School started for Jonathan, not for me. I still have one week to scamper around emailing TA's and graders and undergraduate assistants and course coordinators. One week to prepare for a semester. Except the last day of the week I'll be at a department retreat. And now that I think of it, I'm supposed to speak at said retreat. I suppose I'd better start writing a talk. That takes us down to less than four days. Dang. I hate this time of year.
Oh how I long for the quarter system, rather than the semester system. In the quarter system, the school year is neatly partitioned into three ten-week quarters, with the first arranged to finish just before Christmas, the second just before spring break, and the third in mid June. On the quarter system, the university doesn't have to pick itself up from summer until late September. And the faculty and students wander through August and those first cool days of fall with serene smiles on their faces, watching everyone else scurry and worry and hurry, knowing they have a whole month free to calm down and prepare for the mere 10 weeks of teaching before Christmas. I am a product of nine years of quarter system schools. Oh how I wish my university were on the quarter system.
Ahem. But school has already started for Jonathan, as you know.
How, you ask, is it going for him?
He seems to be liking it. He misses his old school and his teacher and friends. But he is making some new friends, which is good. I need to remember that making good friends takes time. It usually took me a month or two to settle on a best friend for an academic year. I know this because I have a September birthday, and I recall a couple of years of being annoyed in November that I had invited the wrong people to my birthday party. I hadn't become best friends yet with the girl who would be my recess companion through the winter and spring.
No, September birthdays are not ideal from a school year point of view. Unless, of course, your university is on the quarter system, in which case September birthdays fall into the summer holidays, but avoid the crowds, and are perfect.
For my birthday this year, I would like my university to go onto the quarter system.
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2 comments:
Avram's school is on the quarter system, which was a huge adjustment for us. How we wished for a semester system! Mostly just because that's what we were used to, not because of any innate betterness. They are changing to semesters anyway, so perhaps quarters are on their way out, and you can just be grateful you had the chance to have them at all.
My birthday is the first week of October, and since we moved a lot when I was a child, I have very rarely celebrated birthdays with close friends. It's a hard life.
I looooved the quarter system. Classes clipped along at a pace in which you rarely had time to get bored and if you hated a class or a professor or a subject, you only had a few weeks left to endure. My first exposure to semesters was law school and that first one about killed me if for nothing else but its tedious length! Although the second semester of the year was always the hardest for me since my particular law school (ahem, your university) did not believe in spring break and I always broke out in a horrible spring fever right before finals.
Oh, and summer birthdays were no fun in school if you were an attention seeker because you always got lumped in with all of the June, July and August birthdays in a group.
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