Unexpected Consequences

Peg misses regular blogging. With so few readers it wouldn't do to upset any of them.

So today I discovered an unanticipated consequence to my mother passing away. It's a sort of Rube Goldberg of unrelated dependencies (and seeing as how my Basic PTM class has roughly 11 hours to finish their Rube-Goldberg Machine it is only fitting. I wonder how they're doing?) but it is so.

See since I missed quite a bit of the top of the semester, and seeing as how I return not quite capable of full duty cycle somewhere along the way we decided that this semester could do without two of my classes. One would be for Sophomores: Scenery Fabrication & Installation, and one would be for Juniors: Entertainment Rigging.

Actually, Entertainment Rigging was once upon a time Advanced Entertainment Rigging. But that's a different story.

So the consequence. I'm getting there.

Today I plowed through sending out what are sometimes referred to here as "The Letters of Doom." That's student shorthand for an academic warning letter. Students in the SOD that don't get decent marks are in danger of getting dropped, so when those poor marks show up they get a warning letter - hence the "doom" dimension. Anyway, these aren't really letters of doom because they are for mid-semester grades, which in our world are ephemeral and disappear almost as soon as they are published.

Here's the discovery though. Since I am not teaching two of my classes, many sophomores and juniors in the program are not taking my classes, and therefore some portion of these students are not getting the lousy marks they inevitably would have been earning in my classes. And so as a direct consequence of my mother passing away, fewer CMU SOD PTM students will end this semester on academic warning.

It is a long way to go for a silver lining, I'll give you that one.