teaching week i

One week of classes down, nine and a half to go.

I've now taught four classes (a syllabus overview and a proper lecture in each of two sections). I won't lie: the syllabus review was exactly as awkward and boring for me as an instructor as it's always been for me as a student. But today I gave my first proper lectures (on historical linguistics and Proto-Indo-European) and those were terribly fun.

The bad news is that I am so incredibly tired. I was expecting that, sort of, but I wasn't really expecting this level of exhaustion. I only have one prep, but it turns out that a full grad school course load plus one prep plus two lectures plus office hours is incredibly draining. I teach at 8:30, but then I have to be awake and alert through a Greek class that runs through 4:30, and then I should be going home to prep for my Latin class the next day. Today, that didn't happen; today, a nap happened, and it felt like a victory for my strength of will and good sense that I dragged myself back out of bed to eat dinner.

I used to be able to do this in high school: be up at 7:00 and still up at 4:30 and come home with work still to go. (Though I did realize last week that I've never in my life had an 8:30 class. My department in college didn't schedule classes until 9:30 and I went to DC public schools K–12, which has an 8:45 start time.) Hopefully things get easier in here, because I was not at the top of my game in class today, and I'm not so terribly competent in Greek that I can afford to be this far off regularly.