It's been many years since I've taught two classes simultaneously. It seems ridiculous to complain about the work, as actual professors, particularly in the early stages of their careers, have MUCH heavier teaching load. So I'm not going to complain. No promises for how I'll feel after grading my first batch of 48 papers, though. But, really, the whole experience is throwing me for a bit of a loop. I'm trying to get my head around how weird it feels some days. In previous years, whenever I had a bad classroom experience, I alternated between feeling like it was just me sucking and suspecting that actually the students played a large hand as well. While I remain completely aware of my own tendencies toward suck-titude, I'm now laying much more responsibility at the door of simple classroom chemistry. I can now go from my first class--where one of my students is likely to yell at me, one is going to perform his abject dissaffected ennui, and one, I've recently realized, is a white power kid--to my shy but engaged and respectful second class--where even the dude leaning his head against the far corner of the room is nice and speaks in discussions. Oddly, the white power kid is perfectly fine in class, while the disaffected kid made a point of coming up to me after class yesterday and saying: "Yeah, your comments were really vague, and generic, and totally unhelpful." Blech. I'm resisting the urge to generate a taxonomy to explain the different types.
Bottom line, I kind of like it and hate it at the same time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Is it sucktitude or suckitude? Suckiness? Suckenometry?
Yeah even one good student can give you that extra oomph, and the next will spirit it all away on wings of shit! my four classes are apathy, smart but disaffected, smart and enthusiastic, and clueless. In that order.
Post a Comment