Highs and Lows

Listening to: "Your Heart is an Empty Room," Death Cab for Cutie (I bought their album, Plans, a few months ago, and I've been listening to it more the past couple of days. I love love love it.)

Anyhoo. I was thinking today about how life is a series of moments where you either feel like you're on top of your game or you feel like you're one second away from everything falling apart. How easily we seem to slip back and forth between these two states of mind.

Right now I'm feeling like that about teaching. Even though I've had to exert a lot of effort while planning my lessons for class since the semester started--an unfortunate side effect of the fact that I decided to overhaul my syllabus--I've felt relatively happy with how things have gone. Today my class finally started to gel a bit more, and I felt like the students who had been reserved so far were finally waking up. We were laughing, and things seemed to click. But then I found my students' evaluations of my teaching from last semester in my department mailbox.

For the most part, the reviews were positive. A few were glowing, and most were satisfied. But there were a few comments that really threw me. Quite a few of the students wrote under "How can the instructor improve this course?" that I shouldn't say "ummm" so much. Ack. I must have said it a hell of a lot for it to show up on course evaluations. This really bothered me, because I have always been the type of student to get really distracted by this kind of thing. I had an instructor once who always said "okay" after everything he said. I remember that one day in class I wrote "NOT OKAY" on my notebook because I was so annoyed. It makes me cringe to think that my students were thinking something similar when I was up there teaching. Some of the more negative comments targeted my "lack of confidence" and my "predictable" discussion format. Double ouch. When last semester ended, I was really happy with how well my course had gone considering the fact that I was really terrified before I started. I had made it through with very few bumps along the way. It's not easy to hear that my students didn't always necessarily agree. But I guess it's unfair to think that I would just automatically be a great teacher. But still, it threw me.

The situation with social anxiety boy is so f*cked up right now that I don't even want to write about it. So I won 't. But I did have two men smile at me on campus today. I wouldn't normally find this noteworthy, but since moving back to the north, I've come to recognize this as a sign of flirtation rather than friendliness. It's nice to know that men find me attractive even if SAB can't get his shit together.

Alright, that's all I have time to write for now. I have to return to my oh-so-exciting reading for my consortium class at MIT that starts on thursday.