Working on a Sunday...

Not working very hard, I assure you, though I have actually had to engage in a little thinking, as I've been working on the online Nature in Lit. I'm up to week 5 (out of 15)--and I'm realizing how much of the (rather pricey) textbook I'm leaving out of what students have to read. Many of the texts I think are important or that I particularly like are not in the book but are available on the web (Emerson's Nature, for instance, or Whitman's "Song of Myself"). I hope that as I get past the 19th century, I will rely more heavily on the textbook. No: let me rephrase that. I will rely more heavily on the textbook--even if that means slight disappointment that I can't assign something I really love because it isn't in the book. The selection in the textbook is wide-ranging and wonderful, and in fact it can expand my horizons (as there are works in it that I have not read but would like to know at least a little bit). But I'm up to Thoreau's "Walking," which is in the anthology--and rather than using my diminishing mental faculties to try to figure out what to say in the overall set-up for the reading and for the discussion boards (not to mention finding images, which is fun but dangerous in terms of gobbling up time), I've decided to set it aside for now. Again.

I did, however, have another realization about the week by week schedule for that class, and how many weeks of actual content I have to produce: not only can we discount the first and last weeks, there are at least two weeks in the middle of the semester when students will be writing essays. I do have to monkey around with the assignments for the essays, but it will be a process of tinkering with assignments I've used in the past, not anything I have to create from scratch. So, well, that's good.

I'm also bracing myself for tomorrow, when Cathy and I dive back into scheduling. There are still a number of courses assigned to FT faculty that have alarmingly low numbers. Some are just under the mark: we've been using 12 students registered as the line at which a course is considered full enough to run, and some are at 10 or 11 students (including both Paul's elective and mine). But one elective assigned to a full-time faculty member only has 5 students in it at this point--and it's been holding there for a long, long time. Cathy and I are baffled by that: it's a section of American Short Story, and usually the word "short" in the class title is sufficient inducement to get students to sign up. (When I've taught it in the past, my first question to students is, "How many of you signed up because of the word 'short'?" and usually a majority of the hands go up.)

However, I texted Cathy about my concerns today and she seems very calm about it all, so ... fair enough. If she isn't worried, I won't be. She may have inside info that I lack about what our dean will allow, given the fact that students still have two weeks in which to register. I'd feel more sanguine if all the other electives were filled to capacity, but there are a lot of seats out there. (Using 12 students as the benchmark still leaves a lot of room in a class that's capped at 31.) I'll be interested to hear what Cathy's thinking is. Maybe she just has genius plans for how to shift things around. I wouldn't be surprised: she's like that.

I was, in fact, surprised to see that apparently she took rapid action on the sad news that one of our faculty died last week. We've been very concerned about his health for a long while (I may have mentioned this in an earlier post): he took a few very serious falls simply walking across campus. But he loved teaching and wouldn't consider retiring. We're all sad to lose him--but I have to be honest and say that my second thought was "Oh, we have to find someone to teach his classes." I went on Banner to see what was assigned to him--and found nothing. Apparently Cathy had already taken his name off the classes (and may have reassigned them, for all I know). She's nothing if not on top of things, always.

In fact, I worry about the fact that--in my estimation--she doesn't delegate enough. She did most of the adjunct scheduling while I was at the dermatologist's, instead of leaving it for me to work on the next day (and I know damned well she has about 10 zillion other things she has to do at the same time). The office staff and I are trying to get her to hand over more stuff that we can do for her, but I have to say, I completely understand her M.O., as I'm very much the same. 1. I will worry about something until I know it's done, so I usually feel I might as well do it and 2. I am enough of a control freak that I don't really believe anyone will do anything as well as I would.

But I'm working on letting both of those tendencies go.

Shifting gears: Cathy recently found the old faculty web pages (I didn't even know they were still accessible), and when she saw the link to my blog, she raised alarm bells. She's concerned that I might be charged with violating confidentiality regarding personnel issues--even though I don't use names. And I understand her concern, but I refuse to take the blog down, even though I was perfectly happy to remove the link from my faculty web page. I'm sure someone determined enough could still make the connections (I don't hide the name of the campus all the time, after all, and there's enough information available with first names that someone who really wanted to follow the clues could easily figure out who's being talked about), but in my estimation, this is a freedom of speech issue. I don't think I'm doing anything that really violates any necessary confidentiality concerns, now that there is no explicit link between the blog and my presence as a faculty member on campus. I do post to the blog using the computer at work, so I know the administration could easily nail me about it, if the issue were to arise. I may be stupid or naive, but I don't think I have to worry. I understand why Cathy urges caution, and she may be right. But for now, I'll just keep on as I've been doing.

But speaking of the blog, where it is, and all that, for a long while now I've considered migrating it to another platform, one that's a little more user-friendly in allowing followers in particular. I won't do that, however, unless I can sit down with my Montana-based computer guru and work with him on getting it all set up so my followers can still find me and so on.

Which is an issue for so far down the road it's practically invisible. For now, I'm going to switch my brain off for the rest of today and lapse into drooling torpor. It's a gorgeous summer day out there, perfect for doing bugger-all nothing. So, that's what I'm going to do.