The Semester is Nearly Over

1. Students with crazy problems have started contacting me. I anticipate their problems and tell them which documentation they need to bring if they meet with me. The guy with the medical excuse? Doctor's note. The guy with the mysterious and vague complaint about a registration question? Unofficial transcript. I suspect that he was planning on lying to me about why the registration system wouldn't let him enroll and hoping that I'd let him in the class anyway.


2. While waiting for a student who wanted a bizarre exception to stated policy and who ended up being 45 minutes late to our meeting, I made a Placement and Advising Matrix. Find the row with your major and the column with your placement score, and there you have your first math class.


3. In the gen-ed class today we watched a movie. I was so sick of teaching that class.


4. During the movie I planned the lecture for calculus.


5. All the calculus students were ignoring me because they had their last exam in engineering in the class period after mine. They were frantically putting together their cheat sheets and just being basically uptight and neurotic and not paying attention.


6. With 10 minutes left, I asked them if they wanted to see another example or if they wanted to study engineering. They opted for engineering. Let's hope that they can do the problem about this that's on the final.


7. My finals are May 7 and May 8. Next week will be spent cleaning my office and dealing with uptight students.