So it is week 4 of the new term and everyone seems to be heads down busy getting on with teaching and prepping.
Our students are of course very busy, attending lectures, seminars, workshops and thinking about their assignments already which are not due in until January.
So given that our students generally only see us in the classroom and the occasional tutorial, I thought I would write a blog about what I do in a (typical for a Wednesday).
I work part-time, and so Wednesdays are my first day at work. So the first hour today was spent catching up and replying to email messages which have arrived this week. A quick conversation and catch up with fellow 2nd year co-coordinator Jenny Harrand about a request with have received from the University Marketing department. Followed by a lengthy but productive one-to-one dissertation tutorial with a 3rd year student. Great to see students starting to make those links between the lectures and their own personal research projects. Then, I had time to send out some announcements to the 3rd years studying my module ‘Advancing Occupation Focused Practice’ to prepare them for the sessions scheduled tomorrow. Phew!
Time for a short lunch break before our team (OT programme) meeting. Very productive discussions which included some initial ideas of how we here at @YSJOT will be celebrating our 40th anniversary in 2017.
Spoiler alert… there may be teddy bears
involved.
The staff meeting gave me some action points to follow up on, including inviting guest speakers to future staff meetings, writing some Tweets and updating our blog site.
Then time to meet another 3rd year student about their dissertation project (getting excited as it is all coming together). Time to prepare for tomorrow afternoon’s Panel Debate that we are holding to role model to our 3rd year students how to critically engage with a topic and see an issue from different perspectives. Followed by more admin, and squeezed in time to write this blog before I go to choir practice this evening.
This was a typically busy Wednesday for me, but catch me on a Thursday or Friday and I will mostly be in the classroom with students. Busy and long term, it will be Christmas in no time.
m.parks@yorksj.ac.uk Twitter: @YSJOT @jaffaparks