Back to School

This afternoon, I’ll be walking into the first day of classes for the fall semester 2018. Funny, my biggest concern isn’t whether or not I’m properly prepared or if I’ll be able to handle so many new kinds of classes, but whether or not I’ll be able to switch some of my classrooms in order to have a better view of the countryside or the mountains. Actually, I’m kind of excited (in a stable way) about returning to school, seeing the old students and meeting the new ones. This year I’ll be teaching some global citizenship orientated classes, a couple of advanced business English classes, some oral training classes and an English for information technology class. It's about 20 hours of teaching per week. Even though I’ve taught most of these kinds of classes before, they’re still somewhat new for me because I’m planning on doing new stuff in all of them. Mostly I’ll be integrating more technology into the classes and asking students to do more studying outside of the classroom. This last point of asking students to do more studying outside of the classroom is somewhat challenging because, many of them really do have a lot to do, especially if they’re also working to support themselves.

As it is the morning and I’d like to go for a walk before my afternoon classes, I’m going to leave you with part 1 of a lecture series that I’ve recently completed on the subject of democracy. This and artificial intelligence will be two of the themes that I’ll be focusing on this semester.