over

Now all of my teaching stuff is officially, officially over. Which is nice. The excitement of finishing up that chapter was sort of cut down by the news that the article that I submitted about a month ago was rejected by the journal. Those jerks. It's one of those things I guess you have to get used to in research, but that doesn't make it suck any less. I was pretty much pissed for the next couple days.

This research world is an interesting one. I can work hard designing a good experiment. I can carefully perform the experiment. I can carefully process the data. I can sift through the processed data to determine its significance. I can write up a well thought out--and much revised--paper summarizing my finding. Then I submit the paper only to hope that someone who really has no interest in me or the progression of my career or research will deem my paper worthy of his/her journal.

But, not all is lost. I will find another journal to send my paper off to. I will get to send it to some other anonymous reviewer to determine my experiment's worth.

The upside of this is that these anonymous reviewers themselves get to be reviewed by other anonymous reviewers whenever they submit a paper. Maybe I will get to return the favor one day :)

i've got class

So I'm about to finish up my first full semester of teaching. I'm sort of deciding to go out with a bang--stayed up until 3am last night finishing up the exam so a student could take it a day early. And of course I had to be in before 8am to give the exam. So tomorrow I give the real exam then I get to spend two full days grading them and preparing final grades. Exhausting, but then I'll be done and will have lots and lots of free time to do research in. There's that whole PhD thing I would mind wrapping up.

Overall I feel pretty positive about the teaching thing, which is nice because I have several friends that got education degrees then decided to give up on it after their student teaching. College teaching is nice because the kids are pretty mature. And you can always kick people out and/or fail them. Just kidding. But really you can.

The main thing I didn't like about teaching this semester was that I was teaching if for the first time. My overall view for the semester and its goals seemed pretty solid, but goals with individual lectures and how I plan reaching those goals needs a lot of developing. I was spending a fair amount of time--probably too much--preparing for each lecture, but I still feel that I can do a lot better. Teachers that have taught the course before have a pretty big advantage in that respect.