Workaholic?

I'm on the fourth day of the fall holiday that both teachers and students were very much looking forward to. Why have I done school work everyday? I guess with the end-of-quarter crush some grade updating was unavoidable, but I seem to be unable to just do nothing. I remember a time when I actually stayed in my bed for  an entire day, now I keep looking for projects. I must love to be busy (and anyone that has known we for a long time just fainted with shock).

The first extra project I just took on is pretty cool though, I am going to teach a university literature course. The school is California Miramar University, an on-line school out of San Diego that a ESL teaching friend of mine works for. The class will be an on-line survey of American colonial literature, from the early explorers to the 19th century. It's no secret that I would eventually like to teach university, so I'm psyched for this opportunity to try it out. So I'm partly spending my week looking over the textbook and sorting out my syllabus.

Then there's my Yeats presentation at the American Conference of Irish Studies on the 22nd to prepare for. I'll spend most of this week making sure I have my 15-minute speech ironed out. I've never been to such an event, let alone be a speaker, so the nightmares that I will look foolish in a room full of Yeats experts is growing fast. It is exciting though. Yep, I'm a workaholic (and possibly a nerd).

Note to teachers: my biggest revelation of the first 2 months of teaching has been "start simple." If you check out my website and course overview (sites.google.com/site/scottraymoure) you will see I have a ton going on. Computer lab segment, grammar work, journal days, vocabulary notebooks, and service opportunities, not to mention the actual unit topics (laden with way too many texts to survey). My second quarter motto is "streamline." Maybe it's the early developmental stages of 8th graders, but it takes a lot of time to introduce and master a concept as simple as a pronoun, not to mention discussion the effects of the Information Age on culture or dig to the deep message of, and answer to the title question of Soto's essay, "Why I Became a Writer." Baby, baby steps. then retrace the baby steps.

Happy holidays