For the faculty at least, the break was anything but an actual break. I hope that future breaks will be a bit more laid back, but I've realized that, at the very least, the next four or so years will require quite a bit of extra work. The reason being that large amounts of class content and scheduling needs to be reworked after we actually have students take a course and see how they perform in it. I feel like we'll develop an intuition for it after a few semesters, but until then, we're going to be doing a lot of reworking of classes and schedules.

Part of the break, I worked with the faculty to devise new positions that we'll need in order to accommodate the remedial courses that we planned out. Over the next break, I'll be conducting interviews alongside some of the faculty to start filling those positions. By then, we'll probably have a list of even more faculty we'll need. Since most of the remedial courses are in more basic knowledge areas, I've designated an area for construction for a building where they'll be held. This way basic courses won't end up taking more specialized rooms that we had built for other areas of study.

One of the other main things we worked on while we had the time was getting everything planned out for prospective students for next year, since we'll have new documents to send out. We plan on reaching out to previous applicants with all the new information on how we're running things as well. If we didn't have our paper mills, this would have been quite the task. If we hadn't hired as many scribes as we did, I'd have considered making a printing press to speed things up. As it stands, I think I'd like to leave development of the printing press to be a future break task that I work with engineering students on.

Near the end of break, pupils began returning from their break, along with about 50 letters indicating that even more pupils had decided not to return. We're down to 266 students in the first class, which is closer to what I had expected after I offered students the opportunity to drop out. We also received word that the potential paths for the railway have been selected, but railway construction has stalled. Details are being negotiated with Kao, but in essence, the cost is going to go up one way or another. Either a large amount of terraforming is going to have to be done, or some individual's farms and houses need to be demolished to make way for the rail in order to adhere with the rail guidelines for safety. I'm really hoping that this second semester goes better than the first.

It would have been hard for the second semester to start out as bad as the first one did, so I'm happy to say that we managed to avoid that potential outcome. There were still plenty of hiccups in the first two months, but they were more minor than the first semester. We only devised 3 new remedial courses to supplement our curriculum for new students, compared to the 9 we determined in the same period of the first semester.

Unfortunately, we haven't been building out very much new entertainment, which has led to some complaints again. It hasn't been as bad as the complaints and resultant behavior during the first semester though. Mainly, I've had to direct construction resources towards the necessary buildings for the remedial courses and staff housing, so other projects are on hold until then. To placate the staff and students, however, I've had a questionnaire drafted to have people fill out what sort of entertainment they want constructed next. Once necessary buildings are complete, that should give us a direction on what to build next.

I wish I had more time to directly interact with the student body outside of the one course I'm teaching each week, but my schedule is too packed to manage much more than I already do. Since I'm the one with the vision for what the academy will eventually become, I really need to be the one in charge until things finally fall into place. My hope is that in a few years time I can promote someone else to be in charge of the academy, and I can shift my focus towards advanced science and engineering. I'd really like if I could work with other faculty over breaks to really mentor development in different fields. Unfortunately, right now all that mentoring energy is focused on just keeping things afloat.

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We haven't quite reached the end of the semester yet, but we've gotten all the applications in for faculty and students for next year, so I'm having to take as much time as I can reviewing them in preparation for the break. Quite a few prospective students withdrew their applications, which I expected given how well the first year has gone. Most of those who withdrew though were already quite low on the priority list from the previous year, so I could see it as the feeling being mutual.

The main feedback reason I've heard for this is that a number of people had expected that they'd basically be learning right away how to do some of the complicated processes I've developed, and if they'll just be learning basic things then they aren't interested. To be fair, it is possible to learn a single complicated task over the course of a few months. I've been doing that kind of training for demons for decades now. That isn't the purpose of this academy though. I'm not doing this to train new operators for existing processes. I'm doing it to train people to create new processes, which is a far more complicated endeavor. Even those who are here to learn history and politics, the goal isn't to just train them to be the same as the previous generation, the goal is to make them better than them, which is a hard task.

So, this semester we only have 1600 or so applicants, which is still plenty to choose from. The faculty options, by comparison, are more plentiful, because we're hiring for remedial courses, which means the necessary skills to teach were simply less. Compared to being a student, faculty work doesn't seem to have as bad of a reputation, perhaps because no one from the faculty went back to the mainland over the last break. In either case, I've meticulously planned out my own upcoming break to be able to properly conduct the necessary interviews while still handling all the peripheral work that I'll need to do.

I got word that the railway construction has begun on the mainland as well, so they must have sorted out their problems one way or another. Kembora has also increased their iron output and increased some other manufacturing processes as well. It feels a bit odd leaving all that development up to others, given how much of a hand I've had in it in the past.

After the second semester concluded, we had another 22 students drop out, leaving our total students returning for next year at 244. Despite this, we still plan on only bringing in 400 students. After this year, we'll evaluate this policy, but given how rocky the first year was, we felt it would be a good idea to not overdo it. The first year students, unfortunately, are sort of in a limbo as far as where their education is compared to the incoming class. They've basically only got one real semester's worth of learning under their belt, and its a bit of a hodgepodge of new course contents based on how we've decided to split things up moving forward.

The incoming class is going to hopefully have far more homogeneous class skills, since we'll be dividing individuals into remedial and non-remedial courses in different subjects. There was some discussion as to whether we should simply re-sort the first class this way next year, but ultimately we decided against it. While it could potentially benefit those students to be handled in that way, it actually benefits the long term of the academy more if we keep their structure this way. By having such a wide breadth of student skill in those classes, we're getting a much better idea of what the upper and lower limits are for those particular courses. That lets us more easily adjust and split courses moving forward based on what sections a larger portion of the class struggles with.

It may not be perfectly fair to those students, but if we consider the longer term success of the academy, its the quickest way to stabilize the system as a whole. We also don't actually know if our new class method will work better or not, and we won't have good data on it until after this first semester of the upcoming year. As such it'd be hasty for us to change the existing structure entirely. This way, we'll collect data from a new class on the new method, and the old class on the old method. We will, however, have to be careful about survivorship bias in those responses. The remaining students in the old class are already those who were willing to stick it out, so their responses will have to be weighted against the previous responses of those who dropped out already. Statistics and data analysis is such an advanced form of mathematics that it's going to be a while before I can teach anyone else how to properly analyze that sort of data, unfortunately.

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