I haven’t been able to do much blogging since the move, but I thought a brief update might be of interest to some. The semester started three weeks ago and since then I’ve been teaching 6 hours a day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. While that might seem like an ideal schedule to some, I’m finding that that amount of animated teaching leaves me feeling like I just ran a marathon and rather low the following day. On Wednesdays and Fridays I am grading papers, preparing quizzes, going to meetings, and talking with students. Monday is my day to figure out what to say for 6 hours. I’m thankful that I have two sections each of OT Survey I and NT Survey I so that I don’t have to prepare for 12 hours of new teaching each week. The downside is that these are all large General Education courses, and when your smallest class is 62 students, there’s extra work with student interaction and grading.<\/p>\n
I am enjoying teaching, though I think I had expected to do better after being sidelined for 6 years. The physical component is much harder than I expected. It may help for me to explain that I feel that I have to work extra hard to keep the interest of a large number of non-Bible majors who have not necessarily adjusted to college life and who are spread out in a large classroom that is any teacher’s nightmare.<\/p>\n
I am surprised that the NT Survey class is much easier for me than the OT. That won’t last, but since I never took students on a tour of the Garden of Eden or the Tower of Babel, I am not nearly as comfortable teaching those sections as teaching on the life of Christ.<\/p>\n
From the questions in class and the assignments turned in, I am generally impressed with my students. Many are in their late teens, but quite a number are a bit older following army service or years in the work place. I probably have a dozen students who are children of TMC profs or administrators, and I’m starting to learn of other interesting connections.<\/p>\n
I am using PowerPoint, but I am providing handouts which have all of the text from the slides. That scares me a bit, as I wonder if they ‘ll tune me out instead of taking notes. That too forces me to work harder to keep their attention. I decided to go this route because these are lower-division classes and my chief goal is not to teach them how to copy text off of slides.<\/p>\n
I do not allow phones to be used in class for any purpose, but I do allow computers as long as the wifi is turned off. I’ve only confiscated one phone so far.<\/p>\n
I required all of my students, for both OT and NT, to memorize Psalm 1 for the first quiz. Then I required them to write it out again on the second quiz.<\/p>\n
I spoke in the Bible Department chapel last week. I began with a long and unique pitch for IBEX. Applications for this spring are at about 15, and there are less than 5 for each of the following two semesters. I am stunned, shocked, horrified, and mortified. <\/p>\n
The family is doing well, though with five days in the office and two night classes, they are seeing a lot less of me than they are used to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I haven’t been able to do much blogging since the move, but I thought a brief update might be of interest to some. The semester started three weeks ago and since then I’ve been teaching 6 hours a day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. While that might seem like an ideal schedule to some, I’m finding\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}