Freckles & Doubt (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
freckles_and_doubt) wrote2020-02-10 12:44 pm
freckles_and_doubt) wrote2020-02-10 12:44 pm
Entry tags:
hellweek, or possibly hellmonth. Or just Hell. Also, damnation.
So, registration this year has not quite been an unmitigated clusterfuck, but there have been definite, repeated moments in which it has reached those depths. I vanished from blogging for a week with the obligatory muffled squeak because that was the point at which the full upshot for registration of 350 extra students in my orientation programme became both obvious and inescapable, and my life became entirely filled up with stress. First year reg last week was horrible, and entailed enormous queues of students rolled over at day-end into the next session, which immediately developed enormous queues if it didn't have them already. We finished on the final day of formal reg on Wednesday, but only at about 5.30pm, and I worked 6-7 hours on the reg tables on all three days. I spent most of this weekend horizontal on the sofa.
This week is change of curriculum, which has been enlivened in today's iteration by (a) about 60 students registering late, swelling the queues to match the year's registration theme song, and (b) three advisors cheerily emailing me this morning before their scheduled 9am advice session to say they won't be available, something came up, sorry. Three out of ten is a significant proportion when there are 200 students in the queue. I spent the morning sending tactfully querulous emails to advisors trying to scratch up substitutes and basically begging everyone to arrive on time and not to simply flake out.
Thing is, our system runs, in general terms applying to venues, class sizes, scheduled reg sessions and available advisors, close enough to its max tolerances that it really can't take a first year intake which is at 120% of where it is normally. The registration hassles are translating into first year classes, the big subjects (Psychology, Sociology) are in a normal year at the limits of their venue size/number of lecture slots capacity, and this year departments have been screaming at faculty and demanding students are force-removed from classes. Which, of course, translates back into the curriculum change queues.
I am surviving all this, barely, by being very heavily tranquilized, which I have to say is helping materially in the not-collapsing-in-hysterics-or-slaying-student-narcissists-with-my-teeth departments. Weekly video calls with jo&stv and occasional sessions with Vi and gin are also helping. Friends, as I have frequently observed, keep me sane. Work, on the other hand, has the opposite effect.
This week is change of curriculum, which has been enlivened in today's iteration by (a) about 60 students registering late, swelling the queues to match the year's registration theme song, and (b) three advisors cheerily emailing me this morning before their scheduled 9am advice session to say they won't be available, something came up, sorry. Three out of ten is a significant proportion when there are 200 students in the queue. I spent the morning sending tactfully querulous emails to advisors trying to scratch up substitutes and basically begging everyone to arrive on time and not to simply flake out.
Thing is, our system runs, in general terms applying to venues, class sizes, scheduled reg sessions and available advisors, close enough to its max tolerances that it really can't take a first year intake which is at 120% of where it is normally. The registration hassles are translating into first year classes, the big subjects (Psychology, Sociology) are in a normal year at the limits of their venue size/number of lecture slots capacity, and this year departments have been screaming at faculty and demanding students are force-removed from classes. Which, of course, translates back into the curriculum change queues.
I am surviving all this, barely, by being very heavily tranquilized, which I have to say is helping materially in the not-collapsing-in-hysterics-or-slaying-student-narcissists-with-my-teeth departments. Weekly video calls with jo&stv and occasional sessions with Vi and gin are also helping. Friends, as I have frequently observed, keep me sane. Work, on the other hand, has the opposite effect.