Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

First of all something I should have mentioned at least at the start of this week but that I had taken for granted until someone told me in e-mail that I had not brought it up.

I don't have any summer classes this year. In the department there are only two subjects I could teach anyway.

One is Cumputer Fundamentals, the three-unit requirement for Human Biology students that is in their flowchart. Since it is a pre-med course, and these students endured and passed a whole-day entrance exam anyway (instead of only half day for the rest of the courses in the university) then they have to prove that they can hack it through having regular courses during all the summers of their study.

And when I did teach this course (at least three times) before, these students did have a faster comprehension rate than the regular students, even considering that the classes met at least four days a week for three hours each, something normal students and even teachers find a little too quick-paced. And this year, summer classes are from Monday to Saturday to catch up from the election holidays. Harsh.

The second subject is mechanics lecture for engineering students. This was given to one of the Ph.D. senior faculty, despite the fact that it will be a huge chunk of the paid tuition to pay for this professor's 150% "overtime" rate, compared to a junior faculty, and even a part-time one.

I even remember that the university discouraged irregular students taking summer classes just to catch up to their classmates' schedule by the first term.

I guess they had to make an exception in this case though, because apparently there are 42 students enrolled in that subject, which, collectively, failed their mechanics courses within the normal schoolyear. So if the students request for a summer subject with the commitment (signatures?) of filling one class, there will be a section opened for them?

This is a long way from the time that I taught mechanics lab in the summer a few years ago (morning AND afternoon). We had four experiments a week for three weeks, which wasn't as hectic as for the lecture, even if written reports were due two days after performing the experiment instead of one week. And I had extra income.

The university started limiting summer classes during another election year some time ago, citing the fact that the campus will be used for NAMFREL counting operations and the fact that there would be a lot of (re)contruction going on for wanting to minimize the number of students underfoot. Although rumor had it that the university just didn't find summer classes profitable to continue on a large scale.

Still, offering summer classes is a big change from when I was a student, when it still wasn't deemed necessary for a trimestral curriculum.

For the record, the rest of the courses offered by the department are regular classes for medical instrumentation majors: Medical Imaging and Radiation Therapy, which is mostly just hospital tours anyway.
I'm not one of the select few qualified to teach those.

Basically that just means lab acquisitions and other first term preparations for me in the next few weeks.