I wrote down some notes while at my parent's cabin about a blog on men, hunting, and digging trenches, but I'm too stressed about the upcoming semester to flesh it out at this point.
Why does it seem that I always set out to prepare dutifully for my fall classes during the summer, only to wind up scrambling to figure out what the hell I'm doing during the 3rd week of August. My only hope is that it can't possibly be worse than last spring when I showed up (first time in teaching career) to my first day of a class without a syllabus and without realizing I didn't have it.
4 comments:
Everyone's scrambling, and if they say they're not, they're lying.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Really, Mr. Counterintuitive, it's just another version of the everything-bad-is-good-for-you argument. There's something truly authentic about procrastination.
I actually believe a little bit of my last claim. I find that when I really prepare (overprepare, have every minute of the class accounted for) that my teaching is stale, flat. Some of my best teaching moments have come from those times when I'm really unsure about what I'm doing.
Anyway, I hope this makes you feel better.
Yes, yes, I concur. When you're underprepared, it keeps you on your toes!
I always get those pre-semester butterflies (if that is what you can call them.) Basically it is fake stress, however, since when I just sit down for an hour or so I can map out the entire semester and feel pretty comfortable. I know, of course, that there is a lot more to it than that, but that very process of mapping it out gets me back into the "oh yeah I know what the hell I am doing" mind set that I easily fall out of.
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