My second live class will come to an end tomorrow. Fortunately, there isn’t a lot of preparation I have to do for it — I will give a lecture similar to the one I finished with my last live class, and then let my students give their final presentations. And I’ll order pizza for the guests who are coming to help evaluate my students. And that will be it.
But there’s no rest for the instruction-minded. Another online class starts the very next day, and my previous online class is not yet finished. The good news is I believe I have finished transforming all of my classes into an all-objective test format and those are pretty much cut-and-paste jobs now. The bad news is that they still take about an hour each day, and with two of them going at once for the next three weeks, that will be a big bite out of my mornings. (Maybe I’ll do one in the morning and one in the evening.)
This will be the thirtieth online class I have taught. My three-year anniversary at UoP is coming up and after that I am (I think) eligible for a raise. Which is good because teaching these classes isn’t really that much fun. It’s not that hard but it’s also not a challenge anymore. And it is occasionally very frustrating to see low-quality students flail about, fail, blame others, or slack off. Seeing the good students excel is a more rare event and it doesn’t make up for the downside. But that’s why they call it “work” and not “fun.” As I’ve learned, other colleges offer similar sorts of frustrations, so I can either suck it up and do it, or abandon my sidelight job.
