Today is class meeting day "A7."
On the agenda for me is the following:
- Teach "Mass Media Systems Around the World" (Time: 0800 - 0915)
- Sit in on the Global Studies core course that the entire ship "shuts down for" daily - it is held in the Student Union area of the ship with the lecture being broadcast on the closed-circuit TV system of the ship to the various satellite classrooms on the ship for those students who can't fit in the Union(Time: 0920 - 1040)
- Teach "Intercultural Communication" (Time: 1045 - 1200)
Update:
Well, I guess I'm doing something right because today a student in my "Mass Media Systems Around the World" class randomly came up to me in the cafeteria and said "Professor? I just wanted to let you know that I am really enjoying your class. It's really opening my eyes and making me see things completely differently." Ironically, that is the one class that I feel the least prepared to teach. I am constantly trying to figure out how I am going to fill up an hour and fifteen minutes for each class because I always feel like I don't have anything to really say (not enough information to last that long at least). Today was one of the days when I felt like I was completely winging it. At any rate, yay me for being such a good teacher. Actually, I don't think like that at all...I still contend that for every student that loves a class, there is one who absolutely hates it and is bored to death, so I attribute these zealous students as being anomalies! I think there are a lot of professors out there who are far more interesting and engaging than I am...and it's always hard to tread that fine line in class between boring students to death with facts they will never remember and actually providing them with thought-provoking content. Since I go over a lot of this material over and over again year after year in the classes I teach about things like media regulation, media content, media ideology, hegemony, etc., I guess I forget that it's not always readily evident that media work and are created in the ways that they are.
On another note, apparently a lot of people had money stolen from them on their debit and credit cards that were used in Salvador. Luckily, I didn't use mine at all and don't plan on using my credit card at all when in these various ports. I have about $75 worth of local currency for each port that I ordered before I left so I have that with me and that was more than enough for my time in Brazil.
We will apparently cross the Prime Meridian in the middle of the night tonight around 3:00 am.
