Course Building

Okay, I know it has been POSITIVELY FOREVER since I’ve been on here and there are scads and scads of news to catch up on, but all of that will happen in due time. Today I’m here to talk about the life I lead with one of my many hats and that is as an adjunct professor. I actually love what I do. There is something both rewarding and fulfilling about educating young and young at heart minds about the English language. First and foremost, I love the eloquence of language, and if I just remember that this one of the reasons I teach I will never get bored. But as much as I love teaching about language, there is always more to the profession than standing in front of the class and lecturing. There is the inevitable lesson planning that goes into each session, and naturally, course building. To me, it can sometimes be tedious bureaucratic fodder, but at other times totally necessary. Most of this takes place in the weeks before the semester and into the first few weeks of the class. This semester, it seems as if the course planning part is bearing down on me more than usual. There are a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost, the main problem has to be that college teaching is such an autocratic process that the slightest squelch on a teacher’s creative freedom weighs down like shackles. For example, the syllabus. Ideally, I would like for my syllabus to be a single sheet, front and back. Realistically, my syllabi over the past six years have gone into the ten-page realm with all the college and departmental requirements that have to be included on them. One of the things I will have to experiment with is font size, and the other idea I have is to make the entire syllabus newsletter style (I may try this approach in the spring and see how it goes over; the adage goes that it is better/easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission). The other area in which I find myself struggling is with Blackboard this year. For those of you who don’t know, “Blackboard is a web-based program that serves as the college’s online classroom” (that’s straight from my syllabus that I came straight from template syllabus). Recently, one of our new librarians who sits one of our many (again with this word that I find I am having trouble typing correctly [thank God for Spell Checker!]) bureaucratic committees, this one designed to bring a core standard that is “consistent for students.” While I am getting used to this environment, it’s throwing me for a loop because I now I can’t just copy my old courses into a new one; I have to create a whole new course design which falls within the parameters of what the committee has set. Granted, the full change doesn’t go into effect until next fall, but if I have a jump on what’s already coming down the pike, why not start the change now? That way, my life will be all the more easy when the actual transition comes and I can copy the courses I’m developing now and only have to do slight tweaking for next year. I suppose the real reason I’m feeling harried and like I haven’t quite gotten it together yet is because I haven’t quite gotten it together yet. I went on vacation the 16th of August with no idea if two of my classes were going to make. I returned from being out of the country on a Friday after midnight (you might as well say Saturday) to find that my class Saturday had gone from 7 to 17 students in a week. Since the class hadn’t made when I left, I didn’t do a syllabus or a Blackboard Class Request Form, but I managed to throw one together early that morning along with some of my standing policies and make copies beforehand. Ironically enough, the one year I planned something in August before the start of the semester, my usual late-start Saturday class, which usual begins in the middle of September, right in time for my birthday weekend, gets extended to a full-semester class and starts before all the others. As per usual, the technology was not up and running on the first day of class in so-called “new smart classroom.” So there I was standing in front of the classroom, with what can best be described as a jetlag headache, cloggy ears and all. I muddled through and surprisingly was able to give a halfway decent lecture, only to tell them that I wouldn’t see them for two weeks since the college would be closed for Labor Day. And here I am on a Friday, still getting the Blackboard site together for my all my classes just so I can feel organized. Luckily, it’s quiet and I can get a little more done before procrastination once again sets in and I end up doing something so mundane and random (like typing and posting this blog).