Adding More Stress

This year, I’m teaching three different subjects for the first time and I love every minute! While loving three new preps might sound strange to some people, it's not to me since one of my favorite parts of teaching is developing the lessons. Consequently, this year, I am able to do that…a lot. So I spent tons of time thinking about all of the possible options for my course project, which is planned during this class and will be taught next semester. Given the time constraints, personal as well as the limitation of one quarter classes, and the choice of working alone or collaborating with a wonderful colleague, I opted to work with Susan Chubb to perfect and improve our stress unit.

During the last class, both Susan and I blogged about our stress project. Most of the student stress videos were interesting and effective. All of the student feedback about the project was very positive. In their reflections the students thought they learned a lot from the project by “creating the project and listening to other presentations”. Students said they learned from the “examples” in the films “rather than people sitting in front of the camera talking.” Most students liked the “comedy” in the videos and when they were “funny and creative”. As one student stated, the “…funny part which made me laugh and made me watch the video seriously until the end.” When they reflected about any difficulties they encountered, most thought they needed more time, in particular more time to film and edit. Though one student stated that the difficulties his group encountered “were having so much fun we couldn’t focus.”

Therefore, Susan and I decided we want to allow a little more time for their stress videos. In addition, we want them to blog about their experiences and post their videos on their blogs with their blog entry categorized as “health”. We think that expanding our current project, thereby adding more days of stress, makes more sense than trying to add something else to our already full units, especially given the time constraints of a one quarter class.

Here is one of the videos from this quarter: