From my course blog.

icancstructures:

The new semester starts on Monday at both places I’m teaching this semester: the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Endicott College. As such, I’ve had to update my syllabi. Among other things, I’ve adopted the newest (second) editions of both the textbook and reader I use in my Introductory Sociology classes. It’s funny that one of my friends recently asked “How do you keep it fresh?” Well, that’s one way. It wasn’t exactly a “rototill,” but the updates were substantial enough to give me pause. I’ll leave rototilling to my upper level course. I’ve just become aware of a textbook I may want to adopt for that, replacing the current aging entries. They’re not bad books, it’s just that a lot has happened since they were published, and they haven’t been updated.

But this is but one of the biannual rituals of teaching. Others include closing out incomplete grades from the previous semester, and I have had a few of those. So no, I haven’t really been “off” this week. While it’s been a slower pace than when I’m teaching four or more courses, I have had a single-pointed focus that has not been leisure.

I can think of no better way to observe this ritual than with an internet meme, courtesy of the free meme generator app I got from the Mac App Store.

Right now I’m trying to shoehorn a MWF class into a TTh schedule. Theoretically, this should work: 3 x 50 minutes = 2 x 75 minutes. Several different things interfere.

First, as a corollary to the Peter Principle (everyone is promoted to their highest level of incompetence), “work expands to fill thetime alloted for it.”

Second, the course is a process, and it can be difficult to start a big chunk of a topic, only to have to split it across more than one day. This is exacerbated by the somewhat irregular schedule of Tuesday-Thursday classes. There’s the same amount of time between Tuesday and Thursday as between Monday and Wednesday, and Wednesday and Friday, but much more time between Thursday and the following Tuesday. Toward the begining of a semester, I can walk into a Tuesday class and think “Who are you people?”

Lastly, add to this the effort to try to keep the same classes in sync, with papers, tests and all. It’s not going to happen. But the good news, I think is that such things make a professor more nimble and more versatile, therefore more responsive to the students as individuals and idiosyncratic groups. Every class has its own chemistry, which the versatile instructor can use to cross-pollinate ideas across classes.

Does this make any sense?