Back-to-school

This week was the first week of classes for the spring, which is always interesting and challenging in an up-in-the-air kind of way. In the department in which I work, we teach only international students, and there is a lot of turnover from semester to semester. Every semester we have a lot of returning students, but also a lot of students who are brand new to the US. Because we can't be sure of whose visa will get approved, who will actually come up with the money to travel, etc., we can't be sure of who's going to be here until they're here the first week of class. That means that it's impossible to know how many classes are needed or who will teach what until all the students have been processed and placement-tested. We spend the first part of the first week of class doing that, and then we start classes a few days after the rest of the university. It's really the only way this can be done, but is a little stressful for me as a teacher because I don't find out what I'm teaching, or how much, until the day before.

This semester there was some added stress because I quit at the community college, for various reasons. Partly it's because I'm hoping to get a full-time position (with benefits) at the university starting in the second half of the semester, so I couldn't commit to a full term at the community college in case I had to leave in the middle. But even if I don't get the full-time position, I've been wanting to have full-time hours at the university - teaching international students is really my passion, and I can do that better at the university. Without the guarantee of half my income coming from the community college, however, things got a little stressful for me this week while I waited to see if I would have full-time work this semester or not. Yesterday I thought I was only going to have half-time work, which led to some fun panicky emails to check on potential tutoring jobs, but today everything worked out because I was asked to help develop and concurrently teach a spoken English class in a related department to my department. This adds a quarter time to my teaching appointment, and I will try to add another class in Spring B to bring me up to full-time again. I'm really excited about the course-development thing. It will definitely be a challenge, but I think it will be fun. The class will be small, and I know at least one of the students. I'll be in the department where I first fell in love with ESL instruction, and I think I might have an undergraduate assistant. All in all, it's going to be fantastic. I love the way God works things out.