brain, off...

God it feels good not to have to THINK today. I was working on something URGENT from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM yesterday. I hate “urgent”. It’s not that I don’t plan on being productive today, but I’m working on things that won’t be urgent for 3 months. (Never mind the things that will be urgent in 2 weeks that I’m ignoring.)

I’m teaching 2 physics classes next semester (and an online astro class) and I need to pick the readings and books and stuff. I’m waffling over the biographies. I think I’m going to have my Relativity class read a scholarly biography of Albert Einstein (by Albrect Fölsing) but I haven’t decided about the intro class. I was thinking about “Galileo’s Daughters” by Dava Dobel and James Gleick’s biography of Isaac Newton. Both of those are short and fairly good reads. But I worry that any writing I assigned from those would get in the way of the problem sets and other historical papers I’m going to want them to read. Anybody out there with good ideas on how to assess out-of-class reading without having the students write summaries of every chapter?? I suppose I could just put biographical questions on the exams that they would know only if they read the book, but I never do that. My exams typically only test in-class material. And it’s all complicated by the fact that I’m also thinking about having them read one of Galileo’s Dialogues, which is a LOT of difficult reading. And then I think about the Perfect Bio Prof’s classes and how much more work her classes are than mine, and I think well, FUCK... maybe I SHOULD be raising the bar. And then I think... but I kinda like the good-cop reputation... Dr. Dave’s class are really good and interesting, and challenging without being a nightmare when it comes to the workload.

Bleah. I’m indecisive.

The sick thing is, this is the part of teaching I enjoy the MOST!