Like the optimist who jumped off a 30-story building...

...who passed each floor on the way down, saying, "So far, so good."

But, well, yeah. So far, so good.

It's going to be an interesting rhythm to get used to. Tuesdays and Thursdays, I only have one class, at 4 p.m. On Tuesdays, I'll have P&B before class (and I'll have to split on the stroke of on time, or I won't be able to trundle across campus in time--as, given the SNAFU over rooms, the class meets in a science lab)--but unless I have a meeting of some kind, which will be rare, I don't have to be anywhere until that point in the afternoon. My plan is to use the time for working on the online Nature in Lit--grading discussion board posts and so on--though I realize that not all students will have posted work by the time I check on either day. (I should have made their deadlines Monday/Wednesday, so everything would be in by Tuesday/Thursday, but, well, I didn't.) So I'll have to do some work over the weekend on that class, to make sure I give any necessary feedback within the week when it's all due. I have very strict deadlines: if a student hasn't posted within the week when the assignments are due, it's an "absence," and the posts receive zero points--so it behooves me to give feedback when the students are still likely to be checking.

And for the record, one student already submitted her self-evaluation assignment. It's a bit short, but I'm delighted that she's on top of things. It is interesting to have a photo roster for the course, too. I probably won't ever actually see any of the students (though Paul said some of his online students did, in fact, make in-person appearances)--but I "know" what they look like. I expect I will refer to the photo roster as I mark stuff: having a human face to put to the work is somehow important.

In any event, I met with the SF class, and they seem like a reasonable bunch. I ended up talking at length with one student after class; she got special dispensation to take 102 and my lit elective at the same time, and she's one of those students who flunked out of a four-year school, went out into the work world for a while, and now actively wants to be a student. I've got at least one other student who seems a bit older than the average--and pretty smart (with a lovely Brit accent, which, as far as I can tell, is genuine (remember the pseudo-Brit from the Fiction Writing Class years ago? No? I do...)). They were asking pretty good questions. They seemed to enjoy my rather whacky manner today. (Tired. Daffy. It's what happens.) But it is early days--and we know how quickly classes can transform in either direction. Indeed, sometimes first one direction, then the other.

Breaking with tradition, we had a P&B meeting today. (Traditionally, the first Tuesday of a semester is meeting-free.) Nothing of major import--in fact, some of it was just Cathy and me filling folks in on the mad scramble of the week before the semester--and, as a lovely compensation for the fact that we met at all, the meeting ended well early. Good.

Tomorrow, I will be in Advisement, helping all the poor students who for one reason or another don't have a schedule yet and need to try to put one together out of the limited courses still open. Then I trundle back to the office, at which point I hope to do some further organizing. I did spend quite a good amount of time today getting things organized: sorting out and filing the stuff that kept lurking over my left shoulder last week; making sure I had enough copies of handouts for each class; putting handouts in piles according to what I'm handing out when, in the case of the 101 class, that sort of magillah. I did, however, manage to leave the photo roster for SF in the office--but no harm, no foul. It gave me an opportunity to tell them that I am the absent-minded professor, which they'll figure out soon enough anyway, so might as well lay it out there early. And there are a few things that I'd have sworn I printed at home but do not, in fact, seem to have (and at least one probably needs to be changed anyway, so that's actually not a bad thing). I don't know whether I'll have time in the morning to take care of that, but I hope so. If not, c'est la vie.

And on that note, it is time for me to sit in traffic for a while getting to my PT appointment. So, my friends and faithful readers: until tomorrow.