I haven&#039t been on the webpage much lately. I guess part of it&#039s because I&#039ve been busy and the other part is because I&#039ve been generally apathetic. Strange combination, no? All in all, it pretty much means that though I&#039ve been meaning to tell everyone how cool my first week of teaching was, I just haven&#039t gotten around to it. I have, however, a few minutes before heading to the library to say a few words, and so I will do so now. 🙂

K, so the first day of class was Tuesday. I don&#039t have a class roster yet so I didn&#039t know any of the students names, but since I had scheduled in having them write some information on index cards, that helped immensely. I have four students, all girls (It is, after all, an all-girl Catholic college.) and all very nice. We pretty much just went over the syllabus, and I told them how the class is going to work in terms of what we&#039ll be studying each day. Two of the girls had conflicts with the class time because it occured at the same time as a crim or business or something or another class that they wanted to take, so we worked out another time to have the class on MWF instead of TR. Class adjourned.

I e-mailed my contact at SMWC to see if our time shift was okay, and he said that I could do that but that the hour wasn&#039t good because there was a class already in the French room at that time. So I e-mailed them all to tell them that we were going to shift it back an hour, and they were all fine with that. We met again Friday when I went over the geography of France with them. Somewhere at SMWC they were doing construction of some sort because the power went off in the room at about half-past the hour. That was even funnier because I had just turned the overhead projector off. I figured that they could go early (I had no more information since there&#039s only so much you can say about mountains and rivers in a general way.) so everyone left and I drove home.

It&#039s really cool to be teaching, especially something that I really enjoy. One of my friends remarked that I&#039m putting too much time into my lesson plans (of course, that was before he knew that I was working on different lesson plans than the ones he was thinking about), but I am adament about doing a good job. This is the only culture/civilization course that I saw listed on the SMWC webpage, so I&#039m assuming that for some of these girls, this is the only shot they&#039ve got at getting a good, general overview of France and her history and society. So, naturally, I worry a lot and work a lot and spend a lot of time going over tiny details that I&#039m sure I&#039ll forget once I get in the classroom, but well, it happens. I need to work more on getting lesson plans done for an entire week the weekend before or something so that I feel less hurried, less rushed when the week actually begins. Since tutoring starts Wednesday, that means that much less free time to work on correcting my lessons, so I&#039m going to have to budget my time more efficiently.

Speaking of time, it&#039s time for me to run to the library for a couple hours then off to German 101. My French class isn&#039t until this afternoon at 2, so I&#039ve got a little time to start working on Wednesday&#039s lesson. Catch you later!

Posted: August 30, 2004 at 7:35 in the morning.