For the entire semester, I felt that I was barely keeping my head above water. I’m teaching too many courses (26 credits). When I was in college, I did back-to-back semesters of 23 and 24 credits, while working fulltime. While working on my dissertation, I taught 6 classes in the high school and 3 at college, and still had energy to spare. Now, I just don’t have the energy anymore. I think people call this getting old. My doctor told me that I need to accept my limitations. To quote a country song, “But there's more old drunkers than there are old doctors so I guess we'd better have another round”, so I guess I’ll keep fighting the disease of aging.
A lot of times educators feel that “every new class seems worse than the last,” but I know that isn’t true. But, like disturbing weather patterns, I will say that attendance by students seems to get worse each semester and this semester is the worst I’ve ever experienced (I wonder if it is related to climate change?) by a large margin. In full disclosure, I missed 5 days this term, after more than 5 years of perfect attendance at IRSC, which means my attendance rate for the semester was about 92%. To further put this in perspective, I missed less than 10 days of college, while completing more than 250 credit hours. In one live class of 36 students, I had 2 students who had perfect attendance and 5 who missed more than half of the classes. There were 2 days when only 64% of the students attended, and the class average for attendance was 81%. In other words, on average, my students attended about 24 of their 30 days of instruction. And, those data don’t include the tardies…
But as always, I look forward to growth and a better tomorrow. My summer schedule is only 12 credits and in the fall I’m only scheduled for 20 credits. With “so many positive waves” and some needed R & R this summer, I’m already looking forward to a very productive 2017 – 2018 academic year.