Confidence

Mine has taken a hit with the new chair stuff.  Working on it.

Early last week, I got a desperate email from a transfer student's core advisor telling me that the student needs Underwater Basketweaving 101 (the intro to UWBW) for an early ed program.  At this point, any UWBW 101 course slots are reserved for new first year students.  But I relented, because it seems to me more important not to hold back this transfer student's progress than for a first year student to get that specific course.

And then I got an email from the Deanling about it.  And I explained, and it was okay, but obviously not something that made him happy.

And then I got another request from a core advisor about a different student with the same problem.  So this time I emailed the Deanling.  And he requested a meeting (on line), and so we met.  I was prepared to get chewed out for wasting his time when I should have known what to do.  And that expectation says something about my confidence issues right now.

But nope.  We talked about other possible courses, and the Deanling emailed another Deanling over in the early ed program, and that Deanling said yes about that student, but not the sort of general yes we were looking for (to let transfer students with a lot of credits already take a different course).

And so it worked out okay, and I wasn't chewed out, which is very good.

I've picked up the balls I dropped before, and was pretty successful at not dropping any this week.

My workspace is filled with notepads with notes of various levels of urgency.  Some can be recycled once a specific problem is taken care of.  Some need to be kept.  It would be a lot easier if I were mostly in my school office, where there are good places to put such notes.  Here, I'm not as organized.

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Like a lot of places, NWU is planning to be mostly face to face in fall, but also planning to accommodate those with health issues so they can work from home.  That, according to our HR will be processed under the ADA, except people feel uncomfortable because they don't really have disabilities, just need accommodation during Covid times.  Anyway, I knew of three colleagues who asked for and got accommodations and I'm very happy.

We also have a few colleagues who are asking for accommodations for other reasons, a spouse's health, a child's, or something similar.  Those are being handled separately, and I haven't heard about any of them.  I have a bit of a plan, though, that I'm willing to use but hope I don't have to.

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I'd be willing to make a small bet (the only bet I could afford) that we'll actually be pretty much all on line in the all, because the pandemic seems to be getting so much worse in the US. 

Either way, it's scary.  I don't want my colleagues or students to get exposed if we can possibly help it.  So I'm hoping we'll be on line.

On the other hand, a lot of administrative folks are very worried that first year students (especially) will decide to take a gap year if they learn that we're going to be on line, and if another 5-10% do, then we'll be devastated.  We're already down about 5% on first year admissions, and it's scary; and we're WAY down on budget allocation from the state because it's expecting FAR less tax revenue AND paying out WAY more in unemployment.

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The upshot is that I'm pretty much planning to put my one course (an upper level Shakespeare course) on line, and then if we're meeting in person, will use that time for discussions and projects.