Fucking Awesome

So my advisor and dept chair is completely overworked this semester, which caused him to need to observe me teaching today, the second to last class of the semester. jesus christ, i was not looking forward to that. all i had originally planned was to give my students a questionnaire about the course to fill out. i implored them last wednesday to email me if there was anything they still wanted to cover or had questions about, etc. of course, i received no such emails. it was up to me to come up with something good. afterall, my advisor wanted to observe me teaching so he'd be able to write reccs for me in the future. no pressure.

so after hemming and hawing and generally worrying myself to death all weekend, i decided the easiest thing to do would be have a discussion. But I needed to make sure the discussion would go somewhere and I needed full class participation if possible and i also needed to do something fruitful that would not offend my students as a waste of their time.

so this morning i decide, ok, i will make them go around in a circle and talk about the things they learned in my course, what has been most beneficial, what they still aren't sure of, etc. i figured that if i was going to put them on the spot with that question, i better be prepared to go first. UGH. Mine was, "I learned how to better articulate issues of craft, especially 'showing vs telling' and what that means and how you do it."

We went around and they said all the right things. They learned about showing vs telling, they learned about character devlopment, they learned about the importance of revision and how things don't come out perfect the first time, they learned how small moments make great fiction and you don't need some huge event, they learned that every single thing is a story matters, they gained a better eye for how stories are crafted and what the author is trying to do, both for fiction and in other courses, etc etc etc.

It was fucking beautiful, not only because my advisor was there, but because I fucking succeeded in teaching them the things they needed to learn. My advisor is the one who said "they said all the right things." So there is also that.

This class was better than any fucking drug.