Today I signed my termination form for OSU. It feels so weird thinking I’m about done here. In two weeks, I’m departing Oregon (a state I’ve grown to love so much!) for Penn State. Woah. So much packing to do!

Some quick end of the term reflections:

Teaching 4 classes is do-able. Teaching 5 classes is insane. I won’t be attempting to do that again.

I am sad that I won’t be teaching technical writing again (at least not for a few years). The course is fun to teach, and I see so much I can improve on: 1) grading (I graded too softly and am just now getting a hand on how to assess more accurately); 2) scaffolding (breaking up the larger assignments so that they are more clear and more step-by-step based; 3) looking at more sample documents so that students can get a clearer idea of what works and doesn’t work; and 4) doing more peer review of classmates’ documents.

I am happy I get to teach business writing over the summer. The major challenge here will be cramming 10 weeks of material and writing into a 4 week course. I have never taught a whole course in 4 weeks. The closest I could get to saying that is the 4-week units I taught as a middle school reading teacher. But this is a world of a difference. I’m excited for the challenge, though.

So, what’s next? Catching up on some projects that have been neglected over the last 10 months, preparing my business writing class, cleaning my office and email inboxes, packing up so that I can move to State College in about seven weeks, and catching up with some old friends and professors over coffee, dinner, or drinks.

This term I tried to remedy this by moving the project up during the term and moving the resumes and cover letters to the end. However, due to being overwhelmed with grading, I wasn’t able to finish grading the reports before Friday, so no more classes, and what do you know, as I am about to finish up, a case of academic dishonesty. So it’s back to email to ask for students to come into my office.

Some things I want to do next term in regards to the proposal:

1) Focus on the sentence level a bit more, especially in regards to clarity. Many of the proposals that I read don’t explicitly state what they are proposing. When they do state what project they are proposing, it’s not necessarily clear or concise.

2) Discuss primary audience and secondary audience in more concrete terms in regards to a reports. Though I stressed multiple times that general audiences, such as “students,” don’t read business reports, students are still writing in their proposals that students will be a secondary audience of their final report. I need to stress explicitly that a secondary audience of a business report would be individuals or small groups of people who either a) the primary audience sends a copy to, or b) the writer sends a copy to in addition to the primary audience. I think a role play might make this more explicit, rather than just talking about it.

3) Have a more explicit discussion about how to build one’s own credibility in a proposal — how important research is to this. While I stressed that research was necessary, I found quite a few proposals lacked research, which left students proposing projects and not having enough background information or blatantly admitting that they didn’t know information in the proposal that would take easy preliminary research.

4) Engage in activities to show how research methods are meant to be directly related to investigation topics. After developing a list of topics to investigate, the methods one decides upon should directly correlate to those topics. It should answer how one will go about answering those questions.

5) Since we’ll have laptops, we can actually create tables for budgets and schedules together! Exciting! I’ve shown students how to do this, but I still get schedules written out in paragraph form or budgets with money expressed in different forms within the same column.

Overall, I just need to break this big assignment down into smaller parts and tackle them methodically. Some of these activities/concepts I can still incorporate in this term’s class over the next four weeks, of course, so this is good.

Last term, this was a bit more understandable. It was my first term teaching the course, and I overloaded myself (and the students) with the amount of work. I revised the syllabus to require a bit less and tried to spread out the work differently. However, I’m finding I didn’t plan very well still. Being behind in work now is a little bit a matter of circumstances (such as traveling too much for conferences, especially early in the term). But it’s also that I didn’t think about how my technical writing and business writing schedules would wind up with conferences on the same week (week 3) and turning in major assignments at about the same time. I made a huge scheduling biff, and the consequences are there: poor feedback, hurried grading, and delayed returning of paper. Heck, I have one minor assignment that I have still not finished grading from week 2!

Sara and I were talking the other day about this position (the bridge appointment in the English department). When she had it, she said she had to work harder than she did in graduate school, and that she’d be up until midnight grading and was constantly working. I feel the same: I put in 8 hour days, work again after the gym or dinner, sometimes until 11:00 or 12:00, and even sometimes until 1:00 or 2:00 (and once until 5:00 am this term). And then there’s the weekend. While I had some fun this weekend, I think I also worked around 14 hours or more. I’ve learned to focus more this term and procrastinate less (one can tell from my decreased blogging).

This last paragraph is to just complain; it’s not meant as a justification of being behind in grading.

I shouldn’t even be writing this right now, but it was weighing on me as I was grading. I feel slightly better, so now it’s back to work!

Today, I have considerably fewer, though I also teach two classes today. However, I’m currently sitting here waiting for my third appointment, but she, much like the previous student, hasn’t shown up yet. I imagine it’s because it snowed last night.

Oregonians in the Willamette Valley freak out when it snows or ices. They can’t drive or they fear driving, and everything seems to shut down. Luckily, today nothing shut down (that concerns me at least), but if I’ve already had two students out of three miss conferences today, it looks like I’ll be rescheduling quite a few for next week.

By the way, I am very tired of résumés.

What I didn’t tell them was that this was my résumé from 2003 when I was applying for middle or high school English teaching jobs. In one class, I heard each group refer to the author as a “she.” I did tell them that this was my résumé as we moved into whole class discussion of it (and I also told them I had thick skin and could take a lot of criticism¹ — and the students did a great job of offering ways to improve the document). While we had a great conversation about the résumé, I was really struck by how gendered teaching is, something I already knew, but was still surprised by.

¹ There was a lot of criticism. When I sent this out in 2003, I thought it was a great résumé. I didn’t realize at the time how many problems it had — including too much information in some areas, too small of a font, not enough attention to some key words, and some poorly constructed phrases that didn’t really mean much.

I’m excited for break: I’m headed to Europe on Monday, so there will probably be some pretty light blogging over the next month. But I have a lot to get done before I leave, so I’m going to get back to work on some other stuff.