21 September 2014

Final Pilgrimage Meeting (Tues 09 Sep)

Based on the new itinerary
I really should have written something before now.  But this semester is turning out to be more day-to-day work than I anticipated, considering I am teaching mostly on-line classes and not face-to-face, to accommodate being out of the classroom for effectively two weeks.  Of course, it was supposed to be entirely on-line, with no face-to-face, but early in the summer I was told we must offer at least one f2f section of the World Civ survey for incoming freshmen.  And that means I’m not entirely out of the classroom this semester, which would have been weird anyway.  I have a plan to cover the material during the period of my absence, so everything’s hunky-dory there. 

Nevertheless, in typical Absent-minded Professor fashion, in anticipation of an “easier” semester, I had already decided to put all that “free time” to good use in much-needed overhauls of two of my classes … and that’s turning out to be more complicated in the case of one of them than I really expected.  It’s amazing how much of my material throughout the semester is integrated – content, exercises, and so forth – so that changing something here necessitates adjusting something there … and there … and there … and discovering that to do this at some point later in the semester necessitates me having done that sometime earlier to properly set it up.  No wonder you hear the tales of the older professors whose lecture notes haven’t changed in forty years!