Coffee Flavored Kisses

This is a rocky time of year with the start of school. Throw in the anniversary of Katrina’s dance with NO, the second anniversary of my mom-in-law’s passing, and SIL’s birthday, and it’s already moodswing time, but now, I’ve got even more on the plate–fucking Hurricane Gustav is heading towards La and ultimatly Arkansas will be affected, and worse my 79 year old mother decided NOT to evacuate from her home.

I offered to drive down and bring her and the dogs here, but she said no.  Her niece in Mississippi offered to come and get them, she said no.  Annoying old woman, how I love her, and worse understand her.  Odds are I’d be doing just the same thing.  This doesn’t help me much as I sit up here in Arkansas scared shitless about Mom and frustrated.  Also frustrating is the fact that Mike’s family is in much the same boat. I am sure a number of them will evacuate and a number of them won’t.  I have know idea who might show up  on my doorstep. I feel utterly impotent and helpless–and tearful.

The tears, however, have to stop because Monday is SIL’s 20th birthday, and that day is already full of mixed emotions because her birthday is also the anniversary of her mom’s death.  Must. Hold. It. Together.  We’re supposed to take her shopping today. She wants to go to the Build-A-Bear place–well, at least it will keep me from watching weather and news and working myself up into a near panic–like that would take much anyway.

I’m beginning to hate the Labor Day holiday…

So I have met all of my classes.  I cannot say I have yet met all of my students because some have added in since the first class met.  Registration is, I believe, over, so things should settle down.

My total number of students right now is 120–that’s all face to face students.  I quit teachig online after Spring–burnt out ya know.  The odd thing about my numbers are how they have fallen out.  My Tues-Thur comp 1 class is now the fullest class.  Usually, I can’t get a TTH class to have more than 13 people–this semester, it’s 30.  My 8 am MWF class is also comp 1, and right now it sits at 27, since 3 people never showed up for it.  My next largest class is a 9 am MWF Comp 2 class.  It sits at 20, and is followed by my Philosophy class which has 19 people in it. 19! This is followed by World Lit 1 at 15, and then my smallest class is of 7, but it’s on the smallest of the campuses.  Now, I am used to having about 120 students, but that usually included my online students and in 7 classes.  Only I could end up with one less class but the same number of students

Having met these classes, I think I will like them.  They have some strong personalities and seem eager to learn.  These are definitely good things.  Whether I keep that opinion, ask me againn in 10 weeks

Summer’s hot, hazy, lazy ways are about to end.  Partly that’s due to some weird weather patterns (I am not complaining about less heat either!).  Mostly, I am talking about the beginning of classes.  They start Monday.

With the start of classes so soon, I have been busy.  Wednesday was faculty reporting day; we all drive over to the Helena campus to eat breakfast, listen to speakers, and have meetings.  Nothing really new this year, except, our administration announced that my usual campus will get a new building–a community/civic center with an auditorium, meeting rooms, classrooms, and office space.  Our chancellor also made mention of having the inservice of 2010 out here.  I do not think many in Helena were amused

Thursday was the big registration day.  I helped build schedules.  Think of it as brainstorming.  While it was not packed, we were steadily busy with 2-5 students and hour.  We’d done a huge amount of pre-registration all summer, so I was a little surprised by how busy we were.  We did the same on Friday, and it was MUCH slower.

The personal upshot of all this is that I had 5 classes make, one cancelled, and one that’s still up in the air.  I will not cry if I end up with simply 5 classes–I haven’t taught that few in a semester ever here!   While the amount of classes may be a little less, I cannot say the number of students is less.  I’ve got in just the 5 classes that have assuredly made 110 students.  It’s 116 if I add in the iffy class.   That’s only 89 students less than what’s enrolled at our smallest campus.  To break it down further I have 60 students in 2 sections of Comp 1, 20 (maybe 6 more) in Comp 2 (maybe 2 sections), 14 in World Lit, 16 in Philosophy.  I may be screaming help me save my sanity as the semester goes along.

This is perhaps my favorite Superbowl commercial ever:

cat herders

Partially I adore this commercial because well, I have 5 cats. Secondly, herding cats often seems like what I do for a living. Teaching has lots in common with herding cats–it often seems nearly impossible.

It’s an odd metaphor for teaching, but it suits my mind. One of the reasons that herding cats is difficult is well cats don’t listen to orders–they do their own thing. Now, the same is certainly true for people–and certainly true for students (especially traditional [18 year old] students). Students want to do things their way–they want to write what they want to write about. I let them, and then hope I can show them how to refine it to what a college wants of them (or an employer). I don’t force them–often.

Force, power, control, authority–these are things that don’t work well with cats. Try to force a cat to do something–you end up scratched. This is also true with students, though in this case, the scratch is less physically painful. Students scratch by not taking teachers again, by telling others not to take them, by giving bad evaluations, and in really bad cases by physical violence. Granted, I have authority in my class, but I try never to abuse it. I’ve had too much feminist pedagogy, I think. That and I haven’t much physicality to back up forceful power with. It’s very hard to be intimidating when you are 5′1″ and thus shorter than ALL your students. It’s also hard to be intimidating when you’re a bit squishy.

I’m also anti-authoritarian in my own way. In grad school, we had a Writing Program Director who always implied to us that we should dress for class with authority. We still get that message subtly from administrators. I have always been uncomfortable, however, with such blatant forms of authority. I also think it downright hurts a faculty member by cutting them off so obviously and blatantly from their students. Almost all studies show that students will stay in school longer if they form personal bonds with their teachers. How do you form a personal bond when the teacher is wearing business suit armor? I’ve always noticed that I was drawn to the teachers who wore comfortable clothes–or clothes that reflected their personality. So I dress for my comfort not for my authority. Afterall, wear a business suit around a cat, and it’s likely to shred it or puke on it, and certainly shed on it.

So herding cats and teaching seem to go hand in hand for me. I got off on this tangent because Sarai made a comment on my bragging entry, and I responded by saying I was used to herding cats

In other news, my husband seems to have volunteered us (it’s always an us) to assume the duties of caretakers of the community blog. My guess is (if) we will end up splitting that caretaking with him doing tech stuff and me doing moderating stuff. That too is a lot like cat herding–and I guess I have more practice at it

Which is way more than I can say I have at embedding videos on my blog sorry it’s just a link.

I’ve started writing my newspaper column again since school is starting up. There wasn’t anything to write about for summer school, but now that’s it’s recruitment time–so yes, my last column was basically a PR piece. Well, someone’s got to do it.

Back to School

In rough economic times the conventional wisdom is that people go back to school to improve their skills. I don’t know how true that is because when I went back to school it was because I wanted a new career. Then again, isn’t a new career something we might want in rough economic times? Well, it certainly never hurts to learn new skills.

When I first graduated college way back in 1987 (darn! I’ve just made myself feel ancient), I entered the workforce with a bachelor’s degree in marketing; however, marketing and my personality don’t go hand-in-hand. Three years later, I was back in school studying English—it’s been a much better fit.
Now, I will fully admit that going back to school was scary even though I’d really only just left it. It meant sacrificing a lot of time and money. I was lucky because it was just me that I had to worry about, but I had friends who were giving up time with spouses and children. It was a big step to make. Just applying (or reapplying as the case may be) was scary—would the school think I was a failure because I couldn’t make it? Would I be laughed at when I wrote my first paper? Would I need math again? Was this a mistake? These questions all crossed my mind—just as the cross anyone’s mind when going back to school. Nobody laughed; nobody thought I was a failure, and thankfully, you don’t need lots of math to be an English major. And I can say that it was definitely not a mistake.

So, I have first hand experience on how scary it is to go back to school. However, I can also say it’s the best thing I ever did. I also know from conversations with my fellow instructors that many of their educational paths have been full of twists, exits from education and returns to school. In other words, we’ve been there. We’ve made the hard choices to go school and to come back to school. We understand how hard it is to take that first step.

This is a good place to take that first step too. Since very few of us have taken the traditional path to get to here, we find ourselves very willing to help others find their path. We’ve got lots of paths to for people to search, and it doesn’t even require becoming a full time student. We’re here if all you want to do is brush up on your work skills.

If you want to learn how to add some pizazz to a PowerPoint presentation, we can teach you. If you want to improve your communication skills, we can help. We can help you brush up on public speaking, writing, and graphics. We’ll even help you to express yourself with some drawing and poetry. We’ve got courses that help you appreciate music; we’ll help you learn how to use some of those very expensive computer programs. We’ll help you learn to surf the Internet. If you want to get fit, we’ve got that, too. Heck, we’ll help you improve your bowling score with a bowling class. Accounting to zoology, we’ve probably got it covered, and if we don’t, we can probably find out who does.

However, we still need you to take that first step and walk through the door. We’re registering classes, now, and we’ll have our big registration day in just a couple of weeks (August 14, in fact). So come out, we’ll be glad to visit with you, and we promise not to bite (well, okay, I can’t vouch for everyone).