PureGin.org

It's been an exciting day - I was pretty nervous as I rolled into Campus for my first day of teaching - I'd prepared for two courses of two sections each, for a total of 6 hours contact time. Last time I stood in front of a classroom full of university students was at least ten years ago. As I stood waiting for students to arrive, I was wondering how it would feel to be teaching after having been away from it for so on.

While I was doing my graduate work, teaching was generally one of the most enjoyable parts of the day and of the whole graduate lifestyle. Would it still have that appeal? Once the first students arrived, I found I started feeling pretty good about the whole experience.

The first day of school is always pretty exciting, but coming back to this after having been away heightened the sense of this even more - meeting students for the first time, setting up the outline for the course material and how the course will be run, finding out about the backgrounds, experiences and goals of everyone in the class, sharing the excitement of people attending their first university class ever...

I was impressed with the enthusiasm, openness and sense of purpose that the students in my four sections displayed - I think that this is going to be a lot of hard work, but also a lot of fun. One of the big challenges for me is going to be remembering over a hundred names and faces.

The campus at Nanaimo is relatively small (but steep - I'm going to have some pretty good quads from stair climbing in a few months). It was cool to bump into one or two 'newly' familiar faces on my way from one class to the next, already, on the first day.

Already I've had two visits from students to my office hours - even though I didn't actually know my office number for the morning sections and didn't get keys until after lunch. The office is small but really more than adequate, with a nice view, PC (which I immediately unplugged ;) and lots of shelf space. I'm fortunate that our department head was able to arrange for me to have an office to myself.

The admin and support staff were really outstanding - during my time at UBC I often felt a bit spoiled by admin staff in the department, but found that dealing with bureaucracy 'across town' at higher levels or other departments was sometimes frustrating. But so far, things have been pretty stellar all around at VIU.

I will have to start setting up some online resources for my students, and thinking about structuring bits of information that may have some value beyond my immediate teaching this term.

Hmm, lots to do...