Hi friends - grateful to Kimmie and glad to be back at the old stomping grounds (although it's awfully quiet here in Oilmont - where did everyone go?)My friends from a past university have to write navel-gazing self reports every calendar here (here, we have a one-page form to the tune of "describe your teaching in 25 words or fewer - it's fab"). But there, it's a 7-10 pager. They are due 1/15, so people are freaking out, and I thought I would help them.
Here is a suggested proffie self report:
Summary: This year, I did a lot of stuff. I taught students. I did some research. I spent enough committee time to have a permanent dent in my tongue from biting it so as to not tell Professor Silverback to STFU. It was a good year and I deserve a raise.
Teaching: I taught 7 classes this year to 348 students. Most of them were happy, as you can see by their happiness score on the end-of-semester reports you make them do. Only 22 of them over the year filled them out (no accountability in the system) and 4 hated my guts and the horse they rode in on, so the averages are lower than the university average. Funny how that mean vs. median thing works, but I get it, it's complicated.
Anyhow, I know my students learned good stuff because:
I got comments like "Dr. A is the bomb.com. Srsly." and "Yo, I actually know how to weave hamster fur now!" Negative comments included "Amelia refused to violate university policy and give me a completely different final 9 days early so I could go on a cruise with my parents when the prices are cheaper. She is a bitch and obviously hates students You should fire her immediately."
Some of the students did work that won a regional award for fur weaving.
Some of the students did work that professional fur weavers gave a thumbs up to. Way up.
To summarize teaching, I am a bitch and should be fired, but the students did learn actual stuff, so there is that.
Scholarship: I wrote some stuff a few years ago and it got published this year. Good for me. It was all super-important, trust me. Here is a list, in MLA style. See, I know MLA style. To summarize scholarship, no one will ever read what I wrote, but some sucker published it, and that's good enough for me, thee and P&T.
Service: OMFG, where do I even start? I was on the departmental committee from Hell all darned year long featuring Dr. Janie, the clueless administrator, who would interrupt every meeting to ask us to define hamster once again. I was on a different committee from Hell also, this one university-wide, that featured not one, but THREE faculty members sufficiently insecure as to use their votes as a way to make sure we were PAYING ATTENTION TO THEIR BRILLIANT, CLEAR THINKING DARN IT even though it wasn't really germane to the policy on library use that we were trying to come up with. I began starting everything I said with "With deference to Dr. PeterPrinciple's obvious expertise in this area, don't you think it might be useful to..." I am not making this up. To summarize service, those people who say it gets a whole lot worse after tenure were completely right and I will never doubt them again.
Summary: This year was just amazeballs. Please give me a raise and/or tenure It has been 4 years now and I am sure the state can cough up $1000 if you really try.
You are a bona fide star! Kimmie's blog didn't make it. Compound Crystal is trying here afresh. We are all leaving Oilmont soon. News in two days!
ReplyDelete"To summarize teaching, I am a bitch and should be fired, but the students did learn actual stuff, so there is that."
ReplyDeleteSnort. Cackle. I wish I could copy this to put in my end of year activity report. Ours are due on January 8th (even though our spring term doesn't start until the 25th, so how many of them will actually be submitted on time?).
We no longer have to write a "personal statement" of any length for ours; we mostly fill in boxes and add a few thoughts where appropriate. In general, the document runs about 4-5 pages for folks who have been at my institution for a while. This did not stop one of my junior "I'm such a superstar!" colleagues from submitting a report last year that was *thirty-three pages long*. I actually find these things depressing. No matter how much I think I accomplished, how hard I think I worked, how much I think I contributed to "university life," or how good I may be feeling about myself as a human being, when the thing is done and printed, everything is reduced to the same crappy type-font in the seem weeny-looking boxy format. The format we use makes the important stuff look utterly trivial and/or obscures it with a cloud of pointless reporting about our everyday activities. I really think that the admins are just counting the number of things we have typed in, regardless of, oh, quality, value, etc. I've long been tempted to type in the middle of my teaching evaluations: "You're a foo-foo head! You're a foo-foo head! You're a foo-foo head" many, many times, just to see whether anyone is paying attention.
Oh, and thanks for the heads-up about our move! I'm assuming that our blow-out New Year's Eve bash is still on at the compound, so that we can use up all the, uh, leftover chemicals before we depart?
> I'm assuming that our blow-out New Year's Eve bash is still on at the compound, so that we can use up all the, uh, leftover chemicals before we depart?
DeleteDo you know what kind of EH&S paperwork you have to do to move that stuff? Of course we're going to dispose of it, ahem, "properly".
In all seriousness, my school has money to renovate parts of the science building with emphasis on our decades out-dated chem labs. Even though the chemistry bits are most direly in need of the work they are going second so that they only have to be moved once. My section (and the biologists and some of the math folks) have to move twice to accommodate this (once to temporary quarters and then back to our new permanent home). At least if the budget holds out we're going to get a number of nice frills out of the deal: studio style instruction space, hard-point to enable overhead support for some demos we want, the ability to use projection and boards at the same time and so on.
Oh, you're talking about blowing sh*t up! I was talking about drinking and smoking sh*t. Same diff, perhaps. All of Oilmont should be invited!
DeleteI hope you get the nice frills. Frankly, I'm just thrilled on the occasions when I get a functioning document camera.
Happy New Year!
This:
ReplyDelete""Amelia refused to violate university policy and give me a completely different final 9 days early so I could go on a cruise with my parents when the prices are cheaper. She is a bitch and obviously hates students You should fire her immediately.""
This is the funniest shit I ever read. Thanks for helping me blow rum out my nose.
Testing to see if I can still comment with name/URL
ReplyDeleteIt appears that you can.
DeleteI, too, would like to borrow large portions of this (mostly the teaching part, since I don't -- officially, at least -- do service, or research, so maybe I should just paste in the teaching part 3 times). Do you think they run our annual reports through turnitsafe?
ReplyDeleteI also still love "hated my guts and the horse they rode in on"