Teaching again

My second semester teaching at ABAC started this week. My class schedule changed almost twice a day, making it very difficult to prepare for anything. I taught 11 or 12 different sections at 5 different levels, each time thinking that class would be mine for the semester, only to find out I’d have a new schedule again a few hours later. It was frustrating!

We’ve all had to learn to be ridiculously flexible here, and I thought that by now I was able to roll with the numerous changes sure to come my way working in this culture. But this week was a serious test of my patience and adaptability. But I got through it, and hopefully by next week I’ll be able to settle into a routine and actually prepare some lessons.

For the moment I have 8 sections – 5 sections of English I Convo, and 1 section each of Basic English I, Basic English I Convo, and Basic English II. That’s just slightly more than my contracted 18 teaching hours, and apparently I’ll get a little bit of overtime for the extra classes.

I’m looking forward to actually beginning to teach. I feel confident about the course material and how to teach it this semester. And I’m also very happy with the new department chairs. I feel like I’m receiving much better guidance now than we did last semester. So… overall, once the schedule settles down, I think I’m in for a challenging but great semester of teaching!