No me gusta

Let me start by saying that I generally like the Spanish department and I am enjoying being a graduate student quite a bit. But, I am really frustrated by the whole teaching process and it drives me nuts every semester. For one thing, there is just too much politics involved and all that usual junk, but I'm not even going to go into that here. As part of being a "student instructor" (we are not TAs in case you are wondering) you are required to attend a workshop during the week before school beings. So far there is no information available about the workshop. Like when it starts and ends each day, etc. That makes it kind of hard to coordinate my schedule and Master Fob's schedule, plus I will probably have to arrange some sort of child care for parts of the week (yeah, some of us students actually have lives besides school--imagine that). I still don't know which classes I will be teaching or when they will be, and I probably won't find out until partway through the week of the workshop. And, since our salary is just a stipend that is disbursed throughout the semester we technically get paid for the week, but it really doesn't feel like it. I hate the not knowing thing, because it makes it really hard to get prepared ahead of time. Once the semester starts it's even harder to get stuff together and I like to have a running start. I could be doing any one of four possible class options which are all very different. I'd hate to get myself all ready to teach a 101 class and really be teaching 201. Plus, if I am assigned a class I can email them before the first day of school and give them a heads up on the class requirements and possibly weed out some people who shouldn't be in the class anyway. The truth is, I've been struggling with whether I enjoy teaching or not. The lack of support from my supervisors makes it even harder to deal with things. I also hate having to spend the first few weeks of the semester explaining to my students why the required conversation lab isn't up and running or why the required CD ROM only works on the Macs in the HLRC and not on their home computer (and why no one has just put the stuff on the web like other language classes). Urgh--all responsibility and no power make FoxyJ go crazy!