I turned in final grades for the online English course I’ve been teaching this summer. A typical spring or fall semester is 14-16 weeks. This summer term was eight and change. That’s a lot of papers shuffling back and forth in a very short amount of time. But I made it, and so did most of the students. And now I’m looking forward to a bit of a break before the fall semester gets under way. Fall starts on August 20th. That gives me some time to revise my comp II class and finish developing my American Lit II class (a new one, for me).
My “real” job has been keeping me busy as well. We recently rolled out Office 2007, and now we are doing our best to train the six-hundred-some-odd employees on the new features. Excel and Access are my areas of focus, so I’ve been teaching hour-long “boot camp” classes to help people familiar with previous versions of these applications get up to speed with the latest versions. That’s quite a challenge, actually, as Microsoft has, for the first time since Office 97, radically redesigned the GUI of these apps. In the case of Excel, the changes aren’t as radical as a glance at the new “fluent” interface might indicate. But Access has been redesigned in a much more thorough way, and I can safely say that it is a far better application now for the effort.
After the roll out training, I’ll be busy revamping the series of Excel and Access courses that I normally teach. So I’ll be neck deep in Excel and Access all fall.