Back to class

By -
It's that time of year again. The students will be arriving this week and classes will be starting next Monday. I feel pretty ready, since I started working on class planning extra early this year, but I still need to finalize some things and catch up on some new reading assignments. We have a lunch with the new graduate students this week, but otherwise, everything happens next week. I am teaching five days a week this semester. That may seem like an unreasonable complaint, but teaching is not the only work I do. I need time for research and service*, too- not to mention time to plan what I teach. I like semesters when I have one or two days a week that I can work at home. My schedule this semester won't allow that, so I'll have to be more creative about planning my days and work schedule. I'll post more as the semester gets rolling!

*I am missing an OGA meeting next week, since I have class. If I didn't teach every day, I might have been able to go! (If it weren't the first week, I could go, too).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to classes with almost no concern for COVID

By -
Image
Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash   Classes start next Monday and I will be there with my KN95 mask on. I might be the only one since Miami University is not requiring masks despite CDC recommendations for our county being to the contrary. I can't see how this will go well. People are still being hospitalized and dying of COVID. Why should we pretend otherwise? I had hoped they would start with masks with all the students returning to campus, but that is not the case. It's very frustrating. I am not immune compromised, but I'm sure there are those on campus on who are. This policy just seems very misguided. I watched the webinar posted on the U website and that was even more worrying to me. It sounds like they want to rely 100% on personal responsibility for keeping COVID numbers down. Yes, there are people who will be careful, but not everyone!  So that's how I'm feeling a week out from classes. I do get to teach Landscape Ecology again- it's only
Read more

Teaching with Documentaries

By -
As I prepare for fall classes, I am having my annual dilemma over content I want to share with my students. This semester I'm teaching two classes that I've taught before: 1) Global Perspectives on Natural Disasters and 2) Global Change (I'm team-teaching the second one). In both classes, I use a textbook but also assign additional readings and show short and long documentaries during class.  I like to think of the videos as multimedia reading assignments that give students something to think about and discuss. But just like articles and books, I can only show the same documentaries for a while until they become outdated. So each time I have to decide if it's time to retire that favorite video or show it one more time. A great example is The Trouble with Malaria . It's an episode of the CBC series " The Nature of Things " and gives an excellent overview of the disease and struggles to fight it. But it was made 20 years ago! I've been showing it in GE
Read more

Summer Plans

By -
We've reached the halfway point of the summer here at Miami (we start classes on August 24th), so it seems like a good time to take stock of what I've accomplished and what I still plan to do this summer. Progress Most of my work this summer has focused on REU and with the help of my student, we have made some good progress on a project. After some debate, I decided to stick with using some methodology that we've already used in this research, but apply it to different data. Most of the work done so far on this project (and the pilot study before the grant) focused on using fall imagery to detect Amur honeysuckle in forested areas. This shrub expands its leaves earlier in spring and retains them later in fall than the overstory tree species, and thus far, we have used fall imagery in our analysis (we felt that too many other plants were also green in spring). Recently, I started to reconsider this approach and tested some spring images for a conference presentation this spr
Read more