The struggles of keeping everything running at the academy have really started to wear on me. I've now done two staff development sessions, and a month has passed. The aspect of the academy that I was most excited for, teaching others to develop and improve on existing technology, has been almost entirely on the backburner. Part of that I attribute to the fact that this is only the first semester of courses, so obviously the course material itself is going to be introductory. I can't really expect rapid development in that regard.

However, I'm incredibly busy just keeping things from falling apart, which makes the lack of progress feel worse. The lack of a formal education standard prior to entering the academy means that there is extreme variance between individual pupils' skills. If we were to require certain base level skills, the pool of potential applicants would drop dramatically, and we'd honestly lose out on a lot of highly talented individuals in certain fields.

This was a main topic of discussion at the staff development meetings. Some of what I had deemed to just be poor teaching behavior previously was partially justified in retrospect. When some pupils lack certain foundational knowledge, it'd be detrimental to the entire rest of the class to have to wait for it to be explained. What we ultimately decided on was that for this semester, every instructor should keep an ongoing list of every foundational skill they've seen lacking in pupils. This year, the classes will be slowed down to accommodate that lack of foundation.

Moving forward, however, we're going to have a foundational skills assessment for incoming pupils, and offer remedial courses in those skills. Depending on the number of remedial skills you lack, you might end up having an extra year added to your schooling to fit all the necessary courses in. Due to this change, however, I've decided that, should someone drop out in their first year or two depending on the amount of remedial courses they'd be required to take, then we won't attempt to penalize leaving the academy early. This is because they really wouldn't be learning enough about our technology to leak anything they couldn't learn through experience elsewhere in that time, which is the primary reason we want to penalize people who would drop out in the later years at the academy.

All these changes do make me feel a bit bad for this first batch of pupils, however. Their schedules, expectations, classroom styles, and class content has really been shifting all over the place. It hasn't helped that up until recently, there wasn't any form of real entertainment for the dwarves either. The handful of demon students have been content, which I expected, but the dwarves had started to take to binge drinking on their days off in the dormitories, which led to multiple instances of damaged furniture and even a few cases of structural damage that needed to be repaired.

I'm hoping that the recent addition of a gambling hall within the town will at least direct some of that energy into a single location that is better suited to handle that kind of behavior. We've already adjusted the rules such that future damage to furniture or buildings will have to be paid for by the individual committing the infraction. Previously, since almost everything was paid for, we were sort of operating on an honor system, but it's clear that that was a bad idea.

Another two months in, just when it seemed like everything was finally starting to settle down a bit, we had a pretty nasty storm come through. The rain and winds were quite brutal, and there were a handful of mudslides around both islands. Thanks to sea walls that had been built, there wasn't much tidal surge flooding damage, but we still ended up having two weeks without classes. The first week was disrupted due to how bad the weather was, and the second week was filled with cleanup and repair. Thankfully, no one was killed, though there were a few injuries.

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I'm thankful that this level of storm tends to only impact us about once a decade. Historically, they were quite detrimental to our development, but we've managed to adapt our infrastructure to be able to withstand at least some of the brunt of the storm, allowing us to bounce back quite quickly. The last time a major storm came through, we ended up also having to deal with a demon invasion, so I'm hoping that isn't correlated. When Zaka arrived on Kembora initially, it was also during a storm event like that. We've had other storms this size with no demon attacks though, so it could all be coincidence. I can't even really begin to theorize a reason why they'd be causally related though.

The storm at least gave me an excuse to not have to focus all of my mental energy on the same academy based tasks I've been focusing on thus far. I still spent quite a bit of time on it, but I was able to spend some of my time doing repairs, which oddly felt like a break to me. I'm quite glad that we selected for the most compliant of students for the first batch, because we've basically decided that they're going to likely all be here for an extra year to finish their training. Those who needed the remedial training were fine with it, but there were quite a few pupils who were clearly upset. If they had been a more hot-headed group, I would have fully expected a protest or even a riot.

As it was, they basically took out their frustration in other ways, like skipping classes to go gamble and drink. Initial punishments that I handed out for this behavior were very lenient, since I did understand their frustration. The situation actually is a bit worse because there isn't money involved. If money was involved, they'd likely feel more justified in their frustration, but because it is almost entirely paid for, they're stuck without a strong justification for their emotional response. This is one of the many benefits of having money tied to things, since it gives an obvious route of recourse between two parties when things go awry.

From my perspective as the person running everything, it's actually to my benefit that we aren't charging anything, because I'm not really bound by any contracts preventing me from making changes as I see fit. The only individuals paying anything are the nobles, and they're technically only paying for the housing, to which no changes have been made. Eventually, the academy will probably become a paid experience with scholarships being offered as a way to not only make it sustainable, but also to provide that contractual obligation between parties that helps to provide remediation. That's probably over a decade away though, and by then I expect we'll have worked out most of the problems we're running into now, thus standardizing the experience.

As the first semester finally came to a close things had changed quite a lot at the academy. We had a feedback survey that we had all the students complete, and we also offered for anyone to drop out if they wanted to. Given how tumultuous everything was this semester, we also provided free rides back to the mainland for this break, even though we normally would charge for it.

Overall just about a quarter of the pupils dropped out, leaving us with only 311 students still enrolled. Given how everything had gone thus far, I expected more to leave. That said, we had plenty of feedback to comb through and a lot of changes to make to things. Much of the feedback was related to things that we already had plans to fix in the next semester, but would have been too difficult to implement in the middle of an existing one.

A handful of students decided to stay on the island over the break as well. They were mostly students from the remote areas of the dwarven continent who, if they returned, would likely have to spend more than half the break just traveling. Unfortunately for them, the only work we really had available during this break was largely manual labor related to construction, so there weren't a lot of options for them. When they have a bit more knowledge under their belts, I intend to have study related work available, but as it stands, the plan for the faculty during this break is to have extra staff development and department meetings to get ready for both the next semester and next school year.

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