Whirlwinds: Teaching Days and Apprentices

Yesterday was one of those teaching days where I had plans going into the day, with back up plans because I wasn't sure the original plans would work, and then I went with the original.  Let me explain, in case it's useful:

--I had planned to do peer editing with my English 101 class.  I got rough drafts by e-mail, and then I couldn't open most of them, even when students tried to give me editing/access permissions.  Grr.  Some of the students sent in their rough drafts other ways, but I wasn't sure that everyone got the message.

So I went into Monday thinking I'd do Wednesday's lesson (intros, conclusions, and transitions) yesterday if I didn't have the rough drafts.  I was almost sure I was going to do that.  But I printed the rough drafts that arrived over the week-end, and lo and behold, I had them all.  So I shifted back to the original plan, and we did peer editing.

--I hadn't done the speed writing with objects week 1 writing with my nonfiction writing class, and I thought I would do that yesterday.  I knew that one student would be absent, and I wondered if the whole class might be there on Wednesday, if I should wait.  But I also feel we're now in the point of the semester where on any given day, someone will be absent.

We've been in a reading intensive time in that class, so I thought it was good to mix it up a bit.  So I went with the plan:  writing about objects on Monday, one more essay on Wednesday, along with planning for rough draft writing.  But I didn't make that decision until literal moments before the class started.

It went really well, much like the experience I blogged about last week. But unlike last week, I put random collections of objects on the tables.  I did that primarily because there was no time to set up the room before students got there because I have my assigned writing center hour from 11-noon, and the class starts at noon.

My teaching day felt hectic--no down time at all.  I am thinking I need to rethink my office hours, but in some ways, I'm not sure there's a great alternative that works with our current housing, with my spouse commuting down with me to work on our fixer-upper house.

We were both exhausted yesterday, so we settled in to watch The Apprentice.  When the movie first came out, I had no interest in seeing it, but as is often the case with biopics, I slowly changed my mind as I heard other people talk about the movie (interviews and reviews and passing remarks).  It was an amazing piece of work, intriguing to see how the characters made us believe that they were the actual characters that have come to loom so large.  But it was also a good choice for last night because it didn't require much intellectual work--it's not a complicated movie.

I remembered hearing interviews when the movie came out, and so now I'm listening to them again.  I first thought about seeing the movie when I heard the lead actor interviewed on NPR--astonishing to see that I heard that interview back in February of 2025.  Time just zooms along.