Monday was the last day of my summer class and part of the reason that this blog post is late. When I sat down to write this blog post last week I was really struggling with the fact that I wasn’t going to complete my goals for the summer, so I set it aside and took the weekend off. I really wanted to have a good last class and well, my class wasn’t just good, it was great! Several students stayed after class to tell me how much they’d enjoyed the course and wanted to take another from me. And it was then that I realized I’d been looking at things all wrong. It wasn’t what I hadn’t accomplished this summer that counted but what I had accomplished.
At the beginning of summer, I wrote out my goals as I always do. I tried to limit them because I’m usually overly ambitious, put nine things down, and only get five done. This summer, I decided to have only three goals. This would make it much easier, I thought, to accomplish that. My first goal was to teach my World Civilization II full session online class. My second goal was to teach my Dark Folklore short second session class. My third goal was to finish the rough draft of Under the Harvest Moon.
This sounds easy, right? I should have had no problems reaching these goals. I had taught the World Civ II class any number of times and nothing really new needed to go into that. The past three times I’ve been scheduled to teach in the classroom during a short session it’s been canceled due to lack of enrollment so I really didn’t think I would be dealing with goal number two. That left finishing the rough draft, which I had set at approximately 95,000 words.
Well, it didn’t happen that way. My second session class actually made and was full for a summer class. Yay! Money! But that meant that I needed to do all of the prep for it. And I never taught this class before. Still, it was folklore. I knew tons about this. Easy, peasy. I had high hopes that I would get all three of my goals done.
Then the first day happened. I had walked in with the syllabus and 27 pages of notes that I thought would last all week. They barely got me through the first day. Each class was about five hours long and even though I intimately knew the subject matter, I needed to present it in a coherent fashion to my students. Thus the epic lectures were born.
I came to the depressing conclusion last Friday that while goals one and two were in the bag, I still had roughly 60,000 words to go on in goal three and unless a miracle occurred, it wasn’t getting done. With my daily word count hovering well below 1000, there was just no way that I could complete the draft by August 13. I spent the weekend in a bit of a funk because of what I hadn’t accomplished.
As I was chatting with students after class, I was gathering my sizable stack of lecture notes into a neat bundle. It was then that it hit me. I had written this summer. A lot. Monday’s lecture alone was 49 pages long. That is 16,904 words.
I really started to think about it on the 45 minute drive home. Over the span of the five week course, I had written just under 127,000 words of lecture. Plus teaching and grading. That didn’t include the nearly 20,000 words I had added to Under the Harvest moon. 20,000 words is a paltry sum but taken with everything else, it isn’t bad at all. I also took two marketing classes earlier this summer and it completed half of a 144 mile virtual race.
Given everything, I decided to forgive myself for not quite making my goal (I do have some time left so if I light a fire under myself I *might* make it) and be proud of what I did.