It is hard teaching when you are incoherent. Oddly enough, most students will notice and you yourself will notice as well. It is rather frustrating to not be able to go through material effectively. I decided to try going book-less this fall, with readings that were very focused and the frame and evaluation given in lectures. I’ve come to the conclusion that this does not work if the framing lectures and discussion are not available; things are just confusing to my students and for me, so trying to save money has not worked out too well. And of course, this fall I have been both incoherent and absent in successive sessions.
I have not been sleeping because of pain from whatever is going on in my back or right hip. There are more tests to be done, and I will hopefully have an answer in another week or two. In the meantime, the doctor gave me a cortisone shot on Tuesday of last week, which she was hoping would help, but did nothing. The whole thing is really uncomfortable, unpleasant, and without sleep I can’t concentrate enough to teach, as I proved to the word on Tuesday. I stayed home on Wednesday, hoping the shot would help. Of course it didn’t.
So I have been setting up quizzes and assignments and support for the assignments, all through Blackboard. I can’t work quickly, but when I don’t hit the wrong button or an unexpected refresh somewhere on the keyboard, I seem to work well. I am calling on my experience last year, when I had back surgery and was on forced home stay for three weeks, and was trying to teach my classes online without any of the elaborate training they want you to have. I learned a lot. I just didn’t think I would need to call on that knowledge again so soon.
I didn’t use the online material as the primary teaching source -- it was used to monitor their knowledge and their understanding of the readings. But I am sure this can work. I am trying to set up quiz questions with a response for the incorrect answers that will guide students to the resources that will allow them to get the knowledge they need. Then they can retake the quiz and show that they have better ideas of how things work together. The trick is to have the material be interesting and relevant and complete enough that students can understand it and its context while still encouraging them to follow up on the limited information I can cover in just the quiz. I am starting from questions and they can prepare for those however they want. I will set the topic (kings and politics of the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom, or more specifically — the parts of the kings' titulary, family affiliations of the kings of the 3rd through 6th dynasties) and test for those bits of information. I hope this works and they learn the material I am asking them to know — the framework for ancient Egyptian art. Once they have the historical tree set up we can then start setting out the decorations for the sides -- tombs and funerary architecture on one set of branches, and the human body and portraiture on another, and the afterlife and preparing for it (mummification, coffins, grave goods and tomb paintings, etc.) on the third, and religion and its preserved manifestations in temples and private devotional material in the final set. There are a few extra branches that we can decorate as they appear, but the main, most important thing is the original structure of the tree, and that is history and geography.
I am going to spend this weekend trying to set up my tree backwards from the way I usually do it. Wish me luck. I just hope that I can crawl my way around the building next week. I can’t just stay home because everything hurts. I need to get better but if it is just going to stay the same I need to figure out how to cope with what I've got.
That’s the view from around here. Ouch.