The summertime is supposed to be one of rest, recharging, relaxing, and spending outdoors time with family and friends, or alone–whatever your situation requires. And yet, as academics, we too often find ourselves getting behind, despite the relative lack of semester deadlines, meetings, or conferences.
Of course, many of us teach over the summer, whether because it’s a major requirement of our position, or because we like the steady flow of paychecks through the year. For me, it’s a bit of both. We teach a lot of summer courses at our commuter campus, but since we get paid on a 10 month schedule, it’s nice to have a bit extra in the 2 off months.
Besides teaching 2 online courses this summer, I have some revision projects I need to either complete or get started on:
- Online Course Revision – Intro to Fiction. I’ve already taught this course once this year, but I will be running it again in the Fall semester. It was also recently peer reviewed as part of an internal grant for course development, so while the grant contract has now been fulfilled (hooray!), I need to revise just a bit to improve the course for its 2nd round.
- Book Review – nothing major, just a few revision suggestions from a journal to polish up a book review that will be out later this year.
- Fall Course Revisions – I have an ambitious plan to more fully digitize course content (lecture notes, visuals, etc) so that I am not STILL writing things up on the board all the time. I mean, it’s 2016. What am I still doing writing up key ideas when I have perfectly good in class technology I can use?
Along with the above list, I need to get my General Education assessment in for the Spring courses, clean my office and purge old student work, and finish up one or two article drafts. Plus, take my campus Title IX training module.
So, that’s an academic summer for you. What are you all working on this hot summer, dear readers?