Let's Go!

We're back to teaching again!

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah!

I spent Monday planning.

I spent Tuesday planning.

Then on Wednesday, I got back to teaching ... at 14:40. I spent the majority of Wednesday sitting on my thumbs and pacing around awkwardly. I showed up at 9:00 to do some last-minute prep but wasn't able to focus as well, a combination of anxiety and excitement.

Finally 14:40 came and I got back to my favourite class of the week: English in Music and Film. The first lesson is a bit of a slow one (all of my first week lessons are basically just admin and organisation) but I got my students to write some film reviews and see what they can do and what we need to improve. I'm excited about this class and I'm really happy with the selection of films I have ready to go (Full Monty, Singin' In The Rain and Hot Fuzz are all on the curriculum!). I'll try and keep up with uploading the materials I use to iSL Collective as I go.

After that I met the students I'll be teaching (guiding? Assissting?) for Independent Study. Again, I'm excited by all of the projects my students have in mind and I have a good feeling about this semester.

Likewise, my Communication and business classes on Thursday went well. I got to meet new students and give them a rough overview of the course for the next semester.

I spent Friday planning.

No classes on Friday.

The start of the semester is where I get hit by a combination of procrastination and perfectionism that are not a great combination to have as a teacher. I ended up prepping all of my classes for my Wednesday schedule and neglecting to spend quite as much work preparing anything for my other classes. Luckily, I can reuse most of my material from previous semesters at this point.

I wonder if part of it is a desire to stay in this job a little longer. Am Iputting in a lot of time into some classes to prove my care while simultaneously leaving some as "unfinished business" as a subconscious desire to not leave?

Maybe, I don't know, do I look like a psychologist to you?

I've been reading more in between all of this. I'm a little over three-quarters of the way through Amberlough, the book I started last week. It's taken a very sharp turn away from "dashing spies drinking martinis out of delicate glasses" and into "rumpled sociopaths drinking gin straight from the bottole". I'm not objecting, of course, if anything it's making me more determined to read the rest of the series (the "Amberlough dossier" as author Lara Elena Donnely calls it).

I used to run an abortive YouTube channel where I tried to match the games I played to the books I played and sadly I don't know a lot about spy fiction to really match the two. The best I can come up with is Among Us and I'd much rather have an evil alien shapeshifter in my midst than one of Van Der Joost's evil little fascist henchmen.

The real question is what I'm going to do with the book once I finish it. My colleague makes a habit of giving his books to our students, but there's a few problems with that. Firstly, my copy of Amberlough is not in a great condition. It's scratched, beaten and a little torn. Secondly, there's a scene where someone uh ... let's say he uses a very convincing tongue to convince an accountant to send coded messages for him.

Yeah ... maybe we don't give that to students.