What has Laresa been up to?

Well, teaching mostly.  It’s amazing to me how unprepared I manage to be each semester.  You’d think after teaching 1010-level courses some 12-odd times, that I’d have a better handle on things.  But no.  I have to be dissatisfied at all times with my performance and change my curriculum elebenty times a semester.

Part of the problem I realized just after midterms this last semester at UVU, is that I was always teaching someone else’s course instead of teaching MY course.  I’ve started working through that for 1010 as well as the 201/202 classes I do for BYU.  It was strange to all of a sudden realize that I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do; instead, I was doing what got me through the semester without really evaluating its effectiveness.  So I’m trying to push for a lot more discussion in the future, especially since my 2nd block summer 1010 classes are at least 2 hours long.  Hopefully I’ll be able to encourage camaraderie across the classroom between student and student and student and me.

It’s amazingly hard to get some of these students started on the path to thinking.  It’s not that they’re dumb, they’re just really untrained in a lot of ways.  I guess the typical high school course really does teach to the test instead of encouraging independent thought.  Instead of trying to figure out what something means, many students just sit back and wait to be told so they can produce something for the exam.  I think it’s hugely frustrating, and it’s a problem I face at both schools.  Hopefully my decision to write my exams using short answer and short essay exclusively helps get some people over this.

I do struggle with discussion, but mostly because dead air makes me nervous, so this last semester I started watching the clock and waiting up to 30 seconds to say anything again.  It worked pretty well, but I still have the problem of 20% of the class making all the contributions.  Is it always that way or are there miracle classes in the lower division that have full student participation?  I’d kind of like to see one of those, but then I’d be worried that we’d never get through any material.

I’m actually hoping to surmount the material obstacle in the summer by simply covering less material while somehow still meeting department standards for the course.  I don’t use a textbook, so I want to try making up short readings to accompany the different eras (particularly of painting), present the students with a slide show of the style to look at before class, and then select just a few paintings from each era to talk about in depth.  I may also try this with music, but with 1010 prep overlapping with 202 responsibilities, it may be a little hard.  However!  I scored a TA for my 202 class, so a lot of the grading pressure is gone and he TAed for some of the same people I did, so I trust his training.  It is super weird to have a TA and I’m doing my best to pretend I’m a responsible adult worker with underlings.

As for non-school news, I had a hellish time in January and February depression-wise, so I got up the nerve to finally see a new psychiatrist.  He upped my sertraline (Zoloft) by 50 mg and encouraged me to make better use of my adderall and clonazepam; in fact, I found out I was under-using them in my worry of abusing them.  Adderall turns out to be a pretty darn good antidepressant in terms of getting you through the day.  I don’t use it everyday and sometimes the crash can be hard if I don’t time things right, but it can make a day that looked like a complete wash into something semi-productive.  Clonazepam is my favorite miracle drug.  Sometimes I get so suddenly anxious and irritable that I stop being able to function among and around other humans, but if I take lovely clonazepam, in 20 minutes most of the strain is gone and I can think again and respond to others appropriately (in other words, I don’t hate everyone I live with anymore).  I also have been working really hard on my sleep schedule/routine.  It’s hard, but I can usually get to bed at the same time, even if I don’t always (read: never) get up at the same time.  But it has gotten me to the point where I can mostly sleep on my own, without sweet ambien or even benadryl.

The hardest part about the new drug schedule was waiting for them to kick in.  In the past, I’ve usually had a turnover of about 2 weeks.  This time, it was just over a month, so I was really depressed as I tried to wait for things to kick in, worrying that it wouldn’t work.  Then, a few days after I was ready to give up, it was like a key turned and things were okay, at least more okay than they’d been and things were really more bearable.

The thing with my mental illness is that I really need to accept that being at 80% may be as close as I get to other people’s 100% and to measure my energies appropriately.  This is hard because there are so many things I feel I need to improve about myself--diet, exercise, weight, sleep, reading (good books, not pulp), pedagogy, scholarship, spirituality, church callings, friendships—and I don’t have the energy to focus on more than a couple things at a time.  And my obsessive brain can’t stop thinking about all the things I’m not doing, so that’s another thing, paradoxically, to work on!

That said, I’m pretty happy.  I planted flowers yesterday and they just might grow!  I’m reading, they just happen to be Agatha Christie novels.  I’m working and BYU likes me enough that I’m apparently their pinch-hitter for other faculty (my spring/summer courses are both fill-ins) and I’m scheduled for fall as well.  I really like my boss at UVU and she fights for us among all the administrative crap that’s come down this last semester (I think in response to Wisconsin).  My coworkers are good at both schools and I’m doing the work I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid playing teacher.  I’m broke and in debt, but other than that, I think I have things pretty good.

Whew!  That was long.  I’d plan for more, shorter, posts in the future, but that might be too much of a burden to my bipolar/OCD brain.