Still around!
I am real damn busy. I'm teaching German 102 this semester, and lesson planning has started taking over my life. It's like a 24-hour job. I have to figure out what I'm going to teach, what activities would be useful to teach it, how to organize the activities such that the students won't get bored, and copy countless handouts, little worksheets, chapters from the book (the bookstore doesn't have them), etc. I'm just hoping after the first couple weeks things will get easier. Maybe with a little practice, the lesson planning will start going faster. I'm a little handicapped in what I have to do for it because my class meets 3x/week instead of the usual 5 that the other sections have. So of course that means I have to cram lots of material together into fewer meetings. Fortunately my classes are longer, but I really never know how the timing and pacing are going to roll out. Tonight I'm going to dinner with a friend of my dad's who's here interviewing for a job as a doctor at UW student health. He's interested in German and wants to go eat at the Essenhaus. So that should be fun. Just wanted to give people a short heads-up: I am still among the living. :)