Friday, July 08, 2005
Today I took the day off work in order to do the first full day class in the summer-intensive version of my Information Architecture course. So essentially I took the day off work in order to work. ;-)
I saw the culmination of my previous weekend's work in the spiral-bound book that I handed out to each of my 18 students (which by the way represents a full-house). A couple hundred pages at least, and as I remarked to the Director of the Professional Learning Centre who was there, I've been to courses costing twice as much (or more) than mine and received less dead-tree material.
The Director and the Dean of the school were both there to give me an award. It was the Professional Learning Centre's annual "best instructor" award. The Director had called me on Monday morning to tell me about it, so it wasn't unexpected, but holding the little engraved Lucite tombstone-shaped award in my hand made it more real. It was also good to meet the Dean in person, if only because I've heard a lot about her, and that she's a good person to meet should I decide to take the plunge and apply for a PhD at the school. Apparently a citation will appear on this page along with that of the co-winner, but as I post this article it hasn't appeared as yet.
In the back of my mind I couldn't help but think that the standards must have been raised in the minds of my new students. In the end I rolled with it and was happy with the new arrangement of content and pacing of things for the class. It was also heartening to see a couple of familiar faces from other classes I had taught appear in the crowd, at least one of whom said that she had specifically wanted to take another of my courses.
At the end of the (long) day, went over to ROM for a quick visit, specifically with the intention of taking some pics and to see how much material they had on the Old Kingdom, an era I have been posting minor additions to in Wikipedia.
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