Being a bit slow on the uptake, especially when it comes to self-awareness, I have not realized until recently that the reason I used to have more time in the evenings to do things like, oh, exercise, is because I used to routinely take work home over the weekends. That's the calculus: I can have most of my weekends free of work if I stay in the office until past 8 p.m. every night, or I can get home early enough to practice the fiddle (which has replaced exercise in the equation of X number of waking hours in a day and Y number of things to do)--but if I get home early enough to practice, I have to work on the weekends. Pick your poison.
And, yes, I know there will be weeks when I end up doing both: staying in the office late and working at home on the weekend. But usually I'll be able to make the choice--and whenever possible, as long as I'm learning to play an instrument (a difficult instrument at that), I need that time in the evenings. That or routinely have dinner after 10 p.m., which also doesn't seem like a good way to crunch the numbers.
When I was talking to the barking-fit-inducing young woman in Advisement yesterday, I had to explain to her in all seriousness that being an adult means having to make decisions--and often the decision to do one thing means not doing something else. Or having one thing means going without something else. Decisions have consequences. Choices are that: a choice, and unlike on multiple-choice tests, rarely is the option "all of the above."
So. That's about this evening and my desire to drain the soapy water of the day.
Class was good. Small, but good. Today I was particularly happy that only one student sat silent during the class discussion. A few others who have been reticent to share their ideas prior to today suddenly found the courage and encouragement to speak up. One I had rather pegged as a lunk turns out to be OK: he had a pretty great idea in his group, and he shared it with the class. Even the resistant student seemed pretty open today, not snotty at all. The armchair psychologist in me suspects he has Mommy issues, but he seems to understand that I'm not an authority figure against whom he needs to defend himself but someone who is open to his ideas.
My only concern about that class right now is that it seems I may have already lost one of the students who looked set to be among the absolute brightest and best. He never submitted his first reading notes, though I could see they were extensive and his class contributions were excellent--but I haven't seen him in a week. I just sent him an email, letting him know I'm concerned about him and hope he will get in touch (and return to class). There's also a young man who has been chronically late--and significantly late. I spoke with him after class, and he just hasn't been allowing himself enough time for his commute. I suggested he plan to be on campus 30 minutes early, so he can do some studying. If he misses the study time, oh well; at least he'll be on time to class. He said he'd do that. We'll see.
P&B was a lot of the usual routine for fall: assigning mentors for people going up for sabbatical or for promotion, figuring out who would observe whom (which reminded me that I need to let an adjunct know I'll be observing her class: brief time out for that), that sort of business. However, Cathy did let us know that the admin, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to hide all classes for which there is as yet no classroom. That means 1. We can't tell what FT faculty schedules look like without comparing several disparate documents--and even then we may not have the latest information about any changes, and 2. Because we can't clearly tell how many sections we have of anything, and how many of those sections are already staffed, we can't make adjunct assignments. I might note here that because of the early start to the semester, Cathy and I will have a week in which to do all the scheduling of adjuncts--which usually takes at least two weeks--so they can sign their contracts in time before the start of classes. It is therefore especially important that we get a jump-start on assigning adjunct courses, which we can't do now because many of our courses are hidden. No rationale was given for this, by the way; it is mysterious to me how this decision could possibly benefit anyone at all, never mind the way it utterly stymies our ability to do our work. I said in P&B and repeated to Paul--and will continue to repeat--this may be an instance in which we just need to drop the football, or at least threaten to. My advice was to tell the admin that we simply cannot get the schedules all sorted in the two weeks between the start of January and the first day of classes, so if we can't see all our courses--room or no room--our faculty will be sitting in their offices (or at home, waiting for a contract, in the case of the adjuncts), not teaching anything, the first two weeks of the semester, until we can get all the schedules organized. And the students will either be wandering around campus lost or they simply will not be able to enroll because they don't see any open classes. (We're already suffering enrollment attrition--and some of it is because we can't offer enough sections of things because we have fewer and fewer FT faculty to teach them. Can you imagine if even more students can't find an open class in which to register?)
This isn't just a SNAFU, it's FUBAR.
This chair stands in the hallway, a metaphoric comment on the state of the institution.
And on that gleeful note, I'm outta here.
No comments:
Post a Comment