And so it begins again. Classes start today, and I'm sitting at my computer, freshly showered, slurping down coffee in an attempt to wake up, and very soon, I'll be heading to campus, even though I don't actually teach today, to get loads of work done at the office.
I really wish that I didn't need to go in this early, but as any seasoned academic knows, the first day of classes is most certainly not the day to tempt the parking gods. I have high hopes that if I'm there by 9 that I won't need to wander the campus searching for a parking space in a lot that is not my own. Cross your fingers for me.
Other than that, I don't have much to report. I'm excited to actually get back into the classroom tomorrow, although I'm also feeling wistful about the summer that is now officially over. In other words, how I feel on this morning is not unlike how I've felt at the start of every academic year that I can remember. Business as usual.
Except, of course, there are things that aren't business as usual this year. First there's the whole Adventures in Online Teaching thing. Second there's going up for tenure. Third there's the fact that my department has begun an MA program, with which I'm fairly involved, and so that means new committee work and new challenges.
Mr. Stripey doesn't quite understand the academic-year schedule, and so last week during the days of work and meetings he would look at me askance every time I returned home, like, "What up, yo! Where have you been? Because, see, I'm very adorable and don't you want to be with me all the time?!! Everybody else does!" By "everybody else" he means Man-Kitty, though of course, that's not even really true, for it's not uncommon for the Man-Kitty to attempt to escape the exuberance that is Mr. Stripey by crawling into a bag and lying very, very still. At any rate, I'm hoping that the more mature and understanding M-K will some how communicate to the wee one about how things go in the academic year. I don't think that they actually speak to one another, but I do think that they perhaps communicate telepathically.
God, I do not want to go to school. Why can't summer last just a few days longer?
12 years ago
5 comments:
And then there are those of us who forget to renew parking permits and run to fetch them at 7:30 in the morning, only to find out that our gate cards won't be active for up to a week anyway. Oh yeah, my year is off to a good start :)
Just back from renewing my expired parking tag, driving through and around hordes of anxious and VERY young-looking freshman at orientation, trying to come up with an excellent and stress-free syllabus that will magically keep me and the students on track and allow any student at any moment to effortlessly calculate their own grade without my help. I'll likely be here in the office until midnight.
Good luck tomorrow and thanks for the meatloaf recipe.
It didn't do me any good to get a parking permit. All of the faculty lots today were filled with students with yellow parking tickets on their windshields.
I had many first-day mishaps--locked room, parking gate card not yet activated (maybe Gwinne and I teach at the same school?!), and so on.... It sucks to be in class in August, but at least it wasn't really hot outside here today. I think that's what I hate most about returning so early--teaching in rooms with no A/C while it's still summer! (I'm in the upper midwest, not the south, but it's still hot here in August!)
Astroprof: this is what happened to me last year on the first day of school, which caused me (and I presume some other faculty?) to wage a letter-writing campaign of terror (ok, it was only two or three emails, but I was very harsh indeed) against parking services, yelling at them that if they're going to raise faculty parking rates each year and if they're going to charge faculty twice what students pay, then they'd better have some employees out guarding those lots, at least in the morning. They tried to act like I was asking for something unreasonable, but when I told them how many student permits I counted in the lot (yes, I did count them) they got somebody out there guarding the lot the next day. And they did it in the spring, too. And I thought they might forget over the summer, but no! Security was tight! Illegal student parkers were turned away! Huzzah!
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