{"id":573898548,"date":"2025-12-31T20:09:01","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T01:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573898548"},"modified":"2026-01-02T17:37:54","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T22:37:54","slug":"my-class-prep-begins-to-shudder-back-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2025\/12\/31\/my-class-prep-begins-to-shudder-back-to-life\/","title":{"rendered":"My class prep begins to shudder back to life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Doing work was a bad idea. It made my head hurt. <\/p>\n<p>The first two times I wrote the previous sentence I wrote &#8220;It made my hurt.&#8221; It took three tries to get &#8220;head&#8221; into the thing. You know, the critical part &#8230; both of me, and the point I was trying to make. <\/p>\n<p>Anyway. <\/p>\n<p>Maybe, for the new year, I&#8217;ll re-name the blog &#8220;Anyway.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I wrote my old English teacher. Or the woman my keen world wide web research skills convinced me was her. Maybe we&#8217;ll find out one of these days. By the way, nothing takes you right back to grade school quite like writing someone who used to meticulously assessed your grammar. I spent some time on that letter, is what I&#8217;m saying. It was probably too light and breezy by the time I was done. Also, it was edited to within an inch of it&#8217;s life. Usually those two things are at odds with my process. I&#8217;ve no idea what this means. Maybe my former teacher can explain it to me. I wrote a few other people, too. <\/p>\n<p>Then I did some more work. I did some more wrangling of my inboxes. This, I&#8217;ve learned, is best done in doses. Otherwise I just might delete everything in a fit of delight. Some things need to be kept. Some things need to be filed. I tend to use the inbox itself as a To Do list, so I try to keep it under 30 items. Somewhere between 20 and 30 is where my mind switches from &#8220;Can do!&#8221; to paralysis by volume. And that&#8217;s a good speed for an academic, otherwise you might get ideas.<\/p>\n<p>Currently my work inbox has 30 emails, but eight of them are from me, and one other one will be dealt with on Monday. That&#8217;s a good number, for now. I&#8217;d like to keep my personal inbox, also a To Do list, under 20, but it is presently sitting at 33. There are a lot of articles in there to read. This, too, will be done in stages.<\/p>\n<p>I also opened, I dunno, roughly 30 new tabs for a side project I&#8217;m considering. I am considering too many side projects. <em>But I&#8217;ll have a lot of time for them when the semester begins!<\/em> (I will <strong>never<\/strong> learn.) <\/p>\n<p>I had a look at my course evaluations from the fall. Generally quite good. One student complained about their commute. If that&#8217;s as bad as it gets, I had a good term. Here are a few thoughtful answers. We request the feedback, I do not insist it is all positive. <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I really loved taking this class and learned so much from Professor Smith. He uplifted me in moments where I didn&#8217;t know I needed it. Professor Smith gave me academic advice on numerous occasions and was very gracious with our entire class. Overall, this class was a 12\/10!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Professor Smith is one of the best professors I\u2019ve have had at Rowan University. He is a great professor, and I will be taking more of his classes next semester.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This class was always one I was excited to attend due to the fact of Professor Smith\u2019s way of communicating to his students.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I could not have imagined any other professor for this class. I will be taking one of his classes next semester, and the only reason I decided to take it is because he is the one teaching. I&#8217;m looking forward to having another class where he is the man in charge.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s legitimately a once in a lifetime professor take this man\u2019s class whenever he offers.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Professor Smith made it a very comfortable setting that has allowed me to thrive. It is clear he cares for this subject matter, and cares about his students more. He is a vital part of this program.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Maybe some of these classes are pretty good. I can tell in the evaluations which comment comes from which class, but I can&#8217;t tell which person. One of the two classes represented here, Criticism in Sport Media, will be taught again in the spring. The other, Organizational Communication in Sport, I&#8217;ll teach again next fall.<\/p>\n<p>I made calendars for the spring term. I started scribbling on the new calendars. This will be handy for about three weeks. Most importantly, I managed to lay out roughly half of the new Rituals and Traditions course in outline form today. There&#8217;s a lot of prepping to be done beneath that, but I know what half the units will be like, and when. I&#8217;ll give it a few days and then come back and look it over, for quality control. <\/p>\n<p>So it was a solid afternoon. Let&#8217;s see what this builds into.<\/p>\n<p>One work day down. I&#8217;ll take off tomorrow to watch too much football. And then, on Friday, I&#8217;ll set a timer to see how much I can do before I throw my hands up in disgust. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Doing work was a bad idea. It made my head hurt. The first two times I wrote the previous sentence I wrote &#8220;It made my hurt.&#8221; It took three tries to get &#8220;head&#8221; into the thing. You know, the critical part &#8230; both of me, and the point I was trying to make. Anyway. Maybe, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573898548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rowan","category-wednesday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573898548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573898548"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573898548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573898550,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573898548\/revisions\/573898550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573898548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573898548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573898548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}