Well, this will be ... interesting.

This evening class thing is going to be a mixed bag, I think. I don't notice a preponderance of "older" students, as used to be the case--perhaps a few more who've been out there in the world for a while, but not many. One already annoyed the hell out of me by asking what two handouts were after I'd just spent a fair amount of time going over all the handouts. "Where have you been?" I asked him. I asked cheerfully enough, but my gut was saying, "Oh, hang it up. You've already demonstrated that you're not equipped for this." I could be surprised; certainly I have been before. More of the students were actually there than in the earlier section: I think only two were absent, which is pretty good for a rainy evening after dark.

I was disappointed that the three returning students from last semester who are in the earlier section were all absent today. Maybe they figured they didn't need to be there, as they already sort of know the drill, but I have to say that I don't feel this bodes well for them this semester. I truly hope they all button it up starting Thursday; I'll be quite unhappy if they end up screwing up a second time. Two of them are more naturally confident about their skills and abilities in any English course, but all three have loads of potential--if they don't sabotage themselves.

In between classes, we actually did have a P&B meeting; Cathy had a few things she wanted to go over with us, but she gave it the kiss of death by saying it would be a "short" meeting--which of course meant it lasted the entire 75 minutes. We certainly have a lot going on for the start of a term, between all the furor over adjunct schedules and grievances and a few SNAFUs with FT schedules that only came to light today: two faculty members who had one too many classes--and one who had one too few. That last was almost certainly my fault: I thought the communications had gone through about a substitution we had set up just in case--and apparently they hadn't. Fuck.

That said, I would like to start screaming and shaking people saying, "We need more office staff! We cannot operate like this!!" If our poor beleaguered Lori had enough help, someone would have caught the problems before today. Cathy and I were almost fated to screw up: her first time period and my first time without Bruce overseeing everything--and the madness of all the cancellations and schedule changes we were going through. My guess is that both Cathy and I are going to be obsessive about quintuple checking things for summer and especially for fall. But please heaven we'll have more help in the office at least by the time we get to doing fall schedules.

It's awfully damned early in the semester to feel like my strand of pearls just broke....

Anyway, I've been footling around long enough for this evening; my tendency is to stay here even when I'm not accomplishing anything very worthwhile, but I need to get my little self home. I'm hoping the gap between classes on Thursday proves to be a productive chunk of time for things like getting my triage list in order, making sure I'm ready for the second week of classes, that sort of thing. Tomorrow, class followed immediately by Advisement, and it will be a mob scene in Advisement, with students desperately trying to fill their schedules when they waited until the last second to register. Ah well. So it goes.