1. Another year of Why Can’t Us? being answered by “because you lost to the other team,” in this case the NY Mets, a team that never has to win another game again as far as I am concerned. Alas, my poor Phillies – a fantastic season cut too short, and now we are left with the dire prospect of either the Mets, the Yankees, the Dodgers or the Cleveland Team becoming World Series Champions. It is a good thing I don’t follow baseball anywhere near much as I once did or this would be depressing.
2. I just want to point out the fact that for about a quarter of an hour during the season opener last week the Philadelphia Flyers power play – a facet of their game that ranked dead last in the NHL last season and likely cost them the playoff spot that they were shockingly in a position to achieve with fewer than ten games left in the season – was scoring at a 100% rate. This is a mathematical fact and I am going to treasure it even as things regress to the mean once again because why not.
3. Also, the Premier League is back in full swing and has been for a while and my Wolves are looking like prime relegation fodder this year, which is sad because I have no idea if I will be able to watch them once that happens. Everything is so balkanized now – even the NHL is spread across multiple networks, each of which requires its own subscription, so half the time I couldn’t watch the Flyers even if I wanted to and thus I feel less guilty about not doing so. I forget which comedian said it, but someday soon they will start to bundle all the subscriptions into One Big Subscription and then sell it to you as “cable television.”
4. I have mowed the lawn one last time and put the mower away for the season. It’s not supposed to get over 82F (28C) again this year, though it would not surprise me at all if it did. Folks, the climate isn’t changing – the climate has changed. We’re just trying to figure out where it’s going next, is all. If you don’t believe me, consider that Asheville NC, a city in the mountains of western North Carolina 300 miles from salt water – was just wiped out by a hurricane. On balance, mowing the lawn is not that much of an issue, really.
5. Ancestry says I’m back up to 76% Italian in my heritage, which is fascinating since my dad’s side of the family was Very Much Not Italian so I’m not entirely sure where the other 26% comes from. In the decade or so since my mother convinced me to do this my heritage has never been calculated at less than 55-60% Italian and I have to wonder just how strong those genes really are.
6. We have reached the part of the school year where my office is jam-packed with students and every single one of them is bringing a new and exciting disease with them like an offering. Some of them are pretty exotic – did you know people still get whooping cough? this is what happens when antivaxxers are allowed to walk the streets unsupervised – and others are just the standard run of the mill colds, flus, and general cruds. Pretty soon I will have collected the whole set and can trade them in for valuable prizes to be named later.
7. I have two long term project that are coming to an end soon and I’m not sure how that will feel. I suppose I will find out.
8. It is a sad thing when beloved authors reach a point where they no longer feel the need to listen to editors. I’m just about finished a 900pp book that really could have been a 300pp book without losing anything of any real significance and it’s just a good thing that this particular author is a talented enough writer that you don’t feel too bad about the extra pages, though a competent editor would have taken a hacksaw to that manuscript and made it a much better story.
9. One of the local service organizations had its annual Giant Used Book Sale this weekend and we went because we like to do that sort of thing and it’s a good organization to support. We even found a few books to take home with us, thus beginning the replenishment project after the recent deaccessioning. Wheels in wheels.
10. We have hit our first frost here in Baja Canada, a month after we should have. We were pulling jalepeños out of the garden as recently as this weekend. Strange times indeed.
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
A Few Thoughts on the State of the Election Campaign
1. We’re coming to the end of the election season and the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump remains a viable candidate is a damning indictment of American patriotism, morality, and intelligence. He’s not even bothering to hide the fact that he has gone Full On Fascist these days. Not that he could stop himself if he tried – the man is a walking 25th Amendment dementia case who hasn’t been able to form a coherent sentence since 2018 and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the White House even as a tourist. But Fascists gonna Fascist, I guess, and he does seem to be drawing such volk to him like flies on dogshit. If you vote for this guy, guess what that makes you? Go on, guess! You are the company you choose. You can’t claim ignorance this time. You know what he’s planning. You know what he will do. He’s told you, loudly, at every available opportunity. Even through the haze of his senility the crystal-clear lodestar of his ideology remains. Either you stand with those who fought WWII to destroy this sort of thing or you stand with the people they fought. And yes, I mean that in every historical sense. If Trump and his supporters don’t want me to call them Fascists they should stop doing what the Fascists did.
2. I don’t know if you caught the recent statement by General Mark Milley (US Army, Ret.), the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – i.e. the highest ranking military officer this country has – but as you would expect from a soldier he minces no words in describing Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.” And yet Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s cult following is stronger than ever, which tells you all you need to know about who they are.
3. On that note, just this past weekend Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump called for using the military to round up his political opponents and anyone he decides is “radical,” which effectively means anyone who dares to disagree with Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump by contradicting his policies, being the wrong sexual orientation, having non-white skin, belonging to a union, or exercising the rights of American citizens in any way that doesn’t contribute to the fawning adoration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, and if you want to know how dictatorships start this is a good place to start looking.
4. You could also look at his repeated descriptions of immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the nation or his descriptions of his political enemies as “vermin” who need to be eradicated, both of which are direct quotes from Adolf Hitler and thus we come full circle to point number 1 above.
5. FEMA announced this week that thanks to the batshit insane conspiracy theories thrown around by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his loyal minions they have had to suspend hurricane aid efforts in western North Carolina because aid workers are being threatened with violence. Sometimes you feel tempted to step back and admire the aggressively stupid asshattery of the American right as a platonic ideal of evil that really shouldn’t have been achievable in this fallen material world, and then reality sets in and you say to yourself “What the FUCK is WRONG with these people?” instead. There is either no possible answer to that question or there is an answer that will take the rest of your life to list in all of its details and either way we are so, so screwed as a country.
6. Watch what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s campaign is doing, here in the closing stages of the election. They’re only very occasionally sending him to swing states where the vote will be close. He’s too much of a coward and a dementia patient to accept a second debate with Kamala Harris, even on Fox where she has offered to meet him. He’s not doing interviews. Honestly his campaign is not really sending him anywhere much at all – a few highly scripted rallies to rile up his cult members here and there, but his disappearance from the campaign trail at this late hour is unprecedented for a modern election. He’s not trying to win votes. He and his campaign know very well that he cannot win any sort of free and fair election. The Republican candidate for president has won the popular vote only once since 1989 – a record of futility unmatched in American history by any major party – and this year will be no different. He will lose the popular vote by somewhere between two and eight million votes just as he has done twice before – it’s been eight years, nobody’s changed their mind about this neo-Fascist toddler. Instead what you’re seeing is a concentrated effort by his minions to suppress votes and sow chaos and disorder so he can claim the election isn’t valid and seize power some other way – either through GOP control of the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court or through a repeat of the Trump Insurrection of 2021. We stand on a precipice, folks. It’s a long way down.
7. If you’re planning to vote for a third-party candidate this year because your precious “principles” won’t allow you to take the better of the two candidates on offer, just know that you are part of the problem and you will not be forgiven for your smug refusal to notice the world beyond your own fingertips. Moral purity is a luxury enjoyed by people with no responsibilities and no concern for the consequences of their actions. Politics isn’t about purity. It’s not about finding a perfect unicorn candidate. It’s about finding the candidate who will get you further along the path you want to go than the other candidate will. There is only one candidate in this election who is normal – who has pluses and minuses and will leave this nation intact when she is done with it, and there is another who represents everything the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to prevent and the Greatest Generation went to Europe to fight. A vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for the second one, and you either know that or you don’t.
8. The fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has successfully pushed most of his many indictments and prosecutions beyond the election and hasn’t already been jailed for his crimes (some of which the United States has, in the past, executed people for) is a travesty of justice that will haunt the United States for however long it has left.
9. If you’re not making backup plans for when Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump seizes power, you’re kidding yourself. There will be blood. He’s promised that. His cult is eager for it. Fascists do not take kindly to dissent or opposition and those of us who have been banging this gong since 2015 are probably on a list somewhere already. Make your plans now.
10. By my count I have received 17 glossy campaign flyers in the mail frantically attempting to distance Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump from Project 2025, the blueprint for Fascism that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s supporters and former administration staff put together for the initial blitzkrieg against the United States should he be installed into power next year. You can understand why they are trying to distance Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump from a document that mentions him by name over 300 times and which contains policy measures he repeats at nearly every public appearance, I suppose, since Project 2025 is the pure distilled essence of authoritarian dictatorship and is desperately unpopular even among self-declared conservatives. It calls for destroying the merit-based civil service that has defined the federal government since the 19th century and replacing it with a force of toadies, lickspittles, fanatics, and slaves loyal only to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. It calls for expanding the power of the presidency until it is unchecked and uncontrollable. It calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, NOAA (the agency that provides weather forecasting) and FEMA. It calls for a concentrated surge of bigotry and hatred against anyone who isn’t straight, white, or male. It calls for a national ban on abortion, contraception, and anything that might give women the idea that they and not some old white men in a far-off capital actually control their bodies. It will end Social Security, overtime pay, and the Affordable Care Act which tens of millions of Americans rely on for their care. It will get rid of the FDIC and remove regulations on banks so that they can go bankrupt with ease just as they did in the 1920s and take your money with them. It effectively makes the United States the personal property of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his servants, and if that doesn’t kindle you to incandescent rage you really need to re-examine your life choices.
2. I don’t know if you caught the recent statement by General Mark Milley (US Army, Ret.), the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – i.e. the highest ranking military officer this country has – but as you would expect from a soldier he minces no words in describing Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.” And yet Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s cult following is stronger than ever, which tells you all you need to know about who they are.
3. On that note, just this past weekend Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump called for using the military to round up his political opponents and anyone he decides is “radical,” which effectively means anyone who dares to disagree with Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump by contradicting his policies, being the wrong sexual orientation, having non-white skin, belonging to a union, or exercising the rights of American citizens in any way that doesn’t contribute to the fawning adoration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, and if you want to know how dictatorships start this is a good place to start looking.
4. You could also look at his repeated descriptions of immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the nation or his descriptions of his political enemies as “vermin” who need to be eradicated, both of which are direct quotes from Adolf Hitler and thus we come full circle to point number 1 above.
5. FEMA announced this week that thanks to the batshit insane conspiracy theories thrown around by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his loyal minions they have had to suspend hurricane aid efforts in western North Carolina because aid workers are being threatened with violence. Sometimes you feel tempted to step back and admire the aggressively stupid asshattery of the American right as a platonic ideal of evil that really shouldn’t have been achievable in this fallen material world, and then reality sets in and you say to yourself “What the FUCK is WRONG with these people?” instead. There is either no possible answer to that question or there is an answer that will take the rest of your life to list in all of its details and either way we are so, so screwed as a country.
6. Watch what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s campaign is doing, here in the closing stages of the election. They’re only very occasionally sending him to swing states where the vote will be close. He’s too much of a coward and a dementia patient to accept a second debate with Kamala Harris, even on Fox where she has offered to meet him. He’s not doing interviews. Honestly his campaign is not really sending him anywhere much at all – a few highly scripted rallies to rile up his cult members here and there, but his disappearance from the campaign trail at this late hour is unprecedented for a modern election. He’s not trying to win votes. He and his campaign know very well that he cannot win any sort of free and fair election. The Republican candidate for president has won the popular vote only once since 1989 – a record of futility unmatched in American history by any major party – and this year will be no different. He will lose the popular vote by somewhere between two and eight million votes just as he has done twice before – it’s been eight years, nobody’s changed their mind about this neo-Fascist toddler. Instead what you’re seeing is a concentrated effort by his minions to suppress votes and sow chaos and disorder so he can claim the election isn’t valid and seize power some other way – either through GOP control of the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court or through a repeat of the Trump Insurrection of 2021. We stand on a precipice, folks. It’s a long way down.
7. If you’re planning to vote for a third-party candidate this year because your precious “principles” won’t allow you to take the better of the two candidates on offer, just know that you are part of the problem and you will not be forgiven for your smug refusal to notice the world beyond your own fingertips. Moral purity is a luxury enjoyed by people with no responsibilities and no concern for the consequences of their actions. Politics isn’t about purity. It’s not about finding a perfect unicorn candidate. It’s about finding the candidate who will get you further along the path you want to go than the other candidate will. There is only one candidate in this election who is normal – who has pluses and minuses and will leave this nation intact when she is done with it, and there is another who represents everything the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to prevent and the Greatest Generation went to Europe to fight. A vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for the second one, and you either know that or you don’t.
8. The fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has successfully pushed most of his many indictments and prosecutions beyond the election and hasn’t already been jailed for his crimes (some of which the United States has, in the past, executed people for) is a travesty of justice that will haunt the United States for however long it has left.
9. If you’re not making backup plans for when Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump seizes power, you’re kidding yourself. There will be blood. He’s promised that. His cult is eager for it. Fascists do not take kindly to dissent or opposition and those of us who have been banging this gong since 2015 are probably on a list somewhere already. Make your plans now.
10. By my count I have received 17 glossy campaign flyers in the mail frantically attempting to distance Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump from Project 2025, the blueprint for Fascism that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s supporters and former administration staff put together for the initial blitzkrieg against the United States should he be installed into power next year. You can understand why they are trying to distance Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump from a document that mentions him by name over 300 times and which contains policy measures he repeats at nearly every public appearance, I suppose, since Project 2025 is the pure distilled essence of authoritarian dictatorship and is desperately unpopular even among self-declared conservatives. It calls for destroying the merit-based civil service that has defined the federal government since the 19th century and replacing it with a force of toadies, lickspittles, fanatics, and slaves loyal only to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. It calls for expanding the power of the presidency until it is unchecked and uncontrollable. It calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, NOAA (the agency that provides weather forecasting) and FEMA. It calls for a concentrated surge of bigotry and hatred against anyone who isn’t straight, white, or male. It calls for a national ban on abortion, contraception, and anything that might give women the idea that they and not some old white men in a far-off capital actually control their bodies. It will end Social Security, overtime pay, and the Affordable Care Act which tens of millions of Americans rely on for their care. It will get rid of the FDIC and remove regulations on banks so that they can go bankrupt with ease just as they did in the 1920s and take your money with them. It effectively makes the United States the personal property of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his servants, and if that doesn’t kindle you to incandescent rage you really need to re-examine your life choices.
Saturday, October 12, 2024
Testing
I had to get my sleep tested this week because apparently I’ve been doing it incorrectly.
You would think that after nearly six decades of practicing I would have it pretty much down by now but you would be wrong.
If you’ve never done this, it’s one of those minor yet uncomfortable things that happen as you age your way through the process of medical care and it requires you to navigate the Byzantine complexity of the American healthcare system which is designed to protect the wealth of its corporate shareholders rather than anyone’s actual health. Getting useful medical results out of it is an unintended though occasionally helpful byproduct of its profiteering, but FREEDUM and this is why we can’t have nice things in the US.
Sometime over the summer I went in to see my regular doctor, which is a statement that puts me in a distinct minority in this country (see above, re: FREEDUM) so I’m grateful that I at least have this privilege. It has come in handy at times.
This is the third regular doctor I have had in the last few years as the ones I pick have a distinct tendency to retire no matter how old they are. I don’t think this is because of me since I don’t see them that often, but I cannot rule it out. The hospital where they work then asks me to pick a new one and I have no idea on what basis I would make that choice so I just take whoever has the next available appointment and since this usually gives me six to eight months to get used to the idea of seeing someone else it has worked pretty well so far. This particular new guy seems like he knows what he’s doing even if he’s not the most sociable person I’ve ever met. I’ve seen him twice now – once for the “Hi, I’m your new patient, please renew all my prescriptions” meeting that you have to have every time you switch doctors and once for this – and we have yet to have a conversation that isn’t directly connected to medicine or contains a sentence longer than seven words. But so far, so good.
He gave me the required referral for the doctor who would actually do anything connected to sleeping, and that sat on my desk for a couple of months while Life Happened. Eventually I made an appointment with the Sleep Doctor – either they’re not terribly busy or I got very lucky because that only required a wait measured in weeks rather than months – and I went to meet her and fill out more paperwork repeating all of the things that are already on file (medications, allergies, history) and then discuss the new things.
After the examination she said (in a much more professional and polite way, but this is effectively the gist of it) that I am old and fat and yeah these things will happen under those conditions so we’ll do the sleep test to get it confirmed in a way the insurance company that actually determines your medical care will accept and then figure out what to do from there.
This required me to respond to multiple texts from an equipment company confirming that I did actually want them to send me equipment. Of course I don’t read (let alone respond to) texts from numbers I don’t recognize so this took several tries before it worked out, but last week an envelope with equipment in it appeared on my front doorstep along with dire warnings that this test had to be started THAT NIGHT and the equipment returned within 48 hours or there would be CONSEQUENCES.
It would probably go on my Permanent Record.
None of that happened as far as I know. I don’t have access to my Permanent Record so that’s still an open question. But the rest of it? Not so much.
I put the equipment aside on the first day because I had a lot of grading to do and the math just didn’t work out – you have to commit to a certain amount of sleep time for this and that just wasn’t going to happen. But the next night seemed more doable.
For equipment that came in an envelope there certainly was a lot of it.
The main bit was an electronic recording unit about three inches square and maybe half an inch thick. It came with a two-inch wide elastic band that I was supposed to strap around my chest and then snap the recorder to it so that it sat right on my breastbone. It had a full complement of BlinkenLights and made me feel like Ultraman.
You would think that after nearly six decades of practicing I would have it pretty much down by now but you would be wrong.
If you’ve never done this, it’s one of those minor yet uncomfortable things that happen as you age your way through the process of medical care and it requires you to navigate the Byzantine complexity of the American healthcare system which is designed to protect the wealth of its corporate shareholders rather than anyone’s actual health. Getting useful medical results out of it is an unintended though occasionally helpful byproduct of its profiteering, but FREEDUM and this is why we can’t have nice things in the US.
Sometime over the summer I went in to see my regular doctor, which is a statement that puts me in a distinct minority in this country (see above, re: FREEDUM) so I’m grateful that I at least have this privilege. It has come in handy at times.
This is the third regular doctor I have had in the last few years as the ones I pick have a distinct tendency to retire no matter how old they are. I don’t think this is because of me since I don’t see them that often, but I cannot rule it out. The hospital where they work then asks me to pick a new one and I have no idea on what basis I would make that choice so I just take whoever has the next available appointment and since this usually gives me six to eight months to get used to the idea of seeing someone else it has worked pretty well so far. This particular new guy seems like he knows what he’s doing even if he’s not the most sociable person I’ve ever met. I’ve seen him twice now – once for the “Hi, I’m your new patient, please renew all my prescriptions” meeting that you have to have every time you switch doctors and once for this – and we have yet to have a conversation that isn’t directly connected to medicine or contains a sentence longer than seven words. But so far, so good.
He gave me the required referral for the doctor who would actually do anything connected to sleeping, and that sat on my desk for a couple of months while Life Happened. Eventually I made an appointment with the Sleep Doctor – either they’re not terribly busy or I got very lucky because that only required a wait measured in weeks rather than months – and I went to meet her and fill out more paperwork repeating all of the things that are already on file (medications, allergies, history) and then discuss the new things.
After the examination she said (in a much more professional and polite way, but this is effectively the gist of it) that I am old and fat and yeah these things will happen under those conditions so we’ll do the sleep test to get it confirmed in a way the insurance company that actually determines your medical care will accept and then figure out what to do from there.
This required me to respond to multiple texts from an equipment company confirming that I did actually want them to send me equipment. Of course I don’t read (let alone respond to) texts from numbers I don’t recognize so this took several tries before it worked out, but last week an envelope with equipment in it appeared on my front doorstep along with dire warnings that this test had to be started THAT NIGHT and the equipment returned within 48 hours or there would be CONSEQUENCES.
It would probably go on my Permanent Record.
None of that happened as far as I know. I don’t have access to my Permanent Record so that’s still an open question. But the rest of it? Not so much.
I put the equipment aside on the first day because I had a lot of grading to do and the math just didn’t work out – you have to commit to a certain amount of sleep time for this and that just wasn’t going to happen. But the next night seemed more doable.
For equipment that came in an envelope there certainly was a lot of it.
The main bit was an electronic recording unit about three inches square and maybe half an inch thick. It came with a two-inch wide elastic band that I was supposed to strap around my chest and then snap the recorder to it so that it sat right on my breastbone. It had a full complement of BlinkenLights and made me feel like Ultraman.
There was a cable that screwed into it that went to a sensor that clamped onto one of my fingers like it was trying to feed off of it and a tube that screwed into the unit somewhere else that I was supposed to loop over my ears and then shove up my nose except that my ears really don’t accommodate such things well so I had to just tighten it around my head and hope for the best.
It didn’t work the first night – the BlinkenLights swirled red at me the next morning – so I had to do it again the next night and that seemed to take.
I have no idea what it was actually measuring as I got basically no sleep either of those nights. I find anything on my face to be deeply uncomfortable and every time I tried to move all the various cables and cords would tangle together into a knot. So as far as I know this test will result in my immediate hospitalization and they will put me on a diet consisting of nothing but Ambien and vodka just to keep me unconscious for a while.
It's been 22 years since the last time I graduated from an educational institution. I thought I was done failing tests.
Sunday, October 6, 2024
That Point in the Semester
We’ve reached that point of the semester where all you can do is try to keep up.
The first two or three weeks of the semester are hellaciously busy for advisors. Students are coming in to get their classes straightened out – adding things, dropping things, trying to decide whether to do either of those things. They need to make sure their financial aid is straightened out, which has been a nightmare the last couple of years with all the changes made to the FAFSA and the deliberate underfunding of grant aid by state governments. They need to make sure their bill is paid. They need to know how to pay these bills, a Byzantine process with more options than are probably healthy. They need to get the hang of being in college in general, which is not as straightforward as people think. College is an artificial environment and it’s hard to explain if you haven’t been through it. There are a lot of unwritten rules and cultural assumptions and part of being an advisor is helping students navigate through that. It hits hard in the first couple of weeks.
Things calm down for advisors a bit after that, but for faculty that’s when it all starts to ramp up. You’re through the introductory material by then and heading into the heart of the syllabus where things get more complicated and more challenging for both students and professors. Assignments are coming in that need to be graded and if you are basing your assignments on when they naturally fall in the sequence of the material covered (as opposed to, say, trying to spread them out across the calendar to ease your workload) you may find yourself giving exams in every single class you teach in the same week. That’s just how it works out. Have fun grading it all at once. Meanwhile the administration is peppering you with requests for progress reports, alerts, and other such bureaucracy designed to increase student retention so the advisors can reach out to the students who need help and you know that this is important but it is another task on an already large and growing pile.
Then advising gets busy again. Students have a few grades back to them and they’re panicking about some of their classes – sometimes justifiably so – and you have to figure out whether to encourage them to persevere (“This is salvageable if you can do X, Y, and Z”) or cut their losses (“We have a form for just this situation”). You also have to reassure them that this is normal, that setbacks happen, that they can certainly move forward from here, and if they do find themselves in a worst-case scenario where everything collapses around them anyway that college is not a one-and-done experience and they can always come back. There’s a reason we have forms for those situations, after all. There’s also a reason that GPAs tend to rise over time – not because anyone gets smarter, but because students figure out how the place works.
It's a back and forth pendulum of frantic activity.
And if your job entails both advising and faculty duties, well, the busy never ends. It just switches from one to the other depending on what you want to focus on today.
The students are in the same boat, by the way, which is why in my First Year Seminar classes I always schedule the mental health and wellness unit for mid-October. This is about the point in the semester when we start losing people.
Somewhere in there one must eat, sleep, and occasionally do something that isn’t related to any of this because if you don’t take breaks now and then you will eventually stop functioning at all. Fitting these things in can be a puzzle.
We press on.
The first two or three weeks of the semester are hellaciously busy for advisors. Students are coming in to get their classes straightened out – adding things, dropping things, trying to decide whether to do either of those things. They need to make sure their financial aid is straightened out, which has been a nightmare the last couple of years with all the changes made to the FAFSA and the deliberate underfunding of grant aid by state governments. They need to make sure their bill is paid. They need to know how to pay these bills, a Byzantine process with more options than are probably healthy. They need to get the hang of being in college in general, which is not as straightforward as people think. College is an artificial environment and it’s hard to explain if you haven’t been through it. There are a lot of unwritten rules and cultural assumptions and part of being an advisor is helping students navigate through that. It hits hard in the first couple of weeks.
Things calm down for advisors a bit after that, but for faculty that’s when it all starts to ramp up. You’re through the introductory material by then and heading into the heart of the syllabus where things get more complicated and more challenging for both students and professors. Assignments are coming in that need to be graded and if you are basing your assignments on when they naturally fall in the sequence of the material covered (as opposed to, say, trying to spread them out across the calendar to ease your workload) you may find yourself giving exams in every single class you teach in the same week. That’s just how it works out. Have fun grading it all at once. Meanwhile the administration is peppering you with requests for progress reports, alerts, and other such bureaucracy designed to increase student retention so the advisors can reach out to the students who need help and you know that this is important but it is another task on an already large and growing pile.
Then advising gets busy again. Students have a few grades back to them and they’re panicking about some of their classes – sometimes justifiably so – and you have to figure out whether to encourage them to persevere (“This is salvageable if you can do X, Y, and Z”) or cut their losses (“We have a form for just this situation”). You also have to reassure them that this is normal, that setbacks happen, that they can certainly move forward from here, and if they do find themselves in a worst-case scenario where everything collapses around them anyway that college is not a one-and-done experience and they can always come back. There’s a reason we have forms for those situations, after all. There’s also a reason that GPAs tend to rise over time – not because anyone gets smarter, but because students figure out how the place works.
It's a back and forth pendulum of frantic activity.
And if your job entails both advising and faculty duties, well, the busy never ends. It just switches from one to the other depending on what you want to focus on today.
The students are in the same boat, by the way, which is why in my First Year Seminar classes I always schedule the mental health and wellness unit for mid-October. This is about the point in the semester when we start losing people.
Somewhere in there one must eat, sleep, and occasionally do something that isn’t related to any of this because if you don’t take breaks now and then you will eventually stop functioning at all. Fitting these things in can be a puzzle.
We press on.
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