My final 9 a.m. class met today, and you'll be sorry to hear that I missed my very last opportunity to be late.
Out of forty-three 9 a.m. classes, I was truly late only once (by six minutes, thanks to an epic traffic disaster) and overslept once (by half an hour) but still made it in time. Otherwise I think I was technically late one other time (by a minute). But I was in fear of being late ALL THE TIME. I was also grumpy all the time, though perhaps that's a native condition.
Next semester I'm teaching three classes, but I'm back to my preferred late-afternoon/evening schedule. Praise God.
[Still in despair about that essay, though I've been logging lots of writing/revising time. More when I'm less self-hating.]
9 comments:
That's impressive! Good work! (And you can't be held accountable for a bad traffic mess, any more than you'd punish a student for being caught in a bad traffic mess.)
Glad to hear you'll have a schedule more in tune with your own rhythms next semester!
For this very reason--and for this reason only--I look keenly forward to the Things' leaving for college. I freaking hate early mornings.
The one thing I asked for in drafting next year's schedule was no 8:30 classes (our earliest timeslot). What did I get? An 8:30 timeslot. *sigh*
When my husband started teaching back in the mid-50s, his first year he taught at 8 AM *six days a week*. It was harder, he said, when the next year he only taught at 8 AM three days a week. And, like you, he was NOT a morning person.
Congratulations on surviving! I have managed to be late to class coming from my office two minutes away...
I'm headed in the other direction. Thanks in part to a mostly-online schedule (2 online sections, 2 hybrids) I didn't have to be on campus until mid-morning this semester, and I've been going with the flow when it comes to sleep/wake cycles. Starting mid-January (ugh), I need to be on campus at 9, which, given our horrible local traffic (and my own difficulty with getting up and out), means shooting for arriving on campus by 8 a.m., which allow for some prep time or at least some traffic leeway.
My first few years in my current job I had 7:30 (a.m.) classes on a regular basis (the newspaper ad I answered even listed availability at that hour as a qualification). I lived a bit closer to campus then, but I'm still not sure how I did that. It gradually became clear that, much as the legislature wanted us to use classrooms as much as possible, and much as it seemed like that hour should work well for full-time-employed students, in reality students avoided classes at that hour, and, if they did sign up, tended to stop coming and/or fail in larger numbers that usual. Of course one could say the same about online classes, of which we have more an more for some of the same reasons (classroom shortages, supposed convenience for students with complicated schedules, etc., etc.). I'm actually perfectly happy to teach online, but I have no illusions that online courses provide the best learning environment for most of our students.
My Best Scheduled Semester of College ™ consisted of two seminars--the equivalent of two regular classes--Monday evening and Thursday evening. Bliss, bliss ...
I so with you on this Ren Girl! When my alarm goes off at 6:30, I think to myself, "When are they going to college?" It's going to be way worse when they get to high school. That starts at 7:20, which is not an hour of the day I'm even capable of real speech. I don't understand why they set up high school students for such misery. Oh wait. Yes I do. SPORTS. Ugh!
Sorry for the typo. On my phone...
My ideal times to teach are anywhere from 11-2. I hate mornings, and don't really feel quite awake in my every-semester-no-getting-out-of-it 9:00 MWF Humanities class. Next semester I'm back on 4 classes. I think I'm going to struggle a lot with that. (3 preps.)
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