From starting classes suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord, deliver us

William McTaggart (1835-1910), Winter Wheat

I returned from my very productive New York/Philadelphia trip in good shape to have both Anselm: I Can't Believe How Short This Introduction Is and Anselm: Complete Treatises with Selected Recipes and Sick Twitter Burns off to the publishers by my September 1 deadline.

This week, though, is all about getting ready for the start of classes on the 23rd. I posted the skeleton of a syllabus yesterday (the deadline to do so, though what the penalty is, or even could be, for failure to meet the deadline is not at all obvious).

I do not believe in this syllabus. It's pretty close to my syllabus from the last time I taught the class, and that went pretty well, so maybe I should have more confidence this time. But I have a sinking feeling that I have not remotely accommodated the differences between last time and this time. Last time I had 100 students, so I could get some discussion going (a fair bit, as it turned out). This time I have 300, and of course we'll all be masked, and interactions are likely to be much more limited. Last time I had 150 minutes of class time a week; this time I'll have 100. The TAs will have the other 50, and I will need to figure out how to help them use it most advantageously.

I've always thought it strange that the first teaching a lot of us do as graduate students in philosophy is leading discussion sections. I think that's the hardest teaching there is: getting students to talk is hard enough, especially when you see them for only 50 minutes a week, but doing it entirely using material that someone else has chosen is really challenging. I'm glad we have a really well-done graduate pedagogy class that helps our students find their feet as teachers.

Lecturing on your own material, stuff you've chosen because you enjoy teaching it (or are excited about trying it out for the first time), is easy. Getting discussion going on stuff you love and are really eager to talk about is easy. So yeah, my part of the job is easy. I just hope I've planned the new version reasonably well.

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