Life on the other side...



"It must be nice to be done" has replaced "When will you be done?" as the phrase I hear most commonly these days. Done, that is, with graduate school.

Yes, it is most definitely nice to be done.

So now I'm teaching, which I haven't had the chance to do for a while, and it's great fun, even if I'm teaching more of a herd than a class (~350 students in the lecture hall. However, it's an 8AM class, so only about 25% of the herd is awake at any one time.) It's funny how students adapt. The kids who are engaged and ask questions gravitate toward the front, so by the 3rd or 4th lecture, it is more like teaching a class of 30 in front of a studio audience of 320. I should take boxes of Rice-a-Roni to class with me.

I just finished writing the first exam with my colleagues teaching the other sections. This is real chemistry, so the tests ask real chemistry questions. That means getting four instructors to agree on good questions and just as importantly, good answers to those questions, within the confines of what is reasonable for these students to know, which takes some time. I think students would be alternately horrified and amused and surprised to see their four instructors debating the possible answers to questions on a test. I can almost here the shouting, "But shouldn't you guys have this all figured out by now?!" The notion that all this should be cut and dried, and have one precise answer isn't realistic. It's a fun process, though, probably not one that would inspire great confidence from first year students (though it should). No one wants to see the sausage being made.

Meanwhile.... Writing research proposals to send out in order to find jobs. Trying to get data collection going for another research project. Trying to rip apart my dissertation into publishable chunks. So there's plenty to do, probably just as much as before, but it is definitely nice to be done.

We went camping over the weekend, and one of the other guys at our site brought along his readings from his graduate class.

Yup, it's nice to be done.

Posted: Wed - September 30, 2009 at 12:17 PM        

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