Maybe This Year Will Be Better Than The Last

Phew.

It’s nearly midnight on Friday night, and this week has been quite a journey.

For the past three days, I’ve gotten up around 6am and worked until past 10pm. The week before a new semester starts is always chaotic and full of meetings and last-minute prep and problem-solving for all kinds of issues that nobody realized existed until that very moment.

And also problem-solving for issues that you’ve been putting off for six months until you “had the time to deal with them”, but when that time never materialized you just waited until the very last possible moment. Plenty of those as well.

I also somehow found the time to drive out to Mentor for a second round of tacos from Senor Masa (the chicken was incredible, y’all).

All of that is to say that I am officially ready for the Fall Semester to begin on Monday. I’m teaching three classes this fall, and they’re all tweaked and adjusted and live for students to access as of tonight. I’m taking two doctoral classes this fall as well, and they’re both open to me as well (though I’m leaving them alone until Monday). I have two new adjunct faculty members who are teaching classes in my program for the first time this semester, and I feel like they’re both ready to go. I also have several established adjunct faculty members who are teaching more classes this semester than ever, or who are teaching classes they’ve never taught before. All in all, it’s a huge amount of transition. This is the first semester in the last four years when Kellie hasn’t been teaching in my program, which required a lot of shuffling around of classes, particularly because I’m trying to be kind and give myself grace rather than offering myself the kind of challenges I’m usually looking for.

Everyone has stepped up and gotten oriented and done the work to get ready. I’ve spent several hours with several of them this week, and I’m confident that our students are going to have a great semester with this team teaching them. I really am the luckiest program director ever to have such an incredible group of faculty who are excellent social workers and are also really passionate about teaching and imparting some of the skills and knowledge they have to the next generation of folks. I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with, genuinely.

My program started with a few meetings that were held almost exactly seven years ago, through the fall of 2019. It was just an idea back then, and has now turned into something truly amazing. It’s such an awe-inspiring thing for me to look back over notes from those meetings and see what it’s all become. And we’re just getting started! We should hopefully receive initial accreditation in October, which will represent a whole lot of money spent by the university, hundreds of hours of work, thousands of pages of documentation written, and a bunch of people putting a whole lot of effort into making this thing a reality.

We have more than 150 majors (approaching 190-ish, give or take)! Students taking social work classes this fall are coming from 21 different counties! Our in-person classes have expanded to six different Kent State Regional Campuses! We have 29 students entering field placements, our biggest group ever! And 100% of our students who have taken the social work exam have passed it on their first try so far!

We have dozens of students who have graduated and become licensed social workers and who are out there making a real difference in their communities—and it all started with an idea. Sometimes I sit and think about that—how many really great ideas have people had that they’ve never followed through on? How many of them have YOU, yourself, had? It’s a whole lot easier to look back on that idea from this side of it, seven years later, than it was seven years ago to visualize it turning into this whole huge structure that is living and breathing and educating a ton of people in actual tangible ways. I don’t know how we’ve made all these pieces fit into place, but we have.

And I know this is a recurrent theme for me, but at the risk of boring you all, I just find myself so grateful for being right here, right now, getting to do this exact thing at this exact moment in time.

I wrote a letter to my students this time last year, and published it on this Substack. It’s still up, if you ever want to go check it out. In that letter, I spoke about all the uncertainty of the higher education landscape in Ohio as a result of the Ohio GOP passing sweeping legislation which has caused deep harm in our colleges and universities. I spoke about how we will all continue to teach the things we need to teach our students in order to make them good social workers, despite the legislature trying their best to intimidate us into shutting up. I spoke about how I’m going to follow the law, as ridiculous and awful as it is, and still provide students with the best possible social work education I can. I think I’ve done all those things—we’ve done all those things.

I knew last academic year was going to be a tough one—but I didn’t know WHY it was going to be so tough. My preparation did not take into account the possibility that Kellie would die midway through the year and that everything in my life would change (mostly for the worst), but I’m still here. Getting ready for another year to start. Considering how far I’ve come.

And, above all else, missing her.

Enjoy your weekend,

Matt