Feels Like the End

Well, it does. Because it is. It's the end of the summer term at Rose State College, so today I turned in the grades for my lone section of Fundamentals of English. It was an interesting term, and I'll give you the breakdown:

• We had eight weeks to cover sixteen weeks worth of material. We had the same number of class meetings that we would in a normal semester, but instead of twice a week we met four times a week. The classroom time was not a problem, but the students' out-of-class work time and information processing time was seriously truncated.
• I had thirteen people registered when I last checked before the term started. I had ten on my roster the first day of class. I had eight on my final roster, and I never saw three of those. One dropped the first week of class and another stopped showing up on the last week of class.
• I had one day with only one student present.
• I had one day with only zero students present.
• Since this was a developmental class, it was great that I was able to give them so much one-on-one time. Unfortunately, these students were true developmental students and had the usual problem of unpreparedness. The one-on-one time could have been more productive.

So now I'm getting ready for Fall semester. I have five sections at two colleges: one Comp I, three Comp II, and one Intro to Philosophy. I haven't taught any of these courses at the schools where I'm going to teach them, so I have four preps. This should be interesting.

But now I'm faced with a decision I haven't wanted to make: do I pursue my interests or do I meet my obligations? There was hope through the summer that I'd be able to do both, but that hope died. Actually, the death of that hope has changed me. I'm still going to teach, because that's the only work I've ever done that I think was worth my time, but my inability to parlay my qualifications and general personability into full-time teaching means I'll have to take other work, too. At least for the short term.

So this feels like the end of hope, too. And at the end of the month I'll put this blog to rest and start the next one.