Second weekend as a teacher and I’m bushed.

My schedule just got shuffled last Monday and instead of teaching an English 1 class, the department asked me to teach an English 30 instead. Supposedly, I’m better off with an English 30 since it’s business communication. I did that for two years including using all the latest trends in the workplace (IMs, intra-office e-mailing, Lotus Notes…) and I’m confident that I can handle the class. But the trade-off’s a class with freshies.

Some would have probably gone “Hallelujah!” with one less class filled with freshies but English 30’s a general education (GE) course filled with half-interested upperclassmen who are taking the course just to fulfill one lousy requirement. And I tell you, older upperclassmen who are catching up with their GE subjects spell bad news for any teacher. You’d just have to hope that these oldies are responsible enough but chances are, these were the ones who were too lazy to complete the GE requirements in their first two years of school. You can only pray it turns out otherwise.

I immediately announced to members of my English class through e-mail that they have a new instructor for the class. I still had no idea who their new instructor would be. A few e-mailed back their disappointment. I still had their diagnostic essays with me, and I figured I’d meet them one last time.

It’s kind of overwhelming to sit there and have about twenty kids pleading you to stay. In any case, there’s nothing I can do anyway and I just had to confirm the news. I had to go. I should’ve brought a camera to get snapshots of those nalugi faces. But you still have to filter who suck-ups are (or those who think that I’m an easy instructor and they’d just breeze through my course) and those who really like for me to stay (in any case, it’s just based on first impressions).

It’s kind of amazing though. Only two class sessions and you can sense real disappointment in some of them. I’m just really hoping that they we’re expecting a fun semester with me and English 1, hence, the disappointment. In any case, I would’ve made sure that it was fun. If I’m going to teach, at least I’d try to make it fun for me (and maybe for them too). I just don’t hope that those faces looked glum because they thought my class would be easy and it’s a high grade that was taken from them.

Suck ups or not, it was the first time for me as a teacher.

On the lighter side of news, LifeSpy is now getting an average of close to a thousand unique eyeballs a day (actually breached the 1000 uniques per day mark). We also now have close to 500 feed readers. I just hope the recent surge of traffic keeps up. We hope to double that number by the end of the year.

Check out these other posts:

1. First day of classes and it’s Independence Day
2. No more Mr. Nice Guy
3. UP Fair and I hope no one dies this time around
4. Hanging tough, managing… barely
5. First weekend as a teacher