August Project: Improving my Courses

Tuesdays and Thursdays are a double-whammy for me.  I have a long commute (often 90 minutes each way) to campus, which seems to hit traffic congestion right around 55 minutes in.  This is right about when I tend to get antsy in ANY auto trip, so this isn't very fun.  Second, the course I teach both of these days is one where student participation, attendance and contribution is often low.  I suspect that this is more because the content is often emotionally challenging for them, as well as it simply just being a demanding amount of content.

Together, this means I often dread Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I just don't want to go, especially Thursdays, when the round trip commute time is LONGER than the planned contact time with students.  Ugh.  The bribe I would usually give myself was coffee and a walk with a freind who lived near that campus, which, honestly, cut into my work productivity and in the long run didn't really help the underlying issue of struggling with class.

So, obviously, this is one of the first areas I am tackling for my Better Work Project.  I'm cutting down on coffee chats until I'm feeling caught up on my 9-5 tasks.  When an evening art class left me unable to focus on Day3 of the semester, I accepted that I have to be careful about what I do with my weekday evenings, and guard that precious sleep!  The one evening activity I am adding in is Family Dinner Night at my brother's on the otherwise "short" Thursday teaching day (more on this later!). 
I am also focusing on what I can do from the start to make my class better.

Class started last week, and here are a few things I have initiated:
1) Plan the diverse content instruction (in Human Sexuality) around 5 major themes, each with an over-arching question.  (See Understanding by Design (Wiggins and McTighe for more on the philosophy behind this approach).
2) Structure in group- and pair- sharing from the start, including teaching them how to conduct a study group to help them break down the work load.
3) Examine things that are important to my teaching, but that cost me a lot of time.  Instead of developing group norms for the class de novo (which can get great investment from teh students), I am instead taking the most common responses from past years and creating a document, then asking students for their additional input.  I save almost an entire class period doing it this way, with very little (I hope) lost in value to the course.
4) Follow up the first class meeting with an email.
5) Establish(and maintain) a better on-line presence for The Millennial Student

The Better Work Project

I am a community college professor, and this is day two of a new semester.  I already feel a little like I am struggling, and not because I am off to a bad start, but because I am aware that there are challenges that come up again and again that I haven't addressed, and which make my work life less enjoyable than it could be.  Here is a sample:

A 90-minute each way commute twice a week.
A 20-minute commute each way three times a week.
A class that is often stressful because of lack of student participation and challenging content
Stacks upon stacks of grading
The fact that teaching is a gas, and I let it fill too much space in my life
The daunting academic job search process
Juggling many non-teaching work tasks, both administrative and collaborative
Not enough time for The Things That Make Me Happy: my sweetheart, my family, my art...
Afternoon brain drain and absolute zombie days.

Over the next year, I will be selecting one project monthly on which to focus my efforts.  I'll see how it improves my teaching practice and my general quality of life, following a model somewhat like that of Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project.  I'll also be drawing from ideas pulled from ProfHacker and other internet sources.  Posts will be made somewhere between weekly and monthly. I would also love your input, dear readers!