Great news, Laura!

Classes start on Monday. I just got an email today saying that my schedule had been switched around, and for a class where I was originally supposed to teach it online, I'm now teaching a regular on-campus class. I'd already spent several hours getting the online stuff set up. Also, I've never taught this class before, and for the online one, the person who'd taught it online before had given me all the materials she used. Everyone who's taught it in person before has done it as lectures. The course coordinator is giving me her lecture notes to work with, but still, argh.

Also, it violates one of my accommodations, but I don't think I'm going to mention that now, because if I do, then I'll just get switched to yet another different course, with even less time to prep. (I'm supposed to have any back-to-back classes in the same building, and taking on this course means that I've got two back-to-back classes in different buildings. They're close enough that I'll be able to make it, but I won't have any time to talk to students before or after class.)

Jeeze, Hil. Can you adapt any of the stuff given to you for the online classes to use in the in-person class? Is there a rule that it has to be all lecture?

ION, I've been using you as an example to my children of a woman who can do math and not freak out over it. Kara used to be good at math, and now she's not, and I think it's because she heard "girls can't do math" too often and internalized it, but she says I'm dreaming.

I was great at math at the lower levels and even chose accounting for my degree program because I thought it had something to do with math and I was good at it. Ha! As soon as I hit the higher levels, and we are not talking very high here folks, it was completely incomprehensible to me. I ended up with As in my college courses of statistics and quantitative methods, but there were tortuous hours of study every week to memorize stuff that made no sense to me.

I still am thought of as the mathy one in my family because I excel at the sequence puzzles and stuff like that, but DH was the one who had to help the boys with math homework. He tutored in college and actually understood the stuff.

tl;dr - huge respect for the mathy brained people!

Hil, is there no possibility they could change the class location instead? Move one to the other building?

Hil, is there no possibility they could change the class location instead? Move one to the other building?

Generally not. Class scheduling is a huge complicated thing -- I've never been able to get a classroom moved. If there's been an issue, I've always been switched to teaching a different class.

Administrators do face a big challenge covering all of the needed classes and finding a place to hold them, but they often seem needlessly insensitive to the needs of instructors.

One semester I agreed to walk across campus to teach in a room that had space for 500 students instead of the 100 students I usually teach. I did point out that they shouldn't schedule me for back-to-back classes because it wouldn't be possible to make it across a campus serving 40,000 students in the time between classes. Of course they scheduled me for back-to-back classes. I did get in pretty good shape that semester, and still know every shortcut across campus so I have forgiven them that.

But after the first exam I was told that I had used up my photocopy allotment and and would not be allowed to copy the remaining exams for the semester. It turns out that each class gets an allotment based on usual size (100 in this case) and that it couldn't be changed just because there were now 500 students in the class. It wouldn't be fair, I was told, if other people teaching the same class got a lower allotment than I did. I pointed out that I was generating an extra $400,000 in tuition by teaching in the larger room, and that it seemed pretty pathetic that they were trying to stiff me on $50 worth of copying as a result, but this seems to be the sort of thing that is just beyond the ken of an Assistant Dean. I had to collect bits and pieces of photocopy credits from colleagues to get by.

On the other hand, and this is more to the point for Hil, now every time a Dean asks me to go out of my way for the common good I trot out this story and they always sheepishly withdraw the request. When Hil really needs an accommodation perhaps she can use this semester's affront as an example of how flexible she has been in the past.

Well, I did ask for the classes to be moved closer together. I'd expected that they'd move the statistics class. Instead, they moved the calculus class. And they moved it to a room with leveled seating, with stairs going up to the seats. It's a flipped class. I need to be able to move around the classroom and talk to the students in all the different groups, and I cannot go up and down stairs like that. (That classroom is also awful for group work in general, since it's got the desks and chairs attached to the floor in rows.)

This would have been so much easier if it was dealt with weeks ago, rather than moving everything around three days before the new semester starts.

Well, I found out why the class schedule got switched around in the first place -- a grad student's wife had a baby, and there's no parental leave for grad students, so they gave him an online class so he won't have to come to campus as often. Which is fine, but again, could have been done months ago.

So, they have a clue about accomodation at least!

Good morning beautiful people! I am happy to report that things are going well in casa Deena. The kids are in school. The Gregory is working away at something. I did actual, paying work this morning, and I've had a lovely cup of coffee. How are all of you?