Which Semester Is It?

Hard to tell. After having a couple of weeks of down time around Christmas and New Year's, I started the spring term with one of my classes (juniors) last week. A second class (sophomores) starts next week.

At the same time, I'm still finishing up finals from the fall semester - one for freshmen International Relations majors last week and another one for Freshmen English majors next week.

One reason the schedule's so complicated is because, at the beginning of the year, the freshmen have mandatory military training (which just looks like a lot of marching around from what we see). That means they go a month later at the end of the term. Another reason is that students have intensive lecture classes on subjects like politics, law and economics that get tacked onto their term as the lecturers are available. The only sure thing is that the term is 15 weeks long, so at least we know how many classes we have to teach.

The funny thing is - funny unusual, not funny ha-ha - is that some of us get just a couple weeks off, some get about a month. Melia finished the end of November (except for some finals) and won't start again till after Tet! But she had 5 writing classes last fall; after all that grading, she earned some rest.