random whiny bullets of the end of a long week

This was an 'intersemester week' at Northern Uni (weeks are labelled Semester, Intersemester, Research or Vacation in our system).  In the past these weeks were treated as not-quite-vacation, as catch up with grading and write syllabi at home in your pyjamas weeks, fit in a little research travel or writing weeks, wear comfy scruffs and go home early if you come to campus at all, maybe take an actual day off kind of week.  Not any more - Incoming had packed it with meetings, and the university added a few more (because what else could we possibly be doing, when there were no classes?).

I was supposed to end the week by going to a collaborator's house for a 'kitchen supper' with their family.  I called off, citing migraineous headache, which is not entirely untrue as in I have an aggressive headache (which is actually more like stress/not sleeping well/mild dehydration from meetings in hot rooms with only coffee or commercial-type-fruit-juice on offer to drink, and I don't drink the former at all and restrict the latter to one glass a day as too much of the sweet/acid stuff with no pulp in it does not sit well with me, especially when I'm stressed) and although I haven't been sick I have been visiting the bathroom repeatedly and with urgency, which is not a sociable thing to do at someone else's house, especially when meeting their family for the first time.  But the main reason for actually calling off was that I am just Done With People for the week.  So I came home as soon as I could leave today's last meeting, petted and fed my cat, took a three hour nap, and am now blogging (grumpily).

• designing honours-level research content type modules by committee is just about as un-fun as it sounds
• academics can get amazingly wrought up over the definition of words, especially when the same word is defined differently by two people who are supposedly both scientists (hint: if YOUR definition subsumes the OTHER person's speciality and theirs keeps it in a different place, looking up the word in an online dictionary is NOT going to defuse the argument, because it's not about words)
• also, humanities people seem to instinctively resist '-ology' words in the title of a module whilst science-types hate random '-ings', '-ities' and plurals ("sunbathing knowledges" [why not just call it Sunbathing?  Because that sounds 'like something you'd study at school' and 'we need to highlight the plurality of the module experience'), "materiality of the bikini", "worlding the castle experience" [used to be World Sandcastles])
• and telling people to sit round a computer together and write a module specification is... fraught.  I saw one person snatch the keyboard away from another, and type away madly even though they couldn't see the screen, they were so annoyed by the hunt-and-peck method of the first person... and have to admit to rather a lot of childishness myself - I may have said "if you don't want to listen to the answer when you asked the question, I'm just going to go and sit over THERE".  And deliberately sat sideways on to a discussion to indicate my dislike of the way it was going, and also not made eye contact when I knew people wanted to (looking at my knitting here, not going to help you out, no sirree).
• I also had a couple of uncomfortable but necessary interactions before the 'let's all work as a group to create this new chimera' session in which I think I did a decent job of being positive but still protecting myself (for example, one was to warn the coordinator that I planned to stay to the end but might leave early if I was losing control of my snark and argumentativeness(!), and letting them know it would be about me not about them - they are a worrier too and if I slid out early I knew they would either assume some personal crisis or that they had caused me to want to leave or my leaving was a criticism of them, if you see what I mean).  But boy did it take a lot of emotional energy to plan for, practice and go through with them.  It's SO much easier to advocate for someone else than for yourself...
•  knowing that other people are facing even more drastic and unpleasant changes to their undergraduate teaching over the next few years than I am is NOT consoling, it is making me even ANGRIER - my slightly unhealthy mental processes are capable of rationalising assaults on my own material, to some degree, through things like "well you can be just as valuable teaching statistics" and "you aren't Beach Studies trained, so maybe these things AREN'T that important to the typical graduate employer" and even "you deserve it", but I (think I) see other people more clearly and kindly at times, and these are all good, smart colleagues who teach well and benefit students, and the changes are not as far as I can see going to benefit the students.  It is also making me realise that although I've felt like I was throwing packing peanuts at a mastadon during this process, maybe a couple of them got through...
• I do not understand why we as a department are not resisting this process which feels like self-excoriation and involves the creation of huge administrative and teaching-development burdens for us all for the next few years, when it seemed to me we could satisfy the centre by repackaging our already excellent material with new names and some pretty, jargon-adorned paperwork.  A very savvy colleague who has been out of the department on different kinds of leave for a year or so is back this week and attending these meetings.  They happened to sit near me and in the break after the 'update' on the process in the first of this week's meeting-a-thon meetings leant across to say "why aren't we just giving them the paperwork they want based on what we already have?  You and I could write it in a week between us" [I have a not undeserved rep for taking a slightly unseemly pleasure in the crafting of pedagogic-jargon-rich sentences to explain things I want to do, and for getting paperwork approved by the centre easily...].  So it's not just me...
• I have whined here, I'm sure, about how Shellology Accreditation has caused content in my general field to be wiped out from the first year common module, thus requiring me to rewrite my second and third year stuff (although Incoming says, very crossly as if I am being deliberately dense, that of COURSE I have no need to rewrite and am just making work for myself.  I don't get it, I really, genuinely do not get how you can teach STEM content at second year exactly the same regardless of what was covered at first year*).  Well, this week the person who filed the accreditation papers (who is actually mostly a researcher at the moment and rarely around, so why the heck he did it and not the two people who have been doing the rest of the design and teaching liason work I do not know) told me that I was being silly when I blamed Shellology for the changes.  Apparently the original course was entirely suitable for accreditation, and the paperwork I was shown when I tried to resist the changes to justify them was partial or incomplete or otherwise misleading, and of course the beggar told me this when it's too late to fix.  I am... trying not to be really really angry, because it won't help anyone or anything, but... swears were uttered, let's say.
• someone promised they'd ask me to do a certain task (not a very rewarding one, but one of those 'esteem indicator' ish things which I am very short on), but when I checked in with them they'd given it to Incoming because 'well, he's a professor'.  I'm sad about that because, well, it's just another little dismissal, little ignoring, minor word broken, and I'm all out of capacity to absorb any more of these straws at the moment.
• Work started on the yard revamp proper today, with some destruction, and reconstruction begins Monday.  Poor Furball is finding it all very distressing - I've booked her into the cattery for a few days next week, she'll be better off that way, I think.  But I'll miss her - the way a cat doesn't give a pflying pfennig about your day at work or any interpersonal crap as long as you feed her NOW and scratch under her ear NOW is very centering, in the absence of other humans (in fact often better than humans).  And there are a lot more meetings next week...

*Though I have a feeling that's the problem, he does seem to prefer the 'let's just teach the issues the students might encounter, not the underlying science' model of beach studies, and I... think that because our students are somewhat disadvantaged and underprepared compared with those at elite places, that makes it even MORE important to give them at least a little of what their luckier, more privileged peers get at those places - because some of them at least have just as much potential, just as much spark, and these three years of undergraduate are a critical opportunity to realise it, to stretch those intellectual muscles and at least realise there are all these fascinating knowledge-doors that they could look through - for many of them, maybe the only chance, the only exposure they will get, because they will get a standard cog in the machine management-y job and provide for their families and... I want them to have that taste.  I want them to know it's there, I want them to have the basic tools of language and critical thinking and I dunno acculturation to read the odd article intelligently, to get the most from documentaries, to have that door opened a little for them.  Some of them, I am delighted to say, will go on to do masters and PhDs at the elite places, and they should be prepared as best as I can.  Others to work for national agencies and organisations alongside students from full STEM backgrounds and from more privileged places, and they should have every tool I can give them to make the most of it.  I DO NOT CARE if that sounds elitist.  I do not actually care if it's not what students want when they arrive, or what the government wants us to do.  I got into this game because I love learning and I cannot think of any life path that would not be made richer by learning and if for even one or two students I am that person who names the stars to them, who shows them the light from distant windows, who tells them of course they can when they think things are not for them, who gives them the keys to the libraries of human knowledge, who helps them see and nurture their own spark - well.  It's fancy, it's high-falutin', it's maybe self-aggrandising.  But that's my call, the thing I want to pour out into the world.  I want to learn - and I want to share that learning.  To not just tap a specialist research water source for myself or my small field, to keep it pure and unsullied in a cistern, but to pour it out like a fountain, a well-spring, a stream-head...