Hydra

The frustrating thing about planning courses is that, in a sense, you are always fixing the unfixable--namely, the previous semester's problems.  Did the first semester's students collapse into trembling heaps when asked to tell the difference between William Wordsworth and A. C. Swinburne? Then the next semester's students get even more detailed discussions of the signs that allow you to tell one poet from the next.  But now those students cheerfully confuse Thomas Carlyle with J. S. Mill.  (I put to one side the students who mistake Charles Darwin's Origin of Species for Lord Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott."  Let's just say that that requires its own kind of, er, skill.)  Figure out how to fix that, and then some other unimaginable problem will sprout.  And, of course, the activities or lectures which prove helpful one semester have no effect the next.

Never a dull moment, eh?

Comments

[What Now?]

My colleagues and I joke about this phenomenon as the parallel to the truism that generals are always fighting the last war. So we're always teaching the last class in some ways.

[App Crit]

Indeed. But at least it keeps us from teaching the same course.

Tricky business, teaching and Lernean. (sorry, couldn't resist the pun).

Cheers