There it is on the college schedule, the last class.

The class no one will teach. 

The class that I will teach until a teacher is found.

It is the third week of the semester.

The class I speak of is sixteen miles away from where I work all day.  The lack of a teacher forces me to drop everything at quarter-to-five, get in my car, fight throught rush-hour traffic for sixteen miles, and then teach as best I can.

Because there is no teacher.

I didn't want to schedule this class.  I didn't want to run this class.  But because this class is at Thomas Hall--the famous campus with no students that must have students; the campus where five students make a class and it's always touch and go through the middle of the first week of the semester; the campus we don't think of until students have had enough time to register (sometimes until the start of the third week of class)--this class will survive.

I hear of other colleges, many universities, stripping schedules to the bone and then subjecting their students to the horror of core requirements filling up and shutting these same students out; to students dropped if they are absent the first day.  No, not us, not at Thomas Hall.  Whereas we run pretty much everything we schedule at Brookway Campus, inside Brookway Mall (hence the name of this blog), at Thomas Hall we strain and groan to produce five or six students per class, just so we can say, yes, our millions were justified. 

But: in order got get to five or six students, we have to leave the classes in limbo interminably, neither staffing nor cutting, just hoping.  Our president, Herlinda Garces, has demanded we leave classes open sometimes into the second week, not cutting, not staffing, not teaching, maybe nudging things forward (umm, taking attendance, taking a diagnostic, asking students what classes they've previously taken) while we wait for the magic fifth student.  Or sixth.

Always, in the classroom the questions are too probing.  My answers require translation.

Q:  Does this class even exist?
A: Of course it does!
(Translation: No comment.)

There are 25 colleges and universities within an hour's drive of where I now sit.  To my knowledge, we pay the least of any of them.  We also--as we hold classes open, waiting for the magic fifth student, or the sixth--staff last. 

So: we are left with pursuing the leavings of our competitors, who pay more and hire sooner; we are left offering eighty dollars per week to those with Master's degrees in English who have not been snapped up by insitutions of higher learning who often pay twice as much.

So: I'm left with the last class.

A half-hour commute to an industrial park at rush hour. A class with six students. 

So, after a full day's work,  I get in my car. I fight the parking lot that is the forty-minute commute to our campus-in-the-floodplain.  I teach the class for free.  And I confront the questions.

Q: Does this class even exist?