::A Geek in Korea::

I’ve begun to use a new method to get materials to students. Starting with my BioEnglish class, and now with my Freshman English classes, I’ve set up a “file locker” so that students can get information for my class without me needing to bring hundreds of copies of papers to my classes each week. It’s saved paper for the school, and now that I have it set up it should start saving me some time. What did I do?

Well, first you need to move your files online. Either start using Google Documents, or Zoho Office. These are the most developed online web based office suites I know. As long as your I’ve been using Google Documents since it’s free and I am familiar with their products. I’ve been using Google Documents to prepare the majority of the materials I need for class for the past few months. If you can’t prepare using Google Documents, you can still use it as a host for your files. Google Documents will allow you to upload files, and you can even import them into Google Documents. Sadly the import process is hit or miss. Files with .pdf extensions work well, but importing .doc files can cause some frustration when it doesn’t recognize tables or formating. If you make it within the Google Documents web application itself, it is easy to manage, but the web office application isn’t as robust as an actual office application.

Set up a folder structure within Google Documents to begin sharing. I’d recommend setting it up carefully so you know exactly what is being shared. Nothing worse than having an exam or quiz leaked to students through inadvertent sharing.  I have a folder for each of my different classes. Within those class folders, I have a sub folder for shared materials, and another for my documents for the class. Supplemental materials for levels that haven’t been covered stay in the folder until you reach the appropriate unit in the book.

There is no scripting options available for when you want to make a document shared unfortunately, so once or twice a week you might need to send materials to their appropriate folders. You can set a Google Documents shared folder so that anyone can access the materials for the class without needing to log in to Google Documents to download them. For example, I have the slides I am preparing for a class converted into easily printed files for the students. Each week, when I add new slides, or update the materials, the students have access to the new changes.

Before class, I’ll lock down the materials I’m teaching so the students will have access to the most up to date materials. This means that you have to finish working on the materials well before the class begins to make sure the students have access to it. The students are responsible for checking them on their own, printing them out, and bringing them to class. No more wasted copies for absent students! No more copying lots of papers before class. The students are responsible for their own printing, in exchange for having access to the materials early all the time. Pretty fair trade. I only do this in my “for credit” classes where the student’s grades are important and I can assign homework. If I don’t give homework in the class, I provide all hand outs.

The only problem is that the URL to a Google Document Shared Folder is meant to be shared via IM or Email. How do I tell the students where the file is available if it’s a monstrously long string of long digits and random characters that would never fit on a board to be transcribed? That’s where a URL shortener comes in! I’ve chosen bit.ly for this task. I’ve signed up for a free account, which lets me set up a custom http://username.bit.ly/readable_link_style shortened link.

Instead of a long URL no one can recall or reproduce, a relatively short, customized link is far more useful. If you wanted to track class by class access, adding five shortened URLs leading to the same materials would be possible. The bit.ly service will also track the number of clicks your shortened URL has received. If you wanted, you could use this feature so you could track which of your classes was best at checking your links, and when in the week they were checking the things you added. If you knew no one checked the materials until an hour until your class was about to begin, you could know the limit to when you could add changes.

As long as you make the shortened URL as simple, and everyone in the class has it, you shouldn’t get TOO many emails from clueless students. Freeing yourself from the burden of weekly printouts is very nice. Adding supplemental study materials for students is also easy. You don’t have to print it for everyone, just the students interested in that particular information. Students that need extra help can check it out in privacy. That can help someone catch up that is too shy to ask questions in class.

I wouldn’t be able to structure my classes the way I have without moving a significant portion of the materials I need online. Students are responsible for checking their own homework when the answers are simply rote learning exercises. I check all materials that require creative or unique responses. This has cut down my per student homework obligation by 75%. The students still get all their answers solved, and I get to save time grading. When the students do have questions, they can check on their own and then ask exactly what they need to know.

This is a semester long experiment. As long as my URL shortener doesn’t expire (which they are known to do), and the students bookmark the link it leads to, instead of the shortened URL itself, then it will be fine. What other efficiency improvements can be found by moving to a more digital work stream? If I discover anything particularly useful, I’ll pass them on.

Today the nearly final attendance sheets were available for the first time. I say “nearly final”  because we’ve finished enrollment, but “drop week” is two weeks away. The first week of class you get a random bunch of names from the computer, 20% of which never materialize with a body associated with them. The people sitting in your class fall into two camps. Upperclassmen that added the classes before anyone else and fill seats, and frantic freshman hoping to add the class by getting into the computer if any of the other freshman drop. Right now in most of my classes I have as many Freshman as total number of upperclassmen. In two weeks the dynamics of the system might be different.

I’ve collected my student’s information on a sheet for my personal record keeping*. I went through each class and put the student information sheets in student number order, then transfered their English Nickname to the nearly final attendance sheet. Two different June/Jin male/female pairs in the different classes. THREE students named “Eric” in the same class. Those sorts of naming problems were exactly why I wanted original English names, but it happened AGAIN despite my pleas. Oh well. I’ve got their names all written in pencil if they need to change it.

I color coded the student sheets and attendance sheets by colors I’ve assigned to each class on my schedule. This keeps me from losing the different classes papers, or getting confused about which class is on which day. I’ve got enough classes in the week that I’ve got to do something to have an easy visual tracking system. I’ve got special markers for each class I use to keep their papers straight. This is by far the most organized I’ve been in class. I learned this from my predecessor who did the same thing with his schedule. Just a little time coloring on a corner of a paper can speed up your memory of a class.

I used this new information today to call on students and record their participation. It was great. I was calling on everyone! Anyone that put their hand up to volunteer an answer and got it correct got bonus points. It was totally worth the effort of organizing them all later on. It was probably easier to keep track of the attendance on the enrollment sheet, but participation and homework will go on the student sheet from now on. I can instantly see the student’s prior work and figure out if they can answer a question or not, and try to put a face with a name. At the end of the semester I’ll have tons of grades to calculate and use to track the students precisely, and will remember more of them on sight. Right now I still have the energy to keep this going. Ask me in four months if all this extra work was worth it.

Even in the second week of class I can post competitive grades when less than 5% of their total grade has been calculated. I’m not going to put up grades each week, but the option exists to scare the crap out of students already about the curve in the second week of class. If I weed out a bunch of students before drop week, that means fewer quizzes for me to grade. I was pulling class grades out of thin air last semester based on half of a normal term. This is a lot better for everyone.

*Other teachers in the office asked for more personal information than I did. They even went as far as to ask for phone numbers, which is not uncommon since students rarely check email. I learned that after my class surveys. Only a few students check email daily, and most only check once a week at most. One of the student forms another professor made was asking for date of birth! In a freshman class there is a chance that some of the students are actually legally underage (under 20) for a portion of the class. Yuck, inappropriate question! What would they need to know that information for?

Feeling organized and getting all my stuff in order to make my class better is awesome. It sucks transferring grades and everything from the first week to the next, and I spent an hour or two adding grades to the student’s books for the first two classes, but now that I’ve got my system up and running I’m happy how it turned out.

I’ve spent the past week or so freaking out about my class load this semester. It’s not that it’s that much work, but it feels like a lot this early in the semester. My children’s classes thankfully got canceled, which means I have some time on the weekend to unwind if I so choose. Proper planning and regular attempts at keeping focused have given me enough time to get my work done. All I need is some quiet time alone so I can focus. If I have distractions like music playing, a baby crying, or an RSS feeder ticking away in the background, I’ll lose it for a few minutes. Once I get started on something …(starts checking my usual sites….realizes he hasn’t finished writing this blog post…what was I writing about? Oh yeah focus.)

Forgive me if I get distracted from time to time, but I did get a lot of work today. I sacrificed the entire day to work on the stuff that needed to get done for class in the next week. I scanned documents for the next three weeks of classes. I edited lots of presentation slides for clarity and accuracy. I took my preparation for my Freshman class and put it online so that I’ll eventually be able to share it with students before their examinations in a few months. That’s how far out in advance I’m trying to plan my classes these days. I’m thinking months down the line. I figured out a solution so my students can print the documents I make in class if they want them, but doesn’t force me to waste thousands of pieces of paper. I’ve moved to a digital classroom that is always available for review and for the students to use much more than ever before. I’ve got activities for a few days set up and ready to be used. I made quizzes. I planned classes. I did work today, and it was awesome.

Between all that work I walked the dog, took it to the vet, cleaned the floors, washed the dishes and cooked all my meals for the day. I got all this accomplished because my wife spent the majority of the time hanging out with her family, and she took Glow with her so I could work. Helping with the baby is fine when I’ve got a handle on my class work, but when I feel that stress of class hanging over me, I just need some time to work through it.  I’ll never get four months ahead on all the things I need to do, but if I can make it to the middle of the week I can plan again and keep ahead. As long as I get some work done in bits and pieces it isn’t that bad. At least that’s what I am trying to tell myself.

I enjoy working and getting things done to my satisfaction. I know there is a certain level I need to achieve on the things I prepare before I can feel confident in class. Usually when I walk out of a class that doesn’t go well I feel like if I had done more work to prepare I would have done better. Realistically though, after a certain point of time it’s just got to be “done” and you have to move on. If my students see that I spent time on the materials and did my best to explain them, I think I’m doing my job. That’s all I can do.

I went back to revise several of the activities I’ve made for the classes I have for the rest of the week. Now that I have a generic syllabus that I can drop and drag into a text document to make a boilerplate set of class rules, I can start any new semester much more quickly. All the other teacher’s worked that out their first year on the job, but since I started in the middle of the semester and had to keep afloat, I didn’t have the luxury last semester to get all my paperwork in a recyclable form as much as I would have liked. I might have had to repeat some work this semester as I got my materials more refined, but I won’t have to do it all over again. (In theory.)

I’m challenging myself to take a boldly independent and very different take on class from last semester. I didn’t find my class was talkative enough. I really focused on participation when outlining my goals for class this time, and I am determined to let students have time in every class to speak in a variety of different activities and situations. As such, I need new ways to track how students work in class. I’ve made a “Student Information Sheet” that is going to track everything students do in class. I put the finishing touches on this today, with all the grades I intend to calculate for each student. I’m being wildly optimistic to think I’ll be able to chart everything that goes on in class, but it’s a start at changing my approach to class. When someone asks a question, or starts an interesting conversation, I now have a tool to reward them for it. If someone sleeps or comes late, I can now address that issue.

I’ve actually added homework to my syllabus, and have also added class time each week to answering questions about it from students. There is a chance this might backfire immediately if no one does the work, or if it becomes too time intensive to cover well in class. Worse yet, if no one has any questions, what am I supposed to do with the time left that I added to the lesson? Should I just put on music and do a sexy dance to waste time? Too late now for those sorts of concerns. The semester has already started and it’s full speed ahead!

I’ve also built in quizzes, which also take a lot of time to correct and grade. Well, they are “mini” quizzes, but still. More grades. More data points. Way too much work. Every class I teach will now have grades that aren’t just created out of thin air by someone else’s judgment before I even arrived on the job. By the end of the semester I might actually know the majority of my student’s names and faces. I might have something approaching an actual class underway here. I’m approaching a class with the goal of doing work and trying to get results that I can check and verify as they progress through the semester.

I’m becoming an actual professor. What the hell am I thinking?

I had my first set of classes today for the University semester. It consisted of me reading through my syllabus four times. Four classes in a single day is a lot for me. This will be the last time I have four classes on this particular day, because next week they add another class to my schedule and I’ll have five classes all on the same day. Three in a row in the morning, a short rest, then two in a row in the evening. My voice is raw after one day from all that talking! I can’t even imagine how froggy I’m going to sound when my classes run the entire length they are scheduled and I teach another hour on top of it. Brutal. It’s going to be a really rough semester.

Tomorrow I luckily get the day off to recover, and I can also get the activities and lessons for my warm up class finalized. All the work I had done for the rest of the week’s classes, and all the time I spent preparing materials for the rest of the work I have to do, and I still have a full day of planning for my first week. It. just. never. ends. The ONLY good thing about my schedule is that I see all my classes once before I see any class a second time. That means I only need to carry or prepare one lesson at a time. Doubling up last semester and needing to be a week ahead at all times was a pain in the ass.

My classroom is tiny. I have twenty-five students assigned to a class that feels full with 20 students squeezed inside. I teach all my classes in the same tiny cramped room. If everyone shows up to class there aren’t even enough desks for all my students. People were asking if they could show up for any lesson during the day since I have several back to back classes. If everyone did that, I’d end up with people sitting on the floor if there was a crush of students all trying to sit in the same class. Right now I have a feeling my earliest class all wished they came after lunch, and they all want to sign up at a different time. I had two students beg to get into my class together, but they couldn’t get the computer to register their names. Luckily a few people dropped the course and they got in.

The majority of students haven’t taken the class preceding mine last semester. They went straight to level 2. I’m teaching the upper level course, and only about 20% of students have had the first course. I don’t have any way of restricting who signs up (I don’t get to set enrollment policy), and there are no prerequisites in the computer system, so if they want to jump in feet first I’m not going to stop them, but I’m also not going to lower my standards. Sink or swim freshmen, don’t let those Juniors and Seniors eat you alive!

The best thing to happen in class was when I wrote the name of the class on the board and turned around. “This is my name, and I’m teaching this book and this level. Are you all in the right class?”

One student grabbed his bag and schedule and ran out. “Guess not.”

It never happened again every other time I tried it. A student lasted 30 seconds in my class before they ran out!

There were a few legitimately excellent students that stood out already. One student asked if there was a “Koreans Only” rule for admission to the class. I said that anyone could study in the class, but was curious why she asked. She appeared to be Korean, but spoke excellent English. “Oh, I’m Canadian. I just wanted to know if it was okay for me to sign up for this class too.” Cool. I have my first Canuck in class. (The Spell Check suggested “Canker” for a correct spelling of the word “Canuck”. Heh. That doesn’t seem right.)

The Canadian even helped a student who was looking to sign up for class. He didn’t speak any English at all. I have no idea what he is doing in the class. He didn’t understand anything I was saying. I’ve also got two male students competing to be teacher’s pets. Whatever. If my long winded syllabus speech, with lots of promises of homework didn’t scare off a few people, nothing will.

The science-y presentation class continues to amuse no one and is growing in size and scale in failure. The registration for the class has been a total disaster, with classes available to be taught with staff scheduled but classrooms sitting empty, while other classes that don’t exist on anyone’s schedule being filled with students without teachers available to teach them. The registration started TODAY, after the first sets of classes were supposed to start. There were classes opened only after they were in session. No students were able to sign up before the class began. WHOOPS! That made it easy for the teacher responsible. Show up to an empty classroom and wait. There is no roster, no attendance sheets, nothing. Utter madness. Somehow this class is well know and highly desirable, yet all these mistakes are no one’s fault. No one takes responsibility for the mistakes, and they just pass on the blame to the computer system. Lucky that exists in a non-humanoid form. When the schools finally get around to replacing all the teachers and staff with robots, the robot that get’s blamed for all the mistakes come student registration time will likely go on a shooting spree.

Today was supposed to be a somewhat hectic day. I was going to go to different stores and do the weekly shopping. I needed a haircut, and to finalize a few documents for my classes which begin this week. It was raining, so any plan to talk the dog for a walk, or the family along for the trip around town got canceled. Most of the day was spent hanging around with Glow and trying to catch up on sleep. The girl just doesn’t want to go to bed early, and when she does go to bed she wakes up in the middle of the night and wants to play. I predict a long, sleepless semester.

Most of all, I’ve been spending the entire day trying to think of what I might need to do to make the beginning of my semester start smoothly. I keep trying to recall all the different things I need to copy, correct, view, print, and whatever else I need to do before class starts tomorrow morning. The first week of class is an adjustment period for everyone. Nothing of educational value will actually be done for the majority of the first week. No one has books. No one knows anyone else. It’s all awkward and quiet. I come in, explain my syllabus and answer a few embarrassing personal questions, assign some homework, and then do it all over again for every class I see. The next class is spent doing group activities and ice breakers, then data mining for personal information on each of the students so that I can have the background information I need to start evaluating everyone.

I’ve been trying to decide how much paperwork and tracking I want to do with students through the semester. I’m making a personal sheet for each student in the class to write down homework scores and participation grades. This is going to be a huge headache to deal with, but I’m doing it so that I’ll be forced to remember each student, their name, their information, and something about their behavior and activity level in class. If I student comes to me at the end of the semester, I want to point to this particular paper and say, “Well, you got a C+ because you just didn’t talk enough during this particular month of activities.”

It’s hard to keep everybody straight, and learning names was a big challenge that I’m hoping the students will help me with this year. Their first homework assignment, besides getting the right book, is to get a picture for my student sheet. This is so that I can keep a face and a name in mind while I grade them later in the year. I can’t tell you how many times androgynous names like “Jin” or “June” cause me all sorts of problems when I have to keep students straight between multiple classes. I’ve also got to get nicknames or some sort of way to call on them in class that makes each student distinct. It could be “snaggle tooth Jin” or “Big Glasses June” when I get a picture. That would help keep the students with the same names straight. In addition, I need email addresses so that if I need to contact them outside of class I’ll have it available. I need all this stuff now because students show up the first week and then disappear until the end of the semester. If that happens, I need to have a record of their disappearance.

I’ve tried to pick through all the different things I might need to do in the first week or two to keep my class moving in the right direction. I think I’ve got it worked out, but I just don’t know what sort of headaches to expect. In a week’s time things might have gone off the rails and I’ll need to completely rethink everything again. Setting the class up correctly and getting the tone and atmosphere correct the first time is important. Being prepared and professional looking, while friendly and approachable takes a balance too. Thankfully I’ve got a few days this week to stop and plan the last few details before the semester starts in earnest. Then it is a long grinding marathon to the end of the semester.

Right now approximately 50% of the projects, activities, tests, quizzes, and various other assorted items I am doing in my Freshmen English class have either been prepared, thought about, or done before and only need minor tweaking. I’ve planned six weeks out, which is impressive for me. If all goes well, all I need to do is prepare a few quizzes based on what we get to in class, and find a few more things to fill up my class for time if I notice I’m letting students out too early. This early preparation gives me time to think of what I want to do, work on improving it, and hopefully avoid any last minute dash for materials that need to work the first time perfectly to avoid disaster like I had last semester.

Still, I can’t shake that nagging feeling I’ve forgotten something.

Seeing as I am getting paid to entertain people studying scientists with Power Point slides for a few hours each week, I thought I should go through and start improving the slides I was given by the people in charge of creating the materials. They’ve collected information from sources they didn’t bother to cite. The notes are liberally based around things taken from Wikipedia. I’ll just leave it at that.

Anyway, since I have to get up in front of people and use them in a class, I decided that anything I present should at least be investigated a little, expanded when needed, and corrected when proven inaccurate. I’m willing to bet I’m going the extra mile with this class for no goof reason, but I’d rather be talking about something interesting than reading off boring slides any day. I’ve got plenty of other work I could do, but I’m three weeks ahead with my materials in this particular class so I can spend a little time indulging myself to keep the quality high.

Basically I open up the presentation and find definitions and further clarification on any topic using the Internet. This is not scientifically rigorous, but I’m not being paid enough, or have enough time to be scientifically thorough. This is a “science-y” class, not a “science” class. All my slides should contain a disclaimer that says, “While not independently verified to be entirely accurate through scientific means, these ideas are generally know to be true by more than a few people on the Internet.”

Anyway, while “researching” some of my slides I discovered lots of interesting stuff. For example, the difference between a Rod of Asclepius and a Caduceus and how they are commonly confused for being the same thing. I do this sort of stuff all the time in my own free time, but now I get to use that random knowledge in my class. All I have to do is focus and keep on topic while I start diving into links related to links related to my topic and I can find all sorts of interesting stuff. I have to avoid the pitfall of using Wikipedia, where you get off onto some sort of tangent and lose three hours.

Today I went in with a problem with my schedule. It turns out my “final schedule” was just what the computer said it knew I was teaching, but not the actual “final schedule” that I had to teach. They had dumped an extra class on me during the week the computer didn’t know about, and I had only gotten an email about a few weeks back which could have been a “suggestion” or a “actual class addition”. I wanted to know if the schedule was right and the class has been canceled, or the email was right and I had a class that was a “surprise” addition. Classes get added and dropped all the time, so I wanted to make clear what I was responsible for before I finalized my materials for next week and started printing everything off.

The coordinator in charge of adding the new class to my schedule was succinct in her judgement. Her claim was that “the email was the final authority”. It was “absolutely correct”. Any additional class she put on my schedule that didn’t overlap a current class time on my final schedule from the computer was added officially by her account. Okay then, one more class for me. My base schedule has non-optional overtime built right in, which is a violation of my contract. I’ll bring that up at performance review time. This starts at every school that looks to make money wringing the free time out of their teachers. Sad it’s happening so soon at this job.

The surprising thing about this “absolutely correct” email was that they had assigned room numbers to all my classes, but the assignments made no sense. The presentation class for this new program was assigned to a room with no projector, computer, or any means to teach the class. Every teacher in the entire program would teach Power Point slides without the means to do so, and it would have been a nightmare sorting out the room assignments once the semester started. More than a hundred or more people would have shown up to the wrong room for their first day of class if I hadn’t pointed out that the “absolutely correct” email wasn’t correct about those rooms.

I saved everyone enrolled, and everyone on the staff the headache by pointing this out early. She said she could handle it because she was in charge of assigning rooms to all classes. Whoops. I caught her mistake and made her fix it in front of her coworkers in the office.

To her credit, the coordinator did issue a correction to the “absolutely correct” email, noting that I had pointed out the need for a room change. The other people in the program will get spared from having to deal with this particular coordinator on this issue. The worst part is that I know I will be dealing with her for the ENTIRE semester, catching mistakes and little cute errors that she is too busy to notice, but make the teacher’s lives impossible. As long as you catch it early through vigilance it is not too bad, but otherwise you never can be sure what you read is right or not.

One of the classes I teach will be a challenge simply because the class shouldn’t exist. I do nothing except read Power Point presentation slides. I read English slides to Korean people studying to be doctors, who I am pretty sure can read on their own. This is a “for credit” class where I am serving as a teleprompter for grown adults. From what I’ve been told, there is money attached to teaching more science-y classes in English. A government funded program to increase science-y classes means the university adds these classes to collect the money. The result is this slide show lesson.

While I realize I’m sitting up in front of a bunch of students that are perfectly capable of reading everything on the slides, I feel I do need to feel “value added” in some way, otherwise I could be replaced by a Korean English Teaching Robot! Since reading a bunch of slides isn’t exactly the most interesting thing possible, I decided that I’d check out the individual lessons and try to figure out how the fix this class.

I’m not designing any of the materials. Most of the materials I saw were pulled from Wikipedia, which is of dubious quality as a science-y source in a classroom. No one designing an actual hard science course would ever cite Wikipedia as a legitimate source of information, but that’s not my call. Whoever the people in the department they got to prepare the slides picked the materials. I just have to read them. I’m teaching a science-y course. It’s like science, but it’s not fact checked. The words I’ll speak relate to science, and possibly appear in science text books. The title of the course really should be “Listen to a guy read some slides with some English Science words”.

I did some minor corrections on my way through looking over the materials to make it more accurate and to fix any glaring mistakes in formating or grammar, but the science itself is beyond me. I looked up all the terminology, and I could explain what one or another particular word might mean, but could I measure or do the science to check those assertions? Hell no. I only have a basic liberal arts training in a few broad topics, so trying to put anything more than the vaguest bit of depth on one of the slides has me going to Wikipedia myself just to get a background of what they are talking about. As far as I know the slides contain no out-right lies, but there might be a bit of misinformation that isn’t my fault. Thats why people with DEGREES IN SCIENCE are supposed to teach SCIENCE CLASSES.

What I have done is found either a root word, small fact, or an article about each of the most interesting slides to interject something of my own science interests into the presentations. For example, when talking about Ruminant Methane Emissions, I added an article that explains that there is a bacteria that lives in a kangaroo’s stomach that limits their methane emissions. If this was introduced into cattle, it might cut their emissions. Interesting, strange, and actually a bit of strategy by me to keep my class under control.

While I will make the Power Point slides available, what I won’t release is the notes I make about the slides until later. As I go through the slides, I’ll be dropping different facts into my lesson. My notes will have around ten new facts that I’ve gathered from different sources. At the beginning of the following lesson, I’ll have a short quiz. The quiz will cover the material on the slides the students have, as well as materials I only cover in my notes. If the students show up and pay attention during my presentation, it will be an easy quiz. If the students skip the class and only get the Power Point slides from the Internet they aren’t going to know anything about Kangaroo farts. I do this each week, then before the mid-term and final I will release my entire set of slides and notes to allow them to get caught up for their examination.

Yes. I’ve become that professor that gives out the slides but requires you to show up to class anyway for quizzes every week. If I didn’t do the weekly quiz along with the slides, students would simply skip and study the slides for the mid-term and final. I’m already researching all the slides I get to make my notes, so I might as well use that to build something into the class that assures that my attendance won’t slip to zero. The other professor I told about my plan agreed I’d need something to keep students from blowing off the class, and a quiz would probably do it if I weighed them heavily enough. Tomorrow I start working on that syllabus and my second bit of notes for my presentations. The attendance and sign ups for the classes are still under a strange sort of lock down, so there is a chance that the lessons might not all get on the final schedule. Now that I have figured out what to do in the class, as long as I keep getting fed the presentations in a timely manner I’ll be fine teaching every one of these classes. It might be boring, but it pays well.

I still can’t believe this is going to be a credited course based of material taken from Wikipedia to a large degree dictated by a foreigner for no other reason than to say the university offers more English language science courses. Say what you will about that, but I’m trying my best to state accurate scientific information in my classes.

This has been the longest I’ve even been on a “vacation schedule” in quite some time. Normally when you are an academy teacher, the time the students have off from school is the most intensive portion of your year. I’ve done Winter camps and Summer camps, always  in addition to normal class loads. Student vacations are usually hell. Working full time at a university this is the first time I’ve actually had a break from teaching week after week. I haven’t taught a “for credit” class in almost three months! I’m still working more weeks than I am not, but I had a streak of days where work was a distant memory. I could have theoretically gone somewhere for vacation without having to find a replacement teacher or finish my contract first! I haven’t had that luxury in Korea…ever.

Now with the semester looming next week, I’m starting to get that “first day of school” vibe all over again. The sheer amount of work I’ll be doing this semester is starting to wash over me. I’m going to be responsible for five distinct levels of classes. That’s not even the hardest part. The different levels range from first grade in elementary school to doctors taking classes in Biology in English. I got the slides for my first set of Biology classes this evening. I’ll have a week’s worth of solid research ahead of me if I simply want to know how to PRONOUNCE all of these words. Forget about knowing the syllabus or making quizzes to display mastery of the presented material. I don’t know it myself. Lucky for me they are providing that material, as incomprehensible as it might be for me, to use. I’m not responsible for content, only presentation and format. I’m a walking power point slide reader. Add a couple of quizzes taken from the slides, a mid-term, an final, and my class is done theoretically. All that is left is showing up to read some slides. This could either be a great class that is hands off and stress free, or a nightmare of unparalleled disaster waiting to crash down as I am caught between two departments. I don’t know yet how it will end up.

I’ve got four other classes where the onus is on me to come up with something to say. I started doing final drafts of my freshmen class syllabus today. Planning four months of classes in advance is nerve wracking, but at least I only see those classes twice a week. I have book material and group work to do, and lots of new ideas for activities and assignments, a small percentage of which might actually end up the way I imagine it going.

I’ve got a rough idea of what does and doesn’t work, and I have my notes from last semester to speed me along. I’m still teaching two months of new materials right at the beginning of the year. All of that is still experimental, never mind me trying to do something completely different with my class time. I’ve got an idea how to approach the class, which is a step forward compared to where I was when I began in the university. If it doesn’t go smoothly, I’ll just try again and replace what didn’t work.

By far my hardest classes are the Institute classes. They cover half a book I really can’t get the hang of teaching in six weeks and meet every single weekday at the same time of day. The book is atrociously boring, but I see no way to supplement it other than working my ass off and making the best of the student’s time with other activities and materials. I can’t muster up enough energy to do a camp with daily classes during the winter break, but piling it on top of my other work? That is really tough. These classes are absolutely brutal, and I’m someone lucky enough to have them in the evening. Some professors have these classes starting at 6:50 in the morning! I hope that I can recycle the materials from last semester and my current for credit classes into my work at the Institute, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Thankfully I only have one of these classes a day this time around. These classes always made my work day harder to an unreasonable degree.

All of these classes start up next week, and I can feel the deadlines looming in front of me. As long as I keep vigilant and return to the office this week every day to knock out the paperwork and tasks I know about, the surprises I get at the last second shouldn’t be crippling. I doubt there WILL be surprises, but keeping them at “vein popping” instead of “psychotic” levels is my goal with all this industrial output. Each time I plug a hole in my knowledge or find out a better way to arrange my classes I get just a step closer to having a positive outcome in class. Next semester will be punishing, difficult, stressful, challenging, long, and not as financially rewarding as the work I am used to, but at the end of it all I’ll have more vacation and if things go well I’ll get to do it all over again next year.

While I might complain about the challenge of designing and creating my own classes, I love the opportunity to show what I can do in a creative, rewarding, and paying field I enjoy. I’m damn lucky to do what I do. I had to do the same stuff for the past decade, but I didn’t have the control to do any of what I wanted anywhere near the power I have at my current school. Creative freedom is paralyzing when you’ve forgotten what it feels like. Just thinking of returning to a school where Kindergarten is the order of the day, and I spend my time keeping students from stabbing each other with glue sticks is frightening. I might like to make my job sound tough, but it’s still work I love to do at the end of the day, and I wouldn’t trade my current job for anything I’ve ever done in the past.