Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Well, this is the weekend before classes start. Last week is what I call "faculty back" week where we meet as a faculty to take care of some business and to register the students who waited until the very, very last minute to get their classes. The faculty stuff was interesting as I'm in a position of faculty leadership. During our Executive Committee meeting, of which I'm a part as Faculty Senate parlimentarian, our College President announced his resignation, effective Sept 16. Nice. Here we are in the middle of getting ready for our reaccreditation visit and in the middle of applying to become a two year college with four year programs and he up and leaves at about the worst time imaginable. He said that there were family issues involved and you've gotta take care of those things but I can't imagine that the timing could be worse. So, on Thursday I find out I'm being nominated to serve on the search committee. I'm not sure that I'll be selected but we'll see. Quite frankly I'm hoping that the Chancellor chooses someone else from the faculty but if not I'll do my best to make a valuable contribution.

I did see a few DOA students but nothing too memorable except one. I was giving a presentation of how to get prepared for college and how to study and about halfway through my 20 minute presentation I look over and this young man is asleep on the desk. Now there are about 8 students in the room and I'm trying to be pretty interactive so this guy really has to think that he's immune to what I'm saying about faculty failing students at college if the students don't come to class, pay attention and do their work. I just smiled and remembered how good a teacher expereince can be. Most mornings last week I spent the student orientation time with the parents trying to clue them in how just exactly how different college is from high school. I gave them a pretty unvarnished version of things. There were a lot of worried moms and grim dads at times but that's understandable. Most parents aren't used to having someone talk to them about the possibility of their child failing. By the end of the presentation they seemed to understand that they have to have realistic expectations about the college experience.

Today I rode a metric century at 21 mph. I'm still not climbing really well but next week I'm going to start targeting that aspect of my training. I did my first loop up Hog Mt. and absolutely died on the climb. It was after about 30 miles of rollers so I didn't expect to have a lot of pep in the legs but they wilted like two day old lettuce under the heat lamps at McDonald's as soon as I hit the second part of the mile long climb. Lots of work to do before Six Gap.

Thanks for Reading.

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