All the Wonderful Things I've Done
It has been a while since I posted properly, methinks, so I thought I should perhaps give a bit of an update on Being Me.
Teaching
The semester is in full swing. Tuesdays are exceptionally busy - I have a Limina meeting at 11, and because I'm not organised enough to arrange things early, I spend the twenty minutes beforehand madly photocopying things and running around looking stupid. My first tutorial for the day is at twelve, there's usually a staff work-in-progress seminar at 1pm, and my second tutorial is at 2pm, followed by my consult hour at 3pm. So I keep glancing at my watch to make sure I'm not late for the next thing.
Yesterday's tutorials were awesome. Until then I'd been doing some variations on "talking in small groups followed by talking as a big group", largely because past feedback has suggested students appreciate the opportunity to talk slightly more privately before addressing the whole group. In essence this week's tutorials were similar, but with mind maps.
Oh, how I love me some mindmaps! (and just so you know I wasn't just indulging myself, I've had positive feedback on them in SPOTs as well. So there. :-)
The text was Henry V, which can be a bit hard to get your head around, and given that we don't have tutorials next week but return to the same text in two weeks' time, I decided a mindmap excercise would leave a record of this week's discussions to jog people's memory in a fortnight. I divided the students into four groups, and gave each group a set of characters (Henry, the Officers, the Soldiers and the Conspirators, Popular characters) and questions to go with them. The groups drew up their mindmaps on their topics and then presented them to the rest of the group, with discussion along with each presentation. I was really impressed with them, particularly when they realised they weren't presenting to me, nor was I there with all the answers, and actually started debating and discussing points among themselves. My next task is to scan the maps and put them on WebCT, so if the students feel so inclined they can print off copies to refresh their memories.
I gave my lecture for this semster last week, and while there were a couple of things I failed to mention, overall it went fine. I even got applause, which is nice. For after all, I need me some validation. ;-)
Research
Giving the lecture early was a good thing because now I have time to do some "proper"* research, and I am experiencing a bit of a wave of enthusiasm for my topic. It hasn't driven me to actually writing anything yet, but hey, baby steps, right? My current project is trying to read through (and understand) a thesis in French. Because I don't really speak French, I have to read the text out loud to make some sense of it. So I spend a fair bit of time "talking" to myself in French. It can be hard to turn it off at the end of the day, and also embarrassing considering I can't actually speak it.
(BTW, does anyone know why, in writing about film, characters are referred to as personnage masculin or personnage feminin - even when their names are known?)
I'm also looking forward to/dreading my article coming out next month in WiderScreen.
*having said that, I wouldn't mind doing a bit of an article on somethign to do with the Kalevala process... No! Begone, procrastinatory thought!
Internship
I've even managed to come up with some data from my first set of questionnaires for the T&L project. Now all I have to do is make sense of it. My project consists of getting student feedback on the Discusion Board feature in the unit I'm teaching, and the first lot of questionnaires was after people's expectations and prior experience with similar programs. The board itself is going fine, although there has been a bit of a drop in interest since the first week (mind you, that topic was about religion, so it was bound to attract attention).
In an act of philanthropy I also forwarded my spreadsheet from last year to the Humanities admin person to see if it could benefit either her or other applicants. It was something I used last year to calculate costs and hours for my teaching plan - needing enough hours but doing them cheap was a bit of a struggle and presumably one students in "So Bankrupt It's Not Funny" Humanities still face. (Ick, that has such a sense of "back in my day...")
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That's probably all. For now.