Slow-motion teaching

The pile of books dotted with scribbled sticky-notes suggests that I've been hard at work assembling syllabi for fall courses even though I'm not quite done with my summer online course. For me, it's all over but the grading; my students, on the other hand, still have their noses to the grindstone (if they know what's good for them!). Their final portfolios are due Friday, so right now I hope they're hard at work revising their essays and preparing them for submission.

It feels good knowing that my students are working harder than I am, especially since I spent so many weeks working really hard to set up the class before my students ever opened their textbooks. That's what made this online teaching experience both pleasant and rewarding: advance preparation. Because I spent the month of May writing assignments, posting resources online, and preparing narrated powerpoints, after the course opened I was able to relax and devote no more than four hours a week to reading and responding to my students' discussion posts and writing assignments. I was easily able to keep up with the work while attending to my parents' health problems in Florida.

The one drawback, though, was the uncanny sense that I was involved in a conversation running in extreme slow-motion. Last week, for instance, my students listened to a mini-lecture that I wrote and recorded two months ago, so ideas that struck them as fresh and new were already, in my mind, old and stale. It's especially disconcerting when students respond to something I can't remember having said.

Two students dropped out early when they realized that "online" is not a synonym for "easy" and others have missed occasional assignments, but the class has cohered around a core group of diligent students willing to attempt some really interesting writing and offer helpful suggestions to their classmates. After all that work putting the course together, actually running it felt like a holiday.

The holiday ends on Friday when students submit their final portfolios to the online drop-box. Reading and grading them will be the final hurdle before I can close the books on my summer course--just in time to open the books for fall.