If anyone sees a brain lying about, it may be mine.

I know I am the epitome of the absent-minded professor, but especially when it comes to the later of the 101 sections, I have gone beyond my usual levels of disorganization and am pretty much falling to bits.

Of course, so are the students. There were eight students in the later class today. Eight. The updated photo roster (which removes students who have officially withdrawn) stands at 24. One I don't think ever attended; several more haven't been there since about the second week--or even since the first class. The earlier class was better: most of the students were there (apart from a few who fell apart over the first essay).

It's fascinating to me how many students--especially first year students--fall apart at the very first bump. The instant a requirement or deadline or expectation is different from what they're used to from high school, they simply bail: it's too hard. The students in the 101s are about to embark on the final topic, which is about "social technology," and I just read an article in Time magazine about teenagers and the ubiquitous "screen-based activities." I'll make the article available to students (though it came onto my radar too late for me to specifically assign it), but it references the work done by Jean M. Twenge, and I have assigned an essay by her about the concerns. In the essay I assigned, "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" (The Atlantic, Sept. 2017, retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/?utmsource=nextdraft&utm_medium=email), Twenge notes, "Across a range of behaviors--drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised--18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school." That corresponds with my experience: in the years I've been teaching, freshmen have seemed increasingly immature, babyish, dependent, tremulous. That tendency increases the width of the high-school to college gap, which is already pretty wide.

Ask little kids to take on adult responsibilities, and no wonder they bail.

Well. Anyway.

I could probably natter on for a while here, but I need to get the hell out. It's late, and I have to be in at 9:30 tomorrow to make up time in Advisement. And Advisement is now certifiably nuts: registration for spring starts tomorrow, and suddenly we've got students in holding patterns that rival La Guardia's on a bad-weather day. So I will not have any of the promotion folders read for tomorrow's P&B, except the one I'm mentoring (which I read last week). I'll read them on Thursday, I reckon, and send my notes to the various mentors.

I hope I have everything I need packed up and ready to haul to Advisement and from there directly to class; God knows I won't be alert enough in the morning to figure out what I need to take with me.

And as for everything I need to do to be ready for Wednesday? Well, that falls to tomorrow: you know, that "other day" we're so fond of (or of which we are so fond, if you prefer).