So I’ve covered what I did last year, and what I’m gonna do now (I hope). Here’s an even more hopeful/ambitious post: my goals for the 2018–2019 school year.
Read through my course journals from Fall 2017 and make adjustments.
I’ve taught a lot of the classes I teach here at Mason before at Brooklyn College and Florida State, but last year was the first time I forced myself to keep course journals. After each class (well, almost every class), I wrote at least one sentence commenting on the vibe of the class, what went well, what didn’t go well. I want to make this a purposeful activity and incorporate those observations into my adjustments for next year’s courses.
Set up SignUpGenius to have even better boundaries with student meeting times.
So yeah, I made a schedule for myself last year, but I had trouble sticking to it because I have trouble saying “no” to students sometimes if my schedule doesn’t work ideally with theirs. A colleague of mine suggested SignUpGenius as a way to have like an online appointment booking service for my office hours, like you would use for your hair stylist or something.
I’ve tested this out here. Sign up for a fake appointment with me—seriously! I want to see how it works. Feel free to let me know what you think of the layout, etc.
Get a Renaissance singing club running.
In New York, I was in an amateur choir called the Renaissance Street Singers, which was an amazing experience and taught me so much about casual music-making and all the joy it brings. I want to try to recreate that experience here in Fairfax. My idea is basically that it’s not so much a choir per se as a singing club. We’ll gather, read music, eat and drink, chat, and have fun. No need for performances at all, but maybe they could be added at a later stage. I believe in this as a project because it teaches people to not be so shy about their singing voices, you learn to love Renaissance music, you get better at sight singing, and you make friends. It’s the best.
At the beginning of the year, I made this website and posted a thing about it on my office door, but got swamped and couldn’t follow through. Next year I hope to get students and faculty interested, and attempt to figure out a good meeting time for everyone.