Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Bad quarter, bad!

I woke up this morning with a sore throat. I was convinced I had strep, but the doctor claims its just a virus. Yuck! The first week and a half of the quarter were destroyed by my own lack of motivation and Beorn's rotator-cuff injury. When Beorn is hurting he likes lots of attention and has trouble sleeping. If he is having trouble sleeping he tends to make sure that I'm not sleeping either. Maybe I'm just a light sleeper, but he makes a lot of loud noises and rolls around in bed. Now this virus has wiped me out. Tonight was my first "review session" of the quarter. Instead of a required section, this quarter the class I'm TAing for is having us run weekly review sessions. I was expecting about 10-20 people, but 35+ showed up. I was exhausted so I didn't get everything prepared. Since its a geography class I was hoping to show them google earth, but couldn't figure out how my laptop was supposed to connect to the campus network. :( I'm disappointed with my teaching techniques but feel like I have limited time and energy to prepare for these review sessions. The prof gives the TAs her lecture notes but doesn't want us to share them with the students. She wants us to give them handouts and review materials but not directly from her notes because she doesn't want them to get away with not showing up to lecture. The whole class is about memorization, but I'm not allowed to tell them what to memorize. Also, there were two TAs last quarter prepping materials for review sessions, but I'm supposed to make up all the review materials again from scratch. I feel like I'm asking the students to do busy work and doing lots of busy work myself. I'm also behind on my own schoolwork and looking forward to at least three days of illness. Sickness makes me whiny.

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