Is it ever ethical to skimp on comments?

I've found myself pondering this question today. Is it ever appropriate to give few or no comments on a student paper? I don't mean for a particular assignment and treating everyone the same. What I'm wondering is whether it's ever appropriate to give extensive comments on most of the papers in a given batch but less on others.

I find myself wondering this because I'm pretty sure I just marked a paper where I spent more time reading, interpreting (a monumental task at times), and making comments on a paper than I think the student did. In this case, this student has also attended only 3 of the 7 weeks of term. The paper shows it too because we talked about each of the elements that were supposed to be present in the paper over the last 7 weeks and most of them were absent from this paper.

I know I shouldn't take it personally and I don't when students decide not to attend class. But I do find myself resenting the time (and brain power) I spent trying to figure out what this student was saying and then trying to provide constructive advice to perform better. I felt like I was investing more in this than the student was. And I was seriously tempted to just slap a letter grade on it and skip any comments.

In the end I did write comments. I hope the student takes them to heart. But somehow I doubt it. I don't feel any better for it though.

Is that a light at the end of the tunnel? The professor's dilemma

The start of semester is always a bit of a roller coaster ride for me, as it is for most academics. Regardless of how much prep I've started before classes begin, it always feels like I'm falling behind as soon as Labour Day is over. (It doesn't help that the JIL starts a week or two after classes and the research and letter writing for that takes a HUGE amount of time.) But by the end of September, things are usually starting to clear up and the initial rush of preparation lulls a bit before the rush builds again with midterms and other assignments.

So I'm seeing some light at the end of the tunnel and it's a great thing to see. But now I have a dilemma.

If I work through much of the weekend, I will definitely be on top of things and feel better next week. But I've already worked through the last two weekends and am starting to feel the effects. If I take time off and enjoy myself (a hike invite is sitting in my inbox, for example), then I will be no further ahead and run the risk of falling further behind.

Decisions, decisions...

Thoughts (on) Planning and Wandering

I came across this article on shrinking your carbon footprint: Salina Journal News: Shrinking footprints
(which incidentally says almost nothing about what individuals can do to reduce their footprint, so seems misleading). But it got me thinking. Bear with me, this will take a bit of time, but I should get there by the end of the post.

Yesterday, I drove away from my house twice - to two different high-density areas - to meet two different people for two different purposes. And in contemplating my energy expenditure for both those trips (small, given my car, but noticeable nonetheless), I realized that I could have shrunk that footprint if I had known the details of both meetings earlier than I did. I first drove to one place early in the afternoon, had my meeting, then drove home. The drive took about 25 minutes each way, which means I not only was burning fuel, but also spending time rather unproductively in operating my car.

The second (early evening) meeting was only organized that afternoon (in fact, I made the arrangements as I was waiting for the first meeting to start). It was further away, but actually took about the same time to get there. Once I was there, my husband also came with his car because he was coming directly from work. Which means we drove two vehicles back from the same place. You might see where I'm going with this.

Had I known when/where I was meeting people yesterday, I could have organized things so that I only left once and went from one meeting to the next. Instead, there was enough time between the two that I returned home and worked for a few hours in-between.

In addition, had I known that we would have the second meeting and where it was taking place, I could have used public transit to go to the first meeting, move to the second one, then get a ride home. Of course in this city there's a disincentive to actually go with public transit because it would have cost just as much (and possibly a bit more) to buy two transit tickets as it did to burn the fuel I used in my car. (I realize there are other costs associated with the car option, but it is so ridiculously fuel-efficient that the numbers come out very close. And that's without factoring in the time cost of the less-rapid public transit option.)

What I'm getting at in thinking about this is that it's not just about the car or the public transit. Some of what I could have done yesterday to reduce my carbon footprint depended on very social elements of the day, including waiting for a call from the organizer of the second meeting.

In fact, much of my week has been this way. I did manage on Monday to book the two meetings I had back to back, but on Tuesday, I ended up again going home between commitments because I'd had to book the appointment I had in the afternoon weeks ahead of time and then couldn't change it to a time that made more efficient use of both my time and energy expenditure.

Now, I realize that I can't always organize my week efficiently like that, and I'd hate to be so rigid that everything has to be accurately planned out ahead of time. But it struck me as I was thinking about car travel and footprints, and then about my time and my anxiety that I will not get everything that needs to be done finished in time before the semester starts, that maybe we're not talking enough about behaviour changing when we talk about carbon footprints.

We talk about changing light bulbs, and car pooling and getting more public transit options to encourage people to use them, and yet at the same time, I suspect my week is like many other people's in that we spend a lot of time and energy moving around inefficiently, rather than making it more effective. My teaching schedule this term is an example. Because I teach in two different departments, it's been hard to concentrate all the classes on two or three days. Instead, I teach all five days of the week and for four of those days, I'm only teaching one class on that day. That means I'm going to the school every day, a fairly inefficient use of my time, especially since my job does not require me to be physically present when I'm not teaching. (It also means I will need to spend an hour in my car or three hours on public transit each day. Guess which option I'm leaning toward?)

But to return to the question of the social influences on energy consumption. What if we started thinking about energy consumption as more than just kilowatts of electricity or litres of fuel? What if we started thinking about it in terms of hours of energy expenditure? Or started talking about efficiencies of movement in our cities? What if we thought not just about how roads or bus lines connect with each other, but also paid more attention to how people really move through our cities rather than some abstract idea of how we think they might move through them?

I know this city's transit is organized on the assumption everyone wants to go downtown. But lots of us don't. And then we don't use transit because it doesn't go where we want to go without taking us through downtown first (this is why transit is 3x longer than driving to get to my place of employment). Maybe that focus on centrality is efficient on paper, but it certainly isn't for individuals users. But maybe if we started thinking about people individually, we could get somewhere (literally and figuratively!) Given the kinds of geographic mapping technologies we have and computing power, should we not be able to find ways of making an individual's days more efficient by creating systems that do more than just assume everyone is going to one place?

And isn't there a way that I, as one of those individuals, can find a way to make my own movement through the city more efficient, both in terms of my time and my energy expenditure by organizing my days and activities more efficiently? Why does it seem like the more technologies we have for organizing things, the less efficient we seem to get? Perhaps our carbon footprint is a result of social inefficiencies as much as it is structural ones? I'll be thinking about how my social connections affect my energy consumption over the next while, for sure. It might not yield any fascinating insights, but, then again, perhaps it might.

It's August!!!

Those are not exclamation marks of joy. They are exclamation marks of panic. How did it get to be August already?!

What this of course means is that - as usual - I will not have completed all the things I wish to by the end of the summer and need to review my to-do list with an eye to prioritizing the things that absolutely must get done in the next three weeks. But even after I've crossed some stuff off the list (it will have to get done eventually, just not in August), it still seems pretty darn long:

Productive Disagreement

I'm in the processing of preparing a paper for a conference that came up pretty much at the last minute. Those of you who also write conference papers on short notice know what I'm going through - the great idea, the anguish of trying to translate that idea into words, the endless search for the right way (or at least a good way) of expressing those ideas. Sometimes it gets a bit frustrating trying to translate those thoughts into words that would make sense to other people.

The argument is pretty basic. The abstract I sent in outlines it:

The futuristic (Nano)visions of Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber

Most visions of human technology of the future extrapolate the technological developments of the current moment to suggest that development will continue to penetrate human existence, enabling humanity to accomplish more while it also becomes more reliant upon those technologies. Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber begins on such a world, a world penetrated by nanotechnology to such an extent that the humans living on Toussaint feel it gives them a “sixth sense” even if it really is only a “crutch” (Hopkinson 328). However, as the action of the novel switches to New Half-Way Tree, it ultimately reveals that the interconnectedness that the “Granny Nanny” web of nanomites provides a poor account of the diversity of human experience without the stories and the relationships that also make up the life of humans.

As a technology, the nanomites of Hopkinson’s novel envision one way that the nanotechnologies under development in contemporary technoculture might affect human lives. In Nanovision: Engineering the Future, Colin Milburn suggests that nanotechnology is built on such promises, writing that, “the possibilities opened by the capability to restructure and rearrange matter at the nanoscale are immense…. the world itself can be transformed, our lived realities made completely malleable, guaranteeing that the future will be radically and immeasurably different from the present" (6). Milburn further argues that this vision of the transformative nature of nanotechnology is closely affiliated with the imagination, so that writing about nanotechnology is science-fictional in nature.

What makes Hopkinson’s novel unusual is that it counters the technophillic adulation of nanotechnology often presented within science fiction texts. Like Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean, Midnight Robber suggests that enabling technologies do not need to be machinic or divorced from the biological reality of human life. Adopting a Caribbean patois language and attitude, the text provides a refreshing alternate to the masculine, hard science fiction that characterizes writing about nanotechnologies. At the same time that the novel valorizes hard work, relationships, forgiveness, and storytelling over reliance on technology to manage the business of everyday life, the ending suggests a role for nanotechnology that does not unduly intrude or cause dependence for the humans of New Half-Way Tree.

I was doing a good bit of flailing with this one - there's only about a page written so far - so I did what any other writer trying to put together an argument does when stalled: more research! In this case, I found a paper on the same text - Midnight Robber, slightly different idea - web of communication rather than nanotechnology, but still pretty close.

The great thing about reading this paper is that I disagreed with so much of what the writer was arguing. We agree on a number of points, but I felt like this particular writer ignored the entire last half of the book. Which got me thinking about the last half of the book in ways that I hadn't before. And I actually thought some interesting (at least to me!) thoughts about that half of it.

So, I feel reinvigorated for writing this thing. It still needs to get written, and there will be plenty of staring at the screen, tugging at hair, wandering around the house while trying to work out the argument, but I've got a jumping off point now, which is what I really needed.

Productive disagreement, indeed!

When a Bad Experience turns Good

A little while ago, I presented a paper on a single author's work at a conference and it went badly.

It was scheduled for 8am and not only was the audience only 4 people, the other two presenters didn't show up. So I moderated my own paper. Awkward. Especially since two of the audience members were only there to see the paper of a no show.

As I had recently experienced a major setback just before this, I felt like the whole conference was a bust and was really a bit angry that none of the people who I had begun to think of as friends, not just colleagues, who  usually present in this area and might show up were even there. Not even the area chair.

But. A couple of months later, I got an email from that author I was talking about. Apparently the one person in the audience who knew the novel I was talking about also knew its author and told the same about the presentation. The author asked if I would mind sharing the paper. I said, no problem, and sent it as well as some other conference work I'd done on other books. Then we emailed exchanged for a bit, which was really useful because it gave me a chance to find out what the author's perspective was on things I was seeing in the book (not that I necessarily always give that credit; my favourite prof used to always say, 'writers lie' even about their own work). I of course also thought it was kinda cool to email chat with a real author, since I only know a handful of authors, and none of this one's stature (not that it's huge; just bigger than anyone I've met to date). So, yes, I was a bit impressed that an author might take the time to ask about what us academics are writing.

But it also goes to show that even what you think are some of the lows of a career can turn out okay. You just never know....

Ultimate Geek Club

You know how book clubs are cool?

Okay, maybe you don't think they're cool. That means you might want to skip this post. Or. You might want to read on and hear about what would probably be your idea of the worst possible kind of book club. Well, either way...

A couple of friends and I decided we needed to get our theory game on and put together a theory reading book club.

Yup. Theory and book club together.

We've begun with Elizabeth Grosz's Time Travels: Feminism, Nature and Power.

I've gotta say it's been a really good experience so far. Not the book. There are several places where Grosz sets up strawmen as caricatures of what those ideas really are just to knock them down. And that's a bit annoying (especially since she picked on science fiction and science studies - two things I can say I know a little bit about).

But getting to talk to other people about the book, hearing their understanding of it, has really helped me understand some of the parts of the book better than if I had read it alone. And it reminds me of the best parts of doctoral seminars where you get to share ideas with really smart people. I mean, you get some of that at conferences, but at conferences you have to put together a formal presentation and often people don't know what you're talking about (that's the worst, isn't it? When you've slaved over a paper for months and then no one in the audience knows the book/theory you're talking about and you get no questions whatsoever.) In seminars, or in our academic book club, you all are all the same page and get to share cool ideas.

So. It may be one of the geekiest clubs ever, but I'm liking it!

"Glacial" just seems too fast for such responsiveness

Got two job rejection letters today. Two. To which I applied, oh, seven months ago. Seven.

For goodness sake! I know that you only sent out all the rejection letters once you had a signed contract in hand with your selected candidate, but really, if I didn't make your first cut, why couldn't you have mentioned so then? That would've been what, November? maybe December?

In the real world when I worked HR, we either advertised that we would not contact unsuccessful applicants, or contacted them after we set the first interview schedule. Because, really, if you didn't make the cut the first go round, we don't really want you. We always first-interviewed 6-8 people for one position, and if you made it into that first pool, there was no guarantee you'd make it to the second interview or to an offer. But more importantly, if, for some bizarre reason, I interviewed 8 people in a first interview and found them all ill-suited to the position, I wouldn't go back to my pile. I'd repost. Now, I realize that's not quite possible in the academy because you risk losing the line if your search isn't successful, but seriously, if you went through a dozen first interviews and then selected three for campus visits, what would be the chances you would return to the original pile if none of those worked?

I'm willing to bet zero.

So, seriously people, it's almost insulting to get a letter this late in the game, like you thought I still had a chance. I'm not that dense. I got the message loud and clear when I didn't hear from you by January (and when the job wiki made it clear you'd contacted interviewees a month before that).

While we're on the topic, don't be so cheap that you send a letter that is on a photocopied sheet of your letterhead. Seriously, how much would it cost to at least use the real deal? I did. Why can't you?

A Different World

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't mind roaming this world for a world. Getting a bit tired of the one I inhabit.

Almost over

Where to begin?

The end of semester is keeping me busy. Our exam period runs for two full weeks, and even though I only have three exams to invigilate (and then grade of course), they started on the first day and will end on the penultimate day of exams. This was actually good because I squeezed in a conference between the first and second exams. I was thankful I didn't have to get a substitute to cover the exams because we had two other faculty members who needed coverage for exams because of family emergencies and I think it took some time to find help for the second one (I helped the first one).

I also learned that I wasn't selected for an interview for a position that I thought was ideal. That one stung, probably worse than any other has because I've worked in the department before and they'd seemed happy with my performance. But no interview.

Nothing like an event like that to get you rethinking strategy. It's no mid-life crisis or anything, but my attitude toward the job market has changed slightly as a result and I've realized that it's going to be a bit harder than I thought it was (and I don't think I harboured any misconceptions about how hard it would be). So I'm mostly stuck inside my own head figuring all this out. Maybe once I do, I'll have more to say.

Happy Blogversary!

Eight years.

Eight.

Wow. Hasn't seemed that long. But the calendar doesn't lie. It's been up and down lately here, and I know that. Part of it has been deliberate. I've tried not to just use this as a place to complain. And I've felt so tired and frustrated for a number of different reasons this semester (and before, for that matter), that I haven't posted.

I've been trying to follow Thumper's advice in this.

But eight years seems worth commenting. And it's worth reminding myself about what eight years means for many of my students. In fact, this afternoon during a presentation on why Canada should rejoin the ITER project, a student said that we should change our policy because "global warming has gotten so much worse since 2003 when we dropped out of the program."

It was a phrase that caught me off guard, because for me, 2003 feels like it was just a little while ago. But for my student? It was probably junior high, maybe even earlier.

Wow.

Rainbows!

So much water on the road that I saw rainbows in the spray coming off the truck in front of me. A touch of brightness in an otherwise messy ride home...

How many Robax were consumed this weekend?

This is a question I'm curious about. We got a big spring snow this weekend - thank goodness it started on Saturday morning and the usual weekday commute was spared the mess. But, boy, was that snow heavy to move because it was so wet.

I took it in shifts, but still feel a bit stiff. I wonder how many other people are feeling the same way this weekend?

Good news is that the sun has been shining brilliantly all day, which not only helps rid us of that snowfall, but also just makes everything so much more cheerful. Which is good. Tomorrow the marking parade begins and won't ease up for at least two weeks. Another kind of drift to get buried in!

Life outside the academy

I've been realising how different the world looks from within and from without the academy ever since I joined the board of a civil society organization in my city. At first, there were moments when I felt like I was talking a different language than the other board members, or rather, it might be more accurate to say that I felt like they were talking with an accent that I couldn't quite make out at times; like every once in a while I'd lose a word or two. It was a strange feeling.

Things have gotten better since I began - perhaps I've just learnt the lingo, or maybe I'm just listening more attentively and working out the differences.

But there are real differences between the way we do things in the academy and the way things can get done outside of it. Today we spent much of our day generating outcome measures for each of our programs. Our session was partly educational, teaching board members how to do so, which meant the day was quite long and we didn't get through all of them. But that's beside the point.

What was refreshing was the latitude we had, not only in deciding what our desired outcomes were, but also in the kinds of programs we might choose to undertake. So many times when I think of the kind of outcome planning I do in the university, there are a large number of constraints on it. That's probably because most of the outcome planning that I do relates to course planning, or slightly more broadly, curriculum planning. But those kinds of plans are incredibly constrained: by schedules, by class sizes, by institutional goals, by the limitations of time and available space, and by the sometimes limited forms of evaluation available to assess student learning.

In the nonprofit sector, we have limitations (most often financial), but those limitations are transient; we can change many of those limitations by partnering with other organizations or finding additional sources of funding. The academy is far more static, making it very difficult to think about really doing things differently than they are done right now.

Which means that as difficult as it is to interpret the language, the payoff in freedom to imagine how the world can be a better place and how I can contribute to that, is worth it.

Losing my mind?

In the month since the last post, I'd suggest I've had ideas for about a dozen posts.

So, what's the problem, you're wondering. Why no posting?

These ideas tend to occur in the middle of class or a conversation or the daily commute, in other words, when I'm busy doing other stuff. By the time a computer is in front of me, I either can't seem to garner the energy to post, or I've forgotten what I thought about. I realize the latter might be an indication of the quality of the posts. How many times as a child did I call out 'mom' 'mom' 'mom' only to have forgotten what I wanted to ask by the time I had her attention. And her response? 'well, it mustn't have been that important if you forgot'. Guess so.

1 down; 13 to go

Wow.

This first week of classes was intense. There wasn't really anything unusual that went on; it's just that I was out of town until the day before, so that even though I'd prepared all the syllabi etc. before I left town, I still felt like I was thrown into things. Hence, it is Saturday, and I'm scrambling to prep one class for Monday in order to avoid the stress of feeling like I had no idea what we'd be doing in the next class as each one would end.

I know people who can teach like that. But I'm not one of them. It makes me uncomfortable not knowing what we're doing in the next class - I like to have a couple planned out at a time.

But if this keeps up, it's gonna be a wild ride (again!) this semester...

Walk fast to live long or live long if you can walk fast?

This interesting article "If you want to live longer walk faster" describes a fascinating study that found a correlation between life expectancy and the speed at which senior citizens walked. Interesting correlation.

But the title is misleading. The study researchers suggest that the correlation between life expectancy and speed of walking may be because those who walk slowly are in poorer health than those who walk faster. That suggests that the relationship between the two is one in which the ill health causes the slow pace; in other words, those senior citizens who moved slower were already unsteady or in ill health before their pace slowed. It's less likely that these people slowed their pace and then happened to get ill.

Sure, I admit there's probably a connection between walking rapidly and better health - I know when I get moving, I feel my heart rate elevate slightly - it's a bit of exercise without going to the gym that keep my cardiovascular system in better health. But the title is misleading. It seems to suggest that if you walk faster you'll live longer, when walking fast is just an indicator of better health. And this is only in senior citizens, not necessarily in younger people.

Such sloppy titling annoys me. I realize that the title is far more eyecatching than "Slower people die sooner" (though that's not bad), but it really presents the possible connection backwards, suggesting that the reader will live longer by walking faster. Someone who doesn't read carefully might not notice that the actual study suggests something different. Not irresponsible, but this kind of sloppy science reporting does nothing to make the connection between science and everyday life clearer; instead it favours muddying the waters. Such sloppy writing makes the science seem a tad frivolous. Despite the inappropriate title, it's an interesting article. But it still annoys me a bit.

Resolutions?

'Tis the season for New Year's resolutions, but I just can't seem to come up with any. Just like I couldn't seem to come up with a Christmas wish list when my family wanted one, but I sure started thinking of stuff I wanted only a couple of days before the holiday. Too late to do any good for the holiday, but maybe I'll come up with resolutions in another couple of weeks when I've had time to think about it.

I do know there's one thing I want to need to do this semester though: I need to go back to a reading schedule like I had when I was in the research phase of the dissertation. I got almost no research work done this fall and that can't continue. I know part of the reason why I didn't get much research done was the 4 course/3 new prep schedule and the applications, but part of it was also I think because I didn't set a schedule. I tried to research after everything else got done, which meant that a lot of other things just expanded to fill the available space, leaving nothing for research.

Since I've got two conferences already scheduled and both are preliminary work on the new direction I'm taking to move from dissertation to book, then I'm going to have to get the reading done that I want done. That will require a schedule.

So there. One "resolution" I suppose. Job done.