Today begins your teaching for the fall. You sit here in anticipation, a bit like the upward climb on the first big hill of a roller coaster at a dubious travelling carnival. The other side might not have passed inspection and the beams might be rotten.

Already, freshman have innundated you with e-mails, having misinterpreted your general instruction to indicate their class and meeting time when they contact you as a command to send you a message right now indicating their class and meeting time. At least you know how they think and which ones anxiously plan to do well.

Somewhere along the way, in juggling three different schedules — the T half of classes, the Thursday half of classes, the classes that meet on even numbered weeks, and the classes that meet on odd numbered weeks — you mixed up even and odd numbered in a document. Two students alerted you to that, so you had to do a quick fix. By “quick” you mean find the document. Find the mistake. Fix it in its program. Scan for other mistakes. Save as its program. Save as a pdf. Remove the original file from Canvas. Replace with new file. Move new file to correct place in sequence of files for the week. By “quick” you mean about 15 minutes for each class.

Nothing is “quick” online. Everything requires multiple steps.

Mo’ technology, mo’ problems was the first draft of the lyric, you are certain.

You remember the days when all of your preparation for class went into learning more material, devising new ways to present it. You remember that you enjoyed the use of powerpoint as a visual supplement, but most of the work went toward the material. Now, the majority of your time goes towards demands for ever more detailed powerpoints, and more and more of this Canvas crap.

“Easily accessible,” you have actually learned, is really the new, “file it away in a cabinet and forget about it.”

So, now you must get dressed — easily the most creative thing you will have done in a week (aside from knitting a Phrygian cap while watching old movies in the evenings) — go to campus, loaded down with books, find the cleaning supplies that you forgot to pick up last week when they did a mass distribution (again, your mistake), hope that everyone got to the right class at the right time, and get them all oriented.

You just learned that you can’t bring coffee into the classroom.

Take bets on when you snap like a dried-out twig. When, why, and will it come before we all end up all online?

You put your own money on the week of September 21: first assignments and therefore first rounds of grading due, online conference and therefore Zoom and preparations for conference due, book review due the next week, along with next round of grading due.

You are a ticking bomb of unfocused resentment, waiting to go off.