20 January 2022

Side gig admin

A new teaching job comes with new teaching admin! I had to get the course material together, of course, but I also needed to provide information for the participants so they know what they got themselves into, and a lesson plan for the organisation. The information for participants was not much work; I was just asked to provide a paragraph of information per session. As I pretty much had the material ready, that was easily done!

The lesson plan was more work. I was expected to submit a breakdown per 10 minutes what I would be doing in every session. That's a bit difficult if you've never actually met the people you will be teaching! Or not even group anything like them. I mean, if you have taught a course in University a few times, you get an idea of how it goes down with the average cohort of students. But I've never taught retirees before! But I made something up. I'm sure I am free to diverge a bit from this schedule.

Communicating all this was another thing. They were sending me emails on my private email account, and sometimes they seemed to get a bit lost. And some of them I seemed to not get it all. I noticed they had created an adult education Wales email address for me, but I assume that was just an alias of my private mail. That was a bit of a silly thought. I had a proper account, on Microsoft Office 365, but the login information had never quite reached me. Only the day before the course happened, I communicated with their IT support and got in. That was great! Now I don't have to worry about important emails being lost in my Gmail. I just have a separate mailbox for it. And all the other Office appliances involved.

It probably would have been a good idea to organise this a bit earlier, but hey, better late than never. I was almost ready to start!

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