Almost there

Growing up, the end of the spring term of the school year meant the beginning of summer vacation. We weren't quite dirt poor but we never had money for extras - like going away anywhere for vacation. Heck, we were so strapped that my mother sewed us those polyester stretch material pants - the kind with the crease sewn down the fronts - until I was in the fourth grade. After that, our jeans came from Sears Roebuck. Oh, how I lusted after a pair of Levi's jeans!That's what every other kid in the class wore. Even a pair of Wrangler'swould have been an improvement over the bell-bottom, red and white plaid pants immortalized in my sixth grade softball picture.

Happily, those days are far behind me, shut up in the dim recesses of my subconscious mind for the most part. :: tic-twitch ::

These days, summer does mean time to consider going places and doing things. Or it will once the first summer session term completes.

Yep, I am teaching summer school this year. The beginning of the summer session butts right up against graduation and the end of the spring semester and it is really weird.

The hallways are empty and they echo. The department office is empty and dark. The main computer lab, normally a hub of stress, panic and other student activity, is populated only by the lab assistants and they looked rather relieved. As for me, I thought it all felt kind of creepy. I found myself thinking, "Was that Camping guy in California sort of right after all? Was everyone else all raptured up?" I mean, seriously, being off by a day or a week over a seven thousand year calculation is within statistical significance, what with all of the fluctuations and slip in the changing of the calendar systems from Julian to Gregorian and adjusting for leap years and all of that.

I'm trying to keep things upbeat and light for my students. We are all in this six-week-long, crash course semester togeth... oh, wait, hang on a second.... -er. Yes, together: just checked my roster online and everybody is still on it, no harried visits to the registrar to drop the class yet.

Imagine trying to compress fifteen weeks of a weekly activity into just six. Let's say you normally do five 30-minute workouts a week. That's about the amount of time a student spends in a three credit class each week. Let's assume that your normal everyday activities like walking the dog, running up and down the stairs doing laundry, and hefting grocery bags from the car to the house account for the amount of time they spend on their homework.

Cramming all of that down to a six-week interval would mean you would have to do 2½ times as much shopping, laundry, and dog walking and you'd need up your workouts to 80 minutes each or swith to 55-minute workouts every day. Yeah.

It is going to be interesting around here for a while. The students have homework due every day this week which means that I have homework to grade every day.

"No rest for the wicked, Bob, and that means that we can't slack off either, or they'll outwork us."
- Harry Dresden, Proven Guilty

I'll try to come up for air periodically, though given that our air right now is actually a downpour of Biblical proportions, would someone please pass the gillyweed?