Having adjuncted in this program for a while now, I feel like I rather have the hang of prepping for a term. But I wonder whether I will ever lose the sense that I’m missing something, have forgotten something, have contradicted myself in the syllabus or between the syllabus and a grading rubric, or between the syllabus and Blackboard, or or or or.
(Because I always bloody have, every time.)
The urge to tinker, tweak, rework and reorganize, always optimize, also pushes me hard. But it has to fight with the fear of doing something new and screwing it up. It is easier every term to see why some of my own professors taught an apparently invariant syllabus for twenty or thirty years.
Still, I don’t think I know how to be satisfied with my teaching in a world where something new is always close to hand.
I’m also doing different kinds of teaching, now. I’m starting to do primary clinical supervision and dissertation supervision. These are really showing me that I really do want it all to mesh. I want to teach the same principles for addressing human behavior, whether it’s the behavior of a learner, a teacher, a client, a clinician, a writer, a supervisor, or a supervisee. The content varies but the guiding principles are always there. There is something comforting emerging out of that, for me, now.
