I am a power napper

So what I've been doing lately (unsuccessfully, apparently) is starting posts with snippets of ideas that I have, and then finishing them later. I created this title on Wednesday afternoon, having given an extremely good lecture after a 20 minute power nap that I took sitting in my office chair with my feet propped up. I used to nap a lot in college and I think I'm going to start doing it again. I might even bring in a sleeping bag and pillow.

Why I need to nap: I have the misfortune to be teaching at 8am and 2pm. If I'd known this was so unusual for the Northwestern math department, I would have said something when I first got my teaching assignment. I know, my friends in 9-5 jobs will have little sympathy for this, but teaching that spread out is different then simply having to be at Northwestern during those times. When I teach, I have to be "ON" in the same way that one has to be while performing or playing a competitive sport. It's like having two shows in one day, except that I'm supposed to get stuff done between that requires some serious brain power. It's so hard to transition out of that mindset to settle down and be productive. I am also NOT a morning person, so getting up at 6am to catch a 7am train does nothing for my brain.

Ok, the sleeping bag and pillow would be a little extreme, except that one of my classes is what's called a "common course," meaning that there are multiple sections that happen throughout the day, so the exams have to be taken at a different, common time. Because the undergrads are ungodly busy, this time happens to be 7:30pm on Thursdays. That's when they START. The exams are an hour or an hour and a half, not including those students who get extra time for disabilities, and THEN we grade them immediately following so the students can have their exams back the next day. So I'll probably be grading until almost midnight on days when they have exams, and then teaching at 8am. There's no point in my going home and sleeping for 4 hours, waking up and coming all the way back in, so I really think that I'm going to pack an overnight bag and sleep in my office. Fortunately, they only have two such exams. The final is at a normal time during the day.

Overall, it's going to be an exhausting semester. I'm teaching two different levels of calculus, and the students in both classes are needy in different ways. In one of those classes, I have the students who are petrified of math, and it's my job to explain everything patiently, slowly, and repeatedly. My other class isn't quite the overachievers, but they're mostly people who have done well in school, and not necessarily particularly in math. They can handle the material fine, but they tend to worry too much about the details of examples and grading. These are students whose knee-jerk reaction is to email me with a question before taking a really hard look at their problem.

I have a lot of sympathy for both sets of students, which probably helps me to be a good teacher, but also takes a lot of energy on my part. I am thinking that if the emails don't start dying down next week, that I will have to institute an "email window" when students can expect me to answer emails. They're having a lot of trouble accessing the online assignment system, so I'm glad that they're contacting me ahead of time. However, typing, "Unfortunately, there isn't anything I can do about WebAssign directly, so please email support@webassign.net and let me know if the issue isn't resolved promptly," twenty times gets old.

Enough grousing. One detail that I really like about all of these emails? Their official Northwestern email addresses look like FirstnameLastname201_@u.northwestern.edu, so I can tell what year people are just by their address. It's extremely useful, since I need to give different advice, e.g. for dropping a class, to freshmen vs. seniors.

Another plus: as crazy as quarters here are, they're short. 1/10 done already :)