Finals week

This year I really tried to keep everything under control for finals week, but the forces of chaos are once again too strong. Last weekend, Drexel decided to migrate all of their servers to new improved machines and promised no disruptions. Bah! We've had email and internet problems all week and to make things even more fun - our departmental computer support person, who is also heavily involved with teaching this week, is suffering from kidney stones. So his life understandably sucks, and I am left picking up the pieces, which I am glad to do for his sake, BUT... Problems are continuing to occur in my other two classes, and the course directors keep coming to me to help fix them. For example, I submitted my exam questions three weeks ago and informed the course director that I was not making the exam again (as I had to do for the midterm when she asked someone else to do it and he thought that she was doing it and then both were out of town before the exam...). Naturally, in the midst of 8 hours of teaching on Friday, she asked me to go over the exam and help her reformat and pair it down from a completely unreasonable number of questions. So I'm here in the office on Sunday finishing the exam for Monday. The good news is that I now have the title of Deputy Director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program in charge of Curriculum Development and Oversight. Here's hoping that this will mean something on my faculty performance review (which Drexel has overformalized to the max this year). Sigh. Finals week is just as hard on us faculty as it is on our students. We finish exams on Wed Dec 22 and start back with classes on Monday, Jan 3rd. I will be working over that time just to catch up.