Hell Week 1, Day 1

I have finished Day 1 of Hell week 1 at work. The faculty are all back and scrambling to get ready for classes. Everybody wants something and with our enrollment being down everyone is worried about whether their classes will go or if they will get switched or cancelled. The next three days tend to be emotional as you take classes away from adjuncts and give them to residential faculty whose classes are not meeting enrollment minimums.

Not much student interaction this week. A few students will turn in calculators they forgot about last semester or will come in early to rent one for this semester. Once in a while a student will be looking for a signature to skip a class and I'll need to send them to a faculty member.

We have seen a steady decline in our enrollment over the last 6 or 7 semesters. The decline has been especially noticeable in our daytime classes. Our evening classes have been mostly holding their own and the parking lot if full a night when I leave. But most of our residential faculty teach daytime classes and when they have to cancel a class an adjunct losses a class and is sometimes put out of work completely.

The adjuncts who have full time jobs and teach for us part-time for extra money I do not feel so bad for. It's the retirees and other adjuncts where this is their primary or only source of income that I feel bad for. That is what makes this an emotional week, at least for me. Hopefully we'll have some better news for the remainder of the week.