Dear Faculty,

[settingshadow]

While I appreciate your concern about students' lunch habits, vis a vis the proposal to eliminate 12:00 classes, I would like to point out what I have done with this class free time for the past two weeks

Comments

[settingshadow]

Can't live without you, Tom *grin*

No, the larger problem is that we're trying to pass the strategic plan, only it doesn't say anything and everyone hates it, but is going to vote for it anyway, so, to reduce cognitive dissonance they have decided to put off voting for AS LONG AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE (three special GFs have been scheduled in the past two weeks as at each successive GF we put off voting; only the trustees are coming, today, actually, and they want the SP to have passed by then.)

[cazort]

Everyone at RTA seems to bitch and whine about how they are poorly managed, but they're not. There are lots of committees and compared to any committee I ever sat on at Oberlin, the meetings are short and civil. People may blow money here and there, but at least there are a number of people who really care about saving money. And people care about satisfying both the riders, and the community as a whole. I do not miss the GF meetings, although I think I learned something from going to them.

[cazort]

BTW I think they should reinstate 8:00 classes and they should put any class that is in "high demand" in this early slot--thus weeding out the people who don't really "need" or "want" to take it. Also, it would give another slot to put the important classes in so that they'd be less likely to conflict with other classes. SOOO many important classes meet at 9:00, 10:00, or 11:00, people always get shut out of things that they really need to take--adding an extra slot for such critical classes could take some of the pressure off.

[settingshadow]

Al Porterfield used to do that -- offer abnormal at 8:30 a.m. because he hates people who sign up for his classes and don't take them seriously. He got so many complaints that it got moved to 9:00.

But I totally agree. I fought tooth and nail to keep the noon spot open for classes because I feel like it's hard enough to get classes you want without them meeting at the same time. And I convinced GF the first time it came up to a vote...I just lost the second time.

I think there are still a very few 8:00, but I'm very much in favor of there being more. (I loved it when 280 met at 8:30 because I was awake and perky and everyone else hadn't gone to sleep yet and they were funny, sleep-deprived people.)

I'm starting to experience a lot of frustration with Oberlin, I think fairly akin to what you were feeling your last year here. It makes me sad because I used to really love Oberlin and have very high opinions of the people here.

[cazort]

Hmm...I actually do not like the idea of 12:00 classes, even though I do like the idea of 8:00 ones. I think that it's important for people to eat meals together and having 12:00 classes really undermines this. I also think that it could potentially convince lesser-self-disciplined people to eat poorly or not at all, which would be very destructive.

After working at RTA and seeing some of the complex scheduling problems they have, something like the classes at Oberlin would be extraordinarily simple. I am almost positive they could come up with a better solution.

I think the main concern I have with the scheduling of classes is that they give certain slots preferences over others--for example, they may have 7 or 8 slots in a day, but most of the classes are crammed into four of the slots, and the remainder of them are less well populated--so it leads to more conflicts than would be really necessary if they were to distribute the classes equally among slots.