Wednesday, September 14, 2011

A Teacher's Work is Never Done

Looking at my blog stats caused me to see why someone looked this week at my posting from November 9 last year. I went back to that and found I was writing about doing hard work then on revising two course for Spring Semester knowing that would "make next year easier." Well, here's to report that plan didn't turn out.

The two courses I worked on last fall have to be done all over because the textbook publisher brought out new editions of the book associated with these courses. One of these has to be revised, too, to satisfy both master's and doctoral requirements at the same time. And I've inherited a course for spring semester from another faculty member. She agreed the online web site needs to be revised, and in addition I've had to figure out how to do many, many activities differently because the number of students has increased by 50%. And at this same time I'm also trying to develop a totally new course for spring semester. Life did not get simpler.

At work we try to practice what we preach to students -- that nurses need a self care plan to deal with the difficult work they do. Today at lunch we were talking about this a bit. I said my plan was to try to keep my stress level down low enough that I wouldn't take it out on anyone else!

And the students I will have in the "inherited" course in spring are in my fall course right now so it is 50% bigger too than it was last year.

And I just took a burned apple crisp out of the oven because I didn't set the timer. I kept working on the computer waiting for the timer to go off. Well it doesn't go off if it is never set! Oh, well, if not more damage from stress than burned apple crisp, it won't be too bad.

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