Back in schedule

I'm much happier and work better with a schedule. And when there isn't anything bad-unusual going on in my life.

It was a relief yesterday to go home at the end of the day and not feel like I had to rush out and mow or weed or cut brush or something. (There is still some trimming I want to do, but it's not urgent. I might do it Friday afternoon if it's not death-hot like they're predicting. Or, failing that, first thing Saturday before it gets hot).

All but one of my classes have met; no major problems. One student got bad advisement and wasn't put in a lab section but I was able to fix that for her. I'm back to sorting soil invertebrates again. We have a new edition of a textbook for Principles I so my "prep" for teaching will be done a little earlier than normal because I have to put new diagrams and maybe add new information in to the lecture material.

But the thing is, all of these things make me happy, because they are all things I feel like I have control over. I think a lot of misery in the world comes when people feel (rightly or wrongly) situations are out of their control, that some human other than them has the say over how things are done. And humans are notoriously fickle and prone to things like tit-for-tat. I think that's partly what was going on with all my agony over the yard: while yes, I do control when I get the flowerbeds weeded and stuff, I felt like I had NO control over what the city was saying and that I wasn't being given very good information and like the rules were changing on the fly.

It's very different when I'm sitting in my office revising lecture material - I have more or less the final say on how I present it, it's all up to me to get it done, I don't have to wait on anyone.

Having some sense of "local control" is especially helpful when I find watching the news for more than five minutes makes me frustrated and sad because it seems like so much of the rest of the world has spun out of control. (My prayers lately are not that far different from what I asked my father when I was six and accidentally stepped on a piece of dollhouse furniture: "Daddy, it's broken. Can you fix it, please?"). Oh, I know part of being a sane adult is knowing what you do and do not have control over, and I do know that, it's just, it frustrates me when it seems most things going on around me are things I have no control over.

Back to that student who needed to be advised into a lab. I occasionally get students with some kind of problem like that. Sometimes it happens because someone in an office somewhere just had a brain cramp and forgot to do something. Sometimes there's a bit of red tape that needs to be unsnarled. I once commented that I didn't like having power, but I guess this is a tiny bit of power I do have that I enjoy using. It feels good to be able to call up the registrar, give my name and affiliation, say, "I have a student here in my office and it says they're not cleared for online enrollment but it looks to me like all their paperwork is fine" and have the person on the other end of the line say "Okay, we're fixing it now, you should be able to enroll them in thirty seconds" and have it be done. I do this mainly for what I would call Golden Rule reasons: I remember having been an undergraduate student (on a campus much larger than this one, and in times that were less "student-centered") and having some horrible red-tape problem, and getting ping-ponged between different offices to try to resolve it. (And on that campus, the offices were open from 8 am to noon and again from 1 to 4. Good luck if you were a science student with a lot of long afternoon labs....)

One thing I learned, slightly to my surprise, when I became faculty, was that nine times out of ten, when a faculty member called an office on a student's behalf, and it genuinely was a red-tape issue, the red-tape issue got miraculously resolved over the phone - no making the student run from office to office, no bucks being passed, minimal frustration on the student's part. And it makes me go "hmmmm" a little, remembering all the times I was handed a paper and told to go to Office A to get it stamped, and then turn it in for a receipt at Office B, which then had to be taken to Office C.

And so being able to cut through all that is a kind of power. Not necessarily a power that benefits me, but it benefits somebody, so I use it. (And I admit, at times, I wish there was someone who would do that for me in some cases). Now, granted, if the problem isn't just of the red-tape variety, if it's something the student brought upon themselves, I expect them to do the clearing-up themselves. I'm not going to call and petition an office on behalf of someone who got on Academic Probation because they skipped so many classes and didn't hand in work. And if someone comes in with an advisement hold because of parking tickets, I'm going to tell them to go pay off the darn tickets, or at least make a payment PLAN. (We occasionally get students who rack up multiple hundreds of dollars of unpaid tickets). But yeah. Being able to call up an office and say, "I know this student is 'legal' to enroll in classes via the online interface, but it's saying she can't. Is this something you can fix?" and having it be fixed, that feels like something I have control over, and it feels good.