As God is my witness...
¡Nunca, nunca más volveré a dar clases de 9 a 11 de la noche!
Con toda mi credibilidad por el piso, hay que ver ahora de qué me disfrazo para salir adelante y mantener cierta dignidad en la facultad después de las terribles experiencias de los últimos dos años.
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14 comentarios:
Como Dios es mi testigo -- Nunca más volveré a pasar hambre en los campos de Polonia!
How many students? Can't you do something fun, something that's appropriate for the time of day? Hold your class at a restaurant? Have a sleepover at someone's house? Pre-record it, and show it as a video?
(I guess it shows that I went to school in the '60s and '70s.)
There were entire centuries in which I taught night classes. The world has never been the same.
I found it was good to propose a theme for discussion, some engaging topic that could be counted on to keep people awake.
For example:
Do you like Waffles?
Its coffee that keeps people awake, TC.
It's summer, you could hold it outside. That might keep you all awake. I'm sure you've thought of it, it's probably against the rules.
hahaha! I love all your suggestions.
You need to know two awful truths: 1) our classrooms are very depressing 2) I'm a boring teacher and I can't think well at night.
Those are 3 truths, actually... There's a fourth: I am terrible with numbers ;-)
Maybe you could create a loud bang about half way through. Music might help. Loud, banging music.
Oh, now I realize I forgot to answer you, AJP: the noises, music and loud bangs are natural inhabitants of our faculty and they usually invade our classrooms... So no, that wouldn't produce any novelty or change.
But I'm determine: nest year my class will be at 5 PM. I have just one worry about this: if I fail then... I may not blame the late-night schedule.
Julia,
I fear you are too modest (that's always a pleasure, of course) and perhaps even being a bit disingenuous about all this. I reckon your students love and respect and admire you as much as we do, and feel every bit as fortunate to be your students as we do to be your friends.
At any hour.
I strenuously second the proposal of your earlier commenter (well, actually, I guess he was talking to me -- but he knew you were listening) that you become acquainted with the intensely addictive and destructive yet curiously, unarguably, good for the intellect, powers of coffee, as soon as is conveniently possible.
(By the way, when I taught night classes at the university, I found the attention of the students to be much greater if the classroom had windows that could be opened. One building had classrooms over a creek, that was always good. Another building was had no windows and lodged terrible giant scientific mechanisms, cyclotrons & c. That was a catastrophe. I asked to have the creek back. But in later years I could not persist in this folly of teaching full classes at night for almost no money and absolutely no "benefits" (as the necessities of life are sometimes called in El Norte).
(Perdoname -- a personal aside.)
And now, in any case, just last week, in one of those science buildings, a generator malfunctioned, and leaked toxic diesel oil into the creek (Strawberry Creek it is called), creating a terrible poisonous odour and killing off wildlife (as the fauna are called) for miles.
Ay caramba! Even worse than coffee!
Tom,
Thank you, you're very sweet!
I specially enjoy your personal aside. How I wish to have the most remote possibility of class near a creek, be it clean or poisoned...
And must say I have coffee in my veins but I'm definitely a diurnal creature. One cannot fight this.
Un beso!
(Oh, PLEASE! how many awfully evident mistakes I made in my response to AJP. Sorry)
He's right, and coffee is good for you. My daughter hates coffee, but she drinks it sometimes to wake up. I make lots of mistakes in Norwegian all the time, I really couldn't care less about mistakes. Also they are very Latin-sounding ones, nothing to worry about, expressive rather than negative.
Without mistakes, life would be as boring as a machine. Thank the gods for coffee and Latin-sounding mistakes in Norwegian!
(By the way, I think those pan-linguistic gods are probably not related to the God Scarlett invoked as her witness. No, they are the great, infinitely error-tolerant Hispano-Viking deities!)
The idea of the Hispano-Viking deities is wonderful
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