Ranting
My youngest takes voice lessons at a local community music school. Because she's homeschooled, we don't mind (too much) taking the odd times when other students can't come, although we try to choose a lesson time that doesn't cut too much into my work day. She also takes music theory the same day as her voice lesson. Initially, her voice lesson was at 3 and the music theory class at 5.
In order to be efficient about our time, we asked to have her voice lesson moved back an hour to 4:00. That way, I wasn't cooling my jets for three hours in the local coffeeshop (which leaves much to be desired) and we'd save on the parking fees. The student who was previously taking lessons at 4 agreed to the change, and we happily swapped times.
Well, turns out the student has started to get sloppy about attendance and often doesn't show for his 3:00 lesson. The teacher is annoyed and wants us to switch back (or find a way to motivate him to come at the proper time). When YD said that it would be very inconvenient for me to be stuck there for three hours, the teacher's response was "Tell her to bring her grading with her, and you two can have dinner in between classes."
Steam was still coming out my ears with that one, and now this: YD has to sing for a jury on Saturday. It's a five minute thing. We have to drive in from HomeCity, 62 miles away, for a five minute jury exam. The next day YD has a recital, which means another drive in from HomeCity. So I asked if she could be excused from jury this year, as my SIL is coming from California for a visit and we had planned a family day for Saturday. The teacher says no, the administration is VERY adamant that students must do the jury, and that I need to go over to the office and sign YD up for a time. Thinking "No guts, no glory," I went to the office and threw myself on their mercy, asking if we could please not have to drive 240 miles this weekend. They said that it's really up to the teacher, that she could set up an alternate time if she wished. I said, "Oh, REALLY?"
So yeah, I could handle it if she told me she was overwhelmed (her sister just died two weeks ago) and didn't want the hassle of setting up another time. Just don't lie to me.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Is the academic year over yet?
Man, I'm tired. I even took a nap today, and I could use another. It's getting grey and stormy out, after a beautiful, balmy week. Just the kind of weather for long naps...
This past week we had two job candidates, which meant breakfast meetings, lunch meetings, candidate job talks, faculty meetings, etc. We ate and ate and talked and talked and not much work was done. Wednesday felt like a vacation, I had a whole two hours without a meeting. I had two meetings on my calendar for Friday, one at 9 a.m. and one at noon. I dragged myself out of bed for the 9 a.m., only to find that no one was there and it had apparently been canceled. So I canceled my attendance at the noon meeting and went home.
Eldest Daughter is here this weekend and I'm making a huge batch of chicken pasta salad for her to take back with her. Huge. As in ginormous. Except that I forgot to get Italian salad dressing for it and will have to go out to the store later and pick some up. Darn.
I have my plane tickets for Kosovo and Israel. Now to buy tix for Youngest Daughter so she can come with me. This will be such a cool trip!
Man, I'm tired. I even took a nap today, and I could use another. It's getting grey and stormy out, after a beautiful, balmy week. Just the kind of weather for long naps...
This past week we had two job candidates, which meant breakfast meetings, lunch meetings, candidate job talks, faculty meetings, etc. We ate and ate and talked and talked and not much work was done. Wednesday felt like a vacation, I had a whole two hours without a meeting. I had two meetings on my calendar for Friday, one at 9 a.m. and one at noon. I dragged myself out of bed for the 9 a.m., only to find that no one was there and it had apparently been canceled. So I canceled my attendance at the noon meeting and went home.
Eldest Daughter is here this weekend and I'm making a huge batch of chicken pasta salad for her to take back with her. Huge. As in ginormous. Except that I forgot to get Italian salad dressing for it and will have to go out to the store later and pick some up. Darn.
I have my plane tickets for Kosovo and Israel. Now to buy tix for Youngest Daughter so she can come with me. This will be such a cool trip!
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Saturday, day after Friday
Well, it's been a thrilling week.
Thursday I went to a seminar on early intervention. Post-VT, many colleges put together some sort of plan to deal with troubled students and hopefully head off another atrocity. Nice thought, hard to put into practice. There wasn't anything they told us in that seminar that we didn't already know--call this number for that service, etc. Nothing about what to do when none of that works and a deranged person starts shooting up your classroom. Nothing about how you call campus safety when a student is beating you bloody and you can't get to a phone. (That scenario happened at the VA I worked at, where a male nurse was attacked by a patient who beat him in the nurse's station, holding him down on the desk with the phone jammed into his back. The nurse ended up with a broken jaw, a concussion, and lots of bruises. The patient was put back on the same floor two weeks later, and when the nurse came back from sick leave and saw he was still expected to give care to that animal, he quit. Because the VA is federal property, the nurse couldn't sue the guy, either.)
It was a wasted 90 minutes but at least I brought my computer with me and could check e-mail and my online courses. I would have skipped it but then they would have charged the department $50.
Afterwards, I buttonholed a colleague about a graduate certificate I am going to propose. I've blogged about him before--the Human Superball. Conversations with him just go all over the place, and I don't think I've ever walked away thinking anything productive had come out of it. This conversation was no exception.
I'm an industrial engineer working with mechanical engineers and computer scientists. What that means is that we all see things very differently. I tend to see the Big Picture and where things link to each other, and how we could bring in other disciplines or expand an idea to other domains. The guys I work with don't see those things, and it's frustrating for me because they insist on boundaries that I think are too narrow. That's what happened in this conversation; I see how we can expand these course offerings to more than just one application area, and he doesn't. He also has barely disguised contempt for anyone not working in his narrow field. Well, I've asked him for his input and gotten it, and now I am going to ignore him (not hard, because he never answers e-mails and has blown me off a couple of times when we were supposed to meet).
The other thing that annoyed me was we got on the topic of co-listed undergrad and grad courses. In my experience, it's not unusual for grad courses to have a lot in common with an undergrad course in the same subject. For instance, production control at the grad level covers the same topics as production control at the undergrad level. The reason for this overlap is that some people come into a graduate program from other schools, and may not have the exact same background courses, but the grad courses are, or should be, a deeper and sometimes wider version than the undergrad course. I teach a grad level course that has an undergrad analog (not co-listed, though). So he makes the remark that students from my class came to him and wanted to know why they were getting the same material in the grad class as in the undergrad. His answer was that the slides were copied. Now, it's not clear to me that he realizes I teach that class, so I didn't haul off and punch him in the mouth for the insinuation. But I have news for him. I never saw any materials from the undergrad class. I've never even seen the syllabus for the undergrad class. My materials are developed from many different sources, only one of which is the book used for that class. I go way beyond the course description (a lame, passive voice mess which I rewrote but which has not gotten changed yet) and introduce different methods that I bet he hasn't even heard of.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. I will happily ignore this dude as much as possible. Unfortunately, he is tenured. I hope he doesn't sit on my tenure committee...
Yesterday we had the first of three faculty candidate visits. I was very impressed with Candidate 1. She was sharp, personable, had a great presentation, and had clearly done her homework about us and the university. We had a nice time at lunch with her, despite our resident Monopolizer Man, who just could not shut his mouth for anything. Someone would start to say something to her, he'd interrupt and just go on and on and on--then he'd say "Well, DrMom could tell you more about this" and never let the other person get a word in edgewise. Not even our Fearless Leader, who tried twice to gently shut him down. By the time lunch was over half of us were in stitches from our failed attempts to un-monopolize the conversation. In his defense, he's on meds for a medical condition and that may have sparked the diarrhea mouth. But you can be sure we will rib him for it mercilessly for a long, long time.
Oh--exciting things coming up--Eldest Daughter is coming home next weekend AND the weekend after!! Can't wait! And, I'm thinking of buying a canoe so when Son comes home to visit we can go fishing together at the local lake. The Parental Unit and I can, I am sure, come up with an economical rack for the truck to carry the canoe; I've seen a couple examples on the web.
Farther off in the future is a trip to Kosovo to teach a class in maintenance management. I'm planning to go to Israel after that for a week. That will be so exciting!!
Today I hope to get a lot of reading done for next week's lecture and next month's conference paper. It's a quiet, sunny day and there's no other Tyranny of the Immediate things to do. I got through a chapter on vibration analysis already this morning and wow do I feel smarter :-)
Well, it's been a thrilling week.
Thursday I went to a seminar on early intervention. Post-VT, many colleges put together some sort of plan to deal with troubled students and hopefully head off another atrocity. Nice thought, hard to put into practice. There wasn't anything they told us in that seminar that we didn't already know--call this number for that service, etc. Nothing about what to do when none of that works and a deranged person starts shooting up your classroom. Nothing about how you call campus safety when a student is beating you bloody and you can't get to a phone. (That scenario happened at the VA I worked at, where a male nurse was attacked by a patient who beat him in the nurse's station, holding him down on the desk with the phone jammed into his back. The nurse ended up with a broken jaw, a concussion, and lots of bruises. The patient was put back on the same floor two weeks later, and when the nurse came back from sick leave and saw he was still expected to give care to that animal, he quit. Because the VA is federal property, the nurse couldn't sue the guy, either.)
It was a wasted 90 minutes but at least I brought my computer with me and could check e-mail and my online courses. I would have skipped it but then they would have charged the department $50.
Afterwards, I buttonholed a colleague about a graduate certificate I am going to propose. I've blogged about him before--the Human Superball. Conversations with him just go all over the place, and I don't think I've ever walked away thinking anything productive had come out of it. This conversation was no exception.
I'm an industrial engineer working with mechanical engineers and computer scientists. What that means is that we all see things very differently. I tend to see the Big Picture and where things link to each other, and how we could bring in other disciplines or expand an idea to other domains. The guys I work with don't see those things, and it's frustrating for me because they insist on boundaries that I think are too narrow. That's what happened in this conversation; I see how we can expand these course offerings to more than just one application area, and he doesn't. He also has barely disguised contempt for anyone not working in his narrow field. Well, I've asked him for his input and gotten it, and now I am going to ignore him (not hard, because he never answers e-mails and has blown me off a couple of times when we were supposed to meet).
The other thing that annoyed me was we got on the topic of co-listed undergrad and grad courses. In my experience, it's not unusual for grad courses to have a lot in common with an undergrad course in the same subject. For instance, production control at the grad level covers the same topics as production control at the undergrad level. The reason for this overlap is that some people come into a graduate program from other schools, and may not have the exact same background courses, but the grad courses are, or should be, a deeper and sometimes wider version than the undergrad course. I teach a grad level course that has an undergrad analog (not co-listed, though). So he makes the remark that students from my class came to him and wanted to know why they were getting the same material in the grad class as in the undergrad. His answer was that the slides were copied. Now, it's not clear to me that he realizes I teach that class, so I didn't haul off and punch him in the mouth for the insinuation. But I have news for him. I never saw any materials from the undergrad class. I've never even seen the syllabus for the undergrad class. My materials are developed from many different sources, only one of which is the book used for that class. I go way beyond the course description (a lame, passive voice mess which I rewrote but which has not gotten changed yet) and introduce different methods that I bet he hasn't even heard of.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. I will happily ignore this dude as much as possible. Unfortunately, he is tenured. I hope he doesn't sit on my tenure committee...
Yesterday we had the first of three faculty candidate visits. I was very impressed with Candidate 1. She was sharp, personable, had a great presentation, and had clearly done her homework about us and the university. We had a nice time at lunch with her, despite our resident Monopolizer Man, who just could not shut his mouth for anything. Someone would start to say something to her, he'd interrupt and just go on and on and on--then he'd say "Well, DrMom could tell you more about this" and never let the other person get a word in edgewise. Not even our Fearless Leader, who tried twice to gently shut him down. By the time lunch was over half of us were in stitches from our failed attempts to un-monopolize the conversation. In his defense, he's on meds for a medical condition and that may have sparked the diarrhea mouth. But you can be sure we will rib him for it mercilessly for a long, long time.
Oh--exciting things coming up--Eldest Daughter is coming home next weekend AND the weekend after!! Can't wait! And, I'm thinking of buying a canoe so when Son comes home to visit we can go fishing together at the local lake. The Parental Unit and I can, I am sure, come up with an economical rack for the truck to carry the canoe; I've seen a couple examples on the web.
Farther off in the future is a trip to Kosovo to teach a class in maintenance management. I'm planning to go to Israel after that for a week. That will be so exciting!!
Today I hope to get a lot of reading done for next week's lecture and next month's conference paper. It's a quiet, sunny day and there's no other Tyranny of the Immediate things to do. I got through a chapter on vibration analysis already this morning and wow do I feel smarter :-)
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
Ah, heaven
Popcorn, a tall glass of orange juice with extra pulp, and Star Wars Episode IV. Can't get much better than that (Star Trek would be better but you take what you can get). Kitty Son is coveting my popcorn.
Watched "The Dish" last night which is a sweet, nostalgic movie about a little Australian town and the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Am I the only one who is consistently creeped out by that Burger King dude?
Eldest Daughter had some excitement today. The building next to hers in the complex caught on fire. The hall outside her apartment smelled badly of smoke, and the elevators were shut down so she went to stay with BF's parents for the night. Probably a good idea.
Popcorn, a tall glass of orange juice with extra pulp, and Star Wars Episode IV. Can't get much better than that (Star Trek would be better but you take what you can get). Kitty Son is coveting my popcorn.
Watched "The Dish" last night which is a sweet, nostalgic movie about a little Australian town and the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Am I the only one who is consistently creeped out by that Burger King dude?
Eldest Daughter had some excitement today. The building next to hers in the complex caught on fire. The hall outside her apartment smelled badly of smoke, and the elevators were shut down so she went to stay with BF's parents for the night. Probably a good idea.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Miserable Mondays
Mondays I drive to HomeCity to teach a class at Alma Mater U. I don't know what possessed me to think that was a good idea, other than pure greed. Actually, money-wise it has come in handy, as all sorts of unexpected bills have cropped up that I otherwise could not have paid.
So yesterday was a typically nutso Monday. I got up at 7, left at 8:30 to drive to Youngest Daughter's allergist's office in HomeCity for her monthly shots. Turned out that she was also due for the yearly checkup. Over an hour later we finally left and I drove to Brother's office where YD works. Then I drove to Alma Mater U, arriving just in time to finish off the day's lecture and start office hours. After class, drove back to Brother's office to pick up YD, then to the local mall where YD met up with a friend. Then drove to Big Supermarket down the street from the mall, where YD and friend attended a cooking class. Next stop was my house, where I spent just enough time to make and drink a cup of tea. Back to Big Supermarket. YD's class went over by 30 minutes and she spent an additional quarter hour wrapping up a chocolate cake she won (yay! the one bright part of the day!). Left HomeCity finally at 8:30 p.m.
Arrived in UniTown and plopped exhaustedly in the condo at 10 p.m., with three classes yet to prep for Tuesday.
Promptly decided that the online class I am teaching for the first time is going to shift one day, to Wednesday, so I am not killing myself trying to get two major lectures ready two days in a row.
Speaking of that online class, I gotta get the lecture ready. Tomorrow is Wednesday.
Argh.
Mondays I drive to HomeCity to teach a class at Alma Mater U. I don't know what possessed me to think that was a good idea, other than pure greed. Actually, money-wise it has come in handy, as all sorts of unexpected bills have cropped up that I otherwise could not have paid.
So yesterday was a typically nutso Monday. I got up at 7, left at 8:30 to drive to Youngest Daughter's allergist's office in HomeCity for her monthly shots. Turned out that she was also due for the yearly checkup. Over an hour later we finally left and I drove to Brother's office where YD works. Then I drove to Alma Mater U, arriving just in time to finish off the day's lecture and start office hours. After class, drove back to Brother's office to pick up YD, then to the local mall where YD met up with a friend. Then drove to Big Supermarket down the street from the mall, where YD and friend attended a cooking class. Next stop was my house, where I spent just enough time to make and drink a cup of tea. Back to Big Supermarket. YD's class went over by 30 minutes and she spent an additional quarter hour wrapping up a chocolate cake she won (yay! the one bright part of the day!). Left HomeCity finally at 8:30 p.m.
Arrived in UniTown and plopped exhaustedly in the condo at 10 p.m., with three classes yet to prep for Tuesday.
Promptly decided that the online class I am teaching for the first time is going to shift one day, to Wednesday, so I am not killing myself trying to get two major lectures ready two days in a row.
Speaking of that online class, I gotta get the lecture ready. Tomorrow is Wednesday.
Argh.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Spring has sprung and the searches are in full swing
We are in the search process for a new Dean. I missed the first and second candidates, but saw the third. He was pretty impressive, and seemed like an excellent candidate. The first one, according to scuttlebutt, didn't do so well and especially in comparison with Number Three. The second one is our current interim dean, whose main drawback is the lack of a Ph.D. and no major publications. While those things weren't an issue five or ten years ago for an administrator and Dean from a technical college, they are certainly problematic now. Those credentials wouldn't even merit tenure in the other colleges of the university, so I would say it really doesn't matter how stellar the interview--this dean has to be able to stand up with and sometimes against the other deans, and they wouldn't even consider someone like that a peer.
My boss is Candidate Number Five. So that means, if he gets the deanship, we will get a new boss. If he doesn't get the deanship, we will most likely still be getting a new boss. I would imagine, because he's been the Golden Boy so far, that if he doesn't get to be dean the uni will find someway to promote him so he stays. Probably something to do with the global campuses.
That makes me a tad anxious. We've got a new president, and in July a new provost and dean. Sometime in the next year, a new boss. Gack. We are a teaching school, primarily, but with aspirations of more--so that means the goalposts for tenure are moving although the serious support for "substantial" research isn't there yet. I still teach WAY too many courses. There's no money for grad students, and I'm not in a traditional department anyway so it's tough to get them. Grants for what I do are typically given to teams of researchers, not a single PI, and the possibilities for collaboration academically are nil within my department, difficult to coordinate elsewhere. Sigh. Always something.
Our three faculty candidates are coming next week and the week after. I'm looking forward to meeting them, they are all excellent and would be a great addition to the faculty. I'm also glad it's them interviewing and NOT ME. Man, I hate academic interviews.
I passed up the opportunity at Alma Mater U after all, for lots of reasons. The program they were hiring for is brand new and may not fly. It's the baby of the new (and I hear, fickle) dean, which means the faculty hired for it will be under extra scrutiny. Every one of the support staff, who are all friends of mine, urged me not to apply for it. They said they'd love to have me back, but things are not going well in the department. No one knows how healthy a place is better than the support staff.
Not that I updated my CV and research/teaching statements for naught--CAREER is coming up fast and furious and I need them for that application. Ugh!!
On another note: Son celebrated his birthday Easter weekend and none of us were able to get there because of the high airfares. He couldn't come home because of work. So last weekend, Youngest Daughter flew down to spend a few days with him, and this weekend Eldest Daughter is there. From what I hear, lots of fun is being had by all. Son sent home some presents with YD: I got a chocolate alligator (so cool and yummy too!) and Spouse got a lacquered alligator head. He put it to good use, I think:
We are in the search process for a new Dean. I missed the first and second candidates, but saw the third. He was pretty impressive, and seemed like an excellent candidate. The first one, according to scuttlebutt, didn't do so well and especially in comparison with Number Three. The second one is our current interim dean, whose main drawback is the lack of a Ph.D. and no major publications. While those things weren't an issue five or ten years ago for an administrator and Dean from a technical college, they are certainly problematic now. Those credentials wouldn't even merit tenure in the other colleges of the university, so I would say it really doesn't matter how stellar the interview--this dean has to be able to stand up with and sometimes against the other deans, and they wouldn't even consider someone like that a peer.
My boss is Candidate Number Five. So that means, if he gets the deanship, we will get a new boss. If he doesn't get the deanship, we will most likely still be getting a new boss. I would imagine, because he's been the Golden Boy so far, that if he doesn't get to be dean the uni will find someway to promote him so he stays. Probably something to do with the global campuses.
That makes me a tad anxious. We've got a new president, and in July a new provost and dean. Sometime in the next year, a new boss. Gack. We are a teaching school, primarily, but with aspirations of more--so that means the goalposts for tenure are moving although the serious support for "substantial" research isn't there yet. I still teach WAY too many courses. There's no money for grad students, and I'm not in a traditional department anyway so it's tough to get them. Grants for what I do are typically given to teams of researchers, not a single PI, and the possibilities for collaboration academically are nil within my department, difficult to coordinate elsewhere. Sigh. Always something.
Our three faculty candidates are coming next week and the week after. I'm looking forward to meeting them, they are all excellent and would be a great addition to the faculty. I'm also glad it's them interviewing and NOT ME. Man, I hate academic interviews.
I passed up the opportunity at Alma Mater U after all, for lots of reasons. The program they were hiring for is brand new and may not fly. It's the baby of the new (and I hear, fickle) dean, which means the faculty hired for it will be under extra scrutiny. Every one of the support staff, who are all friends of mine, urged me not to apply for it. They said they'd love to have me back, but things are not going well in the department. No one knows how healthy a place is better than the support staff.
Not that I updated my CV and research/teaching statements for naught--CAREER is coming up fast and furious and I need them for that application. Ugh!!
On another note: Son celebrated his birthday Easter weekend and none of us were able to get there because of the high airfares. He couldn't come home because of work. So last weekend, Youngest Daughter flew down to spend a few days with him, and this weekend Eldest Daughter is there. From what I hear, lots of fun is being had by all. Son sent home some presents with YD: I got a chocolate alligator (so cool and yummy too!) and Spouse got a lacquered alligator head. He put it to good use, I think:
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