Semester's End Reflections: In Brief

My friend Angela complained-- like a month ago now-- that I haven't been blogging. Blogs, I said, are the first thing to go when life gets hectic. It's hard to justify spending the time on them when there is so much to do. (The book reviews that are appearing here these days were mostly written back in February and March, so I have done very little writing of late.)

But this week is finals week; I am writing this Thursday morning and it should post Friday morning, and that ought to mean I have just six or seven research papers left to grade in order to be done with the semester. I've taken care of most of my other school-related tasks, so I have time to do things like blog again.

Teaching four classes in hybrid format and having a toddler and an infant at home... well, it did indeed turn out to be a lot of work. But I muddled through to the end, and I think the adjustments I made this semester worked because this semester's final projects went better than last semester's on the whole. (My 101 was not as strong as I'd hoped... but my 201s were definitely more consistent.)

Last semester I scaled back feeder assignments to reduce workload, but my experience was that this 1) deprived students of opportunities to practice things they'd do on the final papers, and 2) gave fewer opportunities to acquire what you might call "cushion" points. So I put all those assignments back in, and I think it worked out. My grade distribution is more like its normal self. Not totally: there are some students with Ds who I think in a normal semester I could have pulled through to a C, but last semester I had a bunch of students who I think normally would have gotten Bs ending up with Cs, and that didn't happen as much.

In the fall, UT will be hybrid no more (supposedly). No more Zoom, no more half-capacity classes, no more recording videos. I hope this is true. Though this semester went better than last, I have struggled to build rapport with my students, and I am tired of teaching to four students at a time and/or asking black boxes to respond. (Actually, one section aside, my Zoom classes have generally been pretty good about keeping cameras on and responding to me.) I am pretty optimistic about the fall... but of course it is easy to be optimistic from this distance!

Now that it is "summer" I have two goals (among many): get back to that book project, and get some blog discipline again. My peak period, though, is the few weeks after my semester ends and before my wife's does (because that is also when daycare closes). We'll see how it goes...