On Gearing Up to Teach a Course

I'm a bit of an aberration (or at least my schedule is) in terms of when the courses I teach begin and end in the program in which I am working.  First of all, the college in which I teach runs on terms rather than semesters, meaning that the grading period is 6 months long instead of 15 weeks as is much more traditionally the set-up.  On top of that, courses start and stop at various time points during a term, based on a multitude of factors.  What that means for me is that the term I will begin teaching one course in February, and two more in April, the latter two being taught to two different cohorts (first-year OT students and second-year OT students).

This is my third go-round with this exact set of courses, and I think I expected to feel a little more in control and a lot more systematically organized in that effort at this point.  I'm getting there ... but I'm not there yet.  I am finding that I intermittently feel excited, nervous, prepared, overwhelmed, confused, emotionally charged, and more - which I'm guessing is in fairly close alignment with how the students who are preparing to start each of those courses are feeling too.

On another front, I am two weeks into the semester in the two classes I am taking as a doctoral student, and so I can relate to what my students may be about to experience in navigating a new course syllabus, buying textbooks, entering due dates for class sessions and assignments/tests into my calendar, etc.  I once had a classmate who compared the starting of a new class to climbing into a bed with new linens on it.  I am not sure that I am in agreement with that metaphor, but I understand the feeling of starting anew.  I hope that I am able to both put my students' minds at ease - to transmit a "we're in this together" message to them from early on in each course - and spark their interest in learning the subject matter at hand.  That's my goal for the next couple of weeks at least ...

I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the job. When my students and I discover unchartered territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illuminated by the lightning-life of the mind - then teaching is the finest work I know." ~Parker Palmer