It's been active here this week. Along with my regularly-scheduled course - for which I have calculated that I am probably earning about CHF 3 per hour, if I count all the hours that I spend in preparation for it - I will also be giving a reading course in English as a Second Language (ESL) beginning in October. The schedule and course work are already planned out for me in that one and I can coordinate with the regular instructor. So even though the stated hourly pay for language courses is less than for "content" courses, the hourly work rate may actually work out to be much higher simply because I'll spend less time of my own in preparation. I have 18 students in the first class and only three in the ESL class. What fun!
In addition to my regular course, thanks to the good-will of the regular ESL instructor, I also spent some time this week sitting in on the ESL class, in order to avoid a too-abrupt transition from what the students are used to. We also had our first faculty meeting of the term this week, which gave all of us a better idea of the university's plans for the upcoming year - and even into the future, assuming that the global financial crisis does not disrupt those prognostications. It was a good meeting on the whole and my colleagues seem very open and friendly so far. I simply feel a bit overwhelmed by trying to learn all the new names.
In this third week, I am finally getting confident enough to recognize my students well enough to call them by their names, instead of simply getting by with a smile and a wave. We have a three-hour session once a week. If I saw them more often, I believe that I would have learned their names much faster. But I do enjoy only having to teach once per week although I do wonder how well they are learning. They may have the same trouble with taking in a whole lot of information at once, only to have it gestate for a week before learning a whole lot of new information. The good thing is that I have covered much of the overall conceptual framework already. Now, it's time to start demonstrating the concepts with real examples and driving the concepts home through case studies. If today's class was any indication, they seem to enjoy that approach and it will get the course away from being totally instructor-centric, even though I'll still have to channel discussions carefully and keep them on track.
Unsurprisingly, it is the female students who seem the more serious from the get-go. In my experience, it usually takes males of this age some time to settle. They like to "test" a bit more. Once they've made a few half-hearted challenges, realize that there will be little encouragement for such and that there is every incentive to buckle down and get to work especially if they have become even slightly motivated by the subject matter in the meantime, some will perform at least as well as their female counterparts. The others will find their own rhythms eventually. But each class has a different dynamic and this one is still in development mode, an appropos term in the circumstances.
Friday seems to have arrived in record time and I am thoroughly looking forward to my "off" day, before I have to get busy for next week's classes. I will also need to find time before next Friday to prepare the equivalent of a final examination for a student who has received official permission to receive credit for the course that I teach, provided that he/she passes the exam that I prepare.
So, it looks as if there is still a busy weekend ahead.
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