School, 7 weeks in

It's been an unusually rough semester so far. I've got three sections of English 100, and, because of the virus, decided to divide each into three cohorts, so the students only come in one day per week and do the rest of their education online. Several things went wrong with that idea.

Each cohort was supposed to be five or six students, but it's been much more common for a group to be two or three. I didn't account for the football players who assume they don't have to do any work in the class, so in a normal semester the 9 a.m. group with 15 registered students would have been running with six or seven—pretty typical football player behavior. Instead, dividing the group so small, I got the tiny attendance. (And, to be fair, the concept of only coming to class one day per week totally confused two or three of them.)

Another sign of the grimness was that several students waited until week seven to even figure out textbooks, etc. Some of them still don't know how to submit papers. Out of 44 active students, something like a third are failing and five have submitted no work whatsoever. It's discouraging to a teacher. 

But there are signs of life. Half a dozen (including, unfortunately a couple who are failing because they don't submit work) are actually pretty good writers and interesting people, and the readings seem to be opening a few eyes. Maybe the semester isn't a total loss.

Two weeks and counting

Been locked in for a solid two weeks now. The weather, as usual for Ohio, is grey, cool, and windy, though it's expected to zoom up into the 50s in a few days. I guess I'm getting used to things, but I'm having trouble adjusting to my future. Apparently, I will never again (or at least for a year or two) actually touch another person or be close enough physically to share a meal or a beer or cup of coffee. I never hear a voice that isn't a YouTube video, and I have no particular use for my own voice. These four rooms are my world.

Yesterday was a defeat/victory of sorts. I had the insane idea of recording a face-to-face video for my students—which led to about four hours of screaming frustration. I eventually gave up on the video, though at the end of the four hours or so I did get the buggy software to do its work. Now I'm so angry at the software that I doubt I will ever use it. (Wrote a message to the software company and got an "it's not our issue" response. In my reply I pointed out that I'm on the committee deciding whether to renew their license and I'm going to recommend against it.)

The world of education is full of computer programs that look great, have glowing testimonials, and simply don't work. There was the grammar handbook software at Akron which looked so good in the beta version, but their update (launched just as school began) did nothing whatsoever, resulting in that publisher being permanently banned from the Akron English department. There was Macmillan's Launchpad, which works beautifully for teachers, but not for students. Now Kaltura, which (on its good days) is a video-capture software with bells and whistles, but has a very unfriendly user interface and a company that does not answer end-user questions. They refer everything to our local IT people, who aren't really specialists.

Possibly the isolation is getting to me. I suspect that may be the case.

Finally getting in gear

This weekend I have a handful of papers to grade. (Will I get them done? Who knows?) Finally I'm getting out of the phase of doing continual overhead and setting up, so I can actually teach courses. Over the last two or three weeks, I have averaged something like 15 hours a week on plain old "overhead" tasks. (Making copies, trying to figure out the latest software glitch, revising courses to conform to the boss's last-second changes, etc.) That's, of course, in addition to 18 hours of actual in-class time per week.

My most vivid task at NCSC appears to be dealing now with all the students who approach me in a breathless panic:

• "MY CAR DIDN'T START THIS MORNING!!! ARE YOU GOING TO KICK ME OUT OF CLASS???"
• The assignment said to write about my reaction to the essay and I used "I" and "me" but the writing center said I did that all wrong. Am I going to fail the course?

I guess I should welcome this. It's quite a contrast to the football players' attitude that all they have to do is sign up for the class, look bored, and occasionally turn in a late paper and — because they are so incredibly valuable to the team — they will pass and get a diploma that will make them rich.

Still, it just wears me out. Apparently these students had teachers who didn't know how to teach or grade, so they picked on the most trivial secondary issues (The printer printed this on both sides of the paper. Will it fail?) instead of trying to actually teach content. Once again, I find that my main task is dealing with the psychological damage. And that's not even taking into account the bias in Freshman English courses toward course designs that flunk people. (Yes, I failed two last semester because they couldn't figure out the software necessary to submit an electronic portfolio. That's the way the course was written by my superiors.)

My Teaching Schedule

I am editing this in March, 2020, six years after it was originally posted. I had thought of deleting it, but it will stay. I kept it because it's a good record of the kind of teaching I was doing back then.

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My weekly schedule is finally nailed down, and very unlikely to change. I have added travel time to the times below, to show when I'm really unavailable for much of anything else (and it's worth noting that the big gap Monday and Wednesday afternoon is so awkward that I will probably find somewhere to hang out and do more school work).

• Monday: 7:30 to 12:30 @ Ashland; 4:00 to 7:15 @ NCSC
• Tuesday: 10:30 to 2:15 @ NCSC
• Wednesday: 7:30 to 12:30 @ Ashland; 4:00 to 7:15 @ NCSC
• Thursday: 10:30 to 2:15 @ NCSC
• Friday: 7:30 to 12:30 @ Ashland

There are Spring Breaks (which, of course, do not match up), and the whole thing is done by mid-May.

Survived the First Day

If you've never taught before, you don't know the odd variety of stage fright one gets before the first day. I've been doing this since 1995, and I'm still convinced it will all crash, that they will hate me, and so forth. Bring out the tar and feathers.

Actually, the second-semester class based on The Soloist went quite well, in spite of the 8 AM time slot. One gets a feel for these things, and the vibe in the room was a good one. I always assume that second-semester developmental classes will be the people who didn't make it the first time around; in fact, this one (as usual) has several non-traditional students. I like non-traditional students. They tend to be more mature and work harder. And they lack the arrogance that often characterizes freshmen who are highly gifted in non-academic areas (for example athletics).

The afternoon was spent at NCSC. Another thing non-teachers wouldn't realize is the incredible number of administrative details it takes to fire up a semester. They all got crammed into a very brief time because of the weather delay and because I picked up this last-second course. This is Wednesday afternoon, and I'm still not quite sure I'll have everything nailed down for the Monday start. Deep breaths. The last-second course is only eight students. We really could run that one as individual tutoring. The big groups are entirely figured out. Poor Tony in the copying department—I hit him hard with work today, about 1000 pages.

The next couple of days I'll still have my nose to the proverbial grindstone, trying to get that last course nailed down.

Snow Day

Ashland University has (astonishingly) shut down on the first day of the semester. It's currently one degree above zero, snowing, and the wind is 30 mph. The temperature has dropped 15 degrees in the last hour.

I remember when the weather was much worse—we were under an ODOT "Red Alert" (severe snow/ice/drifting), which meant it was actually illegal to drive—and Ashland stayed open because it was OK to walk from the dorms. Kind of macho with other people's lives.

When I was a kid, I loved snow days. Staying home and eating cookies. Playing in the snow. Now there's not enough snow to play in (unless one lives near the lake) and the wind chill is actually life-threatening. And I'm still struggling to get my courses set up for NCSC. It's going to be a working vacation.

Once More to the Battlements

For the fourth time since Thanksgiving, I'm putting together a course. Ashland starts Monday, and their two are all ready except for the final copying. (I hope the weather breaks up enough to allow me to do that on Friday.) Same story for one of my NCSC courses, and I have an extra week to worry about them.

Then there's the new one. A teacher at NCSC took sick, so I got the course at the last second. It's a basic writing (developmental) course, and I only have six students. I might possibly pick up one or two more, but I doubt I will hit ten. I've never seen the textbook, and I can't get a copy until Monday. The textbook publisher needs assurances from the school that I really teach there if I am to get access to the teachers' website. Apparently an essential part of the course is the PLATO online learning software, but I cannot get into it because I'm not yet registered as a teacher (and presumably, I am supposed to construct an elaborate set of online exercises and tests for these six students). And apparently, nobody has developed anything resembling assignments for this course.

This is the point where I begin to say, "C'mon guys! Isn't this a LOT of overhead for six students?" And wouldn't it be nice, for once, to be an insider, not an outsider to the whole educational machine?

Stirring Up the Courses

I had an email from my NCSC boss last night. One of my sections only has four people registered, so they are going to cancel it. (No big problem for me: that one was at the other campus and interfered with some church stuff I wanted to participate in, so losing it is a bit of a blessing.)

Do I want another course? On a different day? Something I've never taught there? Ummm.

I think I'll say yes because it's always a good thing to bail the boss out when she gets in a jam. (The scheduled teacher apparently has a health problem and can't do the course.) So that will mean an emergency job preparing another set of lesson plans and so forth. Fortunately, this course will pay a bit more because it's got a lab attached to it.

People ask me two different questions. How much longer do I intend to keep doing this sort of thing? Answer: until it stops being fun or until I stop being effective. And am I uneasy about a job where I get fired and rehired three times a year? No. Most workers actually don't have the job security that I have. Aside from the personal element (helping that boss with the course emergency will make it more likely for me to get assignments in the future), I do have a contract. I know that I'll be working until the beginning of May. Most employees don't have that; they only know that it's traditional to give two weeks' notice before firing, but even that is not set in stone. The average employee in this country really should ask, "Is this my last day at this job?" I don't have to do that for several months.