posted 2005/08/18 at 15:07
I swear, I am such a night owl that when I have to go driving when the sun is still in the east, it totally throws off my orientation. Seriously.
Anyway, the TA training session was supposed to go from 0900 to 1600, but it ended around 1130. Not that I can complain about getting out so early, but if they knew it was going to end that quickly then the least they could have done was start it later in the day. There's a reason most graduate English courses are held late at night: we are, for the most part, creatures of the night.
(Speaking of late-night English courses, on both Tuesdays and Wednesdays I'm going to be stuck on campus until around 2200. Tuesday I don't have to go in until late afternoon, so I guess I'll try doing yoga before going into class, but Wednesdays shall, in all likelihood, have to become my day off of exercise. Oh well, I don't have classes at all on Thursdays and Fridays, and it's not like I'm going to be doing anything with my Thursday nights at this point, right?)
During the training session today, I went ahead and said that the class all the first-time TAs take -- which I took last fall despite being an RA -- just didn't do me a whole lot of good. Thanks to being exposed to critical teaching and liberatory pedagogy in my undergraduate career, I already had strong ideas on how/what to teach before I even started grad school, and in all the teaching-related courses I've taken so far it hasn't been covered by any of my instructors. Tomorrow morning I have to go back to campus to have my syllabus reviewed, and I'm guessing that will be when any fireworks between me and the higher-ups in the English Department will be ignited. Thankfully I've done all my reading up on the subject of pedagogy, and after some of the personal stuff I've been dealing with lately, I'm not going to sugar-coat my opinions or try to please people. I've been charged with making twenty-three students into better writers and better citizens, and that's exactly what I'm going to do.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon