Back to School!

The fall semester started on Monday. My first week went very well. This is the first time I have taught 5 days a week, and also multiple classes in a semester. I was afraid of feeling a bit overwhelmed after the first week, but I surprising don't - instead I'm highly motivated and pumped up. A couple notes of new things that worked this week:

• Spent a good 30 minutes discussing email etiquette in Intro to Computers. This was an excellent idea.


• Minimizing lecture on the basics and having a full out discussion. Wrapping class up with a mini 10 minute lecture. I liked this format, and the students seemed more engaged.


• Make email policy clear on the first day: I will not answer emails after 10:00 on weeknights, and rarely on weekends. This makes teaching a day and weekday job, not a 24/7 job.


• Clearly describe the objectives and how we will meet them each semester.


• Establish classroom norms.

In other news, to celebrate a good first week, I bought some new pants. I LOVE the Express editor pants, but they are just too expensive. I went to Express yesterday, tried on probably around 30 pairs of pants, and then decided on the wide waistband in gray and a light pinstripe. I liked the regular editors, but they just didn't want to fit quite right - either they were too short, too long, too tight, or too loose. They needed 1/2 sizes in pants I think.

I did finish taking off the wallpaper in the office. I haven't done anything since. I'm decided if I want to paint the bottom half blue and leave the top half white while adding some sort of wood divider, or all blue. I appreciate any reader suggestions. The room is a huge mess right now because everything is piled in the center of the room.

I'm currently working on researching computer mediated communication in relation to online courses. I've compiled several articles and books. The reading part is fun. This week I'm moving into the more unfun part: organizing information into presentational and paper form. I'm presenting this as a training session on September 8, and hope to submit to Central States to present in April also.

Hopefully I'll have something more interesting to blog about next week.

School's Eve

The Fall semester starts tomorrow. Coming in to the weekend, I felt completely unorganized and unprepared, but after spending some time looking over materials, I realized I'm in much better shape than I thought. This semester I'm teaching Public Speaking M,W,& F, and KTS Intro to Computers on T & Th. I have 70 students registered for computers. I also have a late start online computers course that will start in October. One good thing is that I taught both of these classes this summer, so everything is fresh on my mind.

This afternoon I decided to start the next big house project: The office. It is painted white and purple, with a pink and purple flower border in the middle:

I started by removing the wallpaper. I actually finished about half before breaking for dinner. I'm not sure if I'll finish it all tonight or not. Next step will be spackling and then priming over the purple. I have some nice light blue paint we bought for the stairway and decided not to use that I will use for the office. Then, I can start putting my cat and viking decorations up on the wall.

I came downstairs and found Neville playing with a big black & blue wasp. Luckily, I don't think it stung him. Chance fought with the wasp for awhile, but the wasp really didn't want to die. Eventually, we got him. Now the window is dirty full of wasp spray.

UPDATE: 9:00PM. I finished removing the wallpaper on all but a portion of one wall - the one over the computer I'm typing on now. I found the easiest way is to peel off the top layer and then use the spray. It's going a lot quicker than expected. Photos to come...

Before and After

We have a Honchar gathering this coming weekend, so I wanted to take some pics of the house to show all the relatives. While going through the pics I took today and some of the older pics, I can't believe the progress we've made in 4 months. Two areas to highlight: The basement and the backyard. The first yard photo was beginning of April 2009. The other photo was taken today (Sorry the pics aren't aligned. I coded the HTML but I've been having some bad luck with that lately...)

Now take a look at the basement. The first one was taken April 5, 2009. The second one was taken today: