Yesterday was the first day of classes for Fall Semester, Friday September 14, 2018.
For a month before I'd been having increasing numbers of increasingly frustrating and distressing nightmares of going to classes without having my handouts done, being late going to classes, finding that the students were in the wrong classrooms and I in the right ones or vice versa, noticing students getting up and leaving class early without permission, and so on and so forth. To avoid any of those kinds of things from happening, I went in to school the Thursday before the first Friday, and spent the whole day making handouts and trying to confirm my classrooms and printing my student lists and so on and so forth. So I woke up Friday morning feeling somewhat confident that everything would be OK... But when my first period class ended and I was about to go from building 10 to building 8 for period 2, I was shocked to see most of the students for the period 2 class (American Culture) trying to come into my period 1 classroom in the wrong building! I stopped one to say, "Aren't we in 811?" and he showed me his smart phone's screen, showing our university website and the classroom locations and sure enough, the period 2 class was for some reason changed without my knowing to the same room as period 1! I couldn't believe it, so I told the students to stay in the building 10 classroom, and went to the usual classroom in building 8 (the same one from Spring Semester), and there found a handful of kids and my TA, and asked them to wait there, and went down the hallway to the phone and called the administration office to explain what happened and to say we'd be in building 8 (our usual room), and could they please turn on the air conditioning in that room. They wanted me to have the class for the first day in building 10, but as there is no screen etc. in that room, I wouldn't be able to show the class some important things on the first day, so I stubbornly held out for having the class in our usual room, and finally (after putting me on hold for five mins or so, during which I heard the start of class bell ring), the administration people agreed... So then I went back to building 10 and got the 45 or so kids to come back with me to building 8, and we finally we got our first class of Fall Semester going! Ho ho ho--it was really very much like my nightmares... And then, to top things off, when I got back to my office, I checked the paper I'd received the day before with my classes and classrooms listed, and sure enough, the change was reflected there, but I had not noticed it before! I am a careless and unobservant person, to be sure--but in this case my oversight was due to the fact they have never in my 20+ years here changed a classroom without my initiating the change, so it never entered my head that the classroom would be different than in Spring Semester. Sigh... Anyway, I guess the class went OK... I reviewed grades, confirmed that most of them would prefer the final examination on the last day of class rather than during the exam period, reviewed using our class website's blog, and then introduced the Mid Term Election phenomenon that's occupying so much American media and other attention right now. Whew--I suppose it's lucky to have gotten the craziness out of the way on the first day of the semester, so that now when all my other classes begin next week on Wednesday and Thursday, everything should be smooth (knock on wood!). And it is good to get back in the classroom and back to work in autumn after the long hot humid summer...
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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