Cleaning up after the weekend and looking ahead

Cleaning up after the weekend and looking ahead
Doug called me on Monday to wish me a Happy Memorial Day. I told him that I had experienced a good Memorial Day that included some time, a couple of hours, spent in reflection. We talked about getting together for lunch next Saturday. I suggested that we should go to Albertacos and get, “two Numbers 8s and two medium drinks for here.” Doug thought that was a good idea.

Going to Albertacos with Doug will be a good way to end Chuckay.

Doug wanted to know if I was going to see STAR TREK while I was on quarter break. I said that seeing the film was one of the planned ideas or activities. I asked if he had seen TERMINATOR: SALVATION. He said not yet but that he planned to see it during the week. His friend Megan did not want to see the film.

Having lunch at Albertacos with Doug will work out well for me. I have to visit a former student and give her an updated and improved letter of recommendation. Since she lives in the same city as Doug, I will see my former student in the morning and then lunch with Doug.

I may stop by my friend Gloria’s frozen yogurt and ice cream store since it is only two blocks off of the freeway and it is directly on my home to the beach. It ought to be warm next Saturday so some ice cream would be perfect for the day.

I went to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf this afternoon for an ice blended drink. I had hoped that the Coffee Bean had brought back their Mocha Mudslide for the Summer. Alas, they did not.

Tihana was working today and she greeted me with a, “Hi Chuck, where have you been and do you want your usual?” I said that I been busy with finals and grading papers. Tihana did make a perfect ice blended drink for me, just like she always does.

I have a visit with Dr. Karen on this Friday. Friday will mark the beginning of Cycle 10 of Round 2 of my chemotherapy treatment. After I finish this Cycle, I think Dr. Karen has plans for me to take a series of tests.

Dinner with Elaine
I had dinner with my friend Elaine on Wednesday. We went to my favorite local casual restaurant, the L. A. Food Show. Dinner was perfect as usual. Elaine was really generous and passed on my offer to share the dessert, ice cream with some hot chocolate fudge.

Mostly, we talked about how our lives have changed since the last time we got together. Elaine thought that I looked really well for someone who was fighting cancer. She thinks I make a perfect teacher; that’s nice after getting the evaluation based purely on numbers and not necessarily on reality from school.

We had a great server Tina, from Redondo Beach, and, no, I do not know Tina. I will definitely ask for Tina to be my serve when I go back to the Show.

Summer Break for Me
The next two weeks are what passes for my Summer Break. I will be back in the classroom beginning with the week of June 8th. I plan to take some time off to rest and do things around the flat.

I also get to participate in jury duty. It is not too bad but it is still timeout of my life. Jury duty selection used to be based on voter registration. That didn’t work out so well because people discovered that not voting and missing jury duty was a good idea. Now, the potential jurors are culled from people with drivers’ licenses or state identification cards in California; that covers everyone except those who are in the country illegally and they can’t serve on a jury anyway.

Teaching
I found out why my teaching schedule is still up in the air on Thursday. The school has changed its instructor evaluation criteria and it now considers student completion or passing the course to be the most significant factor in evaluating instructors. The new changes came out in Week 9 of the last term and this complicated scheduling.

It seems that I am a poor instructor in one of my classes, State and Local Government. My completion rate is well below the school's national averages. As such, I can no longer teach that course. I can still continue to teach the other twenty one courses that I have taught over the last three and a half years.

I can find a certain degree of irony in this outcome. State and Local Government is one of my favorite courses to teach. I guess that I am too intense perhaps with this course because I believe that having a solid understanding of our form of government is so important and I sometimes tend to get carried away with the material.

Not being able to teach State and Local Government in the coming term presented the school with a scheduling problem since I was scheduled to teach both sections of the course. The associate dean has said that I will be teaching Microeconomics and Marketing Research and he will try to find some classes to make up for the ones that I can no longer teach. If the associate dean is unable to find replacement courses for me, I will certainly understand that result.

Visitors
We had a slightly greater visitorship during the last week. The blog had 575 visitors who viewed 960 unique pages. Two pages amount to 80 to 85% of the unique page views. As usual, most of the traffic was from outside of the United States.

I do appreciate all of you who take from your day and visit the blog.

Be well and stay happy.