Time Strategies for Spring 2020

One of my biggest goals for this semester is for more students to work ahead and do extra credit in order to reduce that end of the semester struggle. The end of the semester is always going to be hard because of final exams and big projects that come due in other classes, and I would really like for this class to be totally out of the way when that other stressful stuff is going on. The main piece of advice that students give each other is always about time management and extra credit, so I'm hoping that by putting that advice right there in the sidebar of the announcements blog, it will make a difference, and I'm also going to put a piece of student advice in the announcements every day too, either harvested from the Padlet or from the even older collection of advice I had assembled in the wiki before I started using the Padlet.

I'm guessing the spreadsheet can also be a help with that too; I'm still working out some of the kinks with that, but I've learned a lot from my semesters of being a student in the class and how I used a spreadsheet to manage my work and time, so I hope that will be helpful.

I was going to see if I wanted to remove any of the time articles from the list here in order to add some new ones (there have been some really good pieces about procrastination that people have shared at Twitter over the past few months), but the articles there all looked good, and I know that students have been choosing all of them, so I decided to just leave it as is.

As always, I feel so lucky that teaching online allows me to manage my time really efficiently and without distractions. Plus: NO COMMUTE, ha ha. For the students in these classes, I know everything else is so much harder because they are juggling four or five or sometimes even more classes, plus their job, etc.

So, for me, it's so easy: these classes are my job, and I really treat this as one big class, just with people doing different reading. So, that means I'm basically doing one thing all day every day, Monday through Friday. Just. One. Thing.

Whereas the students are going from one thing to another and another and another. Of course that gets confusing.

Anyway, I hope the advice from past students about working ahead and doing extra credit in order will give students the permission/encouragement they need to break out of the Canvas deadlines and seize more control of the schedule and the assignments. That's definitely what I do as a student in the class, and I am so excited about getting into the Epics this semester... and since this is my last Orientation Week assignment (whoo-hoo!), I might even get to some epic reading today. If not, then this weekend, and if I can do Week 2 this weekend, I can hopefully stay ahead all semester, depending on how things go with my dad.

Happy 2020, everybody! And hey, it's a Leap Year: an extra 24 hours. :-)

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