alphasarah

Normal College Semester: 15 weeks @ 150 contact minutes a week =  2250 contact minutes.
College in High School Semester: 34 class meetings @ 40 minutes each = 1360 contact minutes.
And that's before shortened class meetings for things like School Spirit week (this week), assemblies, etc.  Which, if this semester is anything like last time I taught at the high school, is approximately every other week.

I'll save you the math - at BEST I get 60% of the normal contact hours to cover a semester's worth of material.

Today was to be the first day of class.  I think I've figured out how I can cram things in but OY.  I'm not all that pleased about this turn of events.

When I don't blog for a while, you get bullet points.

• Meeting with Old Plumber must be re-scheduled because the guy who did the actual repair last May was sick today.
• Fashion on Tuesday: cream colored tunic-length sweater belted with skinny red belt (would have been better with a wide belt), brown slacks and red flats.
• Fashion on Thursday (today!): my favorite glen plaid slacks, mustard-yellow cowl-neck shirt, khaki blazer, brown sling-back heels.
• Kid: still precocious.  Not napping at school anymore, so she goes to bed pretty early.  Which is kinda nice.
• SCA: I have taken it into my head to enter Kingdom A&S.  See, the theme was my idea, so I feel a LITTLE obligated.  I finished a set of 13th c. gowns for HRH Liadain that look awesome - I will be able to finish up the write-up of them next week after I actually have a picture of them on a person rather than just on my dress form.
• Still loving the AutoFocus time management system.  I have knocked off SO MANY little niggling tasks that had been languishing - like taking a ton of wire hangers to be recycled, ordering omega 3-6-9s for the kiddo (hard to find them in brick & mortar stores in pedi doses), and other similar things.
• Work: high school is weird, but the kids are pretty receptive.  Their grades, so far... not so hot.  But there's only been one quiz and a reading quiz, so hopefully they'll get the hang of it and/or actually ask me for help.
• Dissertation: progress is being made.  I'm producing mini-reports for Bob that I would love to get additional feedback on - let me know if you want to read them!
• I totally used up my perky earlier today, so I'm just going to say donate to March for Babies!  We're 1/3 of the way to our goal, yay!  And marajade648  is coming to walk with us again, doubleyay!  (So if you wanted you could donate to her, instead.)
• BSG cherry: officially popped.  Are you happy relentlesstoil ?  At some point I will go back and watch from the beginning.
• Speaking of tv, CURSE YOU CBS!  I USED to be able to get HIMYM web streaming... not anymore.  So I've missed the last ... 2 or 3 episodes.  :^(
• The freecreditreport.com commercial with the dudes at the Renaissance Fair amuses me.  I'm not exactly sure why.

In bullet list form...

• Spent 7 to 7.5 hours yesterday cleaning the house.  Am only about half done.  But ZOMG the bathrooms are extra-shiny and we have clean sheets & mattress pads and I even rotated our mattress all by myself.
  
• Super Sekrit Projekt going well, very amusing to me.  More to come upon its completion.
• Put in plastic garden border this weekend.  TRex LOOOOVES worms.  Loves them, is very gentle with them, moves them from the dirt we just dug up to our perennial bed and then covers them with more dirt.
  
• That 100 bulbs for ten bucks box I bought at Aldi?  Totally worth it.  Hopefully this weekend will be lovely so we can do some planting.
• CF light bulbs are cheaper at Aldi than at Target.  PSA and all that.
• TRex has eczema, not some other bizarro rash, so yay.  Also, 35 pounds according to the ped's scale.
• Swimming gets less annoying every time I do it.  But oh, freestyle kills me ded.  And I do need different goggles... no matter what I do, the minute I start to freestyle they fill right up.  And I was very averse to pool water in my eyes even before I wore contacts.
• I think it says something about my fitness level that I'm planning to go for a "short" run today.  Y'know, only a mile and a half.  But, woe, my iPod is out of battery-juice and I didn't have the cable in my bag, so I will be running with ENVIRONMENTAL NOIZE!
  
• Final exam Thursday.  Have spent most of today doing the administrative nonsense that goes with it.  Now administrative nonsense is all done.
• Hooray for webcams and skype, they mean I get to actually SEE Sam instead of just typing at her.
• Per the cleaning spree... I have two things warring within me.  Thing 1: being thrifty/eco-conscious and not throwing things away willynilly.  Thing 2: decluttering, which means occasionally throwing away things that might have been repurposed.

My miscellanea gun, she is out of bullets.  In conclusion, I give you a macro in search of a picture.

My mind, you haz blowed it.

Whatever issue I was having with my night guard last week (or the week before, whenever it was) has resolved itself and I'm happily back to sleeping very, very soundly with it in.  I don't know if there's actually a connection between my sound sleep and the night guard... maybe I'll have to do a systematic study.

I got 2 compliments on my hair today - one from a stranger and one from a friend.  So yay on that.  I am very much still loving it.  It's kinda like my hair was in 11th grade, actually.  I'll have to dig up a copy of my junior pic to really compare.

There is only one HP geek in my class.  See, I talk about how language creates meaning and use words like "muggle" and "kneazle" and "Voldemort" to illustrate how these concepts didn't even exist until J.K. Rowling made them up.  And only one person snickered.  I also got to tell the story of baronessmartha, mittenydoom, and me accidentally spoiling the book for the poor woman in line in front of us at Wegman's.  Poor woman, I hope she's forgiven us.

New gym clothes make me happy.  I can totally understand why people live in their workout pants - I got these (in both black and grey) and they are oh so comfy, and they don't look awful.  But I know what Saint Tim would tell me if he knew I was considering wearing them anywhere but the gym.  I also got this shirt and this one in white & grey.  I already have a couple of tank tops, so I'm set in that department, and when spring/summer roll around I'll have to get a couple more pairs of shorts.

Sadly, I managed to forget my snazzy new exercise gloves today and so I had to deal with rings pinching and losing my grip due to sweaty palms.  Thursday I will not forget them, but Thursday I won't be doing the Gravitron which is really when I need them most.

I win at office hours. See, my office hours run from 8:45 - 10:00. I got here a little after 8:30, plunked down at my desk. It is now 10:01 and I have gotten done all of the things that I really needed to be on campus to do.

And so I am going home, finding an OnDemand workout to do (baronessmartha, I will report back with what we have, and if the tae bo is there, I will try it), and then cleaning up and going to collect my mother at the airport. (and buh, Delta lists her flight as scheduled to leave at 4:45 this afternoon but actually leaving at 9:54 this morning. WTF? In any case, "awaiting takeoff" makes it sound like they've left the gate, which is good.)

I just got my quantiative course evaluation from the last course I taught at UMass.

Question (5=Almost Always, 1=Almost Never	Mean	SD
The instructor was well prepared for class	4.64	.5
The instructor explained course material clearly.	4.82	.4
The instructor cleared up points of confusion.	4.82	.4
The instructor used class time well.	4.73	.47
The instructor inspired interest in the subject matter.	4.18	.75
The instructor showed a personal interest in helping.	4.73	.47
I received useful feedback.	5.00	0
The methods of evaluating my work were fair.	4.91	.3
The instructor stimulated student participation.	4.73	.47
Overall, how much do you feel you learned?  (5=much more; 1=much less)	3.73	1.01
Oveall rating of instructors teaching.  (5=almost always effective; 1=almost never effective)	4.55	.52
Overall rating of this course.  (5=one of the best; 1=one of the worst)	3.82	.75

This is what I've decided teaching race realtions in an introductory sociology class feels like - paining the Sistine Chapel with an 8" paintbrush while wearing mittens.  So of course I made a PP slide to illustrate this to my class - I figure it'll be good for a chuckle at least.

I was gonna go with a "carving something gorgeous with a chainsaw" metaphor but, well, we all know that's possible.  (I really, REALLY wanted to find either a David or a Venus de Milo done with a chainsaw, but not enough to spend more than 2 minutes googling for it.)

...and I totally am understanding why people say this drug is crazy-making. I am sapped of all motivation. I really, REALLY need to be writing a lecture, but I just can't bring myself to do it. It doesn't help that it PAINS me to try to treat issues of race relations in the U.S. in the way that you pretty much have to in an intro class - there's just not enough TIME - teaching this class is really making me believe that the UMass way of teaching intro makes much more sense (no general intro, just topical ones - social psych, social problems, race/class/gender, etc.).

Probably also doesn't help that despite my being OH-SO-CLEVER last night and putting my pills in my purse so I wouldn't forget them this morning, I forgot them this morning. Yes, I am a GENIUS.  So I took my "after lunch" one when we got home and my "after dinner" one after dinner.  One more to take tonight, then tomorrow I'm down to 3 pills.  The hives, by the way, have not made a reappearance, so that's good.

I really think I'm just going to give up on getting lecture written tonight.  I am too fried.  We do live life at a crazy pace in my family... In October we had company for two weekends and I was out of town for five days.  November isn't going to be much less crazy... we had M's parents here last weekend; this weekend M has open house at work and then we're possibly speaking at a March of Dimes thinger Saturday afternoon (did I mention that we're signing up to be an Ambassador Family?).  Next weekend is Aethelmearc Rapier Academy and another MoD thing Friday night (Pink & Blue night at the Sabres game), and the weekend after that is already Thanksgiving!  Gah.  I also have an application for a dissertation fellowship due on the 15th (it's basically done, I'm just waiting to hear back from them with some guidance on the budget/resources end of things), and am still working on sorting out my job situation for the spring.  Oh, and I'll be applying for one full time, tenure-track position for next fall.  There's an opening locally, and I'd be stupid not to try for it.

Apparently what it takes for me to be a REALLY GOOD lecturer is to turn me loose on material that I really, REALLY love.  I suppose I knew this...  but today was the first time I got to really lecture about symbolic interaction and it was far and away the best lecture I've given, possibly ever.  So that was nice.

The question is, how do I get myself that excited about the bits that I just am not as interested in, for the sake of consistently delivering lectures that good?

Happy New Year.  I'll leave it to belmikey to actually know what year it IS because I can never keep track.

We still haven't joined a temple here, so today we went to the children's services at Temple Sinai.  The weather was GORGEOUS and we actually had the 45-minute service out in the lovely courtyard (which made taschlich much easier, as the fountain is out there).  TRex loved it because of all the singing and clapping.  She wasn't the youngest one there, but she was the youngest non-infant.

Other than that, a fairly lazy day.  Walked down to CVS to acquire shaving cream, milk for the kiddo, and sunglasses for her as (we assumed) her last pair got lost when she was in MD.  Of course, we got e-mail from the grandparents today saying that they were, in fact in Grandma's car.  Oh well.

Tomorrow promises to be madness, as TRex's school is closed but both of us have to teach.  She'll be home with me for the early morning, then on campus with a combo of M's department secretary and M while I teach, and then I'll pick her up again from the secretary because M has to teach at noon (and I teach until 11:50).

Ummmm... I have nothing else.