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| title | date | tags | draft | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I'm annoying but I plan to change that (WN30) | 2025-08-25 |
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true |
Doing
I taught my first college class! It went far better than I anticipated; by about half an hour in, I fell into my natural teacher mode and it was smooth sailing from there. I'm excited to work with the kids1 and see how I do throughout the semester. I still have deep-seated imposter syndrome about teaching (adjunct lecturing) the course on a macro-level, but the day-by-day is at least seeming more feasible.
For context, the college I'm teaching (adjunct lecturing2) at is my alma mater. I transferred there as a junior from community college, and this course is the first one I took there — with a professor who went on to become a mentor and a personal friend. She scared the shit out of me then (she still does) because she is so good at what she does, so experienced, and (seemingly) effortlessly incredible as a teacher. The idea that I have to, in some way, fill her shoes — teach her class, in the same room I took it, nine years later — is absolutely terrifying. Who am I to tell these kids how to teach?? I have very lovely friends who have talked me up and assured me that I'll do a great job, but I think I'll never be able to shake the feeling that I'm not doing what she would have (or not doing as good as her). Of course that's ridiculous and I need to be my own person, and it is within this contradiction that I must exist.
I've been to my classroom a few times this week getting some of the bigger projects done. I'll have time to put on finishing touches on the teacher conference days next week, but I'd rather cut open 96 tennis balls at a relaxed pace than rush to do it the day before kids show up.
Site-wise, I'm continuing to backport content from an old blog. This week I've added...
- Here's What I Was Listening to in 2015 (01-07-2016)
- Star Wars Has a Problem with Women and We’re Going to Fix It Together (12-14-2015)
Reading
Watching
Playing
Listening
I did a lot of podcast listening this week! Cleaning and organizing my classroom has been a good opportunity for it because it's mostly mindless labor. I've been digging through Into the Aether's Kingdom Hearts episodes (Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep | Bonus and I Norted Myself) plus the Song Exploder episode on "Miasma Sky."
I've been listening to a lot of Pure Particles by The Bug Club. It has some of my favorite songs of theirs ("If My Mother Thinks I'm Happy," "Pure Particles," and "A Love Song," primarily). I haven't been quite as enthused with their more recent releases — Very Human Features was good, and I didn't really care about On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System3 — but Pure Particles through Rare Birds is such an incredible run of quality.
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I've found myself referring to the students as "kids." They're juniors and seniors in college, so probably at most around ten years younger than me. I'm not sure if this is a speech pattern picked up from teaching middle schoolers, who I can safely call kids, or if I'm an old lady now. More on that later. ↩︎
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This gag entertains me and I will continue it all semester. ↩︎
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The exception is "Have U Ever Been 2 Wales," which is an all-timer. I wish they had gone more in that direction for their album releases. ↩︎