feedback so far from my new colleagues has been overwhelmingly positive. my class management is ok, my lesson plans are fine; not bad for someone with no formal teacher training in the bag eh?!
Thankfully, I'm mostly liking the job.
It's really just an extension of the way I worked while studying; helping other students with the material and finding resources to aid in understanding - except this time I'm actually creating some of those resources myself; for one module the 4 of us teaching it are starting totally from scratch so it's quite a challenge.
But it seems I took on more hours than I can really cope with.
I’ll be honest, I only took into account classroom hours when I agreed to my timetable – I naively didn’t realise there was so much more to being a lecturer than just tweaking my slides, showing up to impart knowledge followed by the odd bit of marking: there's student monitoring, seemingly endless meetings, millions of daily emails, course admin - and that's before I even THINK about looking at a lesson plan or my resources!
I ended up having an ME/CFS incident after my first class last thursday and had to go lie down in the medical room for an hour to stave off the shakes and imminent crash so I'd be ok to teach in the afternoon. Brought home that I need to be careful at this early stage though so it was either lose 2 HE groups or the one FE unit, thankfully it’s the FE unit I’m to lose so that’s going to free up a lot more time to allow me to pace myself; would be a total pisser if I finally get a job and get off benefits only to end up back in bed and on ESA for good.
The really annoying thing about losing the FE class though is that I nearly killed myself 2 weekends ago getting into London for a one-day passport appointment for the CRB check; cost me a sodding fortune as well! I don’t need a CRB for HE teaching so all that money and effort turned out to be unnecessary *sigh* always the way eh?!
Nothing has happened on the 'landlord selling our home' front since the agents came round to take pictures and measurements so thankfully that stressball has yet to hit; just praying it waits until i'm a little more settled at work; getting to grips with this workload AND trying to find somewhere to live would probably kill me!
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