Next week's the last week of classes for the semester. It's amazing how quickly the months have flown by (again!) I have enjoyed teaching & advising the students more than I expected to, and over time have become less stressed by it. Marc quips that he can tell things are going well when I don't even mention it anymore. This is probably because: 1) The bits of information/ knowledge the students have been exposed to over the past few months are starting to click together better, and 2) I've become more confident as a teacher. It is nice to think that both the students & I have grown through this process.

Occasionally get emails from students asking me questions that I think they would have figured out the answers to if they would just think a little harder or in a more organized fashion. None of my students are dumb -- they just need to learn to think in logical steps. Hopefully I've been able to force them towards this exercise, rather than just give them the answers.

Next week, I will have my last long session with them in preparation for the final, and will probably have a few more one-on-one sessions with some students. Given Marc's travel schedule for the Spring semester, I won't teach in Spring, but I am certainly willing to teaching again next Fall -- hopefully there will be an opportunity for me to do so.

As for my research, I've been having to do some waiting of late, which has been a little frustrating. The UNICEF contract finally come through and I've started to work a little on that project. So far I haven't receive much direction from the head of the study, which prevents me from making additional headway on this. In addition, various missing components of the data for my dissertation work are slow in coming in. This has dragged on longer than I had hoped.

~ Shuwen