The New Semester Has Commenced....

Well, the fall semester has started, and as usual, my classes are full, and students on the wait list are pleading for me to add them. I wish I could say it's because I'm such a popular professor, but that would be a lie. Sections have been cut drastically because of the budget situation. Any class without at least 20 students isn't allowed to make, so the remaining sections either wind up a little over-enrolled, or students are left hanging.

At least students are much less likely to drop now, so I suppose there's always a silver lining somewhere.

I have a stack of diagnostic essays and a sentence boundary quiz to peruse over the weekend, so it's definitely a case of "jump in with both feet." As usual, it'll be interesting to see how many of these entering students have no idea what run-ons or sentence fragments are.

I think back to when I was a student taking freshman composition, in 1980. If there were three misspelled words, your paper was handed back to you with an automatic "F." It's a different world nowadays, that's for sure.

But we have pretty new buildings on campus and the latest in high-tech SMART classrooms. Now if only someone would invent a foolproof way to get students to love reading.