Week 9

This week is shortened because we will eat turkey and give thanks and then start to turn on the Christmas machine. Yay! I love it.
The weather is dicey. I remember one year (maybe it was 1985) when Thanksgiving Break became a whole week long because of snow and ice. I remember the relief I felt to be away from some ultra challenging classes. I taught one class in someone else's room using other people's curriculum that contained lots of films and videos that I had to preview ahead of time. That was tricky because the films were always checked out to someone else and once or twice I had to show something that I had not seen before. That made me real nervous and with good cause. Trying to pull off a lesson with unknown material and to keep the attention of a classroom stuffed with hostile learners was gut grinding. The extra snow days gave me extra days to breathe.
This week my current classes were placed in the hands of the research librarian who would present some new ideas about finding sources for research projects. That means I had to turn the class over to someone else. Again, that can be a nerve wracking situation. How will the students respond to a new face and new ways? Will they buy into the presentation or will I need to suddenly become the scowling heavy and remove someone for a "little chat"? Once the students are in front of the computers, will they sneak onto porn or game sites? Will some disappear on the trip over to the library? Will "Lester" (a made-up name) go all bonkers and ask questions that relate to his own strange and skewed perspective of the world? Will they all grow bored and then disturbingly restless as the librarian begins instructing about "truncation" and other really cool features of search engines like Google?
The whole "free" day of a guest teacher is fraught with worry and anxiety. And then, to top it all, snow and ice diminished the class counts by about 40% so this vital and by now urgent piece of research procedure will be left in the hands of the students themselves. The term is too far gone to schedule a make-up session. Week nine had a dramatic ending.