Back to School

A real plus to teaching adult ed is that there is virtually no administrative red tape. A downside to this is that sometimes this means there is no administration, either. I was pondering this today as my closet of a classroom was packed this morning with nearly 50 confused students, who clearly hadn't uttered a word of English in a almost month, wanting to know their schedule for this fall. I had had my class list since early August, but apparently this did not mean that it had occured to our "administrative liaison" to let the students in on the secret of their fall schedule.

Fortunately I had finally bothered to figure out how to work a fax machine last spring, and I was able to eventually get some class lists faxed over to me from a teacher at the other site (who was wondering why no one has shown up yet). I read off each teacher's name and site, and then the names of the students who were supposed to be in that class. There was silence for a moment, which I took to mean comprehension. Then a return to utter chaos, as every single student descended upon these lists. Presumably, my English accent had mangled the names so effectively that we were no better off than we had been before the reading of the lists.

Day One, down.