So yesterday was insane as is fairly obvious from my post. What is probably less evident is that it was insane enough to already get my goat incredibly early in the morning. I got here before eight to finalize my syllabus and make photocopies before class. What ended up happening was a steady stream of students who still hadn’t registered or who had lost their PINs to register along with Jamie who had a million and one questions about the enrollment of my class. All of it before nine, and I had a class to teach then. Seven people out of the scheduled eleven showed up, and after class, things just got more insane.

All right, University 101 in the fall semester (when the majority of the freshmen come in) is broken up into these sections: Open Preference (my area; students with no major), Academic Opportunity Program (conditionally admitted students), and athletes (because they have to learn the NCAA rules and all that crap and generally be treated differently from the rest of the student body because they’re special). There are generally about thirty or more sections of the class offered in the fall. The spring gets hazy. There are three sections; traditionally there are two AOP (Jamie) and one OP (me). This semester, Jamie wanted to do something different with the students who are repeating, because, amazingly enough, people do fail this basic, introductory course. She wanted one section for repeaters, one for new AOP, and mine for new OP. Sounds fine and dandy in theory, but because of our computer registering system, down-right impossible.

I have, in my class, students who are both AOP and OP who are repeating, new OP students, and apparently a couple students who have majors and therefore shouldn’t be anywhere near the class or even know about it. After class with my seven students, I wandered back to the office feeling good about myself because I’d had a good class and they all seem like nice kids. When I hit the office, I was bombarded with questions by Jamie about who was in my class because apparently she’d been doing some digging and there was a whole mess of “problems” with my class. Apparently, four of my students were listed as already having majors, three were repeating, and one had even been dismissed. Dippy. Now I had to find answers or something, I suppose. Why else would she be telling me and going on at great length about it?

After a few more hours of students coming in one right after another and Jamie playing twenty questions while I was trying to work on my class schedule for the term and set up guest speakers, I checked my class roster again. Six more students showed up. Two of them I know for a fact are repeating because they failed my class last semester. Two I know Susan added, and I have no idea where the other two came from. Dippy. Yet another day of trying to figure out what to do with these repeating students.

The thing is that I really don’t care. I understand Jamie wants to have a different section for the repeaters so they’re not doing the same thing over again, but you know what: that’s how college is. You fail Psychology 101, you retake the class and it’s all the same stuff. You clearly didn’t get it the first time, so why not try and get it the second time? I dunno. Part of me prefers teaching all-new freshmen because I don’t have to wonder if half the class is bored because they’ve heard it before, but the rest of me figures that they’ve got to get over their boredom and buckle down because this is college. More than that, they’ve got to figure out how to do a good job despite their personal feelings because that’s simply how the world works. They’ll have to put up with that shit in their jobs and in their homes and everywhere else; why not learn to overcome it in a controlled and safe environment? Eh. Just my two cents, which doesn’t go very far in today’s inflated world. I suppose only a die-hard teacher would consider turning simple, mundane things like sitting still for an hour into a learning opportunity.

One way or another, today’s probably going to be interesting . . . and long.