Been a while...

Hello, strangers!
I, too, have managed to fall off the blog wagon (blogon?) but here are the updates since the last round of… well, updates.
We are working on the finalized stories that the students have been working on all semester—they’ve been writing between one to two pages per week for about 8 weeks. Which means that I have fifteen stores, running from 10 to 30 pages (over-achievers! Damn you!) to grade in, well, about a week. I probably could have thought this out better, but all the same, it’s been going really well.
In order to make sure that the students are all able to receive the same amount of attention for their work, and combating the general lack of class time we have during the year, I decided to split up my class into three smaller groups and have student-run workshops. I thought of this for two reasons: one, I’m able to bounce between all three groups and not dominate the conversation, which I feel is one of the larger drawbacks to professor-run workshops (as I have observed, this seems to promote a “follow the leader” mentality). Secondly, this peer review should be really useful for editing these stories for their eventual destination—Thomas had approached me with the hope that some of the student’s work could be published in a student literary magazine at the end of the year. For students, by students, so who would have the most valuable input than students? I ask you!
That being said, we’ve worked on the first five stories last Tuesday, and tomorrow we’re going to be working on the next round, and finally we’ll finish off on the 15th!
Oh, and a word of advice to those who would follow me as teachers: don’t let the class know you watch Gossip Girl.