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Thursday, August 16, 2007

New Faculty Orientation...

Also known as paperwork central. It was an almost endless parade of faces and names, most of which I won't remember (which is fine as long as I keep their paperwork where I can find them and remember the president and provost's names!). Reid and I went through the benefits paperwork today and I have a nice little list of questions for HR (which I'm going to try and squeeze in tomorrow if they have time, get it out of the way before school starts).

Everyone seems nice... tomorrow is more meetings. And then on Monday, as my friend Julie reminded me, I get to start what I moved her for! The whole reason I want to be here... I get to start teaching! And monday evening we have a theatre department wide meeting, which should be a great way for me to get to meet a lot of the students.

On a sad note, the new provost told us a sad statistic. As the numbers have run the last couple of years, of the 535 freshman who are starting this fall, only half will be here to start their second year. Isn't that remarkable? No wonder the provost's number one priority is retention. We new faculty members are going to do all that we can too... not to keep those who shouldn't be in college, but to encourage those who should be and are just afraid (a large portion of Adams State students are first generation college students and don't always get the encouragement they need from home).

More this weekend, I promise.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

But the important question is ........ ARE YOU NOW FULLY ORIENTED???

And I think that you meant half not have :-) (it is always easier to be a smart aleck in the back of the class than to actually contribute something useful)

BeckyE said...

No, the pictures didn't tide me over - I want to see more pictures of you & Reid! LOL! :)