Summer I is dead, long live Summer II

I've just finished posting the final grades for the graduate course in Evolutionary Theory that I've been teaching with Anita. An evil evo duo, working together to cause students a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, "Oh my God what have I done to myself?!" challenge. (This came from the feedback session, which surprised me -- I was thinking the course would be a 7 or 8 on a scale of 1 to 10 challenge.)

It was a great experience, though, truly team teaching a course. In most cases, team teaching means, "One instructor for the first half of the class, who walks away and you never see again, who is then replaced by a second instructor, who gives very few signs of having communicated with the first." In contrast, we were both in the class every day. (Except that one bad day when Anita's partner walked out of the house with two sets of keys... one of which was hers.) We took turns lecturing and leading discussions, but every so often there would be times when we would end up on opposite sides of a sketch on the chalkboard, going back a forth, making complementary points. It felt, I think, a little bit like what jazz musicians do with music, only we were doing it with scientific concepts.

Great fun. But I'm definitely glad it's over.