Now we’re in Canvas, a new LMS – learning Management System. It seems pretty straightforward, and with the Canvass app I have on my phone, I’m now able to better use the downtime I have on the bus in the afternoons to respond to emails and discussion posts, freeing up more time in the evening when I get home for family-related stuff. And ensuring I respond in a more timely fashion to those posts and emails. I’m looking forward to that. Because when burnout sets in – as it inevitably does – the discussion posts tend to go by the wayside as do the emails, at least in a timely fashion. So I’m hoping the new app will help me cop a better attitude.
But Canvas still has mysteries.
The Faculty Journal, for instance. I found it once over the weekend and thought, hey, this is a great place for me to keep my teaching journal, since it’s built in to the software and I don’t have to go looking for it.
Ha ha, he said. Because since I used it that one time, I have not been able to find it anywhere. So back to other, more old-fashioned ways of keeping that journal, such as on this blog and, most likely, little to not at all.
You may get the feeling I don’t enjoy teaching all that much. While it’s not my chosen profession, it’s not all that bad. I’m not sure I could do it full-time, though maybe soldiering through full-time for a while might be okay if it brought other benefits. And it’s still better than journalism. Which has been my mantra for quite some time now.
My dream, of course, would be to teach creative writing. But that would probably mean I’d have to do some creative writing of my own. And maybe even publish some of it. See “fringe benefits” of teaching full-time. But I let a lot of excuses get in the way of me and my creative writing, so switching careers wouldn’t likely do all that much to help me out. I mean it might for a time, but I need sustainable change. Journalism didn’t allow that, or at least I didn’t allow that for myself as a journalist. There were so many things wrong with that particular career choice. It’s neat for people who find that niche, but it wasn’t working for me any longer.
Enough of that. All this angst upsets my stomachs.
Back to the teaching journal thing.
I have hopes that, going on to my second semester of providing a lot of advance guidance on the argumentative synthesis paper, and supplying my own example of such a paper as the semester progresses, that I have at least tamed that beast a little bit. I still had some students not get the paper, but far more got it last semester with my new approach than did in the past. I’ll see if that holds true this semester.
If I see that holding true, I want to spend more time this semester helping my students see the relevance of learning how to annotate articles, pointing out the benefits not only for this class, but for any writing or research they have to do in the future:
1. Highlighting is only part of it. You have to write in the margin to remind yourself WHY you highlighted. You might remember some of the why, but you won’t remember it all.
2. Highlights and annotations in digital or physical media mean you have your thoughts captured on paper so you can compare and contrast sources and have them ready to insert as you write.
3. Having your annotations on the source you want to use will make writing a works cited page easier.
I’ll have to noodle on this and see if I can add some more advantages or nuance to what I’ve already got.
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