Revising the Powerpoints

School starts in a month, so there's no shortage of work to do to prepare, even though technically I'm still on sabbatical. (And of course, sabbatical is all about work too, just not about teaching at one's home institution.) My main immediate teaching-related task is to get my two fall courses ready to go, although ideally I'd be getting the entire year's courses out of my hair. (Every year I hope to do that before school starts, and every year I fail, prompting a flurry of work at Christmas-time.)
Mind you, everything I'm teaching this coming year is a course I've already taught. In theory, that makes life easier. Well, and indeed it does, just not as much as I'd like. In teaching art history, we use Powerpoint or some similar presentation software such as OIV, having abandoned physical slides around the time I finished grad school. I have never taught a course using traditional slides, although I could have done so had I so chosen during my first years teaching.
The advantage of presentation software is that whatever you've created is available to re-use next time around. This is also, at times, a disadvantage. When I began teaching, I had no access to image databases such as ArtStor.org. Just as my students now often do, I went rummaging around on the internet in search of jpgs to download. In those days much less was available. Fewer museums had put any of their collections online. And, just as today, often the image is not properly labeled, is not of sufficient size to project large, may have poor color, may be cropped without that having been stated, and may even turn out to be somebody's proud copy of a favorite artist's painting. These problems meant that my early Powerpoints had a lot of imperfect images, a problem I compounded by not labeling the works very thoroughly.
So--before each semester starts, I try to go through the Powerpoints, many of which have had portions cannibalized from some other course because after all I might want to show major works by an artist in survey, in a 20th-century course, and in Women in Art--and see what might need fixing. Does the color look right? Is the label complete? Next thing I know, I'm spending hours searching through ArtStor for information that they may not have either, or may have wrong depending on who provided the image to them.
On labeling: not every art historian believes in labeling classroom images, but I sure do--most of my students have no idea how to spell a wide range of foreign names, and I'm not going to write every artist's name on the blackboard at the beginning of class as some of my professors used to. But beyond that, I've learned that my students--mostly aspiring artists--want to know the exact medium, and often how big the work is, and I'd like them to know where these works are. So I work to improve my labeling. And I'd believe ArtStor that a given work by Gabriele Münter is a color woodcut, except that I happen to know it's really a color linocut, which isn't the same thing. And when I see that Paula Modersohn-Becker painted various works on board or on cardboard, I get nervous about information that says oil on canvas, because do they actually know or are they just making an assumption?
This sort of thing is what I fret about when I still have a reasonable amount of time before the semester starts--if there's no time left, I say the hell with it, I'll have to try to fix some things as we go along. But something I have to deal with this semester, which has been an ongoing problem, is that the number of class sessions per week have changed from last time I taught these courses. Somehow this seems to happen to me constantly--that the amount of time per lecture shifts.
When I taught in grad school, we were on semesters, although sometimes I taught once a week, sometimes twice, and sometimes three times. When I got a job, we were on quarters and I taught twice a week. Before long, we switched to semesters, still twice a week but with a different amount of time. Next, my schedule began to rotate between twice a week and three times a week. That was kind of hellish for course prep (I like to divide topics by day, if not by week), so we introduced a schedule that involves teaching three days a week but doing a mix of two-day and one-day courses. I like this new schedule a lot, my colleague a bit less. It seems to work for the students. But it does mean that anything I taught three days a week needs reworking (i.e. everything I'm teaching this year), and the once-a-week course needs to be made less lecture-heavy.
Consequently, while friends who have been teaching longer than I have are astonished that I would need to do more than minor tweaks to my courses, I regret to say that, as usual, I have an unpleasant amount of reorganization to do before the semester starts.