Hurrah! Finally finished grading papers last night! The papers are read and semester grades are online, and after about two more days needed to wrestle three new sections into Blackboard, I won’t have to think about school for a whole month! Mirabilis!
Like most things that are any fun, teaching is poorly paid. But it sure is a hoot! I love students, even when they’re up to no good. This semester the 101s were full of mischief. We had not one but two hilarious ringleaders, one a young woman whose mouth absolutely refused to stay shut no matter how hard she tried to keep it under control, and the other a boisterous young man whose lifelong job title, clearly, will be “Life of the Party.” In these circumstances, I don’t bother trying to suppress them; instead I play along with them and use their energy to drive one teaching moment after another. Though this requires more work, it’s entertaining. Makes for a very noisy classroom, but my theory is that when they’re too quiet they’re asleep.
The online magazine-writing course went reasonably well. A great deal more boring to teach, alas—but at least it doesn’t require any driving. Or any shushing of bouncing blondes! Quite a few students dropped, but those who survived did pretty well. Some of them were actually writing at a publishable or near-publishable level by the end of the term. My co-conspirator taught a hybrid version of the same course in first eight weeks of the semester, and she reports that a lot of her students dropped, too. She made them write five articles, which is quite a few for such a short course. I inflicted only two on mine, but made them do market research, write queries, and jump through one prewriting hoop after another. If we’d had sixteen weeks, I probably would have made them write four feature-length articles and a brite. But eight weeks is, IMHO, too little time for a nonprofessional writer to get a running head start on more than two or three 800- to 1,500-word pieces with queries, interviews, and other research, plus exams on the reading material.
Now it’s time to go sing. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!
😀
Image: Interior of the Francis M. Drexel School, from John Trevor Custis, The Public Schools of Philadelphia. Public Domain. Says the contributor who posted this
on Wikipedia:
The interior of the Francis M. Drexel School in Philadelphia from the Custis book, published in 1897, p. 435 (original numbering) – out of copyright. Available at Google Books. I’ve downloaded a jpg format (rather than pdf format) taken from http://www.thedrexelschool.com/ sub page “History from 1888” (clearly the same photo from the same source). Notice the gaslights in the classrooms and the moveable classroom walls that have been folded up and stored.