The ironies abound...

Well, after all my ranting yesterday about how much I hate teaching 102, today, I reconsidered. We were asked to open a new section of 102, and it works perfectly with the rest of my schedule--and we needed someone to teach it. The fate of Nature in Lit is still unknown, but if it runs, I will now be teaching it as an adjunct. (Yes, I have lost my mind--but really, I don't think it will run; I just think we're postponing the inevitable.) So--unless I really do end up taking Nature in Lit as an adjunct--I'll be teaching two sections of 101 and one section of 102. Which may be hateful but somehow feels less gawd-awful to me today than it did yesterday.

Oddly enough, part of what tipped the scales was my realization that I could use the novel I ordered for the Native American Lit class--David Treuer's The Hiawatha--as the ultimate reading in the 102. I didn't want to teach Left Hand again (that has been so disastrous, I'm not going anywhere near it), and I didn't even really want to teach Word for World. That was a much easier read for the 102 students, but it is just a little too thin to make me feel fully happy. The Treuer novel has the advantage of being more mainstream--set in a real place, real time, with characters who are only "unusual" in being Native--and it is absolutely beautiful.

In any event, the decision has been made and the schedule is set. I just placed a book order, and tomorrow, I get to prep the class. It feels like millennia since I taught 102, but it was only a year and a half ago: spring 2017. So I can resurrect it without too much trouble from the materials I used then. I will have to do some reinventing of the wheel, I know, but ... that's OK.

One other minor oddity about the semester as it's shaping up is that the 102 doesn't have a very congenial classroom to live in. Right now, one day each week I'm in a room we call the "Ballroom"--which has the advantage of being here in Bradley Hall but has the disadvantage of being a huge, echoing space better suited for department meetings and parties as well as having one of the branches of the Writing Center in the back corner, so there will be traffic through the room almost continually. The second day each week, I'll be in a computer lab: also not optimal, as it's hard to do small groups in the space, though at least it does present the possibility for some in-class drafting of writing, if I decide to use it that way. The other advantage to being in the lab at least part of the time is it means a lower cap on the class: most 102s have up to 28 students; my section will have a maximum of 22, as that's all the lab can hold. Meanwhile, I know Cathy and Lori are going to try to find a better solution for me, but whatever. As I have been saying: sixteen weeks, and it's all over, no matter what happens. (And that applies also to my awareness that students who register at the last possible second may not be the ones I would most love to have in my class...)

I also have been consoling myself that I'm ending up without an elective because the cosmos is telling me that the SF class in the spring was so wonderful, that should be the note on which I leave that part of my career. (We'll disregard my unhappiness over the online Nature in Lit in the spring, which was at best a mixed bag.)

But all that's in the future (or the past). Today is also mostly in the past, but to give a quick run-down of how the day went: we suddenly had two classes bounce back to us to staff, in addition to the classes we hadn't quite figured out yesterday and the two new courses that were added (the 102 I took and a new section of 001). Two FT faculty had been holding on to comp sections while they waited to see if an interdisciplinary course filled enough to run--and in both cases, they got lucky, so their comp sections came back to us. But in part because some of our FT faculty are so wonderfully willing to change things at the last minute and in part because we hired three new adjuncts over the past few days, everything got covered.

One of those new adjuncts was a woman we hired after interviewing her today. We're a little apprehensive about her: she has a lot going for her, but she may be too timid for our students--and her approach may pole-vault over some things that our students need. But we'll be observing all the new adjuncts over the semester, and if she's out of her depth, we don't have to hire her again. In fact, if any of them are out of their depth, we don't have to hire them again.

And tomorrow, adjuncts start signing contracts--and then we find out whether we made any howling blunders (assigning a course to two faculty members--or not assigning anyone at all to teach something). Tomorrow, I start prepping my 102. Normally, I'd have put together a photocopied reader for them, but the print/copy service on campus can't turn anything around that fast--and I still don't know how many students I'll have. (There is a bit of a delay for the newly opened course to show up for students to select.) So, I'll be pulling materials together but holding on to them until at least Friday before I do any photocopying (unless the course fills before then, which is, I suppose, possible). Whatever. I just can't get too bent out of shape about any of it right now--which is great. I don't like being bent out of shape, so the more sanguine my approach to everything, the happier I will be.