Busy

The semester has started and the usual swamping has occurred. This time it's extra heavy for me because I'm teaching. Which is fun, but which is a whole lot of work. Usually when a grad student teaches a class as the instructor, the faculty who have taught it provide that student with material, resources, notes, slides, syllabus, and a variety of things they themselves have generated in the past while teaching that course. You hope they give you stuff that is sort of "tried and true", although that is not always the case. This material does not absolve you of construct your own course, but it at least provides even some temporary or intermittent structure here and there.

I do not have this material. The two guys who have taught this course over the last 5 or more years are, well, not content oriented. One is "chalk and talk" and the other lectures straight from the book. This makes my job monumentally more, um, challenging. It is in fact possibly worse than challenging, although that sort of depends on whether my advisor and division head understand the nature of what I need to do in the absence of real mentoring in this course.

So not a lot of posts lately. I'm not officially taking a break from blogging. I intend to blog when I can. But today and until I get a little more momentum in this course, I can't.