Fall semester: day four
If there's one thing I've noticed thus far about my fall semester of teaching, it's that there's a lot of...well, waiting around. I don't necessarily mind this, but I've found myself doing a lot more waiting, pacing back and forth, and not sleeping than I've found myself teaching.
Mondays and Wednesdays, of course, involve a lot of waiting. Get up, go to campus, wait roughly four hours until I can teach and come home. The parking situation on main campus is an absolute mess. By the time I get there (at around 7:20 or so, give or take) the front third to front half of the student lot is already filled. By 8 it's usually completely full. By 9:30 or so when Parker arrives, he's lucky to find a spot. By the time my 11AM students come to class, they're telling me that they're parking on the street and walking a good half-mile or so to class. The university doesn't need a new dorm; it needs a five-or-six-level parking garage. Or less students.
I'll say this, though -- on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I teach on West campus, I roll out of the house after 8AM, make the beautiful drive through back roads and countryside, and get to the campus around 8:40-8:50 before my 9:15 class. There are twelve cars in the parking lot other than mine. Twelve. Ten of them are my students. The other two are the office staff. There is not another single morning class taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays on the West campus -- it is a ghost town.
It is 3AM, and I once more find myself waiting. My fatigue has taken a strong hold this week, and has worked hand in hand with my insomnia. This means that I am sleeping at extremely odd hours, for varying lengths of time, yet when I'm awake and at home I have little energy to do anything productive, and I am usually between times where I could get any more actual productive sleep as well, due to the schedule I have to keep. Yesterday afternoon, for example, I got home around 12:30. I took off my hot, overbearing dressy clothing, let Daisy know I was home safely, and ate lunch on the couch with a book. When I felt myself getting sleepy, I went downstairs and went to bed. I woke up around 11PM, wide awake and unable to go back to sleep or keep sleeping, but with no real energy to do anything once awake.
This is apparently my life right now until I can figure out how to better regulate my sleep patterns. Basically, I now wait until I can leave the house in a little over four hours, go teach my class, come back home, and if I'm tired, sleep then. It's maddening.
Some of you may be thinking why don't you just go back to bed if you're tired, and try to sleep until you have to get up and get ready? I did this last night; I was stuck awake until 2:30 AM or so when I had to get up at 5, and was sleepy, so I set my alarm and went back to sleep...only to wake up at 5, hit the snooze three times, finally got up around six, and felt like absolute shit. Making myself go back to sleep is pointless if I can't get a good six-to-eight hours, because I will wake up feeling much worse than if I just stayed up and drank about four or five more cups of coffee to compensate. When I crash out, however, I crash out.
This has, of course, put a damper on communication this week between me and Daisy; we've Skyped but once since Sunday, and all other communication back and forth has been via message here and there, spottily at best. She's been off work since Tuesday morning, but of course, I haven't. I sleep when she's awake most of the time, and vice versa. I really won't get the chance to talk to her again until at least this afternoon, and that's if neither of us are asleep. Knowing how my body works, as soon as I eat something upon arriving home in the afternoon, I have about an hour (maximum) after that before I get so tired that I literally cannot sit upright and must sleep. By the time I get home from teaching I am also usually ravenously hungry as well, so you can see how this cycle tends to work most of the time. This also happens regardless of how much I've slept the night before or how much caffeine I've consumed prior to eating. It just does. I conk out, the combination of having a full stomach, responsibilities taken care of for the day, and my fatigue finally taking over.
I checked on my office situation yesterday morning while on the main campus, and it remains much the same.
"So do I have a key yet?" I asked the administrator.
"They've made it and it's coming in the mail, as much as I hate it that they send it that way. I've offered to send someone over to pick it up, but they always just send it. When the mail comes today I'll see if it's here."
Mail in the department comes in around midday, sometimes a little earlier or later. My class is at 11, and after it I go back home, since I have literally nothing else to do on campus after it.
"That's good," I said, relieved. "I won't be back on campus today after my class until Monday morning, since I teach tomorrow on West campus, so keep me posted on it."
I thanked her graciously, of course. This morning, since I didn't have an office to sit in, I sat in the lounge and read probably 100 pages of the Pears Cyclopaedia from 1985, a book which someone long ago left in there and had forgotten about. It was mildly interesting if only because it was shocking to see how woefully outdated much of its information was 28 years later. I also made a mental note to charge and bring my DS with me on Monday in case I still don't have access to my new office yet.
My internet, which was out all night Monday night (as you know) has been incredibly spotty for the several days since; in the overnight hours that I've been awake, it has gone offline over and over, only to pop back up a few minutes later. I counted at least four times it's gone out in the past 2.5 hours tonight, and probably missed a few times as well. I don't know if the techs are upgrading it or working on it or what -- all I know is that I've been living here for over four years now, and every year the price of my monthly internet goes up a little bit more. Originally it was $47, then $54, and now it's $57. If I'm still with the same company next year, I'm guessing it'll be over $60. And that's just for internet alone, the second-fastest-tiered service they have. I don't have telephone or cable television through them (I don't have it at all, and if I did, I'd barely use either one anyhow). In those four years, the internet has only gone out for a long stretch of time a very small handful of times. Even during the worst thunderstorms or ice/snowstorms, I haven't lost it for more than a few minutes at a time, and then only very rarely.
My 011 class yesterday went well; in the interim between Monday and yesterday, someone completely rearranged the classroom and actually made the desks and chairs fit into it really well. I now have a desk and chair in there myself (no podium or lectern, though), so I have a teaching space that will be effective enough for the semester. The students seemed to be a little more loosened-up for yesterday's class as well, though that was possibly because we didn't do much other than the diagnostic essay. Unlike other diagnostics in other composition classes, these kids get theirs back and we discuss them in class next week. I graded them one by one as my students turned them in and left the class, and honestly was pretty surprised by their ability to write (for the most part). Judging by their diagnostics, some of these kids would do perfectly fine in 101, so why many of them tested into 011 is beyond me. I'm more concerned about those students who are signed up for the class yet haven't showed up yet -- I've got four or five of them out of a full class capped at twenty. If they don't show up, it's less to grade, yes (they'll auto-fail in two more weeks due to absences alone), but they're going to have some real issues if they suddenly appear in class on Monday morning asking me what they've missed.
As for my 101 class, today I give them their diagnostic. In the overnight hours, to try to be as productive as I can while awake and hating it, I wrote up lesson plans and made handouts for the entire semester through early November. This was like going back in time, sort of, to a simpler era of teaching, and adjusting the readings/schedules to do everything within the allotted timeframe felt totally freeing and almost like reflexes, muscle memory of teaching 101 all flooding back to me, despite the fact that I only taught it for one two-semester year. Thankfully, in the new version of the textbook, they do have a few of the readings I used to cover in appropriate units, so I was able to incorporate a few of those. I didn't make out a schedule for the last unit of the semester yet (early November through finals week in December), though, because I need to overhaul some of the dates and timeframes on that, especially around Thanksgiving week, since I already plan to be out of town and in Omaha for that week.
Pete and Sadie have about halfway made up, it seems. She'll occasionally still growl or hiss at him every few hours, but no longer goes after him or seems to care when he's around unless he looks at her like he wants to spar with her. He even spent some time earlier cuddled up to her licking her ears and face, which she didn't seem to mind. Then again, Sadie is basically bipolar anyway, so who knows.
It's hot; really hot, actually. By the time I got home from class yesterday it was around 90, and my car -- since it's all black with black leather interior, and sat out in the sun all morning -- was sweltering and oppressive. I immediately ran the AC when I got home, and let it run until I went downstairs to bed yesterday afternoon. I turned it on for a while more when I got up, before realizing that it wasn't doing much good. On Tuesday when I ran it once it got stiflingly hot, I let it run for about six hours, and it dropped the temperature in the house considerably before it began making its whining noise again and stopped blowing, signifying that I'd run it too long in this humidity and that it was freezing up. At 6:30 in the morning, in my Man Cave, it is 88.7 degrees. It's 70 outside right now, with a predicted high of 92 this afternoon. I have no doubt I'll have to run it when I come back home from teaching this morning.
Yesterday, only four days after I sent the payment, my new registration sticker for my car came in the mail. That's super-fast, and I'm glad I no longer have to worry about it. I have to remember to put it on the plate in the coming days at some point, though technically I don't have to until the end of September. The car needs a fill-up at the gas station this morning before I drive to/from West campus. It looks like, on average, I'll have to fill the gas tank about every week and a half or so during the semester. I drive a little further on Tuesdays and Thursdays, since the West campus is a little further out of the way for me. I'm getting excellent gas mileage, though, even better than before, since I put new oil and Marvel Mystery Oil into the car last weekend. I don't know if that's really the reason why or what, but it's still good. This morning I'll put some fuel system cleaner into it on fill-up, as it's been a few months since I last did that (and because I haven't driven the car a lot all summer up until this week). That should hopefully knock any more "kinks" out of it, if there are any.
I leave the house in about eighty minutes or so; I showered earlier and put on a fresh, new undershirt I purchased from Walmart on clearance, which I will wear with the shirt I wore to teach in on Monday and a pair of shorts (since it's West campus and all). I told Parker that since I travel between two campuses on different days, I could cut my laundry in half by wearing the same outfit to teach in on alternating days, depending on weather of course. For example, I wore the same shirt yesterday to teach in that I wore when I taught on Tuesday on the West campus. Today I'll be wearing the same shirt I wore on Monday when I taught on the main campus. I consider this to be a small stroke of genius. As long as I don't, like, spill coffee on myself or anything like that, I can get by with two outfits for any given week most of the time if necessary, and may be able to do something along these lines indefinitely for most of the semester. Why not, you know? If nothing else I'll at least be able to do it with my pants, as I have several identical pairs of pants, and don't tend to get them as dirty as quickly.
It's amusing to me how much time and thought I put into what I'm going to wear. I'm not generally that kind of person, yet I already see myself de-evolving into Polo shirts instead of button-up shirts for my West campus days next week, and probably dressier t-shirts for the week after, normal tees the week after that. For my main campus days? Pretty much the same sort of schedule, though a little more slowly. I doubt I'll start wearing my t-shirts until I wear a hoodie or zip-up jacket over them later in the semester, probably past the midterm point when it's colder and I've begun the big wardrobe switch from summer clothes to fall and winter clothes.
Yes, I do put thought into this, don't I? This is totally bolstered by the fact that -- as I mentioned above -- aside from me, my students, and two office staff members, West campus is deserted when I'm there. It's not like I have any administration over there that I need to, or must, impress. That may change for the second eight weeks starting in October, but still. If I wasn't so bored and restless and wanting to get it over with, I could conceivably leave the house at 8:30 or later and get there five minutes before class started, but I always give myself some extra time for traffic or car troubles, as well as a smoke before I go inside to teach. That's also part of the reason I go to the main campus so early on Monday/Wednesday as well, though the bigger reason is parking.
Parker has seriously upgraded his office this semester, even though he is scheduled to graduate in December. He brought in a massive lounge chair that he calls "the throne," and the title is accurate. It's wider, and twice as deep, as my couch. His officemate, not to be outdone, brought in a vertical ionizing fan with remote controlled-oscillation and three speeds. With some new lamps for mood lighting as well, the office is now a completely different place. I can't help but feel a little envious, as I expect my own office (when I get it) to be small, cramped, and nowhere near as inviting. But, it doesn't really matter as long as I get it.
I may stop for Burger King on my way home from teaching; I should roll off the interstate and back into Newton around 11 this morning, before the lunchtime rush. I don't really have anything in the house that I want to eat, and what I have been eating (mainly sandwiches and the occasional can of soup) has really started to wear on me. I have boxed stuff in the cupboard, such as mac & cheese and couscous that I could make, but I'm already tired (again, the fatigue) and by the time 11AM rolls around and I get back up here, I will totally be in full weekend mode, and will want to do nothing but stop doing work, including cooking. As you folks may already know, it's not like I eat fast food all the time, or really at all -- maybe once or twice a semester I'll stop for it just so I don't have to make anything at home -- but I have been desperately craving a burger for the past few weeks, and since the McDonald's in Walmart shut down, Burger King is the closest option for me (and it's right off the interstate on the way home). I may consider it. It depends on how tired and/or hungry I am by the time I get back home.
I messaged Daisy in the overnight hours and told her that if she was awake before 8, we could Skype before I went to campus, but I doubt she will be. As a result I probably won't get to talk to her until this afternoon, provided I'm still awake when she's around.
My weekend plans are sparse; I need to mow the grass again, more than likely, which I'll do on whatever day is the coolest and least sunny, and I'll be spending a bit of time working on student stuff, but other than that? I desperately need to get some quality, off-the-grid sleep where I don't have to worry about getting up at a set time and don't have to plot my resting hours around when I can get it or when I can feasibly continue sleeping instead of just staying awake for hours upon hours on end to power through things. I'll need to write out my rent check and mail it, which will be another large chunk of money gone from my bank account, but thankfully that will be replenished in another three weeks or so with my first paycheck (September 13). And, luckily, I only have another four days of teaching after today before I get a four-day weekend for Labor Day, as well. With Daisy coming down midweek (at least she plans to, I believe) I've got a good stretch of days ahead of me.
Now, off to teach.
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Hot Hot Heat
Fall semester: day three
By the time I got home yesterday morning after teaching my first 101 class of the semester, my mind and body were -- as if by muscle memory -- in weekend mode. That's because I'd already made my two trips to campus and back for the week, and had taught both times, so my mind and reflexes were like okay, your week's over now.
No, no; no, it's not. That's my body thinking it's on its old, grad student schedule from last year, of only needing to go to campus twice a week for a few hours each time to teach. My week is only half over.
I haven't had to go to campus four days a week in over two years. More than that, I've never had to teach four days a week before. The entire process of everything I do now is completely different than what I've done before. My body and mental state still need to get used to it, hence why I was subconsciously ready to start my weekend at 11AM on a Tuesday morning.
My sleep schedules are all kinds of fucked up right now. Monday night I came home and went to sleep until 10PM before I got up, stayed up, and taught yesterday, came home, and passed out again around 2PM on the couch, then went downstairs until around 9PM to sleep. Now it's after midnight and I'm wide awake. My alarm is supposed to go off at 5AM, and yet I'm up here typing away. Whether I go back down there for a several-hour power nap or not remains to be seen.
I suppose, at this early juncture of the semester, I can afford myself this. Tuesday night has become my "hump day" of the week, where I reach the week's midpoint. I've now learned that until I start teaching my night class in October, Monday and Wednesday will be my "long days," and that's only because I have to get to campus dreadfully early in order to be able to park. No, I don't like this, especially since I still do not officially have an office (which I'll get to). This means I'm just there, with nowhere to put my stuff, nowhere to put a coffee pot and sit down at a desk, nowhere for my laptop or anything of that nature. For around five hours total, including the time I teach (an hour, at most, for that). Really, I won't even notice this time when I get an office, as having an office again will allow me to actually relax, sit down, get up and move around when I need to, visit with colleagues, etc. But now? Being there with nowhere to go, when I have to be there regardless, is maddening.
I've been given a minimal update on the office situation, at least. The colleague who I'll more than likely be sharing the office with is fine with my presence there (from what I've been told), especially since we won't really cross paths that often or possibly at all due to our differing schedules. However, we need to try to find a second desk to put in there, even if it's a tiny corner table or something, so I have somewhere to work from. It is, as I mentioned, a tiny made-for-one-person office. And I really don't want to intrude on anyone's space; if I didn't need somewhere to go in the mornings I'm there, I wouldn't be incredibly insistent on having an office at all. But, sadly, I do need one, and my students need somewhere they can go to talk to me for "office hours" scenarios, if and when those scenarios arise. At the very least I need somewhere I can set up three things: my laptop, my small laser printer, and my coffee pot. That's it, really. It's all I need for an office. I don't have books or paperwork as a student anymore, and whatever teaching books and papers I need for the day are in my bag. I already have a spare office chair ready to go in Parker's office, which I'll need to fetch as soon as I get the key to my new one. Whenever that may be, of course.
In other news, it's been incredibly hot this week. Yes, it's been nice and cool for the past month or so, with rain and highs in the 60s and 70s, which has been wonderful not only for my comfort levels but stress levels and electric bill as well. Of course, now that classes have started back up, there's not a cloud in the sky, it's muggy as fuck, and the temperature reaches the high 80s by noon. For the rest of the week the temperatures are supposed to top out in the low-to-mid-90s every day with fairly high humidity. As mentioned previously, it's after midnight and it's still 75 outside with 74% humidity. This would be welcomed in, say, the second half of the semester as a respite from the otherwise fall-and-winter-like weather of possible early snowfall, ice storms, and howling winds, but for the first week back to school, while pretty, it is torturous to be out in every single day when one has to dress respectably in slacks and nice button-up shirts. As you know, my house becomes a sauna when it gets hot outside, whether the house is closed up or with the windows open. It doesn't matter either way. The temperature in my Man Cave right now is 89.6 degrees, and that's after I ran the air conditioner for a few hours earlier this evening. Because of this, dressed or undressed, I'm almost constantly coated in a thin layer of sweat. My body got too used to those highs in the 60s and 70s for the majority of the past month, and grew to crave that again, to physically need those cool temperatures and rains in order to be comfortable.
Of course, in two or three months when it only reaches 30 degrees for the high and I can't keep it warmer than 65 in the house at any given time, I will be cursing that weather too. It's almost impossible for me to stay constantly comfortable, but all of the cooler, rainy weather this past month did it for me. That's what I love. Perhaps I should move to Scotland.
While I was gone to teach yesterday morning (only for about three hours, perhaps less), apparently Pete and Sadie got into some sort of huge fight. I came back home to find that my Man Cave door was open (the latch no longer works properly, so if they try hard enough, they can get the door open) and my room a mess. Pete had knocked over my trash can and had knocked half the stuff off my desk, and one of them had sprayed on the floor in front of my printer -- something they only do when they're fighting hardcore. Sadie, even fourteen hours later, will growl, grunt, snort, and hiss violently if Pete even looks at her or gets closer to her than about ten feet away. I know it's between the two of them, because sweet and innocent Maggie, who would never hurt a fly or cause any trouble whatsoever, routinely cuddles up to me or Sadie, sometimes Pete as well, and Sadie doesn't bat an eye. I don't know what's going on; cat spat, it seems. Pete always looks at me, and at Sadie, like "what's she being a bitch about?" when this sort of thing occurs.
Believe it or not, this happens about four or five times a year, roughly. Most of the time it's over in a matter of hours, if not minutes, but I've seen it last as long as a month before -- a month of hearing their screaming fights in the night while I try to sleep, or a month of Sadie basically hiding under the bed or in my room 90% of the time and only coming out to eat and go to the litter pan. It's not like they're going into heat or anything like that -- all three cats are fixed and have been since they were kittens. Sadie just wants to be a little cunt sometimes, and sometimes that stretches out into a month or so of her just being plain mean to Pete, but never to her sister Maggie. What's worse is that Pete is a pussy about it and puts up with it until she starts acting normally again, treading lightly, avoiding her, and running away instead of standing up to her and fighting back, which would make that shit stop really quick. Sadie likes to play the victim and be mean for no real reason. Being pissed off and growly at Pete for a few hours or for a full day is understandable. Being a total cunt for a month or more is not. Doing shit like keeping Pete from being able to come upstairs or go downstairs because she blocks the stairwell is not. Hiding under the bed and hissing/growling any time I go to bed and Pete comes down to sleep with me is not. I have no patience whatsoever for that shit. The only sort of funny thing about it is that whenever Sadie is being mean, Pete will be extra lovey and clingy with me, as if to say "protect me from that mean crazy bitch." Sometimes that's difficult, as Sadie rarely leaves my side.
Anyway.
My English 101 class today was fine. I have ten students total, as mentioned before. None of them are English majors, and (surprisingly) none of them are high schoolers. They're all either brand new freshmen or they're non-traditional returning students, and the gender ratio is about half and half. Also, to my great delight, all ten of them have experience writing in MLA format. All ten. I cannot tell you how happy that makes me. It's a pretty balanced, small and intimate class, taught in the same classroom I taught my summer 102 in over a year ago. These students seem to be mostly quiet and looked a bit scared as well, though. I've invented a term for this perceived mentality: first semester shell shock. Many of the students I have in both of my semester-long classes are fresh out of high school, having never taken any college courses before. As such, they don't know what to expect, and on their first day in there they have a big burly guy reading to them very seriously and intently from a very strictly-and-officially-written syllabus about what the expectations of the course are -- I can certainly understand that they may be feeling a bit overwhelmed. That's why, at the end of the first class of the semester, I try to describe the sort of person I am without going into too much detail, but to ease their fears -- i.e., I'm a laid-back guy who teaches a pretty casual class, dresses casually, and thinks casually, and that I'm not there to be the English boogeyman, but to genuinely help them learn how to write better, and that I've been doing this a long time. One of my non-traditional
students, who is more than likely around my mother's age, was really nervous about the class until I assured her that I've taught it and other classes many times before, and that I'm a professor who's doing it because he wants to and not a grad student doing it simply because he has to. It has also been my experience that students who take classes on the West campus do it there because they have a particular mindset that doesn't necessarily mesh with the "herd them all into a room with a grad student" sort of classroom environment for one reason or another. The West students tend to be the overachievers, non-traditional, or part-time students, and also tend to be the ones who desperately want to do well. That means they actually put effort into their work, usually to great effect. This group looks like it'll be a fun one simply because of that.
The rest of my week is pretty straightforward in both classes -- take attendance and give them their diagnostic exams, then leave when they're done. My 011 class will be given their first reading assignment today for over the weekend, and my 101 class will be assigned to purchase their workbook, as that's what we'll be going over on Tuesday. This weekend I'll grade the diagnostics and look over the sections I'll be covering for both classes, altogether an hour or two worth of teaching-oriented work I'll be doing while watching preseason football.
The rest of my weekend? Eh. Sleeping? Probably a lot, since my schedule is so messed up. After making my shopping trip in the overnight hours of Monday night, I don't have to go shopping anytime soon, and all of my bills are paid. I'll need gas in the car probably before I go to West campus tomorrow morning again, and I'll have to mail out the rent, but other than that I have nothing else that must be done aside from the aforementioned small amount of student stuff.
For now, though? I'm going to take a shower and see if I can conk out for a short few hours before getting up and facing another day on the main campus.
By the time I got home yesterday morning after teaching my first 101 class of the semester, my mind and body were -- as if by muscle memory -- in weekend mode. That's because I'd already made my two trips to campus and back for the week, and had taught both times, so my mind and reflexes were like okay, your week's over now.
No, no; no, it's not. That's my body thinking it's on its old, grad student schedule from last year, of only needing to go to campus twice a week for a few hours each time to teach. My week is only half over.
I haven't had to go to campus four days a week in over two years. More than that, I've never had to teach four days a week before. The entire process of everything I do now is completely different than what I've done before. My body and mental state still need to get used to it, hence why I was subconsciously ready to start my weekend at 11AM on a Tuesday morning.
My sleep schedules are all kinds of fucked up right now. Monday night I came home and went to sleep until 10PM before I got up, stayed up, and taught yesterday, came home, and passed out again around 2PM on the couch, then went downstairs until around 9PM to sleep. Now it's after midnight and I'm wide awake. My alarm is supposed to go off at 5AM, and yet I'm up here typing away. Whether I go back down there for a several-hour power nap or not remains to be seen.
I suppose, at this early juncture of the semester, I can afford myself this. Tuesday night has become my "hump day" of the week, where I reach the week's midpoint. I've now learned that until I start teaching my night class in October, Monday and Wednesday will be my "long days," and that's only because I have to get to campus dreadfully early in order to be able to park. No, I don't like this, especially since I still do not officially have an office (which I'll get to). This means I'm just there, with nowhere to put my stuff, nowhere to put a coffee pot and sit down at a desk, nowhere for my laptop or anything of that nature. For around five hours total, including the time I teach (an hour, at most, for that). Really, I won't even notice this time when I get an office, as having an office again will allow me to actually relax, sit down, get up and move around when I need to, visit with colleagues, etc. But now? Being there with nowhere to go, when I have to be there regardless, is maddening.
I've been given a minimal update on the office situation, at least. The colleague who I'll more than likely be sharing the office with is fine with my presence there (from what I've been told), especially since we won't really cross paths that often or possibly at all due to our differing schedules. However, we need to try to find a second desk to put in there, even if it's a tiny corner table or something, so I have somewhere to work from. It is, as I mentioned, a tiny made-for-one-person office. And I really don't want to intrude on anyone's space; if I didn't need somewhere to go in the mornings I'm there, I wouldn't be incredibly insistent on having an office at all. But, sadly, I do need one, and my students need somewhere they can go to talk to me for "office hours" scenarios, if and when those scenarios arise. At the very least I need somewhere I can set up three things: my laptop, my small laser printer, and my coffee pot. That's it, really. It's all I need for an office. I don't have books or paperwork as a student anymore, and whatever teaching books and papers I need for the day are in my bag. I already have a spare office chair ready to go in Parker's office, which I'll need to fetch as soon as I get the key to my new one. Whenever that may be, of course.
In other news, it's been incredibly hot this week. Yes, it's been nice and cool for the past month or so, with rain and highs in the 60s and 70s, which has been wonderful not only for my comfort levels but stress levels and electric bill as well. Of course, now that classes have started back up, there's not a cloud in the sky, it's muggy as fuck, and the temperature reaches the high 80s by noon. For the rest of the week the temperatures are supposed to top out in the low-to-mid-90s every day with fairly high humidity. As mentioned previously, it's after midnight and it's still 75 outside with 74% humidity. This would be welcomed in, say, the second half of the semester as a respite from the otherwise fall-and-winter-like weather of possible early snowfall, ice storms, and howling winds, but for the first week back to school, while pretty, it is torturous to be out in every single day when one has to dress respectably in slacks and nice button-up shirts. As you know, my house becomes a sauna when it gets hot outside, whether the house is closed up or with the windows open. It doesn't matter either way. The temperature in my Man Cave right now is 89.6 degrees, and that's after I ran the air conditioner for a few hours earlier this evening. Because of this, dressed or undressed, I'm almost constantly coated in a thin layer of sweat. My body got too used to those highs in the 60s and 70s for the majority of the past month, and grew to crave that again, to physically need those cool temperatures and rains in order to be comfortable.
Of course, in two or three months when it only reaches 30 degrees for the high and I can't keep it warmer than 65 in the house at any given time, I will be cursing that weather too. It's almost impossible for me to stay constantly comfortable, but all of the cooler, rainy weather this past month did it for me. That's what I love. Perhaps I should move to Scotland.
While I was gone to teach yesterday morning (only for about three hours, perhaps less), apparently Pete and Sadie got into some sort of huge fight. I came back home to find that my Man Cave door was open (the latch no longer works properly, so if they try hard enough, they can get the door open) and my room a mess. Pete had knocked over my trash can and had knocked half the stuff off my desk, and one of them had sprayed on the floor in front of my printer -- something they only do when they're fighting hardcore. Sadie, even fourteen hours later, will growl, grunt, snort, and hiss violently if Pete even looks at her or gets closer to her than about ten feet away. I know it's between the two of them, because sweet and innocent Maggie, who would never hurt a fly or cause any trouble whatsoever, routinely cuddles up to me or Sadie, sometimes Pete as well, and Sadie doesn't bat an eye. I don't know what's going on; cat spat, it seems. Pete always looks at me, and at Sadie, like "what's she being a bitch about?" when this sort of thing occurs.
Believe it or not, this happens about four or five times a year, roughly. Most of the time it's over in a matter of hours, if not minutes, but I've seen it last as long as a month before -- a month of hearing their screaming fights in the night while I try to sleep, or a month of Sadie basically hiding under the bed or in my room 90% of the time and only coming out to eat and go to the litter pan. It's not like they're going into heat or anything like that -- all three cats are fixed and have been since they were kittens. Sadie just wants to be a little cunt sometimes, and sometimes that stretches out into a month or so of her just being plain mean to Pete, but never to her sister Maggie. What's worse is that Pete is a pussy about it and puts up with it until she starts acting normally again, treading lightly, avoiding her, and running away instead of standing up to her and fighting back, which would make that shit stop really quick. Sadie likes to play the victim and be mean for no real reason. Being pissed off and growly at Pete for a few hours or for a full day is understandable. Being a total cunt for a month or more is not. Doing shit like keeping Pete from being able to come upstairs or go downstairs because she blocks the stairwell is not. Hiding under the bed and hissing/growling any time I go to bed and Pete comes down to sleep with me is not. I have no patience whatsoever for that shit. The only sort of funny thing about it is that whenever Sadie is being mean, Pete will be extra lovey and clingy with me, as if to say "protect me from that mean crazy bitch." Sometimes that's difficult, as Sadie rarely leaves my side.
Anyway.
My English 101 class today was fine. I have ten students total, as mentioned before. None of them are English majors, and (surprisingly) none of them are high schoolers. They're all either brand new freshmen or they're non-traditional returning students, and the gender ratio is about half and half. Also, to my great delight, all ten of them have experience writing in MLA format. All ten. I cannot tell you how happy that makes me. It's a pretty balanced, small and intimate class, taught in the same classroom I taught my summer 102 in over a year ago. These students seem to be mostly quiet and looked a bit scared as well, though. I've invented a term for this perceived mentality: first semester shell shock. Many of the students I have in both of my semester-long classes are fresh out of high school, having never taken any college courses before. As such, they don't know what to expect, and on their first day in there they have a big burly guy reading to them very seriously and intently from a very strictly-and-officially-written syllabus about what the expectations of the course are -- I can certainly understand that they may be feeling a bit overwhelmed. That's why, at the end of the first class of the semester, I try to describe the sort of person I am without going into too much detail, but to ease their fears -- i.e., I'm a laid-back guy who teaches a pretty casual class, dresses casually, and thinks casually, and that I'm not there to be the English boogeyman, but to genuinely help them learn how to write better, and that I've been doing this a long time. One of my non-traditional
students, who is more than likely around my mother's age, was really nervous about the class until I assured her that I've taught it and other classes many times before, and that I'm a professor who's doing it because he wants to and not a grad student doing it simply because he has to. It has also been my experience that students who take classes on the West campus do it there because they have a particular mindset that doesn't necessarily mesh with the "herd them all into a room with a grad student" sort of classroom environment for one reason or another. The West students tend to be the overachievers, non-traditional, or part-time students, and also tend to be the ones who desperately want to do well. That means they actually put effort into their work, usually to great effect. This group looks like it'll be a fun one simply because of that.
The rest of my week is pretty straightforward in both classes -- take attendance and give them their diagnostic exams, then leave when they're done. My 011 class will be given their first reading assignment today for over the weekend, and my 101 class will be assigned to purchase their workbook, as that's what we'll be going over on Tuesday. This weekend I'll grade the diagnostics and look over the sections I'll be covering for both classes, altogether an hour or two worth of teaching-oriented work I'll be doing while watching preseason football.
The rest of my weekend? Eh. Sleeping? Probably a lot, since my schedule is so messed up. After making my shopping trip in the overnight hours of Monday night, I don't have to go shopping anytime soon, and all of my bills are paid. I'll need gas in the car probably before I go to West campus tomorrow morning again, and I'll have to mail out the rent, but other than that I have nothing else that must be done aside from the aforementioned small amount of student stuff.
For now, though? I'm going to take a shower and see if I can conk out for a short few hours before getting up and facing another day on the main campus.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Our First Day Back(ward)
Fall semester: day two
As an aside before I begin, I do rather like keeping track of the days here, as you see above. I've done it for years now. Sometimes it feels good to be able to keep everything inside a set frame that I can look at and say well, I got through all of the days leading up to this one, at least, or something to that effect. As the semester winds down, I can look at it and say X days to go...
There were many times over the course of the past three months where I never thought I would see this day again -- the first day of a new semester where I'm teaching classes, I mean. As I told Parker last week, I never thought I would sit on the couch in his office ever again. I had a rather...well, depressing summer, as you folks know. Not depressing like "oh god this is the worst summer ever" but a summer which, until a little less than a month ago, I was receiving rejection after rejection for teaching applications, my money was running out, my patience for other people and society in general had worn down to nothing, etc. Yes, actual depression was involved for a good chunk of time. I was convinced for a while that even with my skills, experience, and shining recommendations, I would never teach again -- adjuncting at the university was truly my last hope, the last-ditch backup plan that, after a while, was forced to become the main plan if I didn't want to end up working at Walmart or Wendy's. And it wasn't guaranteed. I was a failure, a failure with two degrees and $40k in student loan debt -- the last of which, which I'd saved for almost a full year -- was petering out slowly as I was using it for survival purposes and bills.
By luck's good graces, of course (which is unusual because I consider myself to be really unlucky most of the time) I got three classes to teach at the university for the fall, and would be able to become a professor, a real professor, in my own right.
It's really strange to think about, actually. It's sort of bittersweet. I will be making enough money over the course of these next sixteen weeks to live on fairly comfortably, and will be able to rebuild some of my savings as well in that time, but it almost feels like...a step backward, sort of? I've graduated and have my degree, yes, but I'm still employed by the same university, the same department, and am surrounded by the same people because even with my Master's degree I couldn't break free of the situation. Think of it as a rocket that cannot reach escape velocity, so it falls back to earth a short distance from where it took off.
Don't get me wrong -- I am excited and slobberingly grateful to be teaching at the university this semester (and quite possibly next semester as well, knowing my luck) because I absolutely adore my job and thrive in an academic environment, but this isn't at all where I thought I'd be after graduation. I had friends and family ask me many times things along the lines of "so what's next?" and I had nothing to tell them, because I didn't know where I'd end up. I've had many, many plans that have fallen through or changed drastically over the course of the past year, and if I were to travel back in time to the first day of classes last year to tell myself where I'd be now, past-me would be like "wow, really? way to go, future me." Sarcastically, of course. I'd had plans to move to the east coast to work for publishing houses and teach at one of a large number of small universities, I had plans to find teaching work in Omaha, I had plans to return home to West Virginia (as much as I desperately did not want to) to work somewhere around my hometown, etc. Over the past year, all of those plans had to be scrapped due to my lack of ability to find stable employment in any of those places, and I ended up being left with my last, and only, option.
So really, my interior monologue is asking me are you better off now than you were before graduation? And the answer, really, is yes and no. It's yes in that I'm getting paid quite a bit more money per paycheck than I did before, I'm no longer taking or studying for classes of my own, and that I'm still teaching, but it's no in that I'm on campus twice as much as I was before, my schedule is alternating back and forth between campuses, I'm driving back and forth more than I've driven since probably my first year of grad school, I don't yet officially have a new office, and getting any free time to myself or time to spend with Daisy is going to be maddening, especially after October 10.
But that's how it goes; this is the hand I've been dealt, and I am incredibly grateful for what I have and what I'll do with it.
Yesterday I exhausted myself doing everything I needed to do before the beginning of the semester today. I took care of all the fluids in the car, draining the rest of my bottle of coolant into it (it was, indeed, a bit low) and put another quart of oil as well as a few good shots of Marvel Mystery Oil. I took out the trash, cleaned the cat room, reloaded the dishwasher, cleaned off the kitchen counters, made sure my syllabi were completely ready, and to be assured that I would sleep, before I went to bed I took three melatonin pills. I was in bed by 9PM, if not before.
I did not go to Walmart; I was hot and tired, and doing everything I needed to do around the house had drained me to the point where I didn't want to get dressed, get in the car, drive there, go shopping, come home, put everything away, and then go to bed. No, by the time I was getting ready to sleep I was so not up for that sort of adventure. As a result, I had to stop at the gas station yesterday morning to get more cigarettes before I drove to campus; I had no other choice if I wanted to be able to survive the day without killing someone. I decided that if I desperately needed to, I could stop at Walmart on the way home.
I did not end up doing that, by the way (I did it in the overnight hours tonight, for reasons which will soon become apparent). By the time I got back up to Newton after my class yesterday, I was tired and didn't want to deal with it. Also, since I wore actual pants yesterday -- and corduroy at that -- I wanted to take them the fuck off, since sweat was running down my legs like rivers. It was nearly 90 degrees by the time I got home yesterday afternoon, and that's no fun for anyone actually dressed professionally.
My class itself went...okay, I suppose. I wouldn't say it went great, or even well. The students in my 011 class almost seem afraid of me. Barely any of them spoke, and I absolutely hate the room I've been stuck in to teach -- it's basically a science classroom. I don't have a lectern or even a table to stand at or sit at, to I was forced to stand in front of the room, or pace back and forth in the front of the room, while I delivered my first-day-of-class, let's-cover-the-syllabus speech. I don't know how I'm going to rectify this situation, or if there's anything I can do to change it anyway. The classroom is oddly shaped, and it's small and cramped -- not much larger than, say, my living room and kitchen combined. For any of you who have been to my house (a fair amount of my readership here, actually), you know how small of a space that is. For twenty students and myself. The chairs/tables were filled completely, and I still had four students absent. I don't know what's going to happen if those four students show up on Wednesday along with everyone else. There's nowhere, really, to put them. I may have to see if I can get a change of room, because I'm really not sure I can deal with that all semester long.
Anyway, I reassured my students that even though I seemed like a hardass while reading from the syllabus, I'm actually a pretty laid-back guy and I'm there to help, not to frighten them. I told them that this is the shortest they'd see my beard all semester, and probably the most dressed-up for classes they'll see me as well. While I'll look somewhat respectable most of the time, it's going to get to the point where I will psychologically need to teach in a t-shirt at times. They seemed to get the fact that I know what I'm doing, I have the experience and wherewithal to teach them, and were a little more at ease by the end of the class. This morning they just seemed fairly frightened -- most of them seemed jarred and didn't know what to expect from their first college class ever. And, really, for a lot of them, it is. I asked, and about 80% of the students in that class graduated from high school in May. They don't know what to expect, they're nervous about college and about college English, and I would imagine over the course of the next few weeks they'll slip more into their normal classroom roles.
One guy did ask me after class if I was serious about the attendance policy. He also happened to be the only student in class who was easily in his mid-to-late-40s.
"Yes," I replied firmly, "I am. It's department policy, not mine."
I wanted to say something along the lines of can you not read, since it's in the syllabus which I just went over less than fifteen minutes before, but then again I realized that this was 011, and there is the genuine possibility that students in this class don't have the greatest reading comprehension skills.
I ran into the Director yesterday morning when I first got there. He and I were dressed similarly, with dressier shirts on and long pants.
"I look respectable," I said. "...it burns."
Mind you, I was wearing a simple button-up white cotton shirt, plaid with brown and blue stripes. The brown matched my corduroy pants, the blue matched my socks and sneakers. Everyone was really impressed, saying things like "wow, you look nice," etc. Parker was awed by my transformation from grad student in Batman t-shirts and long unruly hair to somewhat-clean-cut, respectable Brandon. He was even more awed by my ability to match everything I was wearing, as if he didn't think I knew how to do that.
I have clearly given these people the wrong impression about me for the past three years. I can and do clean up nicely when I need to.
"But," I told Parker when we were alone in his office yesterday, "I am sweating like crazy. Tomorrow I'm on West campus. Nobody sees me. Shorts and sandals, totally."
"Right on," he replied. "I don't blame you."
This is true, really. On West campus, there's nobody there from the department. Nobody there knows me, since I haven't taught there in over a year. At the most, the only people who may recognize me are one or two fellow adjuncts, the ones who teach there all the time, or one of the office support staff there. To everyone else I'm just another instructor, and most of the time, don't look too much different (or much older) than the actual students there. To those ends, yes, today I will indeed wear one of my other dressy button-up shirts, but I am totally wearing my shorts and sandals, because I don't want to sweat half a gallon of liquid from my pores.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, I've decided, will be much more casual than Mondays and Wednesdays are on the main campus, at least for a while. No, I'm not going to break out the t-shirts immediately and try to pass myself off as the super-groovy-fun-time professor, but I will dress more casually and work my way down to that eventually, say, around late September or so. I'll put it this way -- once hoodie weather starts, I will be back in my element for the most part, more than likely on both campuses. Until then? I shall attempt to at least appear mostly respectable. I only have so many respectable-ish outfits that I can cycle through when I'm teaching four days per week.
In other news, my internet was out for a long time tonight. Yesterday when I got home, I messaged Daisy to tell her I was home and safe, made lunch, and watched the first half of Thor. It was hot and stuffy in the upstairs of the house, and I was tired, so I went downstairs and went to bed, only to wake up around 10PM. I hadn't done much; I got up, readied my stuff for today's class -- including filling out my gradebook for everything I needed to fill out, and sent Daisy a few messages telling her I was awake, since for some reason I couldn't sleep anymore (even after being mind-numbingly exhausted when I went downstairs). I began uploading course documents to my students' Blackboard pages when the internet stopped responding.
Hm, I thought. This can't be good. I checked the modem. Yep, internet was out. Cable was out, specifically. I know what the corresponding sets and patterns of lights on my modem mean, so I can easily diagnose problems like this myself. This happened at exactly midnight, so I thought they may have been doing some sort of monthly test on things, and didn't think much else of it. I also know that when the cable goes out, it's usually back on within a few short minutes, and that after I refresh the IP on my router when it comes back, everything is normal again.
Ten minutes went by. Fifteen. Twenty. Still out. I turned on my phone and sent Daisy a text message, telling her that the internet was down and that I was going to take a shower and go to Walmart, finally. I wasn't tired enough to go back to sleep, and I needed to go anyway (truthfully, I would've gone were the internet actually working, since I'd put it off for two extra days anyhow). By the time I showered, dressed, and left the house, it was 1AM, and the internet was still down.
It didn't come back. When I got home, I worked more on the long letter to my grandmother that I've been writing for over a month now (I'm on page sixteen) and played a game on my computer. I knew I wasn't going to get to go back to sleep; I was too awake, not to mention that I didn't really care since I also knew that this morning's class would go quickly and then I'd be back home to sleep when, and as much, as I needed to. I began drinking coffee, alternating between that and Cherry RC Cola (which I picked up at Walmart while I was there). I made a sandwich and ate it as my "dinner" at 2:30 AM. I turned on the AC and let it run, as for some reason it was almost 90 upstairs in my house.
Finally, around 4:30 AM, when the internet had still not come back up, I made a service call to Cox, the cable company. They have an automated menu that lets you request a "box refresh," which means they reset your connection at the central hub. When I chose that option, an automated voice came on that said that there were a large number of outages in my area and that technical crews had been dispatched to work on them. Hm. Interesting.
The internet popped back up sometime after 6AM or so (I wasn't watching or paying attention when it did) and has been fine since. Were I to have slept the entire night as I usually do on weeknights before classes, I may not have noticed it was out. I wonder how often this happens, actually.
My schedule for the day is rather brief. I'll leave the house here around 8, since I don't have to worry about parking on the West campus. I'll teach my first 101 class of the semester at 9:15, a class which only has ten students and should be quite short because all we're doing is going over the syllabus and class policies, and then I'll drive back home. Barring any sort of awful traffic or other issues, I should be back home before 11AM -- an extremely short day for me. I'll spend as much time driving to and from there as I will in front of the students in the class. And, with a class of only ten students, I'll be able to whip through things with no problem, hopefully, for the entire semester. It's the large classes which are difficult to teach because there are so many papers and assignments to grade. Smaller classes are more intimate groups with more class participation and more camaraderie, and I am totally lucky this class is a small one, as it's the class which will produce the most work for me throughout the semester, with four long papers, workshops, a multitude of quizzes and journals, etc.
I told Daisy that I'd be home relatively early, and once I am, we can finally Skype again for the first time since briefly on Sunday...provided that the internet continues working, anyway. She gets off work until Friday after she gets home this morning, and we're trying to plan for her to come down here next week on her days off, since I won't yet be incredibly busy in the semester. The real work with my students will kick off around week three or four, when they're beginning their papers and the like. Until October 10, anyway, even when I keep the 101 class the entire time, I should still be home well before noon. That is a major plus when it comes to my teaching schedule for the first half of the semester.
On that note, I must change my clothing and ready myself to drive southwestward. Is that a word? It is now; I have two English degrees, and therefore have license to make shit up.
As an aside before I begin, I do rather like keeping track of the days here, as you see above. I've done it for years now. Sometimes it feels good to be able to keep everything inside a set frame that I can look at and say well, I got through all of the days leading up to this one, at least, or something to that effect. As the semester winds down, I can look at it and say X days to go...
There were many times over the course of the past three months where I never thought I would see this day again -- the first day of a new semester where I'm teaching classes, I mean. As I told Parker last week, I never thought I would sit on the couch in his office ever again. I had a rather...well, depressing summer, as you folks know. Not depressing like "oh god this is the worst summer ever" but a summer which, until a little less than a month ago, I was receiving rejection after rejection for teaching applications, my money was running out, my patience for other people and society in general had worn down to nothing, etc. Yes, actual depression was involved for a good chunk of time. I was convinced for a while that even with my skills, experience, and shining recommendations, I would never teach again -- adjuncting at the university was truly my last hope, the last-ditch backup plan that, after a while, was forced to become the main plan if I didn't want to end up working at Walmart or Wendy's. And it wasn't guaranteed. I was a failure, a failure with two degrees and $40k in student loan debt -- the last of which, which I'd saved for almost a full year -- was petering out slowly as I was using it for survival purposes and bills.
By luck's good graces, of course (which is unusual because I consider myself to be really unlucky most of the time) I got three classes to teach at the university for the fall, and would be able to become a professor, a real professor, in my own right.
It's really strange to think about, actually. It's sort of bittersweet. I will be making enough money over the course of these next sixteen weeks to live on fairly comfortably, and will be able to rebuild some of my savings as well in that time, but it almost feels like...a step backward, sort of? I've graduated and have my degree, yes, but I'm still employed by the same university, the same department, and am surrounded by the same people because even with my Master's degree I couldn't break free of the situation. Think of it as a rocket that cannot reach escape velocity, so it falls back to earth a short distance from where it took off.
Don't get me wrong -- I am excited and slobberingly grateful to be teaching at the university this semester (and quite possibly next semester as well, knowing my luck) because I absolutely adore my job and thrive in an academic environment, but this isn't at all where I thought I'd be after graduation. I had friends and family ask me many times things along the lines of "so what's next?" and I had nothing to tell them, because I didn't know where I'd end up. I've had many, many plans that have fallen through or changed drastically over the course of the past year, and if I were to travel back in time to the first day of classes last year to tell myself where I'd be now, past-me would be like "wow, really? way to go, future me." Sarcastically, of course. I'd had plans to move to the east coast to work for publishing houses and teach at one of a large number of small universities, I had plans to find teaching work in Omaha, I had plans to return home to West Virginia (as much as I desperately did not want to) to work somewhere around my hometown, etc. Over the past year, all of those plans had to be scrapped due to my lack of ability to find stable employment in any of those places, and I ended up being left with my last, and only, option.
So really, my interior monologue is asking me are you better off now than you were before graduation? And the answer, really, is yes and no. It's yes in that I'm getting paid quite a bit more money per paycheck than I did before, I'm no longer taking or studying for classes of my own, and that I'm still teaching, but it's no in that I'm on campus twice as much as I was before, my schedule is alternating back and forth between campuses, I'm driving back and forth more than I've driven since probably my first year of grad school, I don't yet officially have a new office, and getting any free time to myself or time to spend with Daisy is going to be maddening, especially after October 10.
But that's how it goes; this is the hand I've been dealt, and I am incredibly grateful for what I have and what I'll do with it.
Yesterday I exhausted myself doing everything I needed to do before the beginning of the semester today. I took care of all the fluids in the car, draining the rest of my bottle of coolant into it (it was, indeed, a bit low) and put another quart of oil as well as a few good shots of Marvel Mystery Oil. I took out the trash, cleaned the cat room, reloaded the dishwasher, cleaned off the kitchen counters, made sure my syllabi were completely ready, and to be assured that I would sleep, before I went to bed I took three melatonin pills. I was in bed by 9PM, if not before.
I did not go to Walmart; I was hot and tired, and doing everything I needed to do around the house had drained me to the point where I didn't want to get dressed, get in the car, drive there, go shopping, come home, put everything away, and then go to bed. No, by the time I was getting ready to sleep I was so not up for that sort of adventure. As a result, I had to stop at the gas station yesterday morning to get more cigarettes before I drove to campus; I had no other choice if I wanted to be able to survive the day without killing someone. I decided that if I desperately needed to, I could stop at Walmart on the way home.
I did not end up doing that, by the way (I did it in the overnight hours tonight, for reasons which will soon become apparent). By the time I got back up to Newton after my class yesterday, I was tired and didn't want to deal with it. Also, since I wore actual pants yesterday -- and corduroy at that -- I wanted to take them the fuck off, since sweat was running down my legs like rivers. It was nearly 90 degrees by the time I got home yesterday afternoon, and that's no fun for anyone actually dressed professionally.
My class itself went...okay, I suppose. I wouldn't say it went great, or even well. The students in my 011 class almost seem afraid of me. Barely any of them spoke, and I absolutely hate the room I've been stuck in to teach -- it's basically a science classroom. I don't have a lectern or even a table to stand at or sit at, to I was forced to stand in front of the room, or pace back and forth in the front of the room, while I delivered my first-day-of-class, let's-cover-the-syllabus speech. I don't know how I'm going to rectify this situation, or if there's anything I can do to change it anyway. The classroom is oddly shaped, and it's small and cramped -- not much larger than, say, my living room and kitchen combined. For any of you who have been to my house (a fair amount of my readership here, actually), you know how small of a space that is. For twenty students and myself. The chairs/tables were filled completely, and I still had four students absent. I don't know what's going to happen if those four students show up on Wednesday along with everyone else. There's nowhere, really, to put them. I may have to see if I can get a change of room, because I'm really not sure I can deal with that all semester long.
Anyway, I reassured my students that even though I seemed like a hardass while reading from the syllabus, I'm actually a pretty laid-back guy and I'm there to help, not to frighten them. I told them that this is the shortest they'd see my beard all semester, and probably the most dressed-up for classes they'll see me as well. While I'll look somewhat respectable most of the time, it's going to get to the point where I will psychologically need to teach in a t-shirt at times. They seemed to get the fact that I know what I'm doing, I have the experience and wherewithal to teach them, and were a little more at ease by the end of the class. This morning they just seemed fairly frightened -- most of them seemed jarred and didn't know what to expect from their first college class ever. And, really, for a lot of them, it is. I asked, and about 80% of the students in that class graduated from high school in May. They don't know what to expect, they're nervous about college and about college English, and I would imagine over the course of the next few weeks they'll slip more into their normal classroom roles.
One guy did ask me after class if I was serious about the attendance policy. He also happened to be the only student in class who was easily in his mid-to-late-40s.
"Yes," I replied firmly, "I am. It's department policy, not mine."
I wanted to say something along the lines of can you not read, since it's in the syllabus which I just went over less than fifteen minutes before, but then again I realized that this was 011, and there is the genuine possibility that students in this class don't have the greatest reading comprehension skills.
I ran into the Director yesterday morning when I first got there. He and I were dressed similarly, with dressier shirts on and long pants.
"I look respectable," I said. "...it burns."
Mind you, I was wearing a simple button-up white cotton shirt, plaid with brown and blue stripes. The brown matched my corduroy pants, the blue matched my socks and sneakers. Everyone was really impressed, saying things like "wow, you look nice," etc. Parker was awed by my transformation from grad student in Batman t-shirts and long unruly hair to somewhat-clean-cut, respectable Brandon. He was even more awed by my ability to match everything I was wearing, as if he didn't think I knew how to do that.
I have clearly given these people the wrong impression about me for the past three years. I can and do clean up nicely when I need to.
"But," I told Parker when we were alone in his office yesterday, "I am sweating like crazy. Tomorrow I'm on West campus. Nobody sees me. Shorts and sandals, totally."
"Right on," he replied. "I don't blame you."
This is true, really. On West campus, there's nobody there from the department. Nobody there knows me, since I haven't taught there in over a year. At the most, the only people who may recognize me are one or two fellow adjuncts, the ones who teach there all the time, or one of the office support staff there. To everyone else I'm just another instructor, and most of the time, don't look too much different (or much older) than the actual students there. To those ends, yes, today I will indeed wear one of my other dressy button-up shirts, but I am totally wearing my shorts and sandals, because I don't want to sweat half a gallon of liquid from my pores.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, I've decided, will be much more casual than Mondays and Wednesdays are on the main campus, at least for a while. No, I'm not going to break out the t-shirts immediately and try to pass myself off as the super-groovy-fun-time professor, but I will dress more casually and work my way down to that eventually, say, around late September or so. I'll put it this way -- once hoodie weather starts, I will be back in my element for the most part, more than likely on both campuses. Until then? I shall attempt to at least appear mostly respectable. I only have so many respectable-ish outfits that I can cycle through when I'm teaching four days per week.
In other news, my internet was out for a long time tonight. Yesterday when I got home, I messaged Daisy to tell her I was home and safe, made lunch, and watched the first half of Thor. It was hot and stuffy in the upstairs of the house, and I was tired, so I went downstairs and went to bed, only to wake up around 10PM. I hadn't done much; I got up, readied my stuff for today's class -- including filling out my gradebook for everything I needed to fill out, and sent Daisy a few messages telling her I was awake, since for some reason I couldn't sleep anymore (even after being mind-numbingly exhausted when I went downstairs). I began uploading course documents to my students' Blackboard pages when the internet stopped responding.
Hm, I thought. This can't be good. I checked the modem. Yep, internet was out. Cable was out, specifically. I know what the corresponding sets and patterns of lights on my modem mean, so I can easily diagnose problems like this myself. This happened at exactly midnight, so I thought they may have been doing some sort of monthly test on things, and didn't think much else of it. I also know that when the cable goes out, it's usually back on within a few short minutes, and that after I refresh the IP on my router when it comes back, everything is normal again.
Ten minutes went by. Fifteen. Twenty. Still out. I turned on my phone and sent Daisy a text message, telling her that the internet was down and that I was going to take a shower and go to Walmart, finally. I wasn't tired enough to go back to sleep, and I needed to go anyway (truthfully, I would've gone were the internet actually working, since I'd put it off for two extra days anyhow). By the time I showered, dressed, and left the house, it was 1AM, and the internet was still down.
It didn't come back. When I got home, I worked more on the long letter to my grandmother that I've been writing for over a month now (I'm on page sixteen) and played a game on my computer. I knew I wasn't going to get to go back to sleep; I was too awake, not to mention that I didn't really care since I also knew that this morning's class would go quickly and then I'd be back home to sleep when, and as much, as I needed to. I began drinking coffee, alternating between that and Cherry RC Cola (which I picked up at Walmart while I was there). I made a sandwich and ate it as my "dinner" at 2:30 AM. I turned on the AC and let it run, as for some reason it was almost 90 upstairs in my house.
Finally, around 4:30 AM, when the internet had still not come back up, I made a service call to Cox, the cable company. They have an automated menu that lets you request a "box refresh," which means they reset your connection at the central hub. When I chose that option, an automated voice came on that said that there were a large number of outages in my area and that technical crews had been dispatched to work on them. Hm. Interesting.
The internet popped back up sometime after 6AM or so (I wasn't watching or paying attention when it did) and has been fine since. Were I to have slept the entire night as I usually do on weeknights before classes, I may not have noticed it was out. I wonder how often this happens, actually.
My schedule for the day is rather brief. I'll leave the house here around 8, since I don't have to worry about parking on the West campus. I'll teach my first 101 class of the semester at 9:15, a class which only has ten students and should be quite short because all we're doing is going over the syllabus and class policies, and then I'll drive back home. Barring any sort of awful traffic or other issues, I should be back home before 11AM -- an extremely short day for me. I'll spend as much time driving to and from there as I will in front of the students in the class. And, with a class of only ten students, I'll be able to whip through things with no problem, hopefully, for the entire semester. It's the large classes which are difficult to teach because there are so many papers and assignments to grade. Smaller classes are more intimate groups with more class participation and more camaraderie, and I am totally lucky this class is a small one, as it's the class which will produce the most work for me throughout the semester, with four long papers, workshops, a multitude of quizzes and journals, etc.
I told Daisy that I'd be home relatively early, and once I am, we can finally Skype again for the first time since briefly on Sunday...provided that the internet continues working, anyway. She gets off work until Friday after she gets home this morning, and we're trying to plan for her to come down here next week on her days off, since I won't yet be incredibly busy in the semester. The real work with my students will kick off around week three or four, when they're beginning their papers and the like. Until October 10, anyway, even when I keep the 101 class the entire time, I should still be home well before noon. That is a major plus when it comes to my teaching schedule for the first half of the semester.
On that note, I must change my clothing and ready myself to drive southwestward. Is that a word? It is now; I have two English degrees, and therefore have license to make shit up.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Anticipation
Countdown to fall semester: less than 24 hours
As it is my last weekend of relative freedom, I have (ironically) been trying to take care of everything that needs to be done beforehand, things both easy and ponderous.
Twenty-four hours from right at this moment, I will be standing in a classroom again, dressed somewhat respectably, with nineteen students in front of me in desks. The last Sunday before a semester starts is, and has always been, a day filled with both excitement and fear, an anticipation that is not always completely good or optimistic. For the first half of the semester, I will spend almost the same amount of time driving to/from my classes as I will spend actually teaching my students in those classes. At least the weather is supposed to be nice for the foreseeable future.
People -- friends, colleagues, family, but nobody in the realm of academia -- have always asked me something along the lines of "Don't you get nervous? Public speaking is supposed to be the number one fear of most people."
No, I don't get nervous. Tomorrow begins my fourth year in a row of doing this teaching stuff. I know the drill at this point. The only time I was nervous or out of sorts was my very first teaching day, way back in 2010, when I showed up to my first class five minutes late because I couldn't find the building. It was also 100 degrees that day and I was wearing a thick, long-sleeved shirt, tie, dress slacks, and I had my hair slicked back, so I was basically running around to find my classroom huffing, puffing, and sweaty. Ironically, even though several of my students in that class would become longtime, trusted friends, this was their first impression of me not only as a person, but as their instructor.
After that semester I studied the locations of most buildings on campus where I'd teach in, and plotted routes that would get me from my office to class 1 and from class 1 to class 2 in the least amount of time. My 011 class tomorrow is in a building I've never taught in before, but Parker teaches over there at the same time, so I'll stroll over with him.
But nervous? No. Pshaw. I don't get nervous. Teaching is a thrill to me at this point. My plans for tomorrow are simple -- get up, pound coffee, drive to campus early, make the copies I need to make, meet some of the newbies (if applicable), see my returning friends, teach, and come home. I should be home by 1PM tomorrow at the latest, I'm guessing. No, I don't yet have an office (officially, anyhow). Yes, I'll be tired by the evening, and will probably go to bed early.
I forced myself to go to bed relatively early last night, and again forced myself to get up somewhat early this morning (early for a Sunday, anyway), to try to get my body back on a sleep-at-night, be-able-to-get-up-at-5AM sort of cycle again. I've been somewhat successful with this over the past few days, but the weekend has sort of thrown that a bit out of whack. Tonight I'll probably be in bed by 11, and that's even fairly late for me on the night before the first day of classes.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, at least, I'll be able to move at a more languid pace in the mornings -- the drive to West campus is a bit longer (by five miles or so, give or take, though it's driving in a different direction), but I don't have to worry about parking as much out there, and won't have to fight traffic anywhere near as much as I would going to the main campus. That means I'll be able to leave the house around 8 or so.
What does the start of the semester mean for me? Well, a lot of things, actually, both good and bad:
Daisy is troubled by that last bit, as am I, but neither of us can do much about it at this point. I teach Monday through Thursday -- she gets off work for the week on Tuesday mornings an hour after I've left the house, and goes back to work on Friday evening, when my weekend is starting and I'll be swamped with whatever grading, housework, or errands I'll have to do on my time off. Once again, our schedules clash horribly, and not much can be done about that. She sleeps during the day and works at night, and I teach during the day and sleep at night. I know my body and its limits -- on Thursdays, for the first half of the semester, anyway, I will come home and crash after my week ends, and I'll be in bed by 2PM. This is what I've done every Thursday of the past two years, pretty much, when my week has ended. Getting any time with her during the second half of the semester will be even more difficult once I start teaching my 210 class on Tuesday/Thursday nights -- a class which is completely full at its cap already. Both of those nights I will be coming home and going directly to bed, especially Tuesday nights, as I'll need to get up at 5AM again the next morning. I told her that I will do everything I can to make time for her and for us, but I can only make so much time before I have stuff that I must take care of or before I become completely delirious from lack of sleep.
"We'll figure it out," she tells me.
I don't know what to say in response to that, really. She's mentioned that there's the possibility she could end up changing shifts at work due to a few different factors, and I encouraged her to take that shift change if it's offered -- briefly, anyway, before she dismissed it and said she didn't want to do it because it would be five days a week instead of four. The shift change would be from her overnight shift to an afternoon/evening shift or a normal day shift. I didn't have the chance to explain that I wanted her to do it because it may give her the opportunity to actually get weekends off (like normal people in normal office jobs) and that would be the only time she'd be able to come down here and spend time with me during the semester without me having my hands completely full with absolutely everything I have to do as a professor. As much as I would like them to, my responsibilities don't just stop. If she comes down here on her normal days off, especially during the second half of the semester, she'd never see me and we'd never get any time together. Teaching every-other-day classes on different days, instead of both on the same day, means that on the off-days when I'm not teaching one class or the other, I'm doing the work for those classes. Four mornings of the week, I'll be getting up early to drive to one campus or the other to teach, and won't be back home until the afternoon hours. On Monday and Tuesday nights I'll be grading papers and assignments for my Monday/Wednesday classes. On Wednesday nights I'll be grading papers and assignments for my Tuesday/Thursday classes, which will also extend into at least part of the weekend, more than likely. On Thursday nights for the first half of the semester, I will desperately need to be asleep, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the second half of the semester I will be on campus from 8AM to after 10PM straight through. The weekend is the only time where I won't be running back and forth to and from two different campuses, and the only time where I may not be swamped with student work to take care of. Those short three days I'm off are three of the four days she works overnights. As much as we both desperately want her to be able to come down here to get time with each other for a few days at a time, the only days she could currently do it are my absolute busiest days of the week -- and in the second half of the semester, two of those three mid-week days she has off, I won't be home at all between the hours of 8AM and 10PM.
"I can't go without seeing you until Thanksgiving," she told me a few nights ago. "That's not going to work. I need you."
"I know that," I said, "and I need you too, but I don't know how to work this out yet."
I really don't. She can come down here anytime she wants, obviously -- that's not the issue. The issue is actually seeing me when she does, and getting any time together when she does. For the first half of the semester (for example purposes here), if she came directly down here on Tuesday when she got off work in the morning, for example, she'd arrive here around the time I got home from teaching, and we'd be able to spend time together that afternoon/night before I got up at 5AM on Wednesday morning while she was still asleep and went to teach until that afternoon as well. I'd get home Wednesday hours upon hours after she'd gotten up, would be tired when I got home, yet most of the time would still not get much quality time with her as I would have to take care of everything for my Thursday class that I didn't get to do on Tuesday afternoon/evening because she came down. Our "quality time" that night would basically be her staring at me while I graded papers or did other student work alone in my room on my computer. I cannot avoid this; it has to be done. Thursday morning, I'd get up to go teach yet again while she was sleeping, and by the time I got home on Thursday afternoon at the end of my week -- mind you, she's been awake and alone once more for hours on end -- I'd be even more tired and probably cranky, and she'd either have to leave that evening or on early Friday morning at the very latest, as she works Friday nights.
This is not the sort of scenario I want, at all, when she comes to visit. I'm marrying this woman; I want to actually be able to enjoy the time I spend with her instead of making her feel like she's inconveniencing me or that she's in the way. When Daisy comes down here, I treat her like a queen -- I buy special food for her, cook it and eat it together, we go out to the movies and go shopping together (two things which have become an unspoken sort of tradition when she's here now) and we sleep until we both wake up naturally. That's just how it works. It's like a mini-vacation for both of us, where real life goes away for a few short days. Real life, and the responsibilities associated with it, never go away during the semester.
To run that same scenario for the second half of the semester is even more depressing, but I'll run it anyway: she could still come down on Tuesday if she wanted, though I wouldn't be home until around 11PM and she'd be waiting in my driveway until I got home. We'd get about an hour together at most that night before I had to force myself to sleep and get up at 5AM to leave her still asleep and go teach my Wednesday class. We'd get a few hours together Wednesday afternoon once I got home, if I wasn't swamped with student work to grade and deal with, before I once more had to go to bed early to get up early on Thursday morning, where I would leave her alone for fourteen hours straight once more before I got home after 11PM on Thursday night. She'd either leave then or would leave on Friday morning, at the latest, for work that night, giving her a total of about six to eight hours with me when I'm actually conscious and in her presence over the course of three days.
Even this fall's "fall break" doesn't offer true relief from either of these scenarios; I begin teaching my 210 class on October 10, a Thursday. "Fall break" is the following Monday and Tuesday (the 14th and 15th), which yes, I'll both have off, though she works Sunday and Monday nights. Coming down even on Tuesday morning that week would give us a few more hours together during that day, yes, but would also completely deprive her of sleep for more than 24 hours, and the second-half-of-the-semester cycle that you see above will prevail for the rest of that week anyway...and for another two months afterwards.
I don't know how to fix this, or if it can be fixed. My own schedule, and the workload associated with my schedule, are both set; they can't be altered or changed, truly, in any way. If Daisy could switch to a Monday night through Thursday night shift instead of the opposite (which is what she has now), the problems with scheduling visiting time would disappear, but it's not like I wouldn't be working and/or grading over the weekends as well most of the time. I could at least plan for weekends, though, trying to get everything cleared off my schedule to maximize time with her, such as doing as much grading and lesson planning during the week as humanly possible. However, remembering the incredible amount of finagling she had to do in order to get a few days switched for one week for my graduation back in May, that scenario doesn't seem likely either. In order to do that, as you may recall, she had to work like eight days straight beforehand. I'm not going to ask her to request days off and put her through that again just so she can come down here and visit me. She shouldn't have to work over a week straight just to get a few days off of her choosing. So, really, I'm rather lost and somewhat stumped on what to do here, or what to suggest to her.
As this is weighing heavily on my mind, I wanted to take care of absolutely everything else I could take care of this weekend before classes start tomorrow and I will no longer have anywhere near the amount of time I used to have to do things. To those ends, I have paid all the bills I've had come in the mail over the past week, and have renewed my car's registration -- the latter of which doesn't expire for well over another month, but I didn't want to get swamped and forget about it -- and in a short while I will go downstairs to work on the car itself, replenishing her fluids and giving her a sort of "checkup," so to speak, before I begin to drive her 200 miles a week for the entire semester. My laundry is done and put away, the dishwasher is half full and ready to be ran once it becomes completely full, the garbage has been taken out, and after checking the yard this morning, I won't have to mow it again for at least another week. I even ordered pizza a few nights ago, of which I still have almost a full pizza left, so I don't have to worry about cooking as much for the next few days. My "respectable" teaching outfit for tomorrow has been laid out and is ready for me. My syllabus for 011 -- as well as a few handouts -- have been printed up and are ready for copies in the morning. My class rosters (as of today) have been printed out so that I can have a set attendance list without needing to fill out my gradebook yet, in case some students add/drop this week. Finally, before I go to bed tonight, I will shower, give myself a clean shave to trim up the beard, and put on a fresh pot of coffee so that when I awaken at 5AM, I can begin pounding cup after cup to wake up. All of these things combined take care of virtually everything I can think of before I go back to work for the next sixteen weeks.
Except one thing. One horrible, terrible, frightening thing.
The cats are running out of food and litter, I'm down to my last pot or three of coffee, I have one stamp left after mailing out all my bills, and I'm on my last pack of cigarettes. I will, at some point in the next ten or so hours before I go to sleep, need to go to Walmart.
Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal. I don't like going to Walmart on weekends, but if I have to, do it, I do. It wouldn't be the first time I've had to navigate through throngs of lower-class mouth breathers who get in the way, have conversations that take up entire aisles -- oblivious to the people who need to go down those aisles to shop -- and dodge screaming kids tearing ass around the store, kids who don't speak English (and neither do their parents). And if it's not those people, it's the snooty senior citizens who think they're better or smarter than you just because they're older and richer, and because of that are some of the rudest people you'll ever meet (I'm glad most of them will be dead soon).
This is all normal, and all things I tend to experience when and if I venture to Walmart during daylight hours on a weekend. However, this weekend is different. Tomorrow is the first day of classes at the university. And I learned, long ago, never to venture anywhere close to a shopping center, especially Walmart, and especially the only Walmart in a 30 mile radius, on the weekend before classes start back up -- high school or college. Never. Never ever. You won't even be able to get through the aisles, and all of the problem folks in our society listed above turn their annoyance factors up to 11. It's almost like trying to go shopping for simple groceries and household supplies on Black Friday...if you're oblivious to the fact that it's Black Friday. This is basically Black Sunday, and I urge anyone reading this to stay away from any sort of retail chain today.
I considered putting it off and just stopping there tomorrow afternoon on my way home from campus, as Monday afternoons tend to be pretty quiet, but my cigarettes won't last that long and I'm not going to stop at the gas station or somewhere for no reason just to get more. I have electronic ones, but on the first day (read: week or so) of classes, my stress levels and exhaustion levels are going to be so high that I will need the real thing just to stay focused and to stay awake. I hate admitting that, of course, but it's true. And, more than likely, I'll probably come home tomorrow, make something to eat, and go to sleep in the late afternoon or early evening hours -- since I will not yet be used to getting up and getting off to a running start at 5AM again and twelve hours later I will be feeling that. As mentioned above, I'm going to make myself go to bed as early as possible tonight in order to maximize my sleep, but regardless of that, 5AM is fun for no one.
This means that Walmart must be the last thing I do tonight before going to bed. If I wait until after 9 or 10PM, everything will have quieted down enough for me to go get what I need, quickly, and come back home to sleep. It sort of makes me feel like a spy, operating under cover of darkness, to infiltrate an establishment at a time when the hellhounds that are other people are looking the other way and/or aren't around. I need relatively little; an in-and-out trip should take half an hour, tops.
One of my friends and colleagues is throwing a welcome-back-to-the-grind sort of party, similar to the graduation party, next weekend on Saturday night. I might go to it, though it depends heavily on what I need to do next weekend. Teaching, as I've brought up here before, is one of those professions where one has to live day-by-day, never able to plan anything outside of the classroom more than a week in advance because everything hinges on being able to get those day-to-day tasks done. In this instance, it will involve how tired I am, how much gas I have in the car, how much grading, reading, or lesson planning needs to be done, and what needs to be done around the house or otherwise.
As put-together as things sound, my work for classes and in the department this week is not yet complete; I do not yet have an office, officially, nor have I heard anything else about that (I'll have to check on that tomorrow if the office ladies aren't completely swamped on the first day). I also don't have a diagnostic exam to give to my 011 students, nor do I have their paper assignments yet, so I'll have to get those from the Director's wife -- who teaches in the same classroom I do the hour before I'm in there, coincidentally. Parker teaches in the same building at the same time I do, so at least I'll have company for the walk.
So, really folks, that's all I have for you. Most of my friends in the department who are on Facebook seem to be in hibernation or deep preparation today, as my news feed has been remarkably quiet since I got up this morning, and Daisy herself is in hibernation as well as she works tonight. I'll get to talk to her for a while before she goes to work and before I head out to Walmart (shudder) tonight, but in the meantime I'm going to go work on the car and take care of any and all other little odds-and-ends things I need to do for the day.
As it is my last weekend of relative freedom, I have (ironically) been trying to take care of everything that needs to be done beforehand, things both easy and ponderous.
Twenty-four hours from right at this moment, I will be standing in a classroom again, dressed somewhat respectably, with nineteen students in front of me in desks. The last Sunday before a semester starts is, and has always been, a day filled with both excitement and fear, an anticipation that is not always completely good or optimistic. For the first half of the semester, I will spend almost the same amount of time driving to/from my classes as I will spend actually teaching my students in those classes. At least the weather is supposed to be nice for the foreseeable future.
People -- friends, colleagues, family, but nobody in the realm of academia -- have always asked me something along the lines of "Don't you get nervous? Public speaking is supposed to be the number one fear of most people."
No, I don't get nervous. Tomorrow begins my fourth year in a row of doing this teaching stuff. I know the drill at this point. The only time I was nervous or out of sorts was my very first teaching day, way back in 2010, when I showed up to my first class five minutes late because I couldn't find the building. It was also 100 degrees that day and I was wearing a thick, long-sleeved shirt, tie, dress slacks, and I had my hair slicked back, so I was basically running around to find my classroom huffing, puffing, and sweaty. Ironically, even though several of my students in that class would become longtime, trusted friends, this was their first impression of me not only as a person, but as their instructor.
After that semester I studied the locations of most buildings on campus where I'd teach in, and plotted routes that would get me from my office to class 1 and from class 1 to class 2 in the least amount of time. My 011 class tomorrow is in a building I've never taught in before, but Parker teaches over there at the same time, so I'll stroll over with him.
But nervous? No. Pshaw. I don't get nervous. Teaching is a thrill to me at this point. My plans for tomorrow are simple -- get up, pound coffee, drive to campus early, make the copies I need to make, meet some of the newbies (if applicable), see my returning friends, teach, and come home. I should be home by 1PM tomorrow at the latest, I'm guessing. No, I don't yet have an office (officially, anyhow). Yes, I'll be tired by the evening, and will probably go to bed early.
I forced myself to go to bed relatively early last night, and again forced myself to get up somewhat early this morning (early for a Sunday, anyway), to try to get my body back on a sleep-at-night, be-able-to-get-up-at-5AM sort of cycle again. I've been somewhat successful with this over the past few days, but the weekend has sort of thrown that a bit out of whack. Tonight I'll probably be in bed by 11, and that's even fairly late for me on the night before the first day of classes.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, at least, I'll be able to move at a more languid pace in the mornings -- the drive to West campus is a bit longer (by five miles or so, give or take, though it's driving in a different direction), but I don't have to worry about parking as much out there, and won't have to fight traffic anywhere near as much as I would going to the main campus. That means I'll be able to leave the house around 8 or so.
What does the start of the semester mean for me? Well, a lot of things, actually, both good and bad:
- Regular paychecks again (once they start, anyway). Not as much worrying about budgeting and bill-paying every month.
- A lot more driving back-and-forth. I have to add fluids and check out my car beforehand this afternoon. This also means, unfortunately...
- More money spent on gas. Ugh.
- Daily social interaction with other people -- colleagues, higher-ups, my students, etc.
- The beard comes back.
- Much, much less nightly sleep, except on weekends and holidays.
- Much less free time for chores and errands; shopping, for example, will have to be done on my way home from work or on the overnights of the weekends. Mowing the grass, house cleaning, and laundry will have to be done only when I can make time to do those things.
- I'll lose weight again -- when I'm moving a lot and am not eating during the day because of teaching (during the semester I mostly subsist on coffee, cigarettes, and energy bars), I'll lose the extra pounds I put on this summer from being able to eat what I wanted whenever I wanted to.
- Much more time spent in front of the television with football on (either college or NFL)...but, unfortunately, 90% of that time will be spent grading papers or other assignments for my students.
- The time to write here will slowly dissipate more and more throughout the semester.
- Much less time to spend with Daisy, either on Skype or in person.
Daisy is troubled by that last bit, as am I, but neither of us can do much about it at this point. I teach Monday through Thursday -- she gets off work for the week on Tuesday mornings an hour after I've left the house, and goes back to work on Friday evening, when my weekend is starting and I'll be swamped with whatever grading, housework, or errands I'll have to do on my time off. Once again, our schedules clash horribly, and not much can be done about that. She sleeps during the day and works at night, and I teach during the day and sleep at night. I know my body and its limits -- on Thursdays, for the first half of the semester, anyway, I will come home and crash after my week ends, and I'll be in bed by 2PM. This is what I've done every Thursday of the past two years, pretty much, when my week has ended. Getting any time with her during the second half of the semester will be even more difficult once I start teaching my 210 class on Tuesday/Thursday nights -- a class which is completely full at its cap already. Both of those nights I will be coming home and going directly to bed, especially Tuesday nights, as I'll need to get up at 5AM again the next morning. I told her that I will do everything I can to make time for her and for us, but I can only make so much time before I have stuff that I must take care of or before I become completely delirious from lack of sleep.
"We'll figure it out," she tells me.
I don't know what to say in response to that, really. She's mentioned that there's the possibility she could end up changing shifts at work due to a few different factors, and I encouraged her to take that shift change if it's offered -- briefly, anyway, before she dismissed it and said she didn't want to do it because it would be five days a week instead of four. The shift change would be from her overnight shift to an afternoon/evening shift or a normal day shift. I didn't have the chance to explain that I wanted her to do it because it may give her the opportunity to actually get weekends off (like normal people in normal office jobs) and that would be the only time she'd be able to come down here and spend time with me during the semester without me having my hands completely full with absolutely everything I have to do as a professor. As much as I would like them to, my responsibilities don't just stop. If she comes down here on her normal days off, especially during the second half of the semester, she'd never see me and we'd never get any time together. Teaching every-other-day classes on different days, instead of both on the same day, means that on the off-days when I'm not teaching one class or the other, I'm doing the work for those classes. Four mornings of the week, I'll be getting up early to drive to one campus or the other to teach, and won't be back home until the afternoon hours. On Monday and Tuesday nights I'll be grading papers and assignments for my Monday/Wednesday classes. On Wednesday nights I'll be grading papers and assignments for my Tuesday/Thursday classes, which will also extend into at least part of the weekend, more than likely. On Thursday nights for the first half of the semester, I will desperately need to be asleep, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the second half of the semester I will be on campus from 8AM to after 10PM straight through. The weekend is the only time where I won't be running back and forth to and from two different campuses, and the only time where I may not be swamped with student work to take care of. Those short three days I'm off are three of the four days she works overnights. As much as we both desperately want her to be able to come down here to get time with each other for a few days at a time, the only days she could currently do it are my absolute busiest days of the week -- and in the second half of the semester, two of those three mid-week days she has off, I won't be home at all between the hours of 8AM and 10PM.
"I can't go without seeing you until Thanksgiving," she told me a few nights ago. "That's not going to work. I need you."
"I know that," I said, "and I need you too, but I don't know how to work this out yet."
I really don't. She can come down here anytime she wants, obviously -- that's not the issue. The issue is actually seeing me when she does, and getting any time together when she does. For the first half of the semester (for example purposes here), if she came directly down here on Tuesday when she got off work in the morning, for example, she'd arrive here around the time I got home from teaching, and we'd be able to spend time together that afternoon/night before I got up at 5AM on Wednesday morning while she was still asleep and went to teach until that afternoon as well. I'd get home Wednesday hours upon hours after she'd gotten up, would be tired when I got home, yet most of the time would still not get much quality time with her as I would have to take care of everything for my Thursday class that I didn't get to do on Tuesday afternoon/evening because she came down. Our "quality time" that night would basically be her staring at me while I graded papers or did other student work alone in my room on my computer. I cannot avoid this; it has to be done. Thursday morning, I'd get up to go teach yet again while she was sleeping, and by the time I got home on Thursday afternoon at the end of my week -- mind you, she's been awake and alone once more for hours on end -- I'd be even more tired and probably cranky, and she'd either have to leave that evening or on early Friday morning at the very latest, as she works Friday nights.
This is not the sort of scenario I want, at all, when she comes to visit. I'm marrying this woman; I want to actually be able to enjoy the time I spend with her instead of making her feel like she's inconveniencing me or that she's in the way. When Daisy comes down here, I treat her like a queen -- I buy special food for her, cook it and eat it together, we go out to the movies and go shopping together (two things which have become an unspoken sort of tradition when she's here now) and we sleep until we both wake up naturally. That's just how it works. It's like a mini-vacation for both of us, where real life goes away for a few short days. Real life, and the responsibilities associated with it, never go away during the semester.
To run that same scenario for the second half of the semester is even more depressing, but I'll run it anyway: she could still come down on Tuesday if she wanted, though I wouldn't be home until around 11PM and she'd be waiting in my driveway until I got home. We'd get about an hour together at most that night before I had to force myself to sleep and get up at 5AM to leave her still asleep and go teach my Wednesday class. We'd get a few hours together Wednesday afternoon once I got home, if I wasn't swamped with student work to grade and deal with, before I once more had to go to bed early to get up early on Thursday morning, where I would leave her alone for fourteen hours straight once more before I got home after 11PM on Thursday night. She'd either leave then or would leave on Friday morning, at the latest, for work that night, giving her a total of about six to eight hours with me when I'm actually conscious and in her presence over the course of three days.
Even this fall's "fall break" doesn't offer true relief from either of these scenarios; I begin teaching my 210 class on October 10, a Thursday. "Fall break" is the following Monday and Tuesday (the 14th and 15th), which yes, I'll both have off, though she works Sunday and Monday nights. Coming down even on Tuesday morning that week would give us a few more hours together during that day, yes, but would also completely deprive her of sleep for more than 24 hours, and the second-half-of-the-semester cycle that you see above will prevail for the rest of that week anyway...and for another two months afterwards.
I don't know how to fix this, or if it can be fixed. My own schedule, and the workload associated with my schedule, are both set; they can't be altered or changed, truly, in any way. If Daisy could switch to a Monday night through Thursday night shift instead of the opposite (which is what she has now), the problems with scheduling visiting time would disappear, but it's not like I wouldn't be working and/or grading over the weekends as well most of the time. I could at least plan for weekends, though, trying to get everything cleared off my schedule to maximize time with her, such as doing as much grading and lesson planning during the week as humanly possible. However, remembering the incredible amount of finagling she had to do in order to get a few days switched for one week for my graduation back in May, that scenario doesn't seem likely either. In order to do that, as you may recall, she had to work like eight days straight beforehand. I'm not going to ask her to request days off and put her through that again just so she can come down here and visit me. She shouldn't have to work over a week straight just to get a few days off of her choosing. So, really, I'm rather lost and somewhat stumped on what to do here, or what to suggest to her.
As this is weighing heavily on my mind, I wanted to take care of absolutely everything else I could take care of this weekend before classes start tomorrow and I will no longer have anywhere near the amount of time I used to have to do things. To those ends, I have paid all the bills I've had come in the mail over the past week, and have renewed my car's registration -- the latter of which doesn't expire for well over another month, but I didn't want to get swamped and forget about it -- and in a short while I will go downstairs to work on the car itself, replenishing her fluids and giving her a sort of "checkup," so to speak, before I begin to drive her 200 miles a week for the entire semester. My laundry is done and put away, the dishwasher is half full and ready to be ran once it becomes completely full, the garbage has been taken out, and after checking the yard this morning, I won't have to mow it again for at least another week. I even ordered pizza a few nights ago, of which I still have almost a full pizza left, so I don't have to worry about cooking as much for the next few days. My "respectable" teaching outfit for tomorrow has been laid out and is ready for me. My syllabus for 011 -- as well as a few handouts -- have been printed up and are ready for copies in the morning. My class rosters (as of today) have been printed out so that I can have a set attendance list without needing to fill out my gradebook yet, in case some students add/drop this week. Finally, before I go to bed tonight, I will shower, give myself a clean shave to trim up the beard, and put on a fresh pot of coffee so that when I awaken at 5AM, I can begin pounding cup after cup to wake up. All of these things combined take care of virtually everything I can think of before I go back to work for the next sixteen weeks.
Except one thing. One horrible, terrible, frightening thing.
The cats are running out of food and litter, I'm down to my last pot or three of coffee, I have one stamp left after mailing out all my bills, and I'm on my last pack of cigarettes. I will, at some point in the next ten or so hours before I go to sleep, need to go to Walmart.
Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal. I don't like going to Walmart on weekends, but if I have to, do it, I do. It wouldn't be the first time I've had to navigate through throngs of lower-class mouth breathers who get in the way, have conversations that take up entire aisles -- oblivious to the people who need to go down those aisles to shop -- and dodge screaming kids tearing ass around the store, kids who don't speak English (and neither do their parents). And if it's not those people, it's the snooty senior citizens who think they're better or smarter than you just because they're older and richer, and because of that are some of the rudest people you'll ever meet (I'm glad most of them will be dead soon).
This is all normal, and all things I tend to experience when and if I venture to Walmart during daylight hours on a weekend. However, this weekend is different. Tomorrow is the first day of classes at the university. And I learned, long ago, never to venture anywhere close to a shopping center, especially Walmart, and especially the only Walmart in a 30 mile radius, on the weekend before classes start back up -- high school or college. Never. Never ever. You won't even be able to get through the aisles, and all of the problem folks in our society listed above turn their annoyance factors up to 11. It's almost like trying to go shopping for simple groceries and household supplies on Black Friday...if you're oblivious to the fact that it's Black Friday. This is basically Black Sunday, and I urge anyone reading this to stay away from any sort of retail chain today.
I considered putting it off and just stopping there tomorrow afternoon on my way home from campus, as Monday afternoons tend to be pretty quiet, but my cigarettes won't last that long and I'm not going to stop at the gas station or somewhere for no reason just to get more. I have electronic ones, but on the first day (read: week or so) of classes, my stress levels and exhaustion levels are going to be so high that I will need the real thing just to stay focused and to stay awake. I hate admitting that, of course, but it's true. And, more than likely, I'll probably come home tomorrow, make something to eat, and go to sleep in the late afternoon or early evening hours -- since I will not yet be used to getting up and getting off to a running start at 5AM again and twelve hours later I will be feeling that. As mentioned above, I'm going to make myself go to bed as early as possible tonight in order to maximize my sleep, but regardless of that, 5AM is fun for no one.
This means that Walmart must be the last thing I do tonight before going to bed. If I wait until after 9 or 10PM, everything will have quieted down enough for me to go get what I need, quickly, and come back home to sleep. It sort of makes me feel like a spy, operating under cover of darkness, to infiltrate an establishment at a time when the hellhounds that are other people are looking the other way and/or aren't around. I need relatively little; an in-and-out trip should take half an hour, tops.
One of my friends and colleagues is throwing a welcome-back-to-the-grind sort of party, similar to the graduation party, next weekend on Saturday night. I might go to it, though it depends heavily on what I need to do next weekend. Teaching, as I've brought up here before, is one of those professions where one has to live day-by-day, never able to plan anything outside of the classroom more than a week in advance because everything hinges on being able to get those day-to-day tasks done. In this instance, it will involve how tired I am, how much gas I have in the car, how much grading, reading, or lesson planning needs to be done, and what needs to be done around the house or otherwise.
As put-together as things sound, my work for classes and in the department this week is not yet complete; I do not yet have an office, officially, nor have I heard anything else about that (I'll have to check on that tomorrow if the office ladies aren't completely swamped on the first day). I also don't have a diagnostic exam to give to my 011 students, nor do I have their paper assignments yet, so I'll have to get those from the Director's wife -- who teaches in the same classroom I do the hour before I'm in there, coincidentally. Parker teaches in the same building at the same time I do, so at least I'll have company for the walk.
So, really folks, that's all I have for you. Most of my friends in the department who are on Facebook seem to be in hibernation or deep preparation today, as my news feed has been remarkably quiet since I got up this morning, and Daisy herself is in hibernation as well as she works tonight. I'll get to talk to her for a while before she goes to work and before I head out to Walmart (shudder) tonight, but in the meantime I'm going to go work on the car and take care of any and all other little odds-and-ends things I need to do for the day.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Early Nights
Countdown to fall semester: three days
Yesterday was....interesting.
Mind you, two nights ago, I went to bed early. I went out to the Dollar Tree on Wednesday night to get birthday cards and a few other little things, and planned to come home, order a pizza, and watch as much of Community season 4 as I could. Daisy was busy with stuff at home, and I wanted to be able to relax, eat, and go to bed early, since I had to spend most of the day on campus. I decided against pizza; I went next door to the Dollar Tree, got Arby's, and then came home. After eating and Community, I was in bed by 8:30. That's not a joke.
I awoke once more at 4:58 AM. Okay, I thought, well, this is at least some good practice for the alarm going off at 5AM four days a week from now until December, and I got up. I was originally planning to sleep as long as I deemed necessary -- yesterday I didn't actually have any real schedule I had to be on campus, or anything like that -- but once I was up, I showered, made coffee, and proceeded to go through my normal wake-up routine. It was easier, since I'd gone to bed at 8:30 PM, than it normally is when I get up at 5 in the morning.
I messaged Parker. "Planning to leave the house around 10, should be on campus around 10:30-10:45 depending on how the parking is."
He responded that the parking was fine, and told me that they'd reopened the entrance to campus that I normally took, which leads me directly to the new parking areas. He was right; the parking lot wasn't even half full. In fact, it probably wasn't 1/3 of the way full, even.
"There was a time where I never thought I'd sit on this couch again," I told Parker as I sank heavily into the couch in his office.
"I know, right?"
"The prodigal son returns," I said, sarcastically.
The campus was mostly quiet, from what I could see. The department, however, was and is still a mess. This semester we're dealing with a new chair, a new set of GTAs teaching new classes, many GTAs returning to teach classes they've never taught before, new GTAs trying to get office keys and their information put into payroll (which they should've done weeks ago; I did mine several weeks before I started there as a student, not four days beforehand), moving from one office to another, students getting books to teach with, etc. I don't know how the administrator ladies up there haven't pulled their hair out yet. Everyone's running around trying to get everything done, and I was really trying not to bother anyone for anything that wasn't absolutely necessary. So, to make a long story short before I explain the details, here's what I did accomplish yesterday:
Mostly, I tried to stay out of everyone's way unless I had something I needed to get done. I do sort of feel like an outsider, now, to a certain extent -- I'm the guy who's still around and teaching, but as an anomaly, not a student. Adjunct faculty, really, is like being one small step up from a graduate student -- you don't have to follow the student rules as much, but you're also sort of on your own for a lot of really important stuff, and you're more accountable for that stuff. It's a concept that I'm slowly getting used to.
I don't know how many new recruits (or "newbies," as all of us call them) we have this semester, exactly; I know it's roughly around ten or so. I also don't know if all of them are teaching. Even with this, the office situation in the department seems to be somewhat dire, despite the fact that about that many of us graduated last semester. Suri and her officemate (a fellow MFA poet who graduated a year before me) were forced to move from one office to another one on the other side of the department for what, at this point, seems to be no real reason, and they may have a third person crammed into that tiny office with them. I've met one of the guys who's taking over my office, but who knows if anyone else is going to be in there with him (and it's a big office). There are about three or four offices I know of which are either partially vacated or completely vacated, including my own, the office of the former interim director, and at least two of the old GTA offices, if not more. Why we've suddenly run out of office space in the department is completely baffling to me, as there's more than enough room to accommodate another ten people as well as those returning, from my personal estimates.
"I think we're going to stick you in the office with [other longtime adjunct]," one of the office ladies told me.
"Okay," I said, "that sounds good to me."
The other longtime adjunct is a guy I know as an acquaintance only; he's nice, pretty laid back, quiet, and mostly keeps to himself. I also rarely see him on campus -- maybe once a week, if that. But, and here's the kicker -- as of yesterday, he had no clue that he'd be getting a new officemate. And he's had his own office, a one-person office -- for many years.
"We don't have an extra key for that office, though, because it's always been a one-person room," she told me. "We'll have to make a new key."
"Okay, so how do we do that?"
"We fill out a key request form."
"Sounds simple enough. I guess if we have to, we have to. Let's do it."
"Except we're out of key request forms."
This is why I ran the errand for the department, over to the financial operations office and back, to retrieve key request forms.
As for getting that office, I don't know how I feel about it. I've seen the inside of it before -- it's small, and there's only one desk. Which means, basically, we'd have to share a desk. I don't know how I feel about it because, really, I don't know how the office's primary owner feels about it, because as of yesterday he'd not been notified that he may be getting a new "roomie," and I can tell you if I'd had my own office for years to have that sprung upon me, I wouldn't exactly be happy about it. This is not, however, set in stone.
"What's your schedule?" I was asked.
"I'll be here in the department on Mondays and Wednesdays from about 7AM to around 2PM at the latest," I said. "The rest of my time I'll be on West campus."
I teach at 11 to 12:15 on Mondays and Wednesdays, though if I'm getting parking I will once more have to be there really early as always. There's a new shuttle system too, since they destroyed the old parking lot I used to build a dorm on, but I'll get to that later.
"Okay, well, he's here Tuesday/Thursday mornings and evenings."
"That would work out fine then, if he's up for it," I said. "We'd never see each other and wouldn't be in there at the same time."
Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm on the West campus teaching my 101 class, and in the second half of the semester I'll be over there as well for my 210 night class. So, if that's how they choose to do it, it's like an office time-share sort of thing.
Of course, this all comes down to whether he's receptive to it. If he doesn't want to share his office, he can tell them no, though I don't know how effective that no will be.
"Why did you give up your office in the first place?" Suri asked.
"Well...because I graduated," I said. "My office is a GTA office; they'll need it to stick new GTAs in there."
And, well, it's not like I knew for certain until about two weeks ago that I was going to have a teaching position this fall.
"Although," I added, "I'd be happy to just have it back at this point. I don't care if I have to share it with GTAs; why would I?"
"Really," Suri said quietly, possibly in reflection on her own situation.
As mentioned above, my office situation isn't set in stone. I don't know where I'll end up.
"So we do the key request form, and how long does it take to get the key made?" I asked. "Hypothetically. I know it's not going to be done by Monday."
The office lady shrugged. "Could be Tuesday or Wednesday, maybe longer."
"So where do I go until then?" I asked.
Honest question, really -- I am indeed splitting my time between the two campuses equally for at least the first half of the semester when it comes to actual teaching hours, though I will be spending considerably more time on the main campus because of parking issues and time constraints involved with those.
"You can open the lounge and hang out in there," she said, "at least until stuff gets sorted out or until someone else gets here."
"Hm, that is true."
We have a grad student lounge across the hall from where my possible new office is. I have access to it as an adjunct, even though it's mainly for the grad students. It's rarely used, really, even though it's a nice little room with a microwave, coffee pot, fridge, a couch and really comfortable chair, etc. If I have to lounge about in there for the first week or so, I can. I suppose, anyway. Until some of my friends get there -- Parker has told me he'll be on campus by 9AM most of the time because of the aforementioned parking scenarios. Parker also leaves campus and comes back a lot as well, so I would assume he doesn't really want to deal with the shuttle system any more than he has to. Neither do I.
The shuttle system, by the way, is a three-year-contract bussing system that the university has set up as an attempt to deal with the parking problem. Students can park at the Metroplex (about a mile or two from campus; it's where we held our Playwriting live reading last fall), which has a massive parking lot, and get buses to campus that run on constant ten-minute cycles throughout the entire class day/night. This is a brilliant idea, and means that if I ever need to come to campus at an odd hour or an off-day that I won't necessarily have to worry about parking. Still, it's much easier and more ideal for me to be able to just park in the lot and walk up to the building.
Getting my 011 materials was a bit of an ordeal. I asked if the Director's wife was there yesterday so I could talk to her, and nobody had seen her. When asked why, I explained that I hadn't gotten any of my materials yet for the 011 class, and from what I knew nobody else had gotten their stuff either. The administrator lady called the Director, who assured both of us that she'd send out the requested materials today. I had them in my email when I got home, and emailed her back to thank her profusely for her help. The materials themselves are very basic; they consist of a rough schedule/lesson plan and what the class entails, but I'll be building my own syllabus around those materials from scratch. That's basically what I'll be doing this weekend (today, if possible, to get it done with). Now that I have a copier code, I can print out one of them here at home and make the copies I need on Monday morning when I get to campus, before anyone else shows up and before the department gets hectic for the first day of classes. The keys I already have will get me into the front office and into the copy room.
As for the books for my classes, those were relatively easy to procure. I was lucky in that one of my friends and colleagues who graduated last semester left his 011 textbook behind in his office, as we didn't have any extras. Another interesting thing about 011 is that apparently it doesn't have a workbook to go along with it -- just two textbooks. 210 has a workbook and a textbook. Regardless, I got all of the books and materials I needed, and can spend the weekend (if necessary) putting everything together and readying it for next week.
I suppose -- I mean, I've heard rumblings about it, but nobody's told me anything directly and nobody has confirmed/denied anything -- that there's some sort of meeting on campus today for all new and returning GTAs. As I'm no longer a GTA I'm guessing this doesn't apply to me, and nobody's said anything to me about needing to attend some meeting this afternoon, so my fat, tie-dyed ass is sitting right here all day.
I did wear the cat shirt yesterday, and surprisingly enough, nobody thought it was as tacky as I do. I even got some compliments on it. Some people asked me if I'd made it myself (clearly, those people know me well) and seemed a bit disheartened when I said no, I'd purchased it at Walmart. I'm still wearing it now, actually -- I haven't showered yet since returning home last night and generally wear new shirts as long as possible to "break them in," so to speak.
The other information I got while there yesterday was mainly scattered, with a few tidbits of useful stuff -- I learned my pay scale, as mentioned above. I'm getting $2k per class, which is $6k for sixteen weeks' worth of work. I mentioned before that I knew it would be around this. I've seen some places pay their adjuncts more, and others pay them a lot less, so I'm happy with what I'm getting for such a short period of time of work. That will quadruple what I have in my bank account now and, with paychecks coming every two weeks, will rebuild my savings a little more every month. One paycheck will cover most of my monthly expenses. And, according to the office, our first checks drop on September 13.
"That's sooner than I was expecting," I said, "so that's great."
It may be almost a month away, but I've got more than enough to quite easily last me through when I start getting paid again. And it's real pay this time, not pay supplemented by student loans or anything like that.
"Three classes isn't enough to qualify for you to start paying back your student loans yet," one of my colleagues told me. "You'll be able to defer them or get forbearance on them until you start making real money."
"I know," I replied. "The interest building up will suck, but it's either that or adjust my payment plan to the lowest possible amount and change it back when I can afford to pay more."
My first loan payment, left unchanged, would come due around Thanksgiving. I'll have to log back onto the loans website in the next week or two and see what I can do to change around some things, if possible. Shouldn't be too difficult.
I left campus yesterday feeling a lot more relieved about my situation and the future of the semester. No, I don't know anything about my office yet, I don't have my 011 syllabus put together, but all of this stuff will eventually work out just fine. I've got the weekend to take care of what I can and decompress somewhat -- Daisy will be at work for the next four days, so I'll have the time.
I came home and made food, watched more Community, and decided against ordering pizza once more. If I'm hungry tonight, I may do it then (there's football to watch tonight). It stormed pretty strongly here, and I ended up once more going to bed before 9PM. I slept almost twelve hours -- a first in a long, long time for me -- and, again, it was storming when I awoke. When I got up, I ate breakfast and filled out/mailed out all of the birthday cards I'd purchased, and got on here to write this post.
I don't have a lot of plans for the rest of the day, though I do have a lot to do. I want to finish Community this weekend -- it'll be the only free time I have to enjoy it before I have to stop shirking responsibilities in favor of dealing with student work, and I need to pop the hood on the car to replenish the coolant, windshield washer, and put in another quart of oil before I begin driving her 200 miles a week again. She ran fine down there and back yesterday, but the past few times I've driven her, the "low coolant" light has been on, which means it's either running low, the sensor is going wonky, or the thermostat is sticking again. It's not giving me the "low oil" light yet, but I want to put more oil in her anyway so that the light doesn't come on anytime soon. I try to add about a quart or so a month if I'm driving the car on a regular basis. I need to put the Marvel Mystery Oil in both the oil and the gas tank the next time I fill up next week anyhow. This is my "preventative maintenance," as you know. I'm trying to keep the car in the best shape I can myself for as little money as possible. I will more than likely need new front tires by the end of the semester, though. They're not bad at all, but they're starting to wear down a bit, and regardless of where I am after this semester, the midwestern winters can get rough at times.
Other than that, the car's running well; not running hot, no dripping of oil or coolant underneath it, etc. Looks and feels pretty normal to me. As normal as that car gets, anyhow. The shocks are shot, but everything else is in normal working order.
Daisy's dad asked her last night about when I'd be able to come up again, and she told him it wouldn't be until Thanksgiving, more than likely. In all probability, this is true.
"I have a Monday and Tuesday off in October for 'fall break,' but those days fall at the end of the first eight weeks and around midterms, so I'll be doing midterm grades and preparing to start the business writing class that week," I said. "Aside from that and Thanksgiving, my only other day off until December is Labor Day."
Only scheduled days off, anyhow. If I get sick, the car breaks down, or we get another holy-hell-horrific early snowstorm, I'll cancel class. But it's rare for me to actually do that.
So that's about all that's going on right now. I have my last true free weekend ahead of me, so I'm off to put it to good use.
Yesterday was....interesting.
Mind you, two nights ago, I went to bed early. I went out to the Dollar Tree on Wednesday night to get birthday cards and a few other little things, and planned to come home, order a pizza, and watch as much of Community season 4 as I could. Daisy was busy with stuff at home, and I wanted to be able to relax, eat, and go to bed early, since I had to spend most of the day on campus. I decided against pizza; I went next door to the Dollar Tree, got Arby's, and then came home. After eating and Community, I was in bed by 8:30. That's not a joke.
I awoke once more at 4:58 AM. Okay, I thought, well, this is at least some good practice for the alarm going off at 5AM four days a week from now until December, and I got up. I was originally planning to sleep as long as I deemed necessary -- yesterday I didn't actually have any real schedule I had to be on campus, or anything like that -- but once I was up, I showered, made coffee, and proceeded to go through my normal wake-up routine. It was easier, since I'd gone to bed at 8:30 PM, than it normally is when I get up at 5 in the morning.
I messaged Parker. "Planning to leave the house around 10, should be on campus around 10:30-10:45 depending on how the parking is."
He responded that the parking was fine, and told me that they'd reopened the entrance to campus that I normally took, which leads me directly to the new parking areas. He was right; the parking lot wasn't even half full. In fact, it probably wasn't 1/3 of the way full, even.
"There was a time where I never thought I'd sit on this couch again," I told Parker as I sank heavily into the couch in his office.
"I know, right?"
"The prodigal son returns," I said, sarcastically.
The campus was mostly quiet, from what I could see. The department, however, was and is still a mess. This semester we're dealing with a new chair, a new set of GTAs teaching new classes, many GTAs returning to teach classes they've never taught before, new GTAs trying to get office keys and their information put into payroll (which they should've done weeks ago; I did mine several weeks before I started there as a student, not four days beforehand), moving from one office to another, students getting books to teach with, etc. I don't know how the administrator ladies up there haven't pulled their hair out yet. Everyone's running around trying to get everything done, and I was really trying not to bother anyone for anything that wasn't absolutely necessary. So, to make a long story short before I explain the details, here's what I did accomplish yesterday:
- Got my personal code for the copier, so I don't have to make copy orders anymore unless absolutely necessary
- Picked up my teaching books for 011 and 210
- Tentatively got assigned a new office (more on this below)
- Got my 101 syllabus copies printed and ready
- With some finagling (again, more below) got the 011 syllabus materials
- "Helped" -- and I use that term loosely -- Suri set up her new office, and moved a spare desk in Parker's office to another one
- Ran an errand for the department to pick up key request forms
- Found out my pay scale and first paycheck date
- Briefly met two or three of the new GTAs, but only got the name of one of them
Mostly, I tried to stay out of everyone's way unless I had something I needed to get done. I do sort of feel like an outsider, now, to a certain extent -- I'm the guy who's still around and teaching, but as an anomaly, not a student. Adjunct faculty, really, is like being one small step up from a graduate student -- you don't have to follow the student rules as much, but you're also sort of on your own for a lot of really important stuff, and you're more accountable for that stuff. It's a concept that I'm slowly getting used to.
I don't know how many new recruits (or "newbies," as all of us call them) we have this semester, exactly; I know it's roughly around ten or so. I also don't know if all of them are teaching. Even with this, the office situation in the department seems to be somewhat dire, despite the fact that about that many of us graduated last semester. Suri and her officemate (a fellow MFA poet who graduated a year before me) were forced to move from one office to another one on the other side of the department for what, at this point, seems to be no real reason, and they may have a third person crammed into that tiny office with them. I've met one of the guys who's taking over my office, but who knows if anyone else is going to be in there with him (and it's a big office). There are about three or four offices I know of which are either partially vacated or completely vacated, including my own, the office of the former interim director, and at least two of the old GTA offices, if not more. Why we've suddenly run out of office space in the department is completely baffling to me, as there's more than enough room to accommodate another ten people as well as those returning, from my personal estimates.
"I think we're going to stick you in the office with [other longtime adjunct]," one of the office ladies told me.
"Okay," I said, "that sounds good to me."
The other longtime adjunct is a guy I know as an acquaintance only; he's nice, pretty laid back, quiet, and mostly keeps to himself. I also rarely see him on campus -- maybe once a week, if that. But, and here's the kicker -- as of yesterday, he had no clue that he'd be getting a new officemate. And he's had his own office, a one-person office -- for many years.
"We don't have an extra key for that office, though, because it's always been a one-person room," she told me. "We'll have to make a new key."
"Okay, so how do we do that?"
"We fill out a key request form."
"Sounds simple enough. I guess if we have to, we have to. Let's do it."
"Except we're out of key request forms."
This is why I ran the errand for the department, over to the financial operations office and back, to retrieve key request forms.
As for getting that office, I don't know how I feel about it. I've seen the inside of it before -- it's small, and there's only one desk. Which means, basically, we'd have to share a desk. I don't know how I feel about it because, really, I don't know how the office's primary owner feels about it, because as of yesterday he'd not been notified that he may be getting a new "roomie," and I can tell you if I'd had my own office for years to have that sprung upon me, I wouldn't exactly be happy about it. This is not, however, set in stone.
"What's your schedule?" I was asked.
"I'll be here in the department on Mondays and Wednesdays from about 7AM to around 2PM at the latest," I said. "The rest of my time I'll be on West campus."
I teach at 11 to 12:15 on Mondays and Wednesdays, though if I'm getting parking I will once more have to be there really early as always. There's a new shuttle system too, since they destroyed the old parking lot I used to build a dorm on, but I'll get to that later.
"Okay, well, he's here Tuesday/Thursday mornings and evenings."
"That would work out fine then, if he's up for it," I said. "We'd never see each other and wouldn't be in there at the same time."
Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm on the West campus teaching my 101 class, and in the second half of the semester I'll be over there as well for my 210 night class. So, if that's how they choose to do it, it's like an office time-share sort of thing.
Of course, this all comes down to whether he's receptive to it. If he doesn't want to share his office, he can tell them no, though I don't know how effective that no will be.
"Why did you give up your office in the first place?" Suri asked.
"Well...because I graduated," I said. "My office is a GTA office; they'll need it to stick new GTAs in there."
And, well, it's not like I knew for certain until about two weeks ago that I was going to have a teaching position this fall.
"Although," I added, "I'd be happy to just have it back at this point. I don't care if I have to share it with GTAs; why would I?"
"Really," Suri said quietly, possibly in reflection on her own situation.
As mentioned above, my office situation isn't set in stone. I don't know where I'll end up.
"So we do the key request form, and how long does it take to get the key made?" I asked. "Hypothetically. I know it's not going to be done by Monday."
The office lady shrugged. "Could be Tuesday or Wednesday, maybe longer."
"So where do I go until then?" I asked.
Honest question, really -- I am indeed splitting my time between the two campuses equally for at least the first half of the semester when it comes to actual teaching hours, though I will be spending considerably more time on the main campus because of parking issues and time constraints involved with those.
"You can open the lounge and hang out in there," she said, "at least until stuff gets sorted out or until someone else gets here."
"Hm, that is true."
We have a grad student lounge across the hall from where my possible new office is. I have access to it as an adjunct, even though it's mainly for the grad students. It's rarely used, really, even though it's a nice little room with a microwave, coffee pot, fridge, a couch and really comfortable chair, etc. If I have to lounge about in there for the first week or so, I can. I suppose, anyway. Until some of my friends get there -- Parker has told me he'll be on campus by 9AM most of the time because of the aforementioned parking scenarios. Parker also leaves campus and comes back a lot as well, so I would assume he doesn't really want to deal with the shuttle system any more than he has to. Neither do I.
The shuttle system, by the way, is a three-year-contract bussing system that the university has set up as an attempt to deal with the parking problem. Students can park at the Metroplex (about a mile or two from campus; it's where we held our Playwriting live reading last fall), which has a massive parking lot, and get buses to campus that run on constant ten-minute cycles throughout the entire class day/night. This is a brilliant idea, and means that if I ever need to come to campus at an odd hour or an off-day that I won't necessarily have to worry about parking. Still, it's much easier and more ideal for me to be able to just park in the lot and walk up to the building.
Getting my 011 materials was a bit of an ordeal. I asked if the Director's wife was there yesterday so I could talk to her, and nobody had seen her. When asked why, I explained that I hadn't gotten any of my materials yet for the 011 class, and from what I knew nobody else had gotten their stuff either. The administrator lady called the Director, who assured both of us that she'd send out the requested materials today. I had them in my email when I got home, and emailed her back to thank her profusely for her help. The materials themselves are very basic; they consist of a rough schedule/lesson plan and what the class entails, but I'll be building my own syllabus around those materials from scratch. That's basically what I'll be doing this weekend (today, if possible, to get it done with). Now that I have a copier code, I can print out one of them here at home and make the copies I need on Monday morning when I get to campus, before anyone else shows up and before the department gets hectic for the first day of classes. The keys I already have will get me into the front office and into the copy room.
As for the books for my classes, those were relatively easy to procure. I was lucky in that one of my friends and colleagues who graduated last semester left his 011 textbook behind in his office, as we didn't have any extras. Another interesting thing about 011 is that apparently it doesn't have a workbook to go along with it -- just two textbooks. 210 has a workbook and a textbook. Regardless, I got all of the books and materials I needed, and can spend the weekend (if necessary) putting everything together and readying it for next week.
I suppose -- I mean, I've heard rumblings about it, but nobody's told me anything directly and nobody has confirmed/denied anything -- that there's some sort of meeting on campus today for all new and returning GTAs. As I'm no longer a GTA I'm guessing this doesn't apply to me, and nobody's said anything to me about needing to attend some meeting this afternoon, so my fat, tie-dyed ass is sitting right here all day.
I did wear the cat shirt yesterday, and surprisingly enough, nobody thought it was as tacky as I do. I even got some compliments on it. Some people asked me if I'd made it myself (clearly, those people know me well) and seemed a bit disheartened when I said no, I'd purchased it at Walmart. I'm still wearing it now, actually -- I haven't showered yet since returning home last night and generally wear new shirts as long as possible to "break them in," so to speak.
The other information I got while there yesterday was mainly scattered, with a few tidbits of useful stuff -- I learned my pay scale, as mentioned above. I'm getting $2k per class, which is $6k for sixteen weeks' worth of work. I mentioned before that I knew it would be around this. I've seen some places pay their adjuncts more, and others pay them a lot less, so I'm happy with what I'm getting for such a short period of time of work. That will quadruple what I have in my bank account now and, with paychecks coming every two weeks, will rebuild my savings a little more every month. One paycheck will cover most of my monthly expenses. And, according to the office, our first checks drop on September 13.
"That's sooner than I was expecting," I said, "so that's great."
It may be almost a month away, but I've got more than enough to quite easily last me through when I start getting paid again. And it's real pay this time, not pay supplemented by student loans or anything like that.
"Three classes isn't enough to qualify for you to start paying back your student loans yet," one of my colleagues told me. "You'll be able to defer them or get forbearance on them until you start making real money."
"I know," I replied. "The interest building up will suck, but it's either that or adjust my payment plan to the lowest possible amount and change it back when I can afford to pay more."
My first loan payment, left unchanged, would come due around Thanksgiving. I'll have to log back onto the loans website in the next week or two and see what I can do to change around some things, if possible. Shouldn't be too difficult.
I left campus yesterday feeling a lot more relieved about my situation and the future of the semester. No, I don't know anything about my office yet, I don't have my 011 syllabus put together, but all of this stuff will eventually work out just fine. I've got the weekend to take care of what I can and decompress somewhat -- Daisy will be at work for the next four days, so I'll have the time.
I came home and made food, watched more Community, and decided against ordering pizza once more. If I'm hungry tonight, I may do it then (there's football to watch tonight). It stormed pretty strongly here, and I ended up once more going to bed before 9PM. I slept almost twelve hours -- a first in a long, long time for me -- and, again, it was storming when I awoke. When I got up, I ate breakfast and filled out/mailed out all of the birthday cards I'd purchased, and got on here to write this post.
I don't have a lot of plans for the rest of the day, though I do have a lot to do. I want to finish Community this weekend -- it'll be the only free time I have to enjoy it before I have to stop shirking responsibilities in favor of dealing with student work, and I need to pop the hood on the car to replenish the coolant, windshield washer, and put in another quart of oil before I begin driving her 200 miles a week again. She ran fine down there and back yesterday, but the past few times I've driven her, the "low coolant" light has been on, which means it's either running low, the sensor is going wonky, or the thermostat is sticking again. It's not giving me the "low oil" light yet, but I want to put more oil in her anyway so that the light doesn't come on anytime soon. I try to add about a quart or so a month if I'm driving the car on a regular basis. I need to put the Marvel Mystery Oil in both the oil and the gas tank the next time I fill up next week anyhow. This is my "preventative maintenance," as you know. I'm trying to keep the car in the best shape I can myself for as little money as possible. I will more than likely need new front tires by the end of the semester, though. They're not bad at all, but they're starting to wear down a bit, and regardless of where I am after this semester, the midwestern winters can get rough at times.
Other than that, the car's running well; not running hot, no dripping of oil or coolant underneath it, etc. Looks and feels pretty normal to me. As normal as that car gets, anyhow. The shocks are shot, but everything else is in normal working order.
Daisy's dad asked her last night about when I'd be able to come up again, and she told him it wouldn't be until Thanksgiving, more than likely. In all probability, this is true.
"I have a Monday and Tuesday off in October for 'fall break,' but those days fall at the end of the first eight weeks and around midterms, so I'll be doing midterm grades and preparing to start the business writing class that week," I said. "Aside from that and Thanksgiving, my only other day off until December is Labor Day."
Only scheduled days off, anyhow. If I get sick, the car breaks down, or we get another holy-hell-horrific early snowstorm, I'll cancel class. But it's rare for me to actually do that.
So that's about all that's going on right now. I have my last true free weekend ahead of me, so I'm off to put it to good use.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Plansus Interruptus
Countdown to fall semester: five days
It's Wednesday. Technically, anyway. It's after midnight.
It's also really quiet here. Today has been a relatively uneventful day, though a few interesting things of note have happened. It stormed mildly and rained for several hours this afternoon, which kept it nice and cool all day (right now it's 70). I paid my credit card bill and balanced my checkbook.
However, the final class schedule was released today, which helped to ease my worries a bit. The schedule we got on Friday was the tentative schedule, though usually not a whole lot changes between the tentative schedule and the final schedule. I've never had to worry about any changes, at least not when I was a grad student, anyhow. This time around, however, I did notice something -- and, perhaps, it was something I overlooked before.
As you know, I'm teaching three classes this semester: 011, 101, and 210. I know the 210 class starts in October as an eight-week course; the other two start next week. However, what I noticed was quite interesting. My 101 class, if I'm reading the schedule correctly, may be an eight-week course as well.
I consulted Parker about this, as he is a big part of why and how I've been able to get more classes this semester -- he's always been one of my closest friends and biggest advocates in the department, and I'm pretty sure he helped to organize the schedule.
"My 101 class is bolded," I told him. "It is apparently under the 'block' 8-week schedule. I don't know if that's correct or not, as the meeting times and class lengths are still 75 minutes twice a week -- not three hours twice a week, as the 210 class will be. Doesn't matter to me either way, really; I'm happy to do either style, but I wonder if that's a typo. I may have to ask [administrator] to confirm. She said that the 101 classes on West are typically filled with high school students from [school]. If that's the case, I could understand if it were an 8-week course -- a normal high school semester is nine weeks."
This, if true, would certainly make my semester much more manageable. And I say this because, well, think about it for a moment. The 011 class I'll be teaching straight through, twice a week, for the entire semester anyway. However...if the 101 turns out to be an eight-week course, it changes everything about the second half of my semester. For one, it means I'd teach the 101 course through October, it would end, and then my schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays would basically flip -- after October 10, instead of teaching in the morning and then having to stick around until 10PM, I'd be able to sleep in on those days and go to the West campus at 7PM, thereby ensuring me a lot more free time to grade, sleep, and take care of stuff around the house. It would essentially give me two days more off per week, as I'd only have to teach for three hours on those nights, turn around, and come back home. It would also eliminate the need for me to find something to do around the town for most of the day until I taught the night class.
Again, I don't know if this is the case, or if there's a typo in the whole "block" thing or the hours the class is actually taught or both.
Update: Banner, the class administration system the university uses, says that the 101 class is a full-semester class, from August 19 to December 13, so it's more than likely a typo in the class schedule put out by the department. My hopes of having extra free time now have been, basically, dashed. However, it does mean I'll be able to teach the class at a more languid pace; by the time it gets to the point where I'll be teaching all three classes at once every week (the second half of the semester after October 10) I'll need that extra time during the day on West campus to grade everything I have collected. I might be able to concentrate better there than at home, where I'm distracted by the cats and the fast internet on this computer in my house.
I do have access to all of my classes now via Banner, and can see my rosters. The 101 course is currently the smallest, with 8 students. I have 16 in the 011 course, and 17 in the 210 eight-week course. That's only 41 students total dispersed over three different classes, less than I taught on average per semester with only two classes as a GTA. Unless both of the semester-long classes fill up, the first half of the semester is going to go by really fast at a quick clip when it comes to grading and lessons. I'll be on and off campuses, alternating four days a week for 3-5 hours a day (depending on whatever "office hours" I have to hold and where) and really, those first eight weeks will feel just like old times. The second half of the semester is going to bury me under extra work and extra time, though. Coordinating, giving, and grading three different final exams and/or final papers all at the same time is absolutely going to crush me in December. I doubt I'll get much sleep during those last few weeks of classes.
Mind you, I don't even know if 011 or 210 have final papers or final exams, or "papers" at all. From what Suri told me, the "papers" for 011 are little more than a few paragraphs on a page most of the time, though I don't know how true that is. And I know basically nothing right now about 210 aside from it's a class that teaches students how to write resumes and memos and, well, businesslike writing. I've never taken a class like that before myself, even in undergrad, so I'll likely be learning a lot along with my students.
An interesting aside: one of my former Engineering English students is in that 210 class. Bitchin'. She's one of my good ones, as well.
I have still heard nothing back from the Director's wife after my email to her yesterday; I'm really hoping to hear from her by sometime before Thursday morning at the absolute latest, so that I can get my syllabus made and readied for class to print up and be done with. Nobody else who has classes she reigns over has gotten anything from her yet either (because, oh believe me, I've asked around) so at least I am not alone there.
Regardless of what happens, it'll be an adventure. I'm running off into mostly uncharted territory here, really, and it's interesting to think about the experience and thrill I'll get from helming classes again. Especially three really different ones with different curricula and timeframes. This is not only a test of my fortitude as an instructor, but a challenging one, and one that I'll get to enjoy on a purely academic, intellectual level. When I've said in the past, many times, that I love teaching and that it is quite possibly my calling in life, I wasn't kidding.
In other news, it looks like the rest of my week will be spent in a solitary fashion, and I will be running my errands and going to campus alone on Thursday. Daisy's mother recently had surgery, and is recuperating at home, and after both of us talking about whether she should come down here or not or stay and take care of her mother (who, incidentally, told her she should just come down anyway because it will be a while before she can do so again), we decided tonight -- or, really, Daisy decided and I fully and completely supported her on her decision -- that Daisy's place right now is with her mother at home, and unless something drastically changes, that's where she'll stay and not come down here in the morning as she'd planned.
Really, I'm fine with this. Family comes first, of course. I love Mama and worry about her anyway, and I told Daisy that if I were there, I'd be taking care of her as much as possible as well, just like her. This isn't a lie; I adore Daisy's parents, and I've often said that, were it possible for us to do so, I would love to live down the street from them for the rest of our lives in order to be an active part of the family.
"We can work something out at a later time," I told Daisy. "I love you, and I love Mama, and if Mama needs you, she needs you. Don't worry about it. It's okay."
I didn't want her to worry about me or feel bad because she couldn't come down. I still don't want her to feel bad. I have a lot to do, yes, but it can be done solo, and she's barely had any sleep over the past two days. I just want her to get rest, stay around the house, and take care of her mother, because that's really what she needs right now. We were planning to go to campus together and to see the new Percy Jackson movie, but that -- and anything else, really -- can wait until everything settles down somewhat.
As mentioned, a good chunk of my day today was spent taking care of things I needed to get done around the house and for my classes, but mostly financial stuff. I need to go over to the Dollar Tree tomorrow -- my parents both celebrate birthdays next week, as does my ailing grandmother and my godfather (all of them within a day or two of one another) and I need to get them cards. I've forgotten about the cards every single time I've been over there this summer, and usually I'm really on-the-ball when it comes to the month of August and birthdays and the like. I guess I can chalk that up to being somewhat preoccupied with other stuff, but no more so than I was last summer or the summer before that -- arguably the two worst summers of my entire life.
Note: I know Daisy will read this and think "but we got together last summer!" so I have to add the disclaimer here that I'm not including her in the "worst summers" thing.
"By my rough estimations," I told her earlier tonight, "I would run out of money a lot earlier than I thought I would based on my current projections."
"Yeah," she said, "that's usually how it happens."
"Adding in the cost of gas -- since I haven't driven anywhere this summer -- and my credit card bills that I will have to pay on until they're paid off, based on my estimates I would run out of money around mid-October, now. I mean, I'll be fine, since I'll start getting my paychecks from the university in a month or so, but had I not gotten those classes to teach, I'd be in serious panic mode right now."
"Well, remember, baby, even if you're out of money, I'm not. I have money. I won't let you fail."
She's right, and her job does pay a hell of a lot more than mine does, but that's not her responsibility, and she has responsibilities of her own. I've written about this before -- I never want to be dependent on anyone else, ever again, for basic survival.
Cat shirts and teaching clothes be damned, that's why I keep myself on a pretty tight budget when I do my shopping. One of those credit cards, as mentioned above, has been completely paid off (for the moment, anyhow; I'll more than likely order pizza with it tomorrow, since Daisy won't be here). The other I still have about $100 on. I know, I know, $100 in total credit card debt is nothing, but keep in mind that I'm not a millionaire or anything, either. I have a third card that I've never used yet, a card I keep for catastrophic emergencies only. That's the card I'll have to use if I blow a major part on the car, or if I have to end up junking the car eventually and buying a beater from a low-rent auto dealership. Because, yes, that card's limit is enough for that. It's also what I'll use if I get really sick and have to go to the doctor/dentist/ER, or something anywhere else along any of those catastrophe-esque lines.
Barring that, and keeping my finances mostly in check, I'll probably end up using it to help cover some of the wedding costs, if possible. That also depends heavily on where I am monetarily or career-wise at the end of spring, as well.
So those are my plans for tomorrow and for the rest of the week, really -- to rest up, to take care of my pressing school things, to go to the Dollar Tree, and to order a pizza. All of it rolled together is sort of cathartic, really. No, Daisy's not here, which would make it more cathartic (and more hectic at the same time -- no, don't try to figure that one out), but I'll be able to take care of everything I need to take care of and I will be able, finally, to get the last of my leisure time in before I'm swept away by classes again.
It's Wednesday. Technically, anyway. It's after midnight.
It's also really quiet here. Today has been a relatively uneventful day, though a few interesting things of note have happened. It stormed mildly and rained for several hours this afternoon, which kept it nice and cool all day (right now it's 70). I paid my credit card bill and balanced my checkbook.
However, the final class schedule was released today, which helped to ease my worries a bit. The schedule we got on Friday was the tentative schedule, though usually not a whole lot changes between the tentative schedule and the final schedule. I've never had to worry about any changes, at least not when I was a grad student, anyhow. This time around, however, I did notice something -- and, perhaps, it was something I overlooked before.
As you know, I'm teaching three classes this semester: 011, 101, and 210. I know the 210 class starts in October as an eight-week course; the other two start next week. However, what I noticed was quite interesting. My 101 class, if I'm reading the schedule correctly, may be an eight-week course as well.
I consulted Parker about this, as he is a big part of why and how I've been able to get more classes this semester -- he's always been one of my closest friends and biggest advocates in the department, and I'm pretty sure he helped to organize the schedule.
"My 101 class is bolded," I told him. "It is apparently under the 'block' 8-week schedule. I don't know if that's correct or not, as the meeting times and class lengths are still 75 minutes twice a week -- not three hours twice a week, as the 210 class will be. Doesn't matter to me either way, really; I'm happy to do either style, but I wonder if that's a typo. I may have to ask [administrator] to confirm. She said that the 101 classes on West are typically filled with high school students from [school]. If that's the case, I could understand if it were an 8-week course -- a normal high school semester is nine weeks."
This, if true, would certainly make my semester much more manageable. And I say this because, well, think about it for a moment. The 011 class I'll be teaching straight through, twice a week, for the entire semester anyway. However...if the 101 turns out to be an eight-week course, it changes everything about the second half of my semester. For one, it means I'd teach the 101 course through October, it would end, and then my schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays would basically flip -- after October 10, instead of teaching in the morning and then having to stick around until 10PM, I'd be able to sleep in on those days and go to the West campus at 7PM, thereby ensuring me a lot more free time to grade, sleep, and take care of stuff around the house. It would essentially give me two days more off per week, as I'd only have to teach for three hours on those nights, turn around, and come back home. It would also eliminate the need for me to find something to do around the town for most of the day until I taught the night class.
Again, I don't know if this is the case, or if there's a typo in the whole "block" thing or the hours the class is actually taught or both.
Update: Banner, the class administration system the university uses, says that the 101 class is a full-semester class, from August 19 to December 13, so it's more than likely a typo in the class schedule put out by the department. My hopes of having extra free time now have been, basically, dashed. However, it does mean I'll be able to teach the class at a more languid pace; by the time it gets to the point where I'll be teaching all three classes at once every week (the second half of the semester after October 10) I'll need that extra time during the day on West campus to grade everything I have collected. I might be able to concentrate better there than at home, where I'm distracted by the cats and the fast internet on this computer in my house.
I do have access to all of my classes now via Banner, and can see my rosters. The 101 course is currently the smallest, with 8 students. I have 16 in the 011 course, and 17 in the 210 eight-week course. That's only 41 students total dispersed over three different classes, less than I taught on average per semester with only two classes as a GTA. Unless both of the semester-long classes fill up, the first half of the semester is going to go by really fast at a quick clip when it comes to grading and lessons. I'll be on and off campuses, alternating four days a week for 3-5 hours a day (depending on whatever "office hours" I have to hold and where) and really, those first eight weeks will feel just like old times. The second half of the semester is going to bury me under extra work and extra time, though. Coordinating, giving, and grading three different final exams and/or final papers all at the same time is absolutely going to crush me in December. I doubt I'll get much sleep during those last few weeks of classes.
Mind you, I don't even know if 011 or 210 have final papers or final exams, or "papers" at all. From what Suri told me, the "papers" for 011 are little more than a few paragraphs on a page most of the time, though I don't know how true that is. And I know basically nothing right now about 210 aside from it's a class that teaches students how to write resumes and memos and, well, businesslike writing. I've never taken a class like that before myself, even in undergrad, so I'll likely be learning a lot along with my students.
An interesting aside: one of my former Engineering English students is in that 210 class. Bitchin'. She's one of my good ones, as well.
I have still heard nothing back from the Director's wife after my email to her yesterday; I'm really hoping to hear from her by sometime before Thursday morning at the absolute latest, so that I can get my syllabus made and readied for class to print up and be done with. Nobody else who has classes she reigns over has gotten anything from her yet either (because, oh believe me, I've asked around) so at least I am not alone there.
Regardless of what happens, it'll be an adventure. I'm running off into mostly uncharted territory here, really, and it's interesting to think about the experience and thrill I'll get from helming classes again. Especially three really different ones with different curricula and timeframes. This is not only a test of my fortitude as an instructor, but a challenging one, and one that I'll get to enjoy on a purely academic, intellectual level. When I've said in the past, many times, that I love teaching and that it is quite possibly my calling in life, I wasn't kidding.
In other news, it looks like the rest of my week will be spent in a solitary fashion, and I will be running my errands and going to campus alone on Thursday. Daisy's mother recently had surgery, and is recuperating at home, and after both of us talking about whether she should come down here or not or stay and take care of her mother (who, incidentally, told her she should just come down anyway because it will be a while before she can do so again), we decided tonight -- or, really, Daisy decided and I fully and completely supported her on her decision -- that Daisy's place right now is with her mother at home, and unless something drastically changes, that's where she'll stay and not come down here in the morning as she'd planned.
Really, I'm fine with this. Family comes first, of course. I love Mama and worry about her anyway, and I told Daisy that if I were there, I'd be taking care of her as much as possible as well, just like her. This isn't a lie; I adore Daisy's parents, and I've often said that, were it possible for us to do so, I would love to live down the street from them for the rest of our lives in order to be an active part of the family.
"We can work something out at a later time," I told Daisy. "I love you, and I love Mama, and if Mama needs you, she needs you. Don't worry about it. It's okay."
I didn't want her to worry about me or feel bad because she couldn't come down. I still don't want her to feel bad. I have a lot to do, yes, but it can be done solo, and she's barely had any sleep over the past two days. I just want her to get rest, stay around the house, and take care of her mother, because that's really what she needs right now. We were planning to go to campus together and to see the new Percy Jackson movie, but that -- and anything else, really -- can wait until everything settles down somewhat.
As mentioned, a good chunk of my day today was spent taking care of things I needed to get done around the house and for my classes, but mostly financial stuff. I need to go over to the Dollar Tree tomorrow -- my parents both celebrate birthdays next week, as does my ailing grandmother and my godfather (all of them within a day or two of one another) and I need to get them cards. I've forgotten about the cards every single time I've been over there this summer, and usually I'm really on-the-ball when it comes to the month of August and birthdays and the like. I guess I can chalk that up to being somewhat preoccupied with other stuff, but no more so than I was last summer or the summer before that -- arguably the two worst summers of my entire life.
Note: I know Daisy will read this and think "but we got together last summer!" so I have to add the disclaimer here that I'm not including her in the "worst summers" thing.
"By my rough estimations," I told her earlier tonight, "I would run out of money a lot earlier than I thought I would based on my current projections."
"Yeah," she said, "that's usually how it happens."
"Adding in the cost of gas -- since I haven't driven anywhere this summer -- and my credit card bills that I will have to pay on until they're paid off, based on my estimates I would run out of money around mid-October, now. I mean, I'll be fine, since I'll start getting my paychecks from the university in a month or so, but had I not gotten those classes to teach, I'd be in serious panic mode right now."
"Well, remember, baby, even if you're out of money, I'm not. I have money. I won't let you fail."
She's right, and her job does pay a hell of a lot more than mine does, but that's not her responsibility, and she has responsibilities of her own. I've written about this before -- I never want to be dependent on anyone else, ever again, for basic survival.
Cat shirts and teaching clothes be damned, that's why I keep myself on a pretty tight budget when I do my shopping. One of those credit cards, as mentioned above, has been completely paid off (for the moment, anyhow; I'll more than likely order pizza with it tomorrow, since Daisy won't be here). The other I still have about $100 on. I know, I know, $100 in total credit card debt is nothing, but keep in mind that I'm not a millionaire or anything, either. I have a third card that I've never used yet, a card I keep for catastrophic emergencies only. That's the card I'll have to use if I blow a major part on the car, or if I have to end up junking the car eventually and buying a beater from a low-rent auto dealership. Because, yes, that card's limit is enough for that. It's also what I'll use if I get really sick and have to go to the doctor/dentist/ER, or something anywhere else along any of those catastrophe-esque lines.
Barring that, and keeping my finances mostly in check, I'll probably end up using it to help cover some of the wedding costs, if possible. That also depends heavily on where I am monetarily or career-wise at the end of spring, as well.
So those are my plans for tomorrow and for the rest of the week, really -- to rest up, to take care of my pressing school things, to go to the Dollar Tree, and to order a pizza. All of it rolled together is sort of cathartic, really. No, Daisy's not here, which would make it more cathartic (and more hectic at the same time -- no, don't try to figure that one out), but I'll be able to take care of everything I need to take care of and I will be able, finally, to get the last of my leisure time in before I'm swept away by classes again.
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