Yes,
it's that time once again.
With the start of the 2008-2009 academic year at Shawnee State University, I celebrate my birthday.
This morning I was up with the birds (couldn't sleep) and went down to campus for our first 'Professional Day' whereby the university's administration made several presentations about the growth of the campus and some other topics.
There were some interesting stats about this year: we're getting closer and closer to 4k students enrolled; a huge step for Shawnee. We've seen a huge jump in enrollment over the summer though I don't know the specific stats. I would guess that the increased enrollment was a result of the local, shrinking economy. More people are choosing to enroll for classes if jobs are scarce and they're going to Shawnee because we are generally less expensive.
One of the presentations today said that most students will have something close to $16,500 in debt when they graduate. This doesn't seem to be too bad for a four-year degree. When you're faced with low income and you need to improve your marketability for jobs, the cheapest solution is often the only solution.
The rest of the presentations were a bit wordy - they were more like lengthy lectures on topics that no one cared about. Even though a lot of the faculty would bemoan students for getting up and walking out to grab a drink in the middle of a class; checking their cellphones or talking to their neighbor - almost everyone was showing their boredom.
I love irony.
After the presentations, we were treated to a nice lunch of BBQ chicken and pork. I got to sit with a few other of the professors and a fellow adjunct from my department. I made the joke that maybe we should be sitting at the "Kid's Table" since we weren't full-time faculty.
It was a brief lunch and then I wanted to get some work done, but I found that there are now three other faculty sharing my office. One of which were using it so I just decided to come home and change out of my 'professor gear'. After a summer of living in little more than cargo shorts, t-shirts and Teva sandals, getting dressed in khaki's and a dress-shirt was a bit constricting.
Tomorrow night is the first night of lecture for me. I was hoping to teach during the day again, but my classes are all at night. Oh well, it just means that I can sleep in more.
There's not much more going on right now. I've been able to rearrange and clean the house a little and I'll probably jump into it again here in a few, but I wanted to get a post up.
I haven't been blogging much lately because there's not been much going on. Now with classes getting back into full swing that'll change.
See ya later.
-Tom
3 comments:
Happy Birthday :)
Yeah, I LOVE faculty meetings and seminars where you get to see just how much Faculty practice what they preach in terms of paying attention, and being "Active Listeners."
After a year of this before starting my Masters, I can tell you that I didn't take a lot of shit from the professors of my grad classes.
I wasn't a jerk, I just approached it from, "We are interested in the same things. We do the same thing. You've just been at it longer. You don't need to BS me," and we got along fine.
It was the same thing teaching in high school, but worse. First week of classes, I'm the new guy, (at PHS which was just REALLY weird,) and there's a teachers meeting. Principal and Superintendent come in to talk to us about new mandates from the state and such, and the whole room of teachers that we had in high school that are STILL there. The room is also ironically full of little side conversations, cliques, giggling, and stupid questions, (i.e. questions that had been answered 5 minutes before, and wouldn't have to be repeated if the person asking had been listing...Sound familiar? Sure did to me.) This goes on the whole time.
I wouldn't call it irony as much as a very minor form of hypocrisy, but that's just me.
We start back the 8th. I'm excited. I'm about at capacity for most of my classes, and I have a bunch of incoming freshmen majors. We're doing some cool stuff this year, and I think we've FINALLY got some momentum!
Happy Birthday!
Morganna moves into the dorm on September 5th, so she is both excited about starting classes, but dreading the moving thing.
But she will be fine, and she is really looking forward to starting the college adventure, what with listening to her two professor uncles talk about teaching college classes. (You guys have been stoking her up to go to college for years without knowing it....)
I hope that we will be home when you come visit in October--we are going to New Hampshire for Zak's 40th birthday and our 15th wedding anniversary.
Anyway--when you visit, I will bake you a birthday cake if you like. Just let me know what you would want. Or, I will cook you dinner. Or, you can come eat at Salaam, and I can cook you dinner there! ;-)
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