Strange times at WCCC

Well, today was a weird day at the college. First, in a fundraising competition for United Way between Warren County Community College and Centenary College New Jersey, each school's respective president spent 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM being duct taped to the a wall through student and faculty donations of $1 per foot of tape. Augusta and I each donated for three feet of tape during lunch and got to "stick it to The Man" (the name they gave the event). Really, it was more like sticking The Man to it - "it" being the wall. Somebody put a pink Giants cap on poor Doctor Austin, and they had a piece over his mouth, too (with "Giants rock!" written on it). Needless to say, most people found the whole situation to be endlessly amusing, myself included. At the end of the competition, we contacted Centenary and compared totals - turned out that WCCC won! So that was fun.

After lunch, Augusta normally has a math class at 2:00 PM. However, while we were sitting outside the classroom waiting for it to start, we overheard someone talking to one of her classmates, saying that the class was cancelled today and that the professor that normally teaches it was being replaced. Augusta told me that he was an auditor who sat in on their class a week or two back. Word started to spread pretty quickly, and finally the guy came out and said what was going on. Apparantly the professor was pretty unpopular - not because he was mean or anything, but just because he didn't explain things especially well - and so WCCC decided to fire him. Naturally, this resulted in some of the bitchier students cheering and "good riddance-ing." The auditor was waiting outside the class to tell the students that it was cancelled and to tell the professor that he was being let go.

Now, I don't know that they should have kept this guy if he wasn't teaching well, but regardless, I wasn't too impressed by the way the situation was being handled. First of all, they should have just put a sign up on the classroom door saying that it was cancelled, like they normally do - the students didn't need to know the professor was being fired, or why. But second of all, letting the professor drive down to the college expecting to teach a class and then stopping him in a public hallway to tell him that he's been fired and that he can turn around and go home is a rather shitty way of dealing with things. Augusta and I didn't stick around to see what the auditor actually said to the guy when he came in. I hope none of my employers ever treat me that way.

So Augusta went down to the library, intending to use her newfound free time to do some research for one of her projects, and I went down to my next class, which also was supposed to start at 2:00 PM - intro to radio. There I found Professor Hillyer - my communications professor for the last several semesters - talking to the professor for my radio class. Turns out that the other guys who were in the class all dropped it after the first week, leaving just me in attendence.

Now, before I explain this further, I think need to elaborate a little on this radio class - it's actually more of an internship; class is held once a week, and then there's a "lab" once a week as well, which consists of heading to the radio station where the professor works at 5:00 AM and staying there working with her until 9:00 AM, four hours later. Now, as good as "radio internship" looks on a college transcript or a resume, I was never too thrilled by the whole lab setup for what only counts as a three credit course. Nor was I especially enthusiastic about the class itself.

So anyway, today, I talked to the professor after Hillyer left, and the deal is that she doesn't want to come to the college every week to teach a single student (me), which is of course perfectly reasonable. So she wants to effectively cancel the class portion of the internship, and instead have me come in to the station more than once a week (like two or three times instead). Still at bizarre hours that require me to get up at four in the morning. Now, I just don't want to be devoting all that time to a class that I'm not particularly enjoying so far and don't find to be notably interesting when I also have a job, the school newspaper, and other classes to worry about. So I think I'm almost definitely going to drop radio, and take an art history PowerPack class in April instead, which fulfills the social science elective (which I would be losing by dropping radio) that I need to have in order to graduate in May.

Honestly, if that is what I end up doing, it'll be a huge load off of my shoulders - I tend to do very well in PowerPack classes, and although I'd basically be blowing three weekends in April, after that it would be done and over with, instead of doing this radio thing multiple times a week from now until May. So that's got me feeling altogether more comfortable about the whole situation than I have for the last couple of weeks.

In non-collegiate news, I recently got word that one of my cousins will be coming down from New York this coming Sunday and staying the week, which will be nice - I haven't heard much from her lately, so it'll be good to catch up. And of course, I still can't seem to get in touch with Michael, although I've basically decided that I won't be holding the LGN party until May or June anyway, just because it'll be easier to get everybody together when they don't have classes and coursework to be worrying about.

And most unfortunately, all THREE of my batteries for Cobalt, my laptop, seem to have died simultaneously, rendering me unable to use it without the power cable. I'm hoping Dad will be able to scrounge up another battery or two from the mass of spare computer parts in the attic, but if he can't, honestly, at least it was the batteries and not the power cable. On my last laptop things stopped working the other way around, so I can tell you from experience that good batteries don't mean crap when they're dead and you can't charge them.