Finally!
After a long winter, the air is warming, birds are chirping, the snow has melted away! For some reason, this winter has seemed longer than usual. Probably because that’s what everyone’s been saying and after a while we tend to believe it. Winter was the same length as usual, of course.
Last week’s blog post gave a few ideas of kinds of assignments we could give our students that are challenging for them, but perhaps a little less onerous for us to grade. Here are a few more ideas. I think the key factors for me are variety, brevity and student ownership.
One of the worst parts of my job as a professor is grading. Mind-numbing and neck-stiffening, grading takes huge amounts of time. Reading the same essay question responses or lab reports and papers for dozens of students is so unpleasant that we almost have to tie ourselves to our chairs to get us to do it! And, of course, with stressed-out students beginning and completing those assignments by pulling all-nighters, the quality of some of that work makes the task all that much more stultifying.
After four intense, productive, and amazing days in Chermaitre, the trippers are back in Port-au-Prince. Read on for a short update from them!
Apart from successfully holding a clinic day in the new Chermaitre-Fervil Clinic and meeting the local medical committee, we also conducted a small-scale census around the village, created a beautiful peace quilt with the women’s cooperative, received the cooperative’s first product – coffee from Chermaitre (!), and performed water and soil tests.
Teaching is like being in an endurance race. You’ve got to set a pace and stick with it. You’ve got to ration your energy so that you have some in reserve to make it to the end.