New Class

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I'll be teaching two weeks of a summer English course. Having an intensive writing course thrown at me at the last minute really annoyed me, especially since I've been teaching Math for the past year and like that just fine. The class was described to me as "how to teach students to write papers without copy and pasting everything." Knowing what I know now, I would also add "not using Google translate" to that.

After two days of teaching the class I have to admit that it's as pain-free as I've been led to believe. The students are good, and they know the class because they've all taken it in some form before and know what's expected of them. Some of them have taken an equivalent at another school and because of some arcane requirement, have to take this course. Others have taken it before, failed because they didn't do the work, and don't want to fail it again.

The main drawback of the class is that it's from 2:20 to 6:00 every afternoon. It's nice to be able to go into work a little bit later, but if I thought the building was empty last week just before people were leaving for vacation, it's really empty at 6:00 pm after most people have left for the summer.