Knitting on the blanket is going sloooooow. So I started something new and quick. I hope to finish or near finish it tonight (depends on how fast my crochet ability is). Then I'll have some pics. Instead, for now, you get more ranting...

I was so happy for a few minutes because I actually wrote 3 kick-ass paragraphs on my dissertation. (And yes the dissertation is more than 3 paragraphs long, I'm not starting from scratch here people... the dissertation is already at 53 pages, which includes tables and works cited). But they were 3 really awesome paragraphs based off of ideas I got while rereading an article I hadn't touched in over a year, but picked up because my class will be discussing it today. And so I was happy, briefly, about the writing, and looking forward to class in about an hour.

What changed my mood so quickly to pissed off and annoyed is that this university (like many others), has a policy of allowing students to add and drop classes at will during the first 2 weeks of the semester. In a large lecture class, it is only as annoying as a few students at the beginning of week three showing up and asking "did I miss anything important in the first 2 weeks?" This gets to the level of infuriating when you have a small class to begin with and are trying to pair up students to be discussion leaders for upcoming classes. I had my list prepared and ready to go last night. It took surprisingly longer than I thought that it would to arrange and try to fit everyone into something they wanted. And guess-freaking-what?!?! FOUR students dropped since I last accessed the roster last night and 2 new students joined, which fs-up my schedule and which will cause me to answer "did I miss anything important last week" today at least twice. ARGH!!!

What this leads me to believe is that for the first two weeks of class, I shouldn't do anything. We should all just show up, maybe sing a few campfire-type songs, and patiently wait until the end of add-drop and we know who is in and who is out. If I was running the show, you'd register for classes and the only way to change is to get special written permission to drop from the professor and a Dean, and special permission to add from the professor and a Dean, AND you need to write an eloquent, flawless 3 page essay about why you need to drop/add, none of this willy-nilly adding and dropping. The process should be hard enough to discourage students from actually doing it. I took some pretty terrible and unpleasant classes in college (Orgo and Cell and Molec Bio, anyone?), but I didn't drop them because they seemed "too hard" or "too boring." I signed up for it, I stuck through it to the end and didn't look for an easier class to fill out my schedule.

Sorry for spewing another rant onto the blog, but you can know that my students probably thank you, the blog readers, for listening (reading) my rant, so that by the time I get to class, I've cooled down and won't go off on them!