July is not the time to be obsessing about fall classes but I made the mistake of looking at the course schedule and now instead of relaxing I'm wrestling with numbers.
The good news is that my fall classes have healthy enrollments, but this is also the bad news, entailing math problems such as this one: nine capstone students making presentations to the college community outside of class time, 15-20 minutes per presentation plus time for introductions, transitions, and questions, four English faculty members whose schedules must be consulted so they can attend the presentations, an unknown number of unknown factors (students who say too much or too little, students who don't complete the project and have nothing to present, power outages or technical difficulties or fires or floods), all these factors add up to--what?
Nine is not a massive number but it's more than we normally have in the senior capstone class. Last time I taught the capstone, I had six students and managed the presentations in one long session with a break in the middle, but no one is going to sit through nine full-length presentations one after the other. That means breaking the festivities up into two sessions that somehow fit the schedules of everyone who needs to attend. And what if all nine students attract large cheering sections to their presentations? We're gonna need a bigger boat.
So then I had to look at the enrollment in my African American Literature class, an upper-level class that normally attracts about a dozen students. Eighteen! Crammed into a noisy interior room with no windows and too many desks, a room that always makes me want to lie down on the floor in a fetal position and whimper.
Individual presentations will be difficult with 18 students so I'll have to shift to some sort of group presentation--or steal my colleague's group discussion-leader assignment. And then I'll have to add more time for responding to students' drafts or else assign fewer papers in the class. Preparing that syllabus is going to require a lot more than just changing some readings and altering dates.
If everything goes according to plan, this will be the last time I'll be teaching either one of those classes before I retire, so I want to make them especially good. At the moment, though, I'm being assaulted by intransigent numbers and traumatic memories set in that horrible classroom. A midsummer night's scream! I need someone to provide the formula for success so I can get some rest.
