On the verge of a new semester

 We had a slightly longer break than usual over Christmas and the New Year, but it still doesn't seem enough.  I'm much better off than Jami, who is teaching four different classes, of which at least three are ones she hasn't taught before, but then she's much more organized than me.  I'm teaching three sections of two different classes (Logic and Intro), and I've taught both of them before, but I haven't been entirely happy with the Intro last time I taught it.  The Logic is online, which means a significant chunk of them will do terribly, because Logic is really a class that you have to take face to face so that you can ask lots of questions and be forced to do lots of exercises, but (a) we've promised to offer at least one online section of all the classes required for the major, and (b) online classes just enroll so much better - this one filled up entirely weeks ago.  Anyway, that one just required copying over the "shell" of the course in the program we use for online courses (called Canvas) and changing the dates of the assignments.  Well, I made a few cosmetic changes, but I recorded all the lectures about, Jesus, six years ago now (there's a visible contrast between the "me" in the class lectures and the me in the "Welcome to the class, Winter 2024" video that is a bit depressing) and I made the question banks for the quizzes even longer ago, because I was using them even before we taught it as an online class.  The intro classes, though, are face-to-face, and taught to high schoolers (through the extension program) at 7:40 AM.  So one of them is on campus on Monday and Wednesday, and the other is at a local high school, Carman Ainsworth, on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I've been doing this for the past couple of Winters, and it is not fun.  Dark, cold and way too early for me and the students (who have been known to nod off visibly).  And no, I have no say in the time slot.  Weirdly, the enrollments for these classes are well up from previous years.  So, just as our university barrels headlong towards being STEM-only, our youth, who are perhaps aware that all STEM jobs will be taken by AIs sooner rather than later, are getting all philosophical.  Anyway, here's a taste of the "Dashboard" of my classes and what the Byron one looks like on the "landing page":

And here's the syllabus.  Normally every slot is planned out, but one of my innovations this year (besides fewer papers (t's getting harder to police them for Chat-GPT use) and more "argument exercises" (which I will make very specific and idiosyncratic, in an attempt to thwart AI-authoring)) is to allow them to pick the topics for the last quarter of the course.  This might be a disaster, we shall see.

Class starts on Monday.  Dark and early.