As week two of teaching wound down, I found myself starting to put together a routine, although it’s still incredibly chaotic to me as I adjust.
Since I’m doing the reading along with the students, I’m racing to stay one step ahead so that when questions come up, I can answer them thoughtfully.
I also added a new teacher skill (?) to my toolkit today: grading. This mostly involves wrestling with Canvas, which I am slowly learning to hate, in order to read student reflections and discussions on the readings. This is really interesting and the students sometimes have great insights, but man, when you have 72 students x 6 articles, that adds up. I spent three hours and got about halfway through, so I know what I’ll be spending some hours on this weekend.
If you look at that schedule, you fast realize only 25% of my time is spent in the classroom. The rest is everything else. And what’s doubly terrifying is in Fall, I’ll have a third class in the mix, not just two, and I’ll be delivering the lecture portions, not just listening and absorbing. Hopefully, I won’t have quite as much reading (since I’m doing a lot of it now) and will just refresh the syllabus with any new articles/exercises I want to add. But that’s a problem for August.
Yikes. I think you are making it too hard for yourself. I usually assign two or three articles or videos and students respond on Slack in a class channel that everyone in the class can see. They get a green check and Complete/Incomplete in the grade book. I’ve never had issues with plagiarism because it’s “public” enough that it would be obvious to other students. Also I use question prompts that focus the learning on how it’ll help them make decisions on their individual project. Encourage them to respond to another’s comment. (My husband makes replying to another student a requirement for his class). I pick one or two comments to start discussion in class, trying to pick different people each time.