First Week of J-Term

My class is 3 days into an intense 2.5 week "semester" in my J-Term Photography course. Here was the board after our first day 48 hours ago:

It looks similar to this post from last year, only this board is a bit smaller, so things are more cramped. Besides the smaller white board, I'm enjoying our new space as first showed last month in this post.

J-Term is Wrapped Up!

Finals in my J-Term class happened over a week ago, and I submitted final grades a few day ago. I set some sort of "personal record" 10 days ago by getting grades from a project back to all my students within 3 hours of wrapping up critique! But they needed that feedback as the next project was due just a few days later in this compressed timeline.

I really enjoyed the fast pace of the first week, especially. I love banging through those technical lectures and getting students excited about trying out different functions / modes / manners of creating an image. It's just nerdy fun.

I also really liked having the ENTIRE class laid out before the semester begins. Yes, I usually have a tight syllabus that we follow, but this was different as I had all handouts and examples all laid out and ready to go before day 1. I'm never THAT prepared before the semester begins. (And here's why: it bit me in the butt at one point as I had to adjust a due date by 1 day, so I still had to rework that project.) I shared in this post that I had 197 files all organized online for my students. I added a few things to that during the 2.5 week term, and I ended with nearly 250 files (which does NOT include files students turned in or that number would be around 450 files). And it's worth noting that big 100 slide PowerPoints just count as 1 file.

Alright, back to "regular" teaching... meaning 1 normal in-person class and 1 fully online asynchronous class currently.

J-Term Zoom Meetings

I posted this on Facebook last week:

This is exactly what happened in yesterday's class when I joined a few minutes early. This is also the reason I purposefully joined today's scheduled class 1 minute late.

I added in a comment: "Don't worry: my Minnesotanness kicked in and we chatted about the weather for a minute before the rest of the class joined in." J-Term is still going well! Looking forward to my students wrapping up their final 2 projects this week.

J-Term: First Critique!

I'm 4 days into my first J-Term class (as I wrote about this past weekend). I posted this on Instagram on Monday after class:

"Before and after on the first day of J-Term. Here’s to packing a 16-week semester into 2.5 weeks..."

Today, we had our first critique (with prints, just 4 days in). Tonight, I posted this on Facebook:

Whew. Let's keep this up. This is kind of fun!....

Monthly Challenge 12 of 12: Prepping for J-Term

Tomorrow I start teaching my first J-Term class. My department at Hamline University hasn't offered J-Term classes before, but they have one this year. So I'm working to pack as much of a normal 16 week semester that I can into 2.5 weeks. Yikes.

I've been working on this pretty much since Thanksgiving. I'm more prepared for this than ANY other class I've taught. I won't have time to prep things "mid-semester" like I usually can. So I mapped out the folder structure that I have placed on Google Drive for my students:

That shows the main ideas of what's there: 42 files (or folders). But in reality, at this moment, there are already 197 files (or folders) uploaded within this structure so far. And I know I'll be adding a few more things to go over as the J-Term moves along.

Stay tuned, as I'm sure I'll be sharing updates about how this fast-paced J-Term class is going. Happy New Year!