Day 3 - 258 -- time crunch

Scheduling meetings with students from one class took most of the time today. I'm still dealing with the fatigue of traveling across many time zones, so wasn't fully on task the way I'd like to be. I found that finding 15 minutes for each student in a medium sized class took more hours than I usually have available for office hours. Once this aspect of the course assignment topic selection has been completed, office hours will be back to usual and much less full of scheduled meetings. There will be time to breathe, make a cup of tea or walk to the printer.

To find enough time to book meetings for each student involved opening up afternoons where course preparation and admin tasks generally reside. When the course is being planned and deadline dates determined, the number of class members that will be registered by the beginning of term is not known. We may have a vague idea of about how many will be in a course, but precision is not a given. I do recall that last fall this part of the assignment took a lot of extra hours for the one week. I'd expected a smaller class than presented itself this fall -- not very much smaller, but enough to make a difference in the current activities. There are hours available, but filling them with meeting times, means that the other regular meetings or scheduled appointments occur without the usual prep time. It will improve and this will occur in just another week. Hopefully, by then my head will be in the game and in the game in this time zone. <smile>

A song title and first line of a song came to mind as I was trying to schedule all the meetings and find extra time to squeeze a few more meetings into. Enjoy!

Give me just a little more time -- The Chairmen of the Board