The last Tuesday of classes of spring semester 2025 (#1345)

Topics/tags: Overcommitment

Today is Tuesday of week 14 at Grinnell. Week 14 is the last week of classes of most semesters [1]. Some folks call it Penultimate Week, since it’s the week before finals. Some folks call it Happy Exciting Liberal Learning Week. It has other names, too.

I’m glad to be done with my spring Tuesdays.

Why?

Well, this is my three-course semester. And I’m teaching each of my 3x80 [2] courses on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You might think that this would make my Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays busy. It does. However, my Tuesdays are usually even busier than my Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Let’s consider today, which was only slightly busier than normal.

I arrived a little before 8 a.m. for a meeting with a student. Officially, office hours don’t start until 8:30 a.m. However, this student had a class at 8:30 a.m., so we met early. My office hours were booked until 11:30 [3,4], with only one short break in the middle. I can’t recall how those were distributed between fifteen-minute and half-hour appointments. Maybe two half-hour appointments and seven fifteen-minute appointments. Plus that initial half-hour appointment.

I spent 11:30 a.m. to about 1:00 p.m. in the cafeteria, participating in our weekly CS table. I appreciate the opportunity to chat with faculty and students (and, at times, staff) about technology and its impacts. This week, we were considering the dangers of the library ecosystem employed by modern programming languages like Python, Ruby, and JavaScript.

From 1:00 to 2:00 p.m., we had our weekly department meeting. We debriefed on last week’s talk and panel on student AI use, considered catalog copy, made plans for the summer, and chatted quickly about course learning objectives. Stuff like that. We also debriefed on our new peer class visit process [5,6]. I’m sure we also talked about other things, but I can’t recall and I’m too lazy to find the agenda.

From 2:00 to 3:15 p.m., I sat in on a colleague’s course. They had asked me to spend the semester observing their course, and I’ve tried to make as many sessions as I can. I usually stay until it ends at 3:50, but I had an appointment across campus at 3:30 p.m.

I had a meeting from 3:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

I had another meeting from 4:00 p.m. to about 5:15 p.m.

After that, I went shopping for supplies for Wednesday’s classes. I don’t usually go shopping on Tuesday afternoons. Other than that, it was a fairly typical Tuesday.

I’m glad this semester is almost over.

I wish I could say that I’ve learned my lesson and that I’ll stop scheduling Tuesdays like this. Historical evidence suggests that I have difficulty learning such lessons. I may do better on Tuesdays, but I’ll probably do worse on Wednesdays or Thursdays.

At least I had time to write tonight.

Postscript: Grammarly has a plagiarism/AI check. I decided to use it on this musing. Here’s what it said.

This text matches Cassie Reid Obituary December 12, 2007 - Seawright Funeral Home & Crematory. https://obits.seawright-funeralhome.com/cassie-reid

This text matches University, M. (1909). The Parthenon, April, 1909. https://core.ac.uk/download/482078190.pdf

Ah! Now I see. It’s the From 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. and From 2:00 to 3:15 p.m. that match. Aren’t AI tools wonderful?

[1] Perhaps every semester.

[2] Three meetings per week, eighty minutes per meeting.

[3] a.m., not p.m.

[4] I ask students to schedule meetings during office hours rather than to just arrive and sit in the hallway. It seems to work better.

[5] The new class visit process involves pairing faculty. Each sits in on one or two of the other person’s classes. Before the mutual visits, they meet to discuss issues that each might like the other to reflect upon. After the mutual visits, they reflect. The process is intended as primarily developmental. We were fairly happy with how the process went, although there are some concerns about power dynamics. In any case, it sounds like the College might decide to standardize on some variant of this process.

[6] Insert rant about the time I was required write a CS Department Handbook and was chastised by Council for suggesting in that handbook that we ensure that every faculty member’s classes were visited a few times each semester for developmental purposes. I’m glad that we’ve finally come around to such a process.

Version 1.0 of 2025-05-06.