Getting ready to teach

As soon as the new academic year starts I will have to start teaching like I've never taught before. I will have to do lectures, fieldworks, practicals, exams, tutorials and whatnot. The whole shebang! And some of the lectures I'll have to deliver concern stuff I know quite a lot about, but there is also a fair bit I'll have to first teach myself. A lot of work!

One of the tomes I got from the library to help me on my quest to knowledge

I don't have to start from scratch; I have the powerpoint presentations of my predecessors, but the bad news is that these contain a lot of pictures and not much words. Which in itself is good; one doesn't want to swamp one's slides in text, but if you just have a picture of an iceberg, or of a map with unidentified isolines on it, and no reference or key or nothing, it can be difficult to find out why that pictures is there. And if I can't find out the picture has to go. And then I have to decide myself what knowledge is missing in the lecture, and put it back in myself, and that's quite a lot of work too. And it's not all lost; I also got my predecessor's notes, so that explains a fair bit.

Then there is also the issue of a fair percentage of the pictures stemming straight from the eighties. I don't think you can really show these to modern students! So I have a lot to do. And I have to manage that before September, while also doing a fieldwork and a six weeks scientific cruise in between. And prepare for that cruise, and manage to revise my Iceland paper. I think quite some other things will have to be sacrificed in the coming months!