Wednesday, June 15, 2011

First Class

I had my first class of the summer session this evening. The room was packed. In fact, I had to ask a few people to leave because there weren't enough seats for students who were enrolled, but showed up a little late. Their seats were taken by hopeful individuals who wanted to add. Five spots dwindled to three, and there were still 4 on the priority add list who had come with the intention of taking any spots there were.
But as a whole, the campus was quite empty. Finding a parking spot was not hard because so few classes have apparently been offered that they are spaced out throughout the week. I don't even know if they all started on the same day because Jeremy's humanities class at the college starts tomorrow.
Other unnerving events: the projector on which I had planned to project my syllabus so students who wanted to add could see it did not work. It was in a clear state of disrepair, and sure enough, the technician showed up a few minutes into the class asking when he could fix it. I told him to go ahead because I knew I'd need it, as would other classes scheduled in the room for today and tomorrow. I'll be back there tomorrow, and I'll need it then as well, so I tolerated his loud, squeaky ladder, his ringing cellphone (and conversation), and the fact that he had to climb into the ceiling to fix the thing. I got a bit befuddled by all the clamor.
But the projector is fixed! The semester is off to a start.

4 comments:

Robin said...

Hope you have a great semester--and hope that projector and all other media equipment work reliably throughout the semester!

Robbi N. said...

Thanks Robin.

Marly Youmans said...

Well, that sounds promising--a full class at the start.

Robbi N. said...

It's always full to begin with. The room begins to empty out once the work starts, and students see that taking a class in summer (or two or three) is quite difficult because the semester packs a class into half the time it usually takes. They have to make that mistake at least once to learn it. Jeremy did it last year, despite my warnings.