a multitude of challenges, a bevy of gratification

I’m currently in a phase of the semester where I’m moments away, at any given time, of a major freak-out meltdown.

While I have *adored* teaching the undergrads I normally just TA (read: grade exams), I’m now in my third week of filling in as the teacher, and it’s a struggle twice a week to find interesting, relevant and worthy things to fill 75 minutes of class time. The class is quite large (~ 75 students), so I can’t just pose questions and have them discuss. Nope, their normal instructor has made a habit of lecturing the full 75 minutes, something that I’m not sure I could do even if I tried. I need more feedback than you get standing in front of a room of 75 students, and so I’ve increasingly begun to incorporate small and controlled periods of discussion amidst my “lectures,” such as they are.

Today, though, I fell way short on the preparation side. I spent the weekend absolutely swamped with my own work — exams to grade, tutoring out the wazoo, stuff to read, a paper to write… you get the idea — and never quite made it to lecture prep. So today, armed with my professor’s lecture notes from 3 years ago (thank GOD he’s still got them on the laptop he’s got at the hospital with him, and further that Medical Center of Plano has wireless Internet access!!), I went into the class fully prepared to have a very Socratic class. And so we did. The students talked almost as much as I did. My only real mistake was misreading “LA” as an abbreviation for Los Angeles instead of Louisiana, which I quickly figured out when the students stared back at me with confused looks on their faces. “I mean, Louisiana!” I said quickly. Whoops.

So I’m now about halfway into my day from hell, and have two 3-hour classes to look forward to this evening. I don’t know what possessed me to think this would be a good idea, taking back-to-back 3-hour classes on a MONDAY, no less, but nevertheless, here we are.

I really WILL be glad when said professor gets back, which with any luck will be sometime next week, because it will take a significant bit of pressure off me. I will miss being up front in the class, and will spend the rest of the semester in class thinking, “I would have done this a little differently…,” but I will nevertheless be happy to get a few hours of my life back every week, and to be able to focus more fully on my own classes. Which are overwhelmingly freaking me out.

I’ve got three big projects due at the end of November — because UTD, in its infinite wonderfulness, finishes right around Thanksgiving — and for two of these, I have utterly no idea what I’m going to do. Two papers, no topics. The third project is just a time consuming monster that I have been completely unable to find time to work on. I need two or three really productive days in the library to get most of it done, but finding a whole day is damn near impossible given everything else right now. Friday is the only real candidate, but even my generally free Fridays have recently been poached by other commitments.

I’m getting home after 7 p.m. most nights now (including Saturdays and Sundays), which is hard, both on me and on Daniel. I can’t keep going like this, and frankly I’m a little amazed I’ve managed to keep going as long as I have.

Lest you think I’m bitching ad nauseum, please don’t misunderstand. Everything I’m doing right now (well, except for one thing, which I’ll come to later) is immensely fulfilling and gratifying. My tutor students are, with one exception, utterly AMAZING. Their intelligence and humor absolutely delights me. Faced with a class of 75 where I have little opportunity to develop relationships with the students, and other situations where there are other barriers to one-on-one contact with learners, I find these tutor students to be a wonderful change of pace. I am able to focus on them entirely, and the time I spent with them generally flies by. It’s a fabulous addition to my life, and even though it takes up increasingly large amounts of my week, I wouldn’t even dream of giving it up — of giving THEM up.

I’ll be finishing up the tutoring cycle with two or three of them in the next couple of weeks, and I’ve decided to implement a moratorium on new students for at least a couple of weeks following that while I try to make headway on my schoolwork. I know I’m going to get asked, almost immediately (if not today, actually), to take on more students, but I just *can’t*. I hate that. I want to help everyone!!

The one exception I mentioned is this one student I’ve got who is driving me nuts. I don’t feel it’s appropriate to go into detail, but let me just summarize by saying this girl is spoiled beyond repair and treats me and my schedule with the level of courtesy you’d give, oh, dryer lint? On some level, you know it’s there and you have to do something with it now and again, but you really just don’t think much of it. Low priority. The last of your worries. She consistently and constantly calls me an hour or less before we’re supposed to meet to give me some lame excuse about why she can’t. (Recent favorite: “My mom just told me I have to go do this thing with my dad.” Convincing!) She drives a vehicle that easily costs more than 5x my own, and once told me she couldn’t get her homework done because she was “slammed with cheerleading.” (To which Daniel asked, “What, does she need to go outside and jump up and down some more so she can get caught up?”) {sigh} She drives me batty and her lack of courtesy and respect infuriates me, but there’s not much I can do, so that’s that.

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