Observations...

I've been a bad, bad blogger. This last semester really got away from me, and frankly I didn't pay all that much attention to my teaching, other than the perfunctory preparation. I promise I'll be better now!

So, looking back on this last semester these are my observations:

--Upperclassmen/women are not really more responsible than my first-year students. This is my first time teaching juniors and seniors, and sadly I wasn't really impressed. They didn't attend class, often didn't do the readings, and were more likely to challenge my grading. I had a couple of great students, but overall I was hoping that the quality of students would be better.
--I went back to being a TA last semester, and I can FOR SURE say that I definitely don't like being a TA. I thought it would be less work, yada yada yada, but in reality it was really stressful. I had to develop discussions based on readings that I disliked and felt were unnecessary. I had to deal with a professor who was disorganized and whose syllabus said one thing when Blackboard said another. I am, admittedly, a control freak. But still. I am so excited to go back to teaching my own course in the spring!
--I need to work on being more empathetic...and by that I mean that many of these students have not written research papers before (a travesty, in my opinion) and I need to remember how daunting this is. I am not going to ease up on my expectations, but I do need to be more understanding about the particular challenges of researching in an archives. They are required to use archival sources and come up with a (relatively) original thesis. It can be quite scary and intimidating when you have a slew of newspaper articles, letters, diary entries, etc... on a particular topic but have no idea how to put them together into a coherent project.

What are your thoughts about this last semester? Anything you'll change?