New Semester

Second week of classes... Going well so far. Once again I've played the part of the pushover pansy, and let far more students into my class than my boss requires of me. My department chair capped my classes at 30, which is the department standard teaching load. But since I'm in a classroom with 44 chairs, I gave out overrides to students who begged me to let them in. Consequently, I now have 44 students in one class, and 43 in another. Since it's primarily a lecture course, I figured the education quality isn't suffering too much. But I give 12 quizzes and 4 examinations during the semester, so the grading load is going to be quite heavy. In addition to the 87 students in two sections of that course, I have another 26 students in a graduate course, even though there are only 24 seats in that room. Actually, this third course is taught in a conference room, and there are 24 seats around the table and six more in the back of the room at an auxiliary table. So technically, everyone can sit down, but two students will always have to be at the back table. I asked the students if this was okay, and everyone said yeah, they'd take turns at the back table, since everyone wants to be in the class. I've already given a quiz in all three classes (the two undergraduate classes have had two quizzes already), and the scores are coming out about average (the mean of both undergrad sections was around 70%, which is about where the first quizzes usually come out... although they creep up to about 75 to 78% by the end of the semester -- a lot of the D and F students wise up and drop). This week has been full of meetings. Lots of church meetings on Sunday, although I have no idea why I'm in most of them.... and... --- Oh, my branch clerk financial audit went great, by the way. My books were perfectly clean except for the stinkin' problem that SLC HQ refuses to clear up on their end! A full year we've been working on this trying to get them to correct their error, and still it's not fixed! Maybe my letter will work... my branch president, who I sent a copy of the letter, says he's never seen anyone threaten Salt Lake HQ before! My stake clerk, on the other hand, told me he was glad someone finally had the guts to write what I did, and maybe this type of harsh (polite, but, uh, straightforward) wake-up call will do the trick and get someone out there to get off their duff and fix the mistake.) Okay, back to all the meetings. Meetings, meetings, meetings. Staunton ham radio club meeting Tuesday night, Faculty senate meeting Wednesday (yes, I was elected our department's senator for this year), Harrisonburg ham radio club meeting Thursday, faculty Promotion and Tenure Committee meeting and curriculum study committee meetings today... and next week's calendar is already full of meetings, too: nomination committee meeting, faculty position search committee meeting, instructional technology steering committee meeting, two training seminars, ham radio club Board of Directors meeting, ... Good Golly Molly. Notice that "meetings" are on my list of things that irk me, over to the right of my posts! The ham radio operators in Virginia are in standby mode. The remnants of Hurricane Fay are supposed to cause rain around here, but I personally think they are full of beans, to use a Dubbyism. We're making sure our batteries are charged and our go-boxes are ready for deployment. I hope we don't get a lot of rain. I hate bailing out my garage out back.