First week

How did my first week go? Unnervingly well, and I'm waiting for other shoes and swords to drop. I'm not feeling particularly slaughterous right now, and I'm dumbfounded and a bit vacant with this unexpected hundred bucks and a bus ticket in my pocket.

Or, as Clara from Wendy's said in a spot, "Where's the spleen?"

Oh, there was the conventional idiocy. After explaining orally and in writing what was expected in a simple little assignment that the village idiot of a baboon colony couldn't possibly misinterpret, I still got a handful of one-paragraph, disconnected, purposeless, laundry list "essays." And a few cretinous souls submitted nothing. But I didn't get any whining, so I haven't even bothered to unsheath the machete.

And our accrediting body is going to be sending some muscle in the next couple of years to evaluate us; they'll do some kneecapping if we don't get some bigger fig leaves to suggest we're actually doing something in the name of accountability, that unholy offspring of, on the one hand, the rabid right who think we're mowing our lawns every afternoon at 2 and showing music videos to our students on the days we happen to hoist our unwashed carcasses onto campus and college administrations who need to prove we're not all climbing walls and luxury dorms (well, trust me, we're distinctly not here). So, we get a lot of buzz word bluster from people with a PhD in education and lots of busy work that boils down to this: yes, when we give a student a passing grade in a class, we really do mean it. It's kind of a dialog box prompt. "Are you sure you want to delete?" "Did x student show competency in presenting information in writing?"

But we'll perfect our little system of checkboxes and make them short enough so that we can pay off the enforcer with a couple of clicks and we can get on with actually teaching and evaluating students. So, no big worries there either.

So far, the students are affable, the weather is lots better than it has been, the Krishna food on campus has improved, and I no longer have to teach three 75-minute classes in a row. What's not to like?