Today my chair tells me that the calendar committee has rejected my rewrite of a course description for the calendar because it "included questions." Well, yes. I thought "Why are we here?" would grab a little more student interest than "The student will examine various philosophical perspectives on the nature of being." And use fewer words, too. But no, apparently question marks won't do.
Oh, and the other problem with my course description? Complete sentences. I can't have those either. In the interests of saving space I have to butcher my grammar. They suggested, in place of my 3 short, pithy and eloquent complete sentences (one with a question mark) , a 4 line sentence fragment which not only makes no bloody sense, it actually takes up more space than what I submitted. But they refuse to back down.
Quite aside from every other question this raises (We're a UNIVERSITY. If we don't use complete sentences, who will?), I can't believe how much time they're wasting on this. Every member of that committee is an academic just like me. Have they no papers to grade? Lectures to write? Homes to go to?
Bitching about Teaching:
I teach a class of 100 students. Their single major assignment, worth 40% of their grade, was due on Friday. They've had 6 weeks to work on it. It's tricky and I have spent 2 whole classes going over how to approach it, and complete instructions are up on the web for them.
Some of them will hand it in late. Some of them will not get how it's done or what I expected or how it will be graded, even though they have tried, even though I've gone over all of that exhaustively and put all that information up on the web too. I can deal with that.
What I find hard to deal with, and it comes up every year, and astonishes me every single time, is the number of students who come up to me ON FRIDAY to say "Is there an assignment due today? Uh, can I come talk to you about how to do it?"
Why, no, I don't have office hours today and I do have other things scheduled, I am sorry. Have you read the instructions on the class website? Why, yes, there are instructions up there; the ones I spent a good six hours putting together. The ones I showed you in class and went over twice. You might want to take a look.
And then of course there's the final pass, the whole point in fact, delivered in a shamefaced rush as I get my hand on my office door, preparing to whisk inside and lock it: "canIhaveanextensionIhad4otherpapersduethisweek?"
They never seem to have an answer to my response: "Tell me, why is my paper less important than the other four? Why am I the one you're asking for an extension?"
Besides the fact that I look like a sweet, plump, middle-aged motherly type who might give you one, I mean. Guess again, kid. I mean, true, I am a sweet plump middle-aged mother, but I didn't give birth to YOU.
Bitching about Research:
Sorry. I vaguely remember I was working on something, once. I can't remember which of about 4 stalled projects I'm supposed to be feeling particularly guilty about just at the moment. Maybe it will come to me after the end of term.
I very much get you on the research thing. Exactly how it works in my world.
ReplyDeleteMine, too -- with the added interesting twist that research is not even technically part of my job (but might be necessary to find another job if the need arose, and would almost certainly be necessary to find a better one).
Deleteand mine!
ReplyDeleteI hope things have gotten better for Mildred in the past five years.
ReplyDelete> We're a UNIVERSITY. If we don't use complete sentences, who will?
No one will. Welcome to Idiocracy, Mildred!
> I can't believe how much time they're wasting on this.
> Every member of that committee is an academic just like me.
> Have they no papers to grade?
> Lectures to write? Homes to go to?
Whenever our new department Chair gets enthusiastic about paperwork for the higher-ups that no one will ever read, I want to remind him that just because he's not been active in research for years now doesn't mean that the rest of us should me. Perhaps he should get a hobby?
Well I never. I'd forgotten all about this post.
ReplyDeleteI still feel vaguely guilty about 4 or so stalled research projects, but they are different projects. Eventually I got tired of feeling guilty about the old ones. I don't think I finished them, but it was awhile ago.(Checks CV.) Huh. I finished one or two.
I am not plump;I am a very normal shape. I admit that there are a lot of unreasonably skinny people around here. Dying my hair green has taken care of that pesky 'matronly' look.
The university is going to hell in a hand basket, and I deal with that alternately by staying off campus and by going to meetings and raising hell. Don't know if it helps but it relieves my feelings.
Students are as unprepared and disorganized as they ever were, but what the hell, they're 18. Occasionally I remember what I was like at 18 and have the grace to feel ashamed of complaining about them.
The weather is good today, I'm teaching a couple of classes I enjoy, and then I'll go home and hit Netflix. If I had to pick the single greatest obstacle to ever getting anything done, it's Netflix. Five years ago, I didn't have it, and I worried about 'lack of productivity'. Now I don't fret, because hey! Foyle's War!
Also, does anyone else absolutely hate the word "productivity" to refer to research? I'm not pushing out identical little cubelets of pressed data from some orifice at a monotonous regular pace after morning coffee. I irregularly produce something worth reading. If it's not going to be worth reading, I don't write it anymore. There are much better things to do with life.
Glad to see you lot are still here!
This sounds familiar: "The university is going to hell in a hand basket, and I deal with that alternately by staying off campus and by going to meetings and raising hell. Don't know if it helps but it relieves my feelings." Whether it would work better if I stayed in one mode or the other, rather than alternating years (or semesters, or months, or day) I don't know.
DeleteAnd I like your reflections on research "productivity." A non-steady pace (or perhaps a pace that looks reasonably steady when you graph it over many years, but less so when you graph it over few) is not necessarily a problem (at least not in terms of the actual quality of the scholarship produced, as opposed to the ability to bring in funding, get tenured/promoted, etc., etc.).
I miss you, Mildred! This is Compound Calico and I was the last moderator at RYS. Your posts were always among my favorites!
ReplyDelete