Start of New School Year

The semester starts a week from Thursday. There are two retreats over the next two weekends. I'm fairly excited about this year, because I can be in with both feet. In the past I had to balance participation against language study and family transitions (arrival, pregnancy, new babies). I'm going to try to get to most of both retreats. Weekends are harder for us, but Emily's planning to rely on some other spouses to help with bedtime, which is a big relief.

I'm feeling a bit more confident about teaching, although I know I'll have up and down days. This semester I'm going to use google groups and create a group for each class. Most of my challenges in teaching in another language relate to getting feedback and figuring out how much the class understands. With these groups I can create discussion boards to which they can post. I can also post information on topics. So if I am worried about plagiarism I can post resources. If I do a lecture on different organizations I can put up the weblinks. If I do group reports I can have them share some of their basic materials. I can also send lecture notes to the whole class via email. I think it will up communication. I'll have three classes. The two main ones have 30 and 18 students and then I'm co-teaching a course with 12. I think it will be manageable. However, since I have so many students I probably won't be able to grade the final papers myself (which I tried this semester, and worked, but took a really long time).

The school should have more equilibrium this year than in the past. There are about a dozen core teachers. One is on sabbatical and we have one new teacher, so it's relatively little turnover compared to the past. I'm hopeful that things will be a little calmer.

We're starting to think about plans for the next year. We want to be settled in P-town for the bulk of next fall, but we're going to try to spend a fair amount of time with family also. The hope is that we can get a month during the summer with each family unit and then also have them come during the fall, and also do Christmas with the two families. Logistics will be a little hard to figure out.