Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Time to play The Game

Being that I'm on 50% paternity leave, and that apart from research, the other tasks have not been reduced accordingly, I told myself that I'd cruise through the teaching of my main subject. In the sense that I would rely on last year's slides, that is, not in ay other sense. Normally I spend a lot of time revamping the slides material each semester the course is taught, because one always discovers ways to make it better (like Presentation Zen), and because each set of new students helps highlight areas where I need to work on my lectures.

It's called progress.

As it often does, however, reality struck in a big way when the supposedly parent-friendly administration dealt me a bum hand with respect to lecture hours.

Thursdays from 5-7 PM and Fridays from 3-4 PM. Snake eyes.

What this entails, is that I have to work a lot harder to retain the same percentage of students in the lecture hall. Consequently, I'm spending at least as much time as before updating slides and coming up with all kinds of things to make the course appealing to the (thankfully large) percentage of students who opt to be there for my lectures.

I might as well start bringing my own intro music and a video entrance package.

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