On the Boston Common during the holidays
I’m starting to learn my way around Wordpress a little bit. It’s going to take some time, as will building the new site. But I think it’ll come pretty naturally, so I’m not going to obsessively try to master it in a day or two. The relatively small number of people who look at the site will probably be friends and family anyway, so they’ll be more patient as the format evolves. In any case, I won’t really need the categories, tags, and bidirectional linking until there’s a bunch of stuff on the site. At this point, it’s one static page and a half dozen blog posts. I’m adding new content daily and also migrating some of my content from here, such as the White Pine and Freethinker research posts. So I have time.
There’s no class meeting this week of my one-day-a-week course, World History 1, due to MLK Day. So this week, I’m 100% virtual, which is an odd but not uncomfortable feeling. I assigned some work (on the handbook) to this class, and we’ll return to history content next week. The other classes are set. I graded all last week’s student work and posted the content and plan for this week.
I try to stay pretty current, from day to day, on responding to student annotations and discussion posts, so that by the end of the week most students have received some interaction and also a grade. The ones who wait until the very last minute to do their work, get grades on Sunday, since the deadline is Saturday at midnight. Honestly, they probably get a bit less in the way of interaction, though. Especially if they’re just reiterating things other students have already said. I do give them feedback, however, if their work doesn’t stack up to expectations.
Early in the semester is the time to set some expectations, I think. Both in terms of the timeliness of engagement, and also the volume and quality. That’s another reason I’m having the students who are writing term papers this semester read and respond to what I call the handbook (How to Read, Research, Make Notes, and Write), which I’ve made available to them for free in the learning management system. I want them to be thinking about this process throughout the semester, in the hope that when we get around to the term paper it won’t be a five-alarm fire and they’ll have some understanding of what they need to do.
The weather outside the last few days has been cold and gray, with occasional flurries of snow. This morning is sunny but the temp is -9 and the wind is blowing. So I guess I’ll be staying indoors, riding my stationary bike and adding to my prep for the next several weeks of my courses. I’m hoping I can stay ahead, despite the fact that I’m rewriting the US History 1 and World History 2 texts. Rewriting, however, is much easier than writing from scratch. So it seems like less of a lift than last semester, when I wrote my World History 1 text on a just-in-time basis.
Toward the second half of the semester, I’ll probably figure out how to package one or more of these courses and make them available to the outside world. In the meantime, I’m trying to make them as self-contained as possible. It’s good work, for a cold bright winter day!