Incoherent Scribblings

Crazy Summer Schedule

This summer I am taking two classes, the first of which begins on Tuesday.

At West Texas Town University, we have two summer terms and I am taking a class each term this summer. These graduate-level English classes are what are referred to as “shortened format” and will meet Monday through Friday from 8:30-11:30 in the morning. My Summer I class (Romantic Poets) meets June 17-July 3 and my Summer II class (Folklore) meets July 8-July 25. Although I am sure I won’t want to do much more than sleep in August, at the moment I am quite enthused about these classes and extremely pleased that once I have finished them I will have 9 semester hours, or about ¼ of the coursework, for my English Master’s Degree complete.

However, since I am still working full-time I had to do some creative rearranging of my schedule in order to fulfill the 40 hour a week commitment to the University that will allow me to take these classes for free.

In all honesty I am extremely fortunate to work for a department on campus that doesn’t keep to a traditional 9-5 schedule. In order to serve our clientèle, the library is not only open on the weekends but until 10:30 in the evenings as well. This, as you can imagine, has served me well when coming up with what everyone in the library has begun to refer to as my “crazy summer schedule.”

At first I was going to attend class in the mornings and then head to the library to work a full eight-hour day which would have had me getting off work at around 9:00 every evening. This sounded like a doable situation until something began to nag me: If I was going to be taking classes, it was only logical to assume that I would have homework. Now, while I can probably get away with doing a little homework every now and again in my office, I came to the conclusion that overall the University probably wouldn’t approve of paying me to sit around in my office reading Romantic Poetry and writing a critical analysis of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

And so the time-sheet figuring began anew. As part of my job responsibilities I am required to work one evening a week and if I was willing to work eight hours on both Saturday and Sunday I could easily make up the time that I was going to be in class. However, something told me if I were to implement this solution of going to class five days a week and working seven days a week I would be burnt out before the end of June.

In the end I found a middle ground between the solutions. I sacrificed half of every weekend of the weeks that I will be in class, I agreed to an eight hour day on the day that I work my evening shift, and all the other days I will work a six hour day so that I can do homework during those evenings on my own time.

It’s a good thing that the library doesn’t open until noon on the weekends though… usually by then my hangover is gone anyway.

Only Tuesday

One of my responsibilities as Education Coordination Librarian at West Texas Town University is to organize and schedule our Library Instruction* program.

I am not saying that I haven’t had anything to do in that capacity since I started my position in September, but since the semester was already in full swing when I arrived the actual organizing and scheduling I did for fall was minimal. The majority of the classes had already been scheduled and most had already been taught.

Since the fall semester ended, however, I have been spending a lot of time completing various tasks in preparation to “officially” take control of my program. I have compiled a mountain of statistics. (I am still not sure what I am going to do with them, but at least I have them!) I have read about assessment. I have created forms and documented procedure. I have done at least a dozen other things too, but I will stop there… You get the idea.

Luckily though, just as I was beginning to get rather bored with all the “busy” work, the spring semester arrived. Classes don’t officially start until tomorrow, but I wanted to start the semester off right by getting the word out that there is a new education coordination librarian in town.

I went to the beginning of semester faculty/administrative staff meeting and took a couple of minutes to introduce myself. I schmoozed networked after the meeting over coffee Coke and donuts. I passed out my business card. I sent a follow-up email.

Before I even went to lunch I began getting requests and taking reservations. In fact, the response has been such that when I left my office tonight I still had reservation forms on my desk to double check against my calendar… and it’s only Tuesday!

* Insert the buzzword of choice here: library instruction, bibliographic instruction, user education, or information literacy to name a few.