And tomorrow it begins....

Tomorrow begins the third year of my tenure as a part-time faculty member at the College of Idaho. I got back yesterday from a wonderful McCall retreat and spent most of today (minus some time in Boise dealing with car stuff....) getting ready. Luckily there is an administrative assistant in the education department to make all of my copies so all I needed to do was drop off the papers for her. I did a little tweaking of some documents and the schedule but otherwise, most of it was taken care of. I also changed the schedule a little bit but that will just give me a more time to focus on lesson planning and discipline.

As for my Effective Studying Class, I am totally changing things up and I'm excited but nervous about it at the same time. I am moving away from practicing writing and spending more time of skills that will really help them in all of their classes. I understand that writing is important, but they all are taking a writing class anyway and can use the ASC if they need help so I'm going to be incorporating more discussion, reading and note-taking on scholarly articles and technology. I'm changing the group projects and implementing an individual project as well as only one paper. The midterm and final will be in-class because honestly, I'm so sick of reading bad papers. I'm also hoping to incorporate these skills into what they're doing in other classes, especially with notes, tests, etc. I'm very nervous but hopefully some of the things I'll be doing will be successful.

I'm looking forward to Happy Hours, even though Kelsey is leaving us for Boise State. Speaking of Boise State, I'm also looking forward to "War Making and Peace Making", my BSU class. There are about 14 of us, a few people never talk but the rest of the people have interesting comments. I'm working really hard to be open-minded with all of my classmates and so far have been doing a really good job. There is one kid, a newbie to the school and the program who thinks he's got it all but has a hard time asking a question without consulting Niki first. He'll learn... he reminds me of my freshmen who overcompensate and then get better with time. It's nice to have Mark, Zach and Tim in the class and last week when we went out, a certain individual didn't drive me crazy like usual. That was pretty swell. The books seem interesting and there are only two papers- hallelujah. Tomorrow, after teaching three classes, I can look forward to a glass of wine and "Paris: 1919". I can take it.