And Then There Were Ten

It looks as though all of my Public Speaking classes are going to go. I have 22 students in one class and that will definitely go. My Thursday evening class has 15 students. Ten is what they officially need to have the class go. Even if a couple of students drop out, I don’t see there being any issue with this class.

It was the third class, my Friday morning class, that was the question. It now has ten students registered. Usually a class at a campus center (as this one is) will go with eight, so there is a little room for students to drop and still have the class go.

So once again, it will be three classes. I am currently making some adjustments that I hope will enable me to better use my time and not get overwhelmed by three classes and a full-time job. So, first off, I have reduced the amount of information I give the students in the critiques. Yes, they still need to be given enough information to help make them better speakers, but the format I use will be much simpler. It will simply start off with the things I liked about the speech. The next part will go into suggestions. The final part will end with more positives.

I also am doing away with a final exam. I always thought I had to give one but my mentor has advised me differently. This will give me an additional two class sessions for teaching (the one used for the exam and the one used for review).

I will be assigning the students a three to five page type written paper and that could take more time to look at, but I will have a metrics set to go and it will allow me to look at things on my time.

I truly think these few things will make it easier for me to handle the three classes. The other thing which will make it much easier this semester is, I am not teaching every day of the week. Last semester I had three classes and between them, I was on the road every day of the week. This semester, it is just Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Thursday being the long day as I have a morning and an evening class and I will probably just hang out on campus. Still, I think I have everything worked out so this should hopefully work well for me.