half a dozen short stories
  

The biggest challenges are actually coming from the upgrading class, which I said I'd take on only in the last couple of weeks. This was before I realized the sometimes strict limitations that the class imposes, like the approved reading list for novels, the required assignments, the Canadian content requirement and the need for a Shakespeare or a 'modern' play (defined pretty much as 20th century). Oh, and a limitation on the cost of the textbook, which meant that my original plan had to be scrapped because I would have gone $5 over the limit.

When I sat down to put together the syllabus for the upgrading class, a lot of the material that I had in front of me from which to fulfill the requirements was material that I haven't taught before, so a lot of the new reading comes from this course alone. I'm still looking forward to most of that reading and the challenge of developing the material, but it will be a lot of work!

The bright spot in all this is that my two lit classes - poetry and the survey - are not full, so I should have fewer papers to mark in those than usual, and the fact that I'm not teaching any composition also means I'll have less marking to do than I usually have. In fact, the upgrading course - which will probably require the most handholding on my part - consists of a number of unit tests as well as a couple of shorter writing pieces, so the marking in it should be fairly light as well.