Back to the grindstone

Share

Tomorrow I begin teaching at MCCC again; I’ve got three sections of composition this term, all on Mondays and Wednesdays, and all at the satellite campus. I won’t be driving that much, and I’ll have lots of days off, but I’ve never taught more than one class in a day before and now I have three to deal with. This should be an interesting challenge for me, especially since I’ll be teaching MCCC’s Composition I as a fifteen-week course for the first time ever. Even though all of my classes fall in a five-hour window, I am concerned that I may begin to run out of energy near the end. Still, if I want to teach full-time then I need to be able to handle three classes in a day, so this will be yet another trial for me as I work towards full-time employment. I’ve been spending today putting the final touches on my handouts and getting the course Websites designed, and as usual I’m feeling a bit of nervousness about how tomorrow will go. It would be a bad sign if I wasn’t nervous, though; if I’m nervous then I’m on my toes, and more able to adapt the classes to my students’ needs.

If there was a theme to this month or so of time off from work, it was catching up on things. Over the past couple of years I had bought a lot of books and DVDs that I had never gotten around to watching, which I kept in separate piles to go through at some point. The time for doing that never seemed to come, though, so I forced myself to work through those piles as much as I could. I finished the pile of DVDs this past Saturday, and although I couldn’t get the book pile finished (there was just too much stuff there), I’ve got it down to five books, two of which I’m in the middle of right now. (The Scarlet Letter and Gandhi’s autobiography if you care.) I’m glad to have those admittedly small weights off of my shoulders, and I’m hoping that this will allow me to focus on other things here, but I must admit that now I’m kind of eager to get some more DVDs to watch and books to read. (I won’t be able to do that soon, though, since I won’t be getting paid again until the middle of the month.)

In addition to those things, I also got back on track with a couple of things that I’d neglected after Dad’s death, namely playing piano and playing DDR. I’ll save the DDR details for my diet and dance game log as always, but it’s felt good to get back to music after so long of an absence. I’m building my repertoire of other people’s songs back up right now, and I’m hoping to get back to composing in a couple of weeks. One of the reasons I wanted to get a new computer was so I could run new composing software; I spent about $500 on composing software in my late teens, but the company that made the software went out of business long ago and my old software wouldn’t even run on Windows XP, let alone Vista. I’m not sure where I’ll find time for songwriting once I’m back in the groove of teaching, but I’ve done a pretty good of managing my time this break. I only hope that I can continue to do such a good job as I go back to teaching in the coming weeks.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.