Almost Ready

Preparing for my new class in under a week has been a nightmare. I agreed to take on the class ten days before the start, but I didn't meet with the dean to get further information until this past Wednesday. That's when I found out the instructor formerly assigned the course hadn't ordered books. Taking care of that was an easy process. The hard part will be staying ahead of the students with the reading! I have the grammar/writing reference book, but we're reading a full-length nonfiction book too; I don't have that one. Again, no big deal. I can push back the start-date on class discussions. In the meantime, since it was too late to order a textbook, I've been searching for readings that would be good for the assignments I've planned -- and I just planned them today. My college insists that we do our syllabi online, so I went into the site to do it. The previous teacher, despite doing nothing else, had actually mostly built her syllabus. This was a big pain. It's hard enough to start from scratch; I had to override her entries and insert my own.

Now I have everything ready except for the class schedule. I like to chart it out week-by-week, with a qualifier at the end stating that it's merely a framework. At least it keeps the students (and me) mostly on track. I will probably wait until tomorrow to finish. As long as I have it up before the start of class (8:30 Monday morning), I'm good. I have several handout to distribute the first day of class, materials that I think will be useful to the students and also give me a bit of a buffer. I always like to have "props" on the first day, something to hide behind until I adjust to the class -- and vice-versa. I don't have time to print the syllabus, so I'll bring it up on the computer projector in class to go over it.

I've put so much time into the new class that grading for my other classes has fallen by the wayside. Tomorrow that will likely be all I do. Really, I just need to grade a batch of essays for my afternoon class. It shouldn't take long. This will sound childish but tomorrow is the last day our pool is open for the season, and I haven't been once this year. I won't sacrifice work time to go, but I will try hard to finish my work so I can take a dip or at least soak up a little sun. I had my roots touched up yesterday and got a haircut (more of a trim); a little sun on my skin would look good, and if you work in front of people, you know that looking good (or at least feeling that you look your best) gives you a nice, necessary boost of confidence to rock the day. I'm looking forward to rocking the day!