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

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Well, I'm back after the longest month in the history of history. I had hoped to update you on the semester at least once a week and instead I've been struggling to keep my head above water. It's not anything in particular, just a lot of little things: more meetings for Faculty Senate, meeting with students to plan activities and run student skills seminars, lots of early semester grading, etc. I can tell that things are going to slow down just a little bit over the next couple of weeks as a couple of commitments will be winding down and my class sizes will be starting to get a lot smaller.

The first four weeks of classes have been interesting. I have two classes I'm really happy with, one that's half and half and one that's pretty terrible. My engineering physics class is a joy to teach this semester. After a group last year that was less than committed to the level of work required of a student wanting to go to Georgia Tech (I had two good students and they only took the first semester of the course), this group is obviously committed. The other good class is a small group of allied health students taking physics early in the morning. They seems to be sharp and dedicated to doing well. The so-so class is my other physics class for allied health students. The problem is that I seem to have a bunch of preppie kids who think the course is some sort of vacation at Hilton Head or something. My best students seem to be those from other cultures right now. I have abobut four students who come to class dressed in the latest styles and then train-wreck any work I give them. One dude showed up smelling so strongly of alcohol that that I was tempted to tell him to go brush his teeth.

The terrible class is my physical science class. The class average is a 58 and I have 16 of the 29 students who are failing the class. They won't read the material I line out for them, they won't turn wortk in on time and they won't participate actively in the class. The really scary thing is that a lot of these students want to be elementary school teachers. It blows my mind. If they can't get their work in to me on time, what makes them think they'll get their lesson plans and individualized educatioin plans done for their kids when they're teachers.

The physics classes get their first exams this next week. That should clear out the wanna-bes and the brainless preppies. I'm not sure how to thin out the physical science class. The absence policy might do it. I give them three free misses and then each one after that costs them 3% of their final grade. I've already got five students in the penalty phase and a couple more just about ready to start losing ground. My hope is that when they hit about 9 or 10% they'll walk away and withdraw.

Once things thin out the grading load will drop off pretty significantly and the meeting thing should ease up once we finish our reaffirmation process later this month. Hopefully that'll give me more time to ride (that's been pretty spotty of late) and more time to read some of the books I got for my birthday.

Hopefully, I'll update again pretty soon. Thanks for stopping by.

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