Impressions

Work stuff, this is… some of my basic impressions about my new workplace. The bulk of the post is behind the splice, and it’ll take a click for the whole thing to be imposed upon your screen.

Well, most of my students seem head and shoulders above any other University-aged students I’ve taught since in Montreal. That is to say, they’re responsive, undaunted by the very notion of homework being a possibility, and some of them even seem quite eager. This is a very nice thing.

So I’m here in my nice big office-of-my-own (eat your heart out, Virginia Woolf, I have two rooms of my own) busily building my class website, and when it’s done, I’ll post an URL, though I’ll be asking people to comment about it over here, instead of over there. It’s just basic and simple, nothing like a Moodle installation — about which I know almost nothing, and which I don’t feel confident implementing at this point. There will be three blog installations for classblogs, plus my own blog-as-CMS for the site as a whole. Right now it’s very bare-bones, but it’ll get its own style in a little while, as I get the thing developed. I just really needed a break from it, which is kind of funny since back in the old days when I used Movable Type, I used to spend hours and hours trying to get one simple little function to work. Now, I have great huge chunks of a site ready and up and running, in only a few hours’ work, and yet I feel this need for a break.

As for my schedule, it’s looking mostly alright. I have one class in the morning and one in the evening Mondays and Wednesdays, and one in the morning and two in the evening Tuesdays and Thursdays.

At this point, I have all my syllabi printed out and made available on the site, and I just need to dive into planning classes. I have three tomorrow, and I have to prep for two of them — the Elementary Writing Course is just a first meeting, so there’s no planning necessary, but the Media English and the Advanced Writing classes I need something ready for, since we met already. I suppose I should go and plan for those classes, therefore.

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