20160112.0658

Work continues, as it of course does. Yesterday's went well enough. I met with my classes for the first time, laying out the syllabus for them, and it seemed to go over well enough. Tomorrow will see diagnostic writing exercises; I have my students do them so that I can get a view of the kind of writing they do. Having that view helps me to determine how to begin working with them as a class, and I tend to build review time into my course calendars--even if I do not always avail myself of it. So things are off to a decent enough start in the classroom.

I have much reading to do. My scholarly texts are piling up on me again, and I need to winnow out that pile quickly. Too, my teaching load is of an unfamiliar course and with textbooks new to me; I need to plow through them to get ahead of my students at the very least. And I need to find a text I can use to model some of the activities I need to do for the term, which means yet more reading in support of me writing the kinds of things I ask my students to write. No freelance work is currently on offer for me, though, so I have a bit of time to tend to that reading.

Perhaps I can get on to some of the needed writing, as well. In addition to needing to draft samples of the assignments I ask my students to complete, I need to draft assignment sheets for those assignments. One of them is already in progress and is, in fact, nearly done. I need to have more than one of them ready, though. I think I will not work on the others in the same way that I have worked on the one I have in progress; drafting the text offline works better for me than doing so online, as it happens. (Thinking with hyperlinks in place is markedly useful, however.) And the writing I need to do for my own other projects remains in need of doing, of course. I did not attend to it during the last month nearly so much as I ought to have done, and I will doubtlessly feel the lack of it in the coming weeks.

It seems, then, that I remain busy as the new semester begins, shifting once again the kind of work that needs to be done but altering in no real way the quantity of it--unless it will be, perhaps, to increase it more than the initial bump at the term's beginning suggests. I will somehow get done all of what needs doing, as I have no other recourse. I can only hope that it ends up being worth the effort; I still have no idea how effective have been my earlier efforts.