Mary C. Henry

As the semester comes to a close, I find myself thinking about my classes this semester and considering ways to improve them the next time I teach them. Two of my classes (hazards and landscape ecology) will be put on the shelf until next August, but I will be teaching physical geography (GEO 121) again in just over a month (yikes!) Now would be a great time for me to make notes about what worked well, how the timing of some things worked and didn't work, and other thoughts for next fall. Even though I'll be teaching GEO 121 again soon, there is a good chance that I'll forget about some changes I wanted to make before then, so I should make some notes about that, too! One of the things that I struggle with in GEO 121 is making the class interesting and more interactive. The lecture part of the class has 90 students and we meet in a lecture hall with seats that are bolted to the floor and I'm stuck at or near a large stationary podium. This setup is not conducive to stud...

Well, I had really intended to update this more regularly, but that hasn't happened and now the semester is almost over. Next week is our last week of classes, then finals are the week after that. We are on a pretty late calendar this year with grades due on December 22nd! Between now and then, I will be spending a good amount of my time grading. Grading papers. Grading exams. Grading projects. I assign written assignments in all of my classes, because I think it is useful and valuable, but this time of the semester I often start second-guessing my wisdom about this when I have 80-some-odd papers, 16 research papers, 9 project reports, (and a partridge in a pear tree) to grade- not to mention hazard journals, labs, and exams. My friends on Facebook are used to me complaining about grading and often ask why my teaching assistant doesn't do it. Well, I only have a TA for one class and his/her job is to grade labs and exams. I have usually graded any papers myself. It's not th...