Higher Education going to the dogs

Dog earns MBA. Nope, not an Onion story.

It may not be the water cooler...

...but I did have an excellent hallway conversation this week that has me pretty excited about the possibilities.

I ran into one of the philosophers in the humanities department across the hall from us and we started talking. We shared what kind of classes we were teaching and what we liked about them, and he told me he was teaching a philosophy of science course.

Since I read some science philosophy in the course of the dissertation, I asked him a bit more about the course, and we talked for a bit about different elements and ideas within the discipline. Although the course he is teaching this term is a basic introductory course, he did indicate that they were proposing a new kind of course for next year. It would be a gen ed course called "Social Constructions of Science" and they were hoping to put it together in such a way that instructors from multiple disciplines would be able to teach it, bringing their own experiences and interests to the course.

I told him I would be very interested in seeing the instructor guide and participating in the later stages of the course development when they start shopping it around to instructors in other disciplines to see how it might work on the ground.

I would love to teach that kind of a course. Even though it isn't a literature course, I think there's a lot of room within a course like that where I could potentially show students how literature might be used to engage with questions about how we understand science. I don't teach much literature anyway, so it's not like I'd be abandoning the teaching of literature if I took on a course like it, and I'm coming to realize that I will probably be happiest in a place where I could work more as a generalist than a specialist (as long as I could still continue to research as a specialist as well).

But the point of the story is that if I hadn't made an effort to get to know this other instructor's name, and took the opportunity to chat in the hall for a few moments, I wouldn't have even heard of this potential opportunity. So even if my group isn't going as well as I'd like, there are other opportunities. I just need to keep my eyes open!

Thinking aloud

I had an interesting meeting today with a couple of other instructors at my school. I suppose you could think of it as a professor support group, though it's a bit more than that since we also talk about teaching, sharing assignments, techniques and ideas about how to keep students engaged (or even awake!)

The university I teach at has a great system of support, and these informal groupings are just one of the programs that they encourage, which is really nice, but at the same time, I feel like none of us are sure what we want to do in this group. See, the problem is, the groups are ideally supposed to be composed of someone who has been around for a while, and then maybe a couple of new people.

In that kind of configuration, the person who has been around awhile gets to hear new ideas and such, while the new people get to learn those invisible ropes that no one tells you about and the rules that aren't written down but count very importantly when evaluation time etc. comes around.

Problem is, there are two of us newbies in the group, and our one member who has been around for a while has been around as part-time faculty for all of that time. Which means that the whole learning the ropes part of the group is less useful since part-time people are kept out of some of the loops. This is partly because the hoops and loops don't apply to them, but also partly because only a few part-time people who put themselves out there and get involved in everything and anything for several years are really noticed by the department.

In all fairness, this makes sense. When I was working part-time, I saw my job as teaching and little more. I was collegial and came out for events that interested me, but I felt no obligation to do a lot of the additional duties that full-time people are expected to undertake. So there is a real divide between full and part time people. It's not an overtly hierarchical divide, but it does divide the two groups in terms of responsibility and presence around the department.

Long and the short of it is, in this group we've formed, we can talk about classroom experiences, and maybe share ideas about marking or assignments, but neither of my group members are going to give me the inside scoop on what's what around here.

Guess I'll have to hang around the water cooler instead... too bad we don't have one...

This is getting old...

I just got a notice from one of the professional associations that I belong to - I am no longer eligible for the graduate student membership rate because I've used that for seven years.

That's a long time! Granted, I began my membership when I was in my Master's program, so that isn't just the doctoral program, but that's still a really long time!

Double your fun

My city now has two universities, not just the one.

It's been a long time coming, so it's pretty cool!

Training horses

This weekend we were invited to the acreage of some friends who are starting to breed horses and during that time, we were able to observe a training session.

It was interesting to see the mixture of authority and respect that is necessary to horse training. On the one hand, the trainer has to make it clear who's in charge. By on the other hand, horses are large animals, and they are so powerful that the trainer has to have a healthy respect for that power. It results in a trainer who might use ropes, or a whip (for the sound more than touch), or a strong voice, while keeping a respectable distance from mouth and hooves.

The power of the horse needs to be respected. The trainer needs to be in charge. It's a situation that doesn't make for any easy answers. Kinda like the power dynamic between teachers and students, particularly when it comes to evaluations!

Think about it.

It's a good tired

It's been an exhausting couple of weeks (I know, I know, it's only Thursday!) This new job is simultaneously invigorating and completely draining. It's great to meet so many other like-minded - and smart! - people, but meeting so many new people at one time can be mentally tiring.

I'm in a term teaching gig, which means I have only been offered work for the next ten months. While that kind of temporariness is no different than working as a sessional (or part-timer), the full-time aspect means that I am expected to perform all the job responsibilities that a tenure-track member of the faculty is expected to do. I will also be evaluated in the same manner, and should I get a job at a university that recognizes my work here, I could apply to have my year here count toward tenure elsewhere.

What that really means is that I am essentially starting an assistant professor job, without the title (or the job permanence).

Of course, since I'm on a short term, and would love to be on a longer term, I also feel the pressure to outperform the actual assistant professors hired in the department, because they are assured of work next year. I'm not. But that's another worry I don't need to think of right now.

I knew from others that the first year is hard. But I knew it in a cognitive way, not the way that my body now knows it. I've been feeling exhausted every day, even though my college activities have usually lasted less than a full 8-hour day. The combination of wanting to make a good impression, taking in a lot of information, making a lot of decisions (e.g. benefits to sign up for), and trying to finish off the writing I wanted to do this summer has meant that I've been sleeping 8-9 hours a night and still feeling not-quite rested.

I don't doubt that things will get easier as the semester and year progress, and I'm relatively confident that even next week, when the meetings trail off and the teaching ramps up I'll feel more like I'm in my element. But right now, I'm feeling old as I toddle off to bed at least an hour earlier than usual...!

New research in epidemiology

Taking zombies seriously.

To think about

In discussing teaching philosophy statements with new colleagues today, one talked about the importance of inspiring non-majors by getting them to understand and value literature for the things it allows us do. Getting students from other disciplines to see the value in looking at things from a different perspective is one of those powerful things that literature can do.

Although I know that, and I figure that English majors know that, I guess I hadn't really thought about how the classroom is an opportunity to get non-majors to see it in the same way. Not necessarily to convert them to English majors, but so that they can use that knowledge to their benefit in their own discipline.

Interesting food for thought.

Library Clues

You know you've been writing in graduate school for a long time when the library has changed the formatting of its homepage twice in the time you've been using it.

You know you're not finding that book when the four libraries (and consortia) you belong to do not carry the book.

The allure of research

One of the things I've learned about myself over the last several years is that I have a mistaken, but nonetheless healthy, conviction that if I just do enough research, my work will write itself. Even though I know it's a fallacy, there is a small part of me that really believes that with enough research, everything will just come together effortlessly and voila! the paper will be written.

I suppose it's not so much a belief as a fervent case of wishing it were so, but it's the reason for every act of writing procrastination that I've succumbed to over the last several years.

I do know that it's false, and so the procrastination never lasts for too long, but it's a potent procrastination force nonetheless. Even now, with a good conference paper that's been invited to be turned into a longer journal article, I find myself tempted to go to the databases, to find the perfect resource that when magically applied to my paper, will turn it into solid gold!

(I'm thinking in magical metaphors because the paper is about magic, though not really about alchemy... hey, wait... No! I must resist the desire to research alchemy as an angle for the paper...)

See what I mean?

Quote of the week

I don't believe any of you have ever read PARADISE LOST, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic -- something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
- Mark Twain, "The Disappearance of Literature" speech, 20 November 1900

Timeless space

Having spent the last two weeks on a few airplanes, I've come to realize that flying for more than about four hours has a very unreal quality about it, especially if you travel over more than four time zones.

You enter the aircraft, sit down, and patiently wait until allowed to leave again. You try to amuse yourself with movies, or books, or games, but you're in this strange place that has no real reference to the outside world. At 35,000 feet, the world is another place that you're no longer connected to.

And even though your body insists that it is the time that you just left, your mind knows that it must begin to abide by the rules of the time zone you'll be entering, which is sometimes a big enough gap to make you feel terribly confused. And tired. And when you're in the plane, you're not sure if you should be paying attention to your head, which says the time is what is coming up, or your body, that insists on the time that you are leaving.

It's a bit like suspended animation, only you're awake and usually bored.

Nirvana vs Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit up

This is both delightful and disturbing at the same time.

The necessity of writing

For years as a writing teacher I've told reluctant students - usually engineers - that they need to learn to write to be successful. They don't need to do it wonderfully, but they do need to do it adequately.

This necessity has been driven home several times over the last few months. Just the other day, I read about paper written by physicists about magic (it's for an article on technology and magic in medieval literature, and in all fairness, it was about quantum physics). Now, granted, all the primary researchers were located in Spain, so English may not have been a language they could use comfortably. But even with that in mind, there were so many hyperbolic lines of the "since the dawn of time" kind, that I cringed over and over again.

In addition, several months ago I was working with a document created by engineering professionals, designed to act as a training manual. We were to convert the content of the paper version to an elearning program.

Usually, when I work with material from an SME (subject matter expert), my biggest concern is translating written text into the visual and audible forms that perform better on the web. But this time, I spent a huge amount of time rewriting the content. There were problems in the document that were so fundamental that I despaired of repairing them even.

Some sentences were so garbled that I had no idea what it was meant to convey. There were lots of sentence fragments, and some sentences that just left off mid-sentence, as if it was cut-off (though it wasn't!) Faulty parallelisms were rampant, and the document showed little evidence of editing since the topics seemed to be arranged in the order that they occurred to the writer rather than any logical arrangement.

I've always believed that comma use was highly individualistic and variable, but this document used commas in ways that were utterly baffling, as if the writer knew there were rules to using commas and they needed to be followed, but had forgotten the rules and just made them up as he/she went along.

All in all, developing the content for this elearning program was one of the most painful tasks I'd ever undertaken for this company.

In all the time I stood in front of classrooms of engineers, lecturing on the importance of good writing, my motivation was primarily to get them producing things by the end of the term that I could read without cringing. But now that I've seen the result of poor writing skills, I've got even more motivation to teach them (and other writers) how to write clearly, because after reading this training manual, I feel sorry for all the people who tried to learn from it!

The Future of the Professoriate - Extinction?

The Chronicle forum, Faculty of the Future: Leaner, Meaner, More Collaborative, Less Secure is a depressing read. Don't let the title fool you - the positive element "more collaborative" isn't a good thing - it's a survival tactic. Overall, most of the writers take a very bleak vision of the future. It's telling that the only positive view of the academy 20 years from now comes from an administrator, not faculty.

Sometimes it feels like a room of one's own can be a prison when you've got a deadline hanging over your head.

The worst part of writing?

I hate writing plot summaries.

It's a strange but true observation. I get nailed every time a reader comments on my writing that I don't provide enough plot summary of primary sources before diving into the analysis.

Gee, that's probably because I hate writing plot summaries.

Which is really bizarre, considering they really are so terribly simple. While they might not be as simple as I'm suggesting, they really are just a catalogue of important events in the narrative of the novel. And yet, I detest writing them. My drafts always have these little starred lines in them with a note to "insert plot summary here" scattered throughout them.

Why do I detest writing them? I don't know.

Sometimes I suspect it's because they seem so easy. And then I think if they're so easy, they're not very sophisticated. And perhaps I don't want to do them because I don't want to admit I can write so simply? Bizarre logic, but there you go. I just hate writing them.

Starting over... again

I really don't understand why it is so terribly hard to get a handle on each new chapter when I start it. Even in revision, I'm having trouble concentrating on the new chapter that I'm starting to edit today.

Perhaps it just has something to do with the holiday and BBQ yesterday?

Happy Canada Day!