Your house’s old empty living room—made redundant by an add-on in the back—is roughly 19.5 feet south to north and another 17.5 feet west to east. Walking counterclockwise—although you do like to play Midnight Express periodically and shake it up by going clockwise for a while—one circuit is 20 steps (about 48 feet) and takes approximately 20 seconds. So, that means 3 rounds per minute times 60 minutes equals 8,640 feet (or 1.63 miles) per hour. It therefore takes 6,380 steps to get to Mclennan Community College, 495 circuits to get to Baylor University, or almost 7 hours (6:48:42 to be more specific) to get to Texas State Technical College, all current or former employers.
Two Saturdays ago, in your ongoing quest to brain out the perfect (or at least, better) class, you paced around for 8 solid hours—from 2:30 am until 10:30 am—while listening to Spotify and that got you how much closer to realizing your goal?
It’s hard to say . . . just yet.
There are at least three stages you go through when teaching each semester:
First class day (Optimism): The class syllabus and schedule have been finalized, printed out, and copied to distribute to students. Everything is rosy as one thing logically leads to another all the way to the end of the semester where course goals and objectives will inevitably be achieved.
Two-thirds of the way through the semester (Disgust): For reasons large or small, the class has veered off course. All of sudden, you realize what obviously went wrong is only a scheduling problem—do this and then that, idiot!— and that fixing these logistical errors will make sure it won’t happen next semester.
Post-semester (Despair): You realize that just “fixing” the old class schedule to work better for the upcoming semester is just rearranging the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that ultimately makes a crappy picture. Once again, you also realize it’s not the class structure that’s nearly as important as what the overall goals are at in the end. And, finally, you realize (redux) that perhaps your conception of those goals—as well as how to best achieve them—needs to be drastically rethought.
And then . . . what?
(Classes start on Monday . . . only four days from now.)
Walk faster, bub.
(My last piece of advice? Wear comfy shoes.)
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Mark Roy Long 