Showing posts with label being an academic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label being an academic. Show all posts
Monday, January 21, 2013
Blahs
Writing group entry for this week kinda sums it all up
goals: a) spend 15 minutes with paper A on three occasions and b) 2 x 15 minute free-writings (because they are satisfying).
achieved: - Overcome by Inertia and Grading. NADA.
analysis: Many excuses, no real reasons. I'm still not 100% well, though improving slightly which is a relief, and I have grading with a longish deadline which I SHOULD do which means that I spend a lot of time looking at it, and not letting myself start anything else because then I won't grade, and not starting the grading. I am chipping away at it slowly, and the deadline will come and it will all be done, but... yeah. Owning My Failure here!
goals for next week: a) spend 15 minutes with paper A on three occasions and b) 2 x 15 minute free-writings (because they are satisfying). Finish all the grading!!!
this week's topic: One of the difficulties is that teaching/service/meetings are mostly about other people's needs, and research is in many ways about one's own needs, whether it's the need to do the work for itself, or the need to have the papers on the c.v., or the need of getting out of grad school at last. Many of us - especially the women - are full of both appropriate impulses to be part of a community and inappropriate socialisations about the relative importance of others needs and our own. So research, even if it feels like a positive and necessary thing, has an undercurrent of 'shouldn't spend too much time on selfish, self-benefiting things.'
The College Misery mantra - don't care more about a student's education than the student does - is very useful. Except when the inertia mice get into the wheels...
____________________________
Furball is a bit manic - we have a lot of SNOW here in the UK and apparently that's turnewd her little head... first there was the Washing Basket Incident. Clean laundry is an excellent cat bed, but the owner of the laundry does not approve, and tends to do totally unreasonable things such as shut the whole basket into the wardrobe so it's not accessible. Sneaky means are needed. She was particularly interested in the washing this week because, it being cold, I was drying stuff on the heated airer so it was all lovely and cosy. She woke up from a nap on a shelf to see me with a basket of folded laundry next to the airer and took a flying jump into the basket. Sadly, the laundry was still wet. And she somehow got her leg through a pair of underpants, so as she leapt out of the nasty wet landing place, they went too... and somehow she got her head through the other leg-hole as she leapt. Some very rude words were said in cat, and I need to do some mending, but she was fine (after a little snack to soothe her offended dignity).
Then there was the New Sleeping Place incident - I have floor-length curtains in a couple of rooms, and radiators under the windows. In one of the curtains, the deep hem is coming undone a little. Apparently, wiggling and rolling yourself into the undone hem and snuggling against the radiator inside the curtain is really, really comfy and cosy. Until your human comes along and assumes that the bulge in the curtain is a sock or something that fell off the radiator and pokes it with their foot. Being woken up like that is not funny. Especially if you then get your claws caught in the curtain and can't get out.
Dinner-time for cats is now Dark Time (which is about 4pm, as opposed to normal cat's tea time of 6pm) or Human Just Came Through The Door time. If I give in to the crying, paper chewing, pen stealing and general Total Nuisance Being of a cat pointing out that dinner time is NOW not later, and feed her, I get peace at the time... but then she wants Second Dinner about ten pm, loudly and insistently. I hate giving chewed work back to students.
Monday, January 07, 2013
Stress and academia
It's the time of year for LISTS and surveys and the like, and as so often our profession features.
A US article here ranked 'professor' as one of the top ten least stressful jobs - although they did clarify down in the comments that the 'study' considered only tenured, Full Professor, ignoring everyone else in the hierarchy and the difficulties of getting to that position... for soldier or nurse they didn't pick only the highest, most secure version of the profession for their analysis, as far as I could tell. Anyway, it sparked off the usual spate of "I'm so stressed so we are all so stressed" and "shut up you're so lucky and it's all your own fault anyway" posts around the academic blogosphere... two of the more considered positions are here and here, where two bloggers try and take a more nuanced approach to identifying stress within the job.
A UK report found a rather different picture; this one considered all kinds of academics and universities, and found that the self-reported experiences of stress made the sector a very difficult one.
The contrast between these two reports struck me. The US article looked from the outside - that is, it compared things like the responsibility of the role (so that a medical role which works directly with people's lives is innately considered more stressful than an academic role) in some kind of scaled, semi-objective way. The UK report drew on the opinions of people within the professions being compared. It seems to me that in this difference lies the true issue.
Stress is about individual responses to sets of circumstances - a situation which one person finds dull can be high-pressured to another. A friend from college is a medic who likes to work in intensive care or emergency sections - she says geriatrics is depressing, orthopedics is boring etc. etc. Boredom is stressful - she likes the buzz of being needed, thrives on emergencies, and was frankly pretty wearing to be around as an undergrad when all that thrill-seeking focus was looking for something to operate on. Another moved from academia to accountancy, because he was sick of the vagueness of the outcomes and moving goals of academic work - he loves the tidiness of accounts which are right or wrong, the structure of commuting and working standard hours and ticking things off neatly. People choose a profession partly because it suits them and their needs, right? But my feeling is that there is a big flaw in academia; the selection process requires a different set of skills than the job-as-experienced-today, especially in the UK setting. The selection process - the years of study and research and post-docing, the teaching training, developing your own teaching philosophies and research plans etc. etc. - selects for independence, for self-management, for the ability to go off alone into your own head and into the depths of a subject. It selects for the ability to think outside the box, long term, and to work towards big goals.
Being an academic, however, you lose most of the nexus of control. Your research is now mostly controlled by your ability to get funding, or the work of your students or post-docs - so you are now responsible for more e.g. people's work and careers (which you are probably stressed by, if you are both conscientious and used to working alone) and have much less control over how things actually get done (my fingers still ITCH to sieze some labwork off students and say "just let me do it" because I KNOW why stuff is going wrong and it's driving me NUTS waiting for them to follow through on my advice or even better/worse learn for themselves how to fix it). When my first post-doc project went seriously off the rails due to some fieldwork problems in the first few months, yes, I was stressed, I was anxious - but I was also able to throw myself into the reading, thinking, talking, writing needed to find an alternative route, to implement it, to put in the hours needed to find the new track and push the work onto it. And if I failed it was MY failure, not my FAULT but not in my control and affecting others. Your teaching is controlled at the least by departmental and programmatic structures - curricula are communal things, which modules you are assigned, modes of assessment, length of and number of classes, types of location - all these things are not fully in your control. I'm in a team-teaching-loving environment, with all sorts of extra layers of approvals and rules such as no more than three assessment items, no two assessment items can assess the same set of learning outcomes, all assessment items must total this number of hours of exam or this many words, all items must be set by the week before the semester starts for approval by a committee etc. etc., so I feel that only the time I'm in the classroom is in my control... and since my preference is to NOT be in total control of the classroom, since learning happens whilst doing rather than whilst listening, perhaps the only thing I really do control is the words on the handouts and powerpoints, and whether those get copied on time (which also depends on things like whether there is any paper or toner in the copier or a queue, and those things are not mine to control). Then there's the bureaucracy and changing priorities and firefighting...
And my point is, these things may not be very stressful on some absolute scale of stressful life events, but for the kind of person who typically makes it into an academic job in a middling institution, they are very stressful indeed. I mean, I was really good at science, right? Predicted great grades at A level. The school just assumed I'd apply for pre-med or vet school, because I had the academic skills. But I knew myself, and I knew I'd crumble under the people-handling demands of those jobs. Some people get good stress from life and death situations, a joyous surge of energy and sense of being alive and valuable that they thrive on. Me? I get the toxic kind of stress from even the smallest emergency situations like dealing with a cut finger in a laboratory. But the thrive-on-stress people would probably get the toxic stuff from carrying out thousands of identical measurements, or meeting with ten different groups of students to explain correlation analysis ten times for the second time this year and doing that every year.
Academia IS stressful, these days, for the majority of those involved in it. Partly because of the changing culture, the poor economy, changes in society, etc. etc. Partly because we are whiners, maybe - certainly we do like to articulate and critique everything we encounter and feel, it's what we're trained to do. But partly because many of us aren't really in the right situation to do our best work, or even to do OK work - we're awkward hand-carved pegs of all sorts of special shapes, mostly being managed by people who are the same as us and therefore no good at it or who have no patience for the boring necessities of good management and leadership because they are expected to ALSO teach and research and so on as well as manage with minimal training or support, and it's STRESSFUL for US.
Maybe that's because many of us wouldn't do great in the 'real world'. I've done my share of 'minimum wage' type jobs, and I wasn't great at bag packing or dealing with shop customers or receptioning - couldn't manage the 'look cheerful all the time' bit for a start. Shelf-stacking was OK if it was overnight when there weren't customers around, but I was a bit too prone to daydream and to 'making inappropriate comments' (such as saying 'oooh it's like a build your own cow kit' after spending an hour sorting all the different cuts of beef and organs and stuff in the big freezer, apparently that traumatised the girl I was working with). Bar work - I was good at the sums, and eventually learnt to both pull a decent pint and to mix the bizarre cocktail preferences of the darts team, but lacked the ability to build a rapport with people needed to be really good at it, and didn't enjoy the need to be 'in public' all the time. I liked my really boring data job (I checked paper forms to make sure that all the boxes had been filled out and that some numbers added up before someone more senior entered them into a computer) - clear goals, clear outcomes, a nice quiet desk in a corner of a busy room, and permission to read a book in the lulls as long as I worked like the clappers in the busy times. I liked working in the sorting room at the post-office, the teasing of the students was good-natured and the work was mostly repetitive and came in flurries with the odd bit of interest and the odd bit of sitting around. I've done contract work, depended on clients, written tenders, written reports in different corporate styles - not much, but enough to have an idea what's involved, and to appreciate the challenges it presents. I'm also a first-generation-to-university type, so no-one in my family had an academic job, so I know what different kinds of work are generally like.
I'm not totally ivory towered. And yes, I'm a delicate little flower with a sense of entitlement I expect. But I continue to find my work stressful, both in the lack of control and in the conflicts between the stated purposes and aims and the actions that are required or rewarded, and at the same time struggle to find an alternative which would suit me and my talents and my weaknesses, especially now I have these various health issues... Anastasia, for example, writes a really interesting blog about her transition from academia to high school teaching which is clearly going well for her. I am totally in awe, because no way could I handle the people-work she describes, clearly relishes and seems to excel at. That sort of thing - I can do it, if I'm honest, I do do with some of my students, but I can do it for an hour for one or two people and then I'm wrung out and have to find somewhere to hide and recuperate. I would not consider classroom teaching as a possible role for me in a school during the compulsory school years. Nu-uh. Just... no. Horses for courses.
A US article here ranked 'professor' as one of the top ten least stressful jobs - although they did clarify down in the comments that the 'study' considered only tenured, Full Professor, ignoring everyone else in the hierarchy and the difficulties of getting to that position... for soldier or nurse they didn't pick only the highest, most secure version of the profession for their analysis, as far as I could tell. Anyway, it sparked off the usual spate of "I'm so stressed so we are all so stressed" and "shut up you're so lucky and it's all your own fault anyway" posts around the academic blogosphere... two of the more considered positions are here and here, where two bloggers try and take a more nuanced approach to identifying stress within the job.
A UK report found a rather different picture; this one considered all kinds of academics and universities, and found that the self-reported experiences of stress made the sector a very difficult one.
The contrast between these two reports struck me. The US article looked from the outside - that is, it compared things like the responsibility of the role (so that a medical role which works directly with people's lives is innately considered more stressful than an academic role) in some kind of scaled, semi-objective way. The UK report drew on the opinions of people within the professions being compared. It seems to me that in this difference lies the true issue.
Stress is about individual responses to sets of circumstances - a situation which one person finds dull can be high-pressured to another. A friend from college is a medic who likes to work in intensive care or emergency sections - she says geriatrics is depressing, orthopedics is boring etc. etc. Boredom is stressful - she likes the buzz of being needed, thrives on emergencies, and was frankly pretty wearing to be around as an undergrad when all that thrill-seeking focus was looking for something to operate on. Another moved from academia to accountancy, because he was sick of the vagueness of the outcomes and moving goals of academic work - he loves the tidiness of accounts which are right or wrong, the structure of commuting and working standard hours and ticking things off neatly. People choose a profession partly because it suits them and their needs, right? But my feeling is that there is a big flaw in academia; the selection process requires a different set of skills than the job-as-experienced-today, especially in the UK setting. The selection process - the years of study and research and post-docing, the teaching training, developing your own teaching philosophies and research plans etc. etc. - selects for independence, for self-management, for the ability to go off alone into your own head and into the depths of a subject. It selects for the ability to think outside the box, long term, and to work towards big goals.
Being an academic, however, you lose most of the nexus of control. Your research is now mostly controlled by your ability to get funding, or the work of your students or post-docs - so you are now responsible for more e.g. people's work and careers (which you are probably stressed by, if you are both conscientious and used to working alone) and have much less control over how things actually get done (my fingers still ITCH to sieze some labwork off students and say "just let me do it" because I KNOW why stuff is going wrong and it's driving me NUTS waiting for them to follow through on my advice or even better/worse learn for themselves how to fix it). When my first post-doc project went seriously off the rails due to some fieldwork problems in the first few months, yes, I was stressed, I was anxious - but I was also able to throw myself into the reading, thinking, talking, writing needed to find an alternative route, to implement it, to put in the hours needed to find the new track and push the work onto it. And if I failed it was MY failure, not my FAULT but not in my control and affecting others. Your teaching is controlled at the least by departmental and programmatic structures - curricula are communal things, which modules you are assigned, modes of assessment, length of and number of classes, types of location - all these things are not fully in your control. I'm in a team-teaching-loving environment, with all sorts of extra layers of approvals and rules such as no more than three assessment items, no two assessment items can assess the same set of learning outcomes, all assessment items must total this number of hours of exam or this many words, all items must be set by the week before the semester starts for approval by a committee etc. etc., so I feel that only the time I'm in the classroom is in my control... and since my preference is to NOT be in total control of the classroom, since learning happens whilst doing rather than whilst listening, perhaps the only thing I really do control is the words on the handouts and powerpoints, and whether those get copied on time (which also depends on things like whether there is any paper or toner in the copier or a queue, and those things are not mine to control). Then there's the bureaucracy and changing priorities and firefighting...
And my point is, these things may not be very stressful on some absolute scale of stressful life events, but for the kind of person who typically makes it into an academic job in a middling institution, they are very stressful indeed. I mean, I was really good at science, right? Predicted great grades at A level. The school just assumed I'd apply for pre-med or vet school, because I had the academic skills. But I knew myself, and I knew I'd crumble under the people-handling demands of those jobs. Some people get good stress from life and death situations, a joyous surge of energy and sense of being alive and valuable that they thrive on. Me? I get the toxic kind of stress from even the smallest emergency situations like dealing with a cut finger in a laboratory. But the thrive-on-stress people would probably get the toxic stuff from carrying out thousands of identical measurements, or meeting with ten different groups of students to explain correlation analysis ten times for the second time this year and doing that every year.
Academia IS stressful, these days, for the majority of those involved in it. Partly because of the changing culture, the poor economy, changes in society, etc. etc. Partly because we are whiners, maybe - certainly we do like to articulate and critique everything we encounter and feel, it's what we're trained to do. But partly because many of us aren't really in the right situation to do our best work, or even to do OK work - we're awkward hand-carved pegs of all sorts of special shapes, mostly being managed by people who are the same as us and therefore no good at it or who have no patience for the boring necessities of good management and leadership because they are expected to ALSO teach and research and so on as well as manage with minimal training or support, and it's STRESSFUL for US.
Maybe that's because many of us wouldn't do great in the 'real world'. I've done my share of 'minimum wage' type jobs, and I wasn't great at bag packing or dealing with shop customers or receptioning - couldn't manage the 'look cheerful all the time' bit for a start. Shelf-stacking was OK if it was overnight when there weren't customers around, but I was a bit too prone to daydream and to 'making inappropriate comments' (such as saying 'oooh it's like a build your own cow kit' after spending an hour sorting all the different cuts of beef and organs and stuff in the big freezer, apparently that traumatised the girl I was working with). Bar work - I was good at the sums, and eventually learnt to both pull a decent pint and to mix the bizarre cocktail preferences of the darts team, but lacked the ability to build a rapport with people needed to be really good at it, and didn't enjoy the need to be 'in public' all the time. I liked my really boring data job (I checked paper forms to make sure that all the boxes had been filled out and that some numbers added up before someone more senior entered them into a computer) - clear goals, clear outcomes, a nice quiet desk in a corner of a busy room, and permission to read a book in the lulls as long as I worked like the clappers in the busy times. I liked working in the sorting room at the post-office, the teasing of the students was good-natured and the work was mostly repetitive and came in flurries with the odd bit of interest and the odd bit of sitting around. I've done contract work, depended on clients, written tenders, written reports in different corporate styles - not much, but enough to have an idea what's involved, and to appreciate the challenges it presents. I'm also a first-generation-to-university type, so no-one in my family had an academic job, so I know what different kinds of work are generally like.
I'm not totally ivory towered. And yes, I'm a delicate little flower with a sense of entitlement I expect. But I continue to find my work stressful, both in the lack of control and in the conflicts between the stated purposes and aims and the actions that are required or rewarded, and at the same time struggle to find an alternative which would suit me and my talents and my weaknesses, especially now I have these various health issues... Anastasia, for example, writes a really interesting blog about her transition from academia to high school teaching which is clearly going well for her. I am totally in awe, because no way could I handle the people-work she describes, clearly relishes and seems to excel at. That sort of thing - I can do it, if I'm honest, I do do with some of my students, but I can do it for an hour for one or two people and then I'm wrung out and have to find somewhere to hide and recuperate. I would not consider classroom teaching as a possible role for me in a school during the compulsory school years. Nu-uh. Just... no. Horses for courses.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Is this even legal?
Apparently, the Dean decided that there would be No Availability Constraints included in the timetabling process this year for the Science Faculty (staff are allocated to modules, identify the kind of teaching room they need, students pick modules, THEN a central administrator and a computer programme attempt to generate a timetable which suits everyone based on number of students, room capacity/type, all the different student choices and academic availability).
That means:
And we were assured that any clashes will be dealt with retrospectively by asking the centre to amend the timetable once it's issued. If you've read here for any length of time, you've probably noticed the complete inability of timetabling to get things right (it's an old programme, the one person is very busy... and it's also a bureaucratic, inefficient system which takes no account for the needs of the students and academics that it should support), so I have little faith in that.
::pout::
Also, apparently the department might be changing its name! Because... someone (apparently none of my colleagues) has filed the paperwork to do so with the faculty. We are all baffled.
I hate staff meetings, I am always left feeling distinctly less loyal to the institution than I was beforehand.
That means:
- no requests to not teach after 4pm so you can pick up your children.
- no requests to not teach on a specific day when you have other committments... even if those committments are admissions events, or a staff development programme that you run, or whatever
- no ability to have identified research days (which really matters if you run long experiments, work at an off-site facility etc.)
- AND no requests that someone PAID for four days a week only TEACHES four days a week.
And we were assured that any clashes will be dealt with retrospectively by asking the centre to amend the timetable once it's issued. If you've read here for any length of time, you've probably noticed the complete inability of timetabling to get things right (it's an old programme, the one person is very busy... and it's also a bureaucratic, inefficient system which takes no account for the needs of the students and academics that it should support), so I have little faith in that.
::pout::
Also, apparently the department might be changing its name! Because... someone (apparently none of my colleagues) has filed the paperwork to do so with the faculty. We are all baffled.
I hate staff meetings, I am always left feeling distinctly less loyal to the institution than I was beforehand.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Briefly
The new chiropractor seems nice. And favours deep massage over just 'poking the hurtiest places' which makes treatment more pleasant, so we'll see if that works. It hurts differently this evening which is, I guess, a start...
Post Doc F is off on holiday next week - and I have 59 statistics reports and 8 independent research projects to grade, with more to come. ::pout::
The work level in the department has been very low the last few days, because a flotilla of ducklings (not sure if that's the right word but it ought to be!) hatched out in our building's courtyard, the duck having hidden herself away under some ornamental plantings, and we have been advised to let them stay there for a few weeks, safe from most predators. They seem unphased by cooing students with cameras, have been enjoying the puddles left by the recent rain, and are being fed special food for baby chicks from a farming shop that a colleague who is usually very rigid and formal insisted on rushing off to buy from his own pocket the day they hatched (in case there wasn't enough food in the courtyard). When I left this afternoon, the post-grads were arranging a duck feeding rota for the weekend.
I finally began a horrible administrative task that I've been putting off for weeks now - everyone in my department of senior lecturer level and above is expected to read the possible REF submissions of other colleagues in their research 'supergroup' and rate them on the REF scale, then the results will be compiled (everyone's work having been read by several other people) and used to decide who is REF-able and who isn't. If that doesn't mean anything to you you are lucky! (REF = Research Excellence Framework, formerly known as the Research Assessment Exercise). I was assigned three colleagues' papers to read: Very Difficult Colleague (who is a Bully), Touchy Colleague (who has already told me what score their papers should get - surprisingly enough, they're ALL of top international standing!) and Colleague I Teach With A Lot. So it's been really hard, in that I know these people, and I find it tricky to separate that from assessing their papers, and also that I am kind of scared of one of them and wary of the others (in that if they take agin me life could be harder for a while, and it's happened before, so...). Plus, I think the whole thing is STUPID. Another reason I may never get to be a Prof!
Post Doc F is off on holiday next week - and I have 59 statistics reports and 8 independent research projects to grade, with more to come. ::pout::
The work level in the department has been very low the last few days, because a flotilla of ducklings (not sure if that's the right word but it ought to be!) hatched out in our building's courtyard, the duck having hidden herself away under some ornamental plantings, and we have been advised to let them stay there for a few weeks, safe from most predators. They seem unphased by cooing students with cameras, have been enjoying the puddles left by the recent rain, and are being fed special food for baby chicks from a farming shop that a colleague who is usually very rigid and formal insisted on rushing off to buy from his own pocket the day they hatched (in case there wasn't enough food in the courtyard). When I left this afternoon, the post-grads were arranging a duck feeding rota for the weekend.
I finally began a horrible administrative task that I've been putting off for weeks now - everyone in my department of senior lecturer level and above is expected to read the possible REF submissions of other colleagues in their research 'supergroup' and rate them on the REF scale, then the results will be compiled (everyone's work having been read by several other people) and used to decide who is REF-able and who isn't. If that doesn't mean anything to you you are lucky! (REF = Research Excellence Framework, formerly known as the Research Assessment Exercise). I was assigned three colleagues' papers to read: Very Difficult Colleague (who is a Bully), Touchy Colleague (who has already told me what score their papers should get - surprisingly enough, they're ALL of top international standing!) and Colleague I Teach With A Lot. So it's been really hard, in that I know these people, and I find it tricky to separate that from assessing their papers, and also that I am kind of scared of one of them and wary of the others (in that if they take agin me life could be harder for a while, and it's happened before, so...). Plus, I think the whole thing is STUPID. Another reason I may never get to be a Prof!
Sunday, April 22, 2012
In which I am Really Annoyed...
...but am going to have to be careful to blog vaguely enough to not be particularly identifiable. However, I will blog - if only because it might stop me seething long enough to go to bed soon (it's gone midnight already and I have done NOTHING productive today so I need to vent!).
The process of sorting out next academic year's classes is always long-drawn out and disorganised. Discussions and planning are promised, then postponed, and it all ends up being done at the last minute apparently behind closed doors or by throwing darts at the wall blindfold and at least one someone feels like they've been let down badly by the non-system. I guess this year it's me.
The first annoyance is the IgnoranceOfHistory annoyance. We have multiple kinds of independent research project which are done by students in their penultimate and/or final years for different undergraduate programmes. Each type of IRP has had a different person coordinating it for the last few years, partly so that the needs of the different student groups (even such silly things as making sure that general emails have the right submission date for each group and the right word length for the project) are clearly recognised - when one person has taken care of more than one IRP, the smaller student group has rightly or wrongly always felt themselves to be neglected. Also, coordinating an IRP is one of those roles where the person doing it has minimal duties for most of the year then mad rushes at certain pinch-points (e.g. semester ends) - even though the IRPs are different, the pinch-points are the same. It is true that the oversight of IRPs is not perfectly coordinated between the different people, partly because no-one has ever required that they coordinate - each IRP is taught as a totally separate module - and partly because IRPs are highly individualised, with the pattern of supervision agreed between student and supervisor and highly dependent on the nature of the project (facilities needed, balance of work between field, lab, computer lab, writing, etc.etc.).
I have coordinated one of the smaller IRPs for the last few years (not always the same one) and I enjoy it. I like the one-to-one nature of the work and also enjoy running the occasional progress/advice meetings for the whole group, and IRP supervision is something I both do a lot of and find challenging and interesting. So, yeah, I have Opinions on the process.
When the FINAL list came round, about two days after the final date for submission of paperwork in-house and about three days before the transfer of paperwork from department to faculty (at which point we lose all opportunity to edit for our own ends although they can make us rewrite for very dumb reasons*...) but that's depressingly usual, I noted that I wasn't down for either of the IRPs I usually have one of, so I queried it. "Oh yeah, well, after I agreed your workload with you, I changed my mind and decided to have one person do all the IRPs" said the Director of Teaching (hereafter DOT). "You can't complain because it's less work for you." Now, DOT has been here nearly as long as I have, DOT KNOWS why we moved away from this model. However, DOT says he must balance the load fairly and clearly IRP oversight is a suitable teaching assignment for one of the research professors.
I have looked after IRPs for years and years. I'm also the kind of academic students talk to, and will come and ask for advice even about modules I don't teach. Most supervisors have one or two relationships which don't work out, or IRPs have problems. However, TWO of my colleagues feature consistently in student complaints or problems, every year - they don't reply to emails, they arrange meetings then aren't there, they go to conferences in teaching time and don't warn the students to plan ahead, they tell the students to do tasks but refuse to tell them how to do them or point them to relevant reading (and I do believe the students have the right of it most of the time - one of the IRPs I have coordinated is like super-honours-IRP for the best, grad-school-bound, conscientious students), just for being generally unhelpful, unavailable and unsupportive. Yes, you guessed it - one of those people is now looking after ALL the IRPs for the whole department. Do I really believe that, because I'm not officially coordinating any IRPs, I will not have any extra IRP related work next year? Not now this person's in charge, I don't.
The second problem - oh lord, the second problem makes me so angry. I took on directorship of a degree route from one of the people who took Voluntary Severance around Christmas. I sit on teaching committee, and I also teach one of the key modules in the final year for this route. I am therefore in a good position, in THREE good positions, to know what is planned for this route. (Routes have directors, but they are all made up from different core and option combinations of a departmental suite of modules, and the DOT has oversight of all the curricular decisions about that suite of modules. And as usual the DOT left it until close to the last minute - yes, we had Issues, as in VS losses and new appointments and one of the new people might not be starting this autumn but next autumn and and and - but that's no excuse for screwing things up this badly). And so, when asked by the students, I felt entirely justified in saying that whilst I couldn't tell them the exact details, yes, the final year would follow the same pattern as previous years (so much core, so much IRP, so much senior-seminar-options) and that there would, as there has been for as long as the programme has existed (and as clearly stated in all the documentation), be a choice of senior seminar options - they being OPTIONS, you understand.
A document was emailed to students yesterday afternoon (yes, Friday, around 3pm), and to staff about 2 hours AFTER it was sent to students, which explained all the rules for choosing optional modules for next year for all the different routes (yes, it is one hell of a cumbersome system). And what did it show? NO CHOICE in the final year of 'my' route. The core has changed around. They must take two senior seminars from a list of two. So, right, first, I look like an idiot in front of my route's students (I've already had "but I thought you said..." emails from two of them). Second, my senior seminar has gone from option to core (which immediately makes it much less teachable, and larger), and I wasn't even told this was happening, never mind ASKED. Third, what was the point of all the teaching committee meetings in which this was all discussed, all the individual discussions with staff? It would have taken so little to email me and say, there is an issue, we may need to change this... DOT is not pleased that I have 'misled the students'. I am really not pleased with DOT. And these are final year students, they do not deserve to be messed around.
They are not flakey students, and they are smart, vocal and strongly likely to argue about this. They understand and accept that the actual options may not be many and may change from year to year, but I will be surprised if they accept the change from having options to having no options without a battle**. I am NOT looking forward to Monday... and I am just so CROSS. Last year, things happened which I only found out about after they were set in stone, curricular/teaching team things, small things individually but all making problems for me and for students. I assumed that I was just missing out because teaching committee was taking all the decisions on itself - I don't LIKE that, I want teaching decisions to be made by everyone who teaches who cares to be there, and for people to be consulted - but now I'm ON teaching committee and it's still happening... makes a farce of having a committee.
I just feel like I'm in an invidious position here, and I'm Not Pleased.
Third, there was a "typo" claiming that students had to pay additional lab charges for my final year option, which I have been told will definitely be taken off the books if it doesn't fill this year. And guess what, they DON'T have to pay charges, and modules with charges very rarely fill... I think it was probably a genuine error, but, so SLOPPY. WHY not let the people with lab elements to their modules check the list of which ones attract additional charges? Oh yeah, because you're in a hurry... because it was left until the last minute... because the document should have been out on Monday... hmm. We won't accept 'ran out of time' as a reason for student errors, so why should they accept it from us?
* example: last year, learning outcome statements took the form "on successfully completing this module, you should be able to....". This year, the accepted form of words was "given detailed guidance, students will be able to..." (replacing "detailed" with "moderate", "limited" and then "minimal" over the four levels of taught modules). This is plainly just bureaucratese, but they sent ALL THE FORMS back to us and made us write in in red pen the new form of words then send them back to the centre. The same form of words on all the forms. And the person in the Department who coordinates this decided to delegate the work, and sent each form out to the module leader, so that every person in the department had to read the new briefings and write the new words on the form and then hand them back in for checking and... ::rant:: ::incoherant arm-waving and emoting::
** it just so happens that the most articulate of the group, a popular and genuinely nice guy, is a student rep on the faculty teaching committee and has just finished his 'representative governance training' at the students' union - I kind of look forward to seeing just how politely stroppy he might get.
The process of sorting out next academic year's classes is always long-drawn out and disorganised. Discussions and planning are promised, then postponed, and it all ends up being done at the last minute apparently behind closed doors or by throwing darts at the wall blindfold and at least one someone feels like they've been let down badly by the non-system. I guess this year it's me.
The first annoyance is the IgnoranceOfHistory annoyance. We have multiple kinds of independent research project which are done by students in their penultimate and/or final years for different undergraduate programmes. Each type of IRP has had a different person coordinating it for the last few years, partly so that the needs of the different student groups (even such silly things as making sure that general emails have the right submission date for each group and the right word length for the project) are clearly recognised - when one person has taken care of more than one IRP, the smaller student group has rightly or wrongly always felt themselves to be neglected. Also, coordinating an IRP is one of those roles where the person doing it has minimal duties for most of the year then mad rushes at certain pinch-points (e.g. semester ends) - even though the IRPs are different, the pinch-points are the same. It is true that the oversight of IRPs is not perfectly coordinated between the different people, partly because no-one has ever required that they coordinate - each IRP is taught as a totally separate module - and partly because IRPs are highly individualised, with the pattern of supervision agreed between student and supervisor and highly dependent on the nature of the project (facilities needed, balance of work between field, lab, computer lab, writing, etc.etc.).
I have coordinated one of the smaller IRPs for the last few years (not always the same one) and I enjoy it. I like the one-to-one nature of the work and also enjoy running the occasional progress/advice meetings for the whole group, and IRP supervision is something I both do a lot of and find challenging and interesting. So, yeah, I have Opinions on the process.
When the FINAL list came round, about two days after the final date for submission of paperwork in-house and about three days before the transfer of paperwork from department to faculty (at which point we lose all opportunity to edit for our own ends although they can make us rewrite for very dumb reasons*...) but that's depressingly usual, I noted that I wasn't down for either of the IRPs I usually have one of, so I queried it. "Oh yeah, well, after I agreed your workload with you, I changed my mind and decided to have one person do all the IRPs" said the Director of Teaching (hereafter DOT). "You can't complain because it's less work for you." Now, DOT has been here nearly as long as I have, DOT KNOWS why we moved away from this model. However, DOT says he must balance the load fairly and clearly IRP oversight is a suitable teaching assignment for one of the research professors.
I have looked after IRPs for years and years. I'm also the kind of academic students talk to, and will come and ask for advice even about modules I don't teach. Most supervisors have one or two relationships which don't work out, or IRPs have problems. However, TWO of my colleagues feature consistently in student complaints or problems, every year - they don't reply to emails, they arrange meetings then aren't there, they go to conferences in teaching time and don't warn the students to plan ahead, they tell the students to do tasks but refuse to tell them how to do them or point them to relevant reading (and I do believe the students have the right of it most of the time - one of the IRPs I have coordinated is like super-honours-IRP for the best, grad-school-bound, conscientious students), just for being generally unhelpful, unavailable and unsupportive. Yes, you guessed it - one of those people is now looking after ALL the IRPs for the whole department. Do I really believe that, because I'm not officially coordinating any IRPs, I will not have any extra IRP related work next year? Not now this person's in charge, I don't.
The second problem - oh lord, the second problem makes me so angry. I took on directorship of a degree route from one of the people who took Voluntary Severance around Christmas. I sit on teaching committee, and I also teach one of the key modules in the final year for this route. I am therefore in a good position, in THREE good positions, to know what is planned for this route. (Routes have directors, but they are all made up from different core and option combinations of a departmental suite of modules, and the DOT has oversight of all the curricular decisions about that suite of modules. And as usual the DOT left it until close to the last minute - yes, we had Issues, as in VS losses and new appointments and one of the new people might not be starting this autumn but next autumn and and and - but that's no excuse for screwing things up this badly). And so, when asked by the students, I felt entirely justified in saying that whilst I couldn't tell them the exact details, yes, the final year would follow the same pattern as previous years (so much core, so much IRP, so much senior-seminar-options) and that there would, as there has been for as long as the programme has existed (and as clearly stated in all the documentation), be a choice of senior seminar options - they being OPTIONS, you understand.
A document was emailed to students yesterday afternoon (yes, Friday, around 3pm), and to staff about 2 hours AFTER it was sent to students, which explained all the rules for choosing optional modules for next year for all the different routes (yes, it is one hell of a cumbersome system). And what did it show? NO CHOICE in the final year of 'my' route. The core has changed around. They must take two senior seminars from a list of two. So, right, first, I look like an idiot in front of my route's students (I've already had "but I thought you said..." emails from two of them). Second, my senior seminar has gone from option to core (which immediately makes it much less teachable, and larger), and I wasn't even told this was happening, never mind ASKED. Third, what was the point of all the teaching committee meetings in which this was all discussed, all the individual discussions with staff? It would have taken so little to email me and say, there is an issue, we may need to change this... DOT is not pleased that I have 'misled the students'. I am really not pleased with DOT. And these are final year students, they do not deserve to be messed around.
They are not flakey students, and they are smart, vocal and strongly likely to argue about this. They understand and accept that the actual options may not be many and may change from year to year, but I will be surprised if they accept the change from having options to having no options without a battle**. I am NOT looking forward to Monday... and I am just so CROSS. Last year, things happened which I only found out about after they were set in stone, curricular/teaching team things, small things individually but all making problems for me and for students. I assumed that I was just missing out because teaching committee was taking all the decisions on itself - I don't LIKE that, I want teaching decisions to be made by everyone who teaches who cares to be there, and for people to be consulted - but now I'm ON teaching committee and it's still happening... makes a farce of having a committee.
I just feel like I'm in an invidious position here, and I'm Not Pleased.
Third, there was a "typo" claiming that students had to pay additional lab charges for my final year option, which I have been told will definitely be taken off the books if it doesn't fill this year. And guess what, they DON'T have to pay charges, and modules with charges very rarely fill... I think it was probably a genuine error, but, so SLOPPY. WHY not let the people with lab elements to their modules check the list of which ones attract additional charges? Oh yeah, because you're in a hurry... because it was left until the last minute... because the document should have been out on Monday... hmm. We won't accept 'ran out of time' as a reason for student errors, so why should they accept it from us?
* example: last year, learning outcome statements took the form "on successfully completing this module, you should be able to....". This year, the accepted form of words was "given detailed guidance, students will be able to..." (replacing "detailed" with "moderate", "limited" and then "minimal" over the four levels of taught modules). This is plainly just bureaucratese, but they sent ALL THE FORMS back to us and made us write in in red pen the new form of words then send them back to the centre. The same form of words on all the forms. And the person in the Department who coordinates this decided to delegate the work, and sent each form out to the module leader, so that every person in the department had to read the new briefings and write the new words on the form and then hand them back in for checking and... ::rant:: ::incoherant arm-waving and emoting::
** it just so happens that the most articulate of the group, a popular and genuinely nice guy, is a student rep on the faculty teaching committee and has just finished his 'representative governance training' at the students' union - I kind of look forward to seeing just how politely stroppy he might get.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Thursday
I came in meaning to start the day by finishing and submitting my grant review. I read the document and made notes yesterday, so I just had to turn the notes into comments typed into the correct boxes, decide some scores, and press submit. I only just pressed submit 5 minutes ago.
I also was late for class today. Class in a classroom right next to my office. The students all queued up, and my door was open, they could see me and I could see them, and none of them asked me why I wasn't letting them in (because I forget the time of the rescheduled class). They just stood there until ten minutes after class would usually start, when I went out to ask who they were waiting for so I could ring the office and check for them, and they said "er, you actually". When I asked why they hadn't said something they said "you looked busy" as if that was unusual...
Why do they barge in, as they have done all day, and happily ask irrelevant questions (e.g. "will DrX (academic in the next office, who isn't in today) be in next Tuesday, because I'd like to ask him about my essay for his class then"), even if I have another student in with me, but when I'm SUPPOSED to be with them, and they can see I'm in my office alone, they don't even ask?? I iz confuzed
I also was late for class today. Class in a classroom right next to my office. The students all queued up, and my door was open, they could see me and I could see them, and none of them asked me why I wasn't letting them in (because I forget the time of the rescheduled class). They just stood there until ten minutes after class would usually start, when I went out to ask who they were waiting for so I could ring the office and check for them, and they said "er, you actually". When I asked why they hadn't said something they said "you looked busy" as if that was unusual...
Why do they barge in, as they have done all day, and happily ask irrelevant questions (e.g. "will DrX (academic in the next office, who isn't in today) be in next Tuesday, because I'd like to ask him about my essay for his class then"), even if I have another student in with me, but when I'm SUPPOSED to be with them, and they can see I'm in my office alone, they don't even ask?? I iz confuzed
Wednesday
Turkish food = delicious (sigara boreki - delicate crispy rolls of filo pastry filled with herby feta cheese/mediterranean vegetable and halloumi kebabs cooked over charcoal/walnut stuffed figs stewed in a spiced syrup and mint tea).
Having a visiting speaker whose career track has interesting parallels with mine (e.g. fell into current research because of combination of opportunity/lack of funding/original field crowded by well funded Big Names) and who is fun to talk to is great - we had a lovely grumble about how much the main prestige funding body in our field favours work with 'machines that go ping' and swapped 'stupid things referees have said about my projects' stories.
Spending a few hours over said Turkish meal swapping hilarious fieldwork stories with the visitor and a couple of colleagues I like but rarely spend time with because we're all busy and they have little kids - positively refreshing.
Despite all the student emails, complaints and Things Not Done, yesterday was a Good Day (even though I managed to burn a rather personal location with a baked bean... long story. Don't think anyone else noticed. It was a very JaneBian sort of incident though...).
Although getting up this morning was HARD.
Having a visiting speaker whose career track has interesting parallels with mine (e.g. fell into current research because of combination of opportunity/lack of funding/original field crowded by well funded Big Names) and who is fun to talk to is great - we had a lovely grumble about how much the main prestige funding body in our field favours work with 'machines that go ping' and swapped 'stupid things referees have said about my projects' stories.
Spending a few hours over said Turkish meal swapping hilarious fieldwork stories with the visitor and a couple of colleagues I like but rarely spend time with because we're all busy and they have little kids - positively refreshing.
Despite all the student emails, complaints and Things Not Done, yesterday was a Good Day (even though I managed to burn a rather personal location with a baked bean... long story. Don't think anyone else noticed. It was a very JaneBian sort of incident though...).
Although getting up this morning was HARD.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Monday
There are four teaching weeks to go, then four examining weeks and two meeting weeks. I'm teaching a week-long field course somewhere in there (date yet to be finalised! Numbers of students unknown! Stress? Wot dat den?). Then I go in the field (a whole other kind of stress...). One day at a time.
Today I did set up an appointment with my GP (ten days off, because apparently it's a busy time of year... huh??). I did a lot of teaching stuff. A LOT. And it's still not done, of course. I also checked my diary - I had another class tomorrow I'd forgotten about, and a meeting today (staff-student consultative committee. Not much fun really). I ran some laundry, which I have to unload and hang to dry before I go to bed, and set up an on-line grocery order to arrive at the weekend... (not sure yet if I can get out of going in the field on Friday. I both want to go and don't want to go. If I DO go, I don't get my day off this week, which is probably not smart),
***********************************
Baffling failure to follow instructions by students moment:
Students went on a field trip to two beaches. They were specifically told to record in their field notebooks some observations of specific features of both beaches then write a paragraph or two of their first impressions of the differences between them and the reasons for the differences.
There is no way that the students did not all go to both beaches - they went together with an academic in a minibus from the department to beach one to beach two and back to the department. They all had notebooks, issued by the department. The weather was sunny and dry, in fact it was better in the afternoon than the morning.
So WHY did only about 25% of the students write ANYTHING about beach 2? The rest were asleep on the bus and sleepwalked along the boardwalk for two hours at beach 2? They all lost their pencils? Their lunch was too soporofic? (Note: ban lettuce from fieldwork packed lunches!)
They all did an acceptable job at beach 1, yet 75% of them decided to write NOTHING about beach 2 and not do the summary. They are going to be pretty miffed at getting marks of 25-40 for the day, but really, WHAT HAPPENED? I DO NOT GET IT.
**********************************
Staff-student consultative committee. We have on-line module evaluation forms, and our completion rates are poor, even when we lead the students by the hand to the computer room so they can do the forms. I have permission this semester to set up a prize draw which you can only enter by finishing an evaluation and clicking a button at the end. It is for small prizes - (Amazon vouchers, £10ish values). Will this help, I ask? Entire student component of committee says, oh, yes, definitely, we love free stuff! Everyone will do questionnaires if we can win stuff!! OK.... I guess we can only try!
**********************************
Now to sort the laundry and try to get to bed before midnight.
Today I did set up an appointment with my GP (ten days off, because apparently it's a busy time of year... huh??). I did a lot of teaching stuff. A LOT. And it's still not done, of course. I also checked my diary - I had another class tomorrow I'd forgotten about, and a meeting today (staff-student consultative committee. Not much fun really). I ran some laundry, which I have to unload and hang to dry before I go to bed, and set up an on-line grocery order to arrive at the weekend... (not sure yet if I can get out of going in the field on Friday. I both want to go and don't want to go. If I DO go, I don't get my day off this week, which is probably not smart),
***********************************
Baffling failure to follow instructions by students moment:
Students went on a field trip to two beaches. They were specifically told to record in their field notebooks some observations of specific features of both beaches then write a paragraph or two of their first impressions of the differences between them and the reasons for the differences.
There is no way that the students did not all go to both beaches - they went together with an academic in a minibus from the department to beach one to beach two and back to the department. They all had notebooks, issued by the department. The weather was sunny and dry, in fact it was better in the afternoon than the morning.
So WHY did only about 25% of the students write ANYTHING about beach 2? The rest were asleep on the bus and sleepwalked along the boardwalk for two hours at beach 2? They all lost their pencils? Their lunch was too soporofic? (Note: ban lettuce from fieldwork packed lunches!)
They all did an acceptable job at beach 1, yet 75% of them decided to write NOTHING about beach 2 and not do the summary. They are going to be pretty miffed at getting marks of 25-40 for the day, but really, WHAT HAPPENED? I DO NOT GET IT.
**********************************
Staff-student consultative committee. We have on-line module evaluation forms, and our completion rates are poor, even when we lead the students by the hand to the computer room so they can do the forms. I have permission this semester to set up a prize draw which you can only enter by finishing an evaluation and clicking a button at the end. It is for small prizes - (Amazon vouchers, £10ish values). Will this help, I ask? Entire student component of committee says, oh, yes, definitely, we love free stuff! Everyone will do questionnaires if we can win stuff!! OK.... I guess we can only try!
**********************************
Now to sort the laundry and try to get to bed before midnight.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
a rant
KJHaxton left a comment on yesterday's post "if I were a moderately well off person...":
This is so true, especially in the UK where even in research-active graduate degree awarding institutions there is no wide-spread system of GA, RA or TA support for graduate students, so it's incredibly hard to maintain even a one-student group unless you get the hang of getting large money.
And I don't THINK it's just me/us having somewhat arrogant expectations of the type of job we are supposed to be doing in a second-tier, squeezed middle university. It could be argued that if the resources are not provided, perhaps we are not supposed to be building active research groups, but focusing on our undergraduate teaching. Perhaps 'research' activities should be the sort of scholarly engagement with the field typical of a teaching-heavy position (although even THEN some sort of travel money adequate to attend the odd conference might be considered necessary?). However, this is clearly at odds with the various mission statements issued by my institution (and others), and with the institutions' Research Excellence Framework (and all the blooming meetings we keep having to have about research and How We Will Prove We Are Excellent). In my end of the sciences, at least, four internationally significant research papers in good quality journals over a period of 5-6 years (plus esteem indicators and a contribution to the research environmental figures, e.g. all research active academics are supposed to have a minimum of 1 grad student and 0.75 of a post-doc per year over the submission period which implies a large amount of money from somewhere...) requires more than a few months' thinking time in the summer and subscription to a few journals, it implies fieldwork, years of laboratory work and/or computer time etc. etc. Resources we don't have. System is BROKE.
Some days I am very, very angry about how patronising some people have been about the relatively slow rate of paper production and software release my group has achieved. When you don't even have access to the high-speed computer cluster in your department (belongs to another research group, they said what we were doing wasn't appropriate, fine) but have still managed to work by going into the undergrad teaching lab after classes end at 6pm, logging in to all the machines and setting little bits of the analysis running on each machine, then being in again at 7 or 8am to collect all the outputs and clean the machines up before classes start at 9, and the only two people working on the project are yourself and a colleague who have heavy teaching loads due to not being, you know, WELL FUNDED (because although people want the WORK we do, they don't want to fund it enough, or are not really willing to help me work out how to get it funded, or write me into their projects as anything other than a partner (that means, I do some of the work for none of the money), not including say even a few months of an RA or junior technician, never mind a PDRA, then of course we're blooming slow. Other days I think why do I bother? Presumably if this stuff I do is important, other people would do it if we weren't. Presumably if I was any good I'd get the funding.
A lot of science-career bloggers talk about how badly being a post-grad/post-doc prepared them for being a faculty member. For me, that wasn't true. Although we didn't have much in the way of formal courses and accreditation, being in a big group, observing and asking questions, and taking the opportunities that came my way meant that by the time I began to look for a faculty position seriously (at the end of my first post-doc) I had given talks, done a variety of teaching duties from overseeing labs someone else had designed to grading piles of tests to writing and giving lectures and even a short course of my own design, made posters and spoken at conferences, published a few papers, written some stuff for a general audience, designed a research project from scratch and redesigned it twice when things went wrong, organised the day-to-day running of part of the lab, ordered supplies, trained masters students in technical skills, supervised a couple of independent research projects, written grant applications, coordinated a multi-person project with a deadline, written a PhD thesis, given invited seminars, helped organise parts of conferences and field expeditions... I thought I had most of the skills. I applied for and got a place on a week-long seminar for PhD students deciding whether or not to enter industry, where I confirmed my assessment of my own skills as Lacking in certain key areas - tolerance of micromanagement, ability to work With People full time, a general need to go my own way rather than blending with the crowd or the corporate speak - which the course implied were essential to doing well in 'industry'.
So much of academia has become about sales, in essence. You can't just do good science, you have to be SEEN to do good science. You can't write a realistic grant proposal, you have to "promise the sun and deliver more", every time (quote from colleague who is very very successful at getting money). I've read final reports - I've written them - in which one has to demonstrate how wonderfully one has met the original goals even if one's first experiment showed those goals to be inappropriate and ill-chosen. You can't fail, or blunder, or mess around in the fruitful, messy, frustrating confusion of real science - not for more than a very short time, anyway, because you have to submit lots of interim reports showing how you hit every intermediate goal on your gannt chart. You have to tell students 'let me give you some feedback' when you are giving them feedback in the hopes that they will tick agree or strongly agree for the 'gives feedback' statement on the National Studnet Survey or the TQA/MEQ/quality appraisal instrument/[insert latest trendy name for student evaluations here]. You have to sell, sell, sell - to the parents, the students, your colleagues, the funding bodies, the faculty, the department. And I find it so hard. I'm an ACADEMIC, dammit. I question, I self-reflect, I critique, it's what I do. I "over-think things" and "obsess about minor details (such as whether an experiement will actually work rather than if it sounds good to a non-expert on the funding panel)" because thinking is what I DO.
I am not great at selling myself, or the supremacy of my work - it's useful, it's neat, but it AIN'T GOING TO BRING ABOUT WORLD PEACE, CURE CANCER AND SOLVE THE FUEL CRISIS IN THE NEXT THREE YEARS. I'm not brilliant at public outreach. I'm a mad ideas, play with the data, spot the problems, poke at the assumptions sort of academic, not a sage on the stage I know it all type. I'm also fat, tired and not in the best of health.
I wanted to teach, and research. I expected to need to coach, mentor, write for a range of academic and interested-public audiences, present, explain, organise, manage budgets, plan logistics, design and redesign experiments and proceedures, design and explain course structures, engage in student support, help to run my department and to build community structures in my field. I expected, anticipated, that it would be fine that I'm the second-in-command/crazy ideas from the back room type. But it isn't. The selling, the shilling... I can't do it, and I am made to feel so STUPID for that. Why isn't it enough to be good at most of the job?
And why does promotion, and funding, seem to depend on success at being SEEN to be clever, not in actually doing good science and teaching well? Even the students seem to prefer the brash self-confident showy types, even when said showy types disappear for three weeks in the semester because they are SO IMPORTANT and just assume someone will cover their classes? Or ignore all the rules and give students bad advice and cause them to be late with their projects? But Dr X is so clever they say.
Pah!
The final paragraph makes me smile. It's so familiar - think it fairly often myself. And an indication of all that is wrong with the system. Can anyone think of any other area of employment where an employee would even contemplate a pay cut/freeze in order to divert some money towards an aspect of their job? I think it highlights the different mindset of academics, leaves us wide open to exploitation (you'd be at work 3 or 4 days a week on a 2/2.5 day a week contract), and just shows why the funding system currently is broken - we can't effectively do what we were employed to do.
This is so true, especially in the UK where even in research-active graduate degree awarding institutions there is no wide-spread system of GA, RA or TA support for graduate students, so it's incredibly hard to maintain even a one-student group unless you get the hang of getting large money.
And I don't THINK it's just me/us having somewhat arrogant expectations of the type of job we are supposed to be doing in a second-tier, squeezed middle university. It could be argued that if the resources are not provided, perhaps we are not supposed to be building active research groups, but focusing on our undergraduate teaching. Perhaps 'research' activities should be the sort of scholarly engagement with the field typical of a teaching-heavy position (although even THEN some sort of travel money adequate to attend the odd conference might be considered necessary?). However, this is clearly at odds with the various mission statements issued by my institution (and others), and with the institutions' Research Excellence Framework (and all the blooming meetings we keep having to have about research and How We Will Prove We Are Excellent). In my end of the sciences, at least, four internationally significant research papers in good quality journals over a period of 5-6 years (plus esteem indicators and a contribution to the research environmental figures, e.g. all research active academics are supposed to have a minimum of 1 grad student and 0.75 of a post-doc per year over the submission period which implies a large amount of money from somewhere...) requires more than a few months' thinking time in the summer and subscription to a few journals, it implies fieldwork, years of laboratory work and/or computer time etc. etc. Resources we don't have. System is BROKE.
Some days I am very, very angry about how patronising some people have been about the relatively slow rate of paper production and software release my group has achieved. When you don't even have access to the high-speed computer cluster in your department (belongs to another research group, they said what we were doing wasn't appropriate, fine) but have still managed to work by going into the undergrad teaching lab after classes end at 6pm, logging in to all the machines and setting little bits of the analysis running on each machine, then being in again at 7 or 8am to collect all the outputs and clean the machines up before classes start at 9, and the only two people working on the project are yourself and a colleague who have heavy teaching loads due to not being, you know, WELL FUNDED (because although people want the WORK we do, they don't want to fund it enough, or are not really willing to help me work out how to get it funded, or write me into their projects as anything other than a partner (that means, I do some of the work for none of the money), not including say even a few months of an RA or junior technician, never mind a PDRA, then of course we're blooming slow. Other days I think why do I bother? Presumably if this stuff I do is important, other people would do it if we weren't. Presumably if I was any good I'd get the funding.
A lot of science-career bloggers talk about how badly being a post-grad/post-doc prepared them for being a faculty member. For me, that wasn't true. Although we didn't have much in the way of formal courses and accreditation, being in a big group, observing and asking questions, and taking the opportunities that came my way meant that by the time I began to look for a faculty position seriously (at the end of my first post-doc) I had given talks, done a variety of teaching duties from overseeing labs someone else had designed to grading piles of tests to writing and giving lectures and even a short course of my own design, made posters and spoken at conferences, published a few papers, written some stuff for a general audience, designed a research project from scratch and redesigned it twice when things went wrong, organised the day-to-day running of part of the lab, ordered supplies, trained masters students in technical skills, supervised a couple of independent research projects, written grant applications, coordinated a multi-person project with a deadline, written a PhD thesis, given invited seminars, helped organise parts of conferences and field expeditions... I thought I had most of the skills. I applied for and got a place on a week-long seminar for PhD students deciding whether or not to enter industry, where I confirmed my assessment of my own skills as Lacking in certain key areas - tolerance of micromanagement, ability to work With People full time, a general need to go my own way rather than blending with the crowd or the corporate speak - which the course implied were essential to doing well in 'industry'.
So much of academia has become about sales, in essence. You can't just do good science, you have to be SEEN to do good science. You can't write a realistic grant proposal, you have to "promise the sun and deliver more", every time (quote from colleague who is very very successful at getting money). I've read final reports - I've written them - in which one has to demonstrate how wonderfully one has met the original goals even if one's first experiment showed those goals to be inappropriate and ill-chosen. You can't fail, or blunder, or mess around in the fruitful, messy, frustrating confusion of real science - not for more than a very short time, anyway, because you have to submit lots of interim reports showing how you hit every intermediate goal on your gannt chart. You have to tell students 'let me give you some feedback' when you are giving them feedback in the hopes that they will tick agree or strongly agree for the 'gives feedback' statement on the National Studnet Survey or the TQA/MEQ/quality appraisal instrument/[insert latest trendy name for student evaluations here]. You have to sell, sell, sell - to the parents, the students, your colleagues, the funding bodies, the faculty, the department. And I find it so hard. I'm an ACADEMIC, dammit. I question, I self-reflect, I critique, it's what I do. I "over-think things" and "obsess about minor details (such as whether an experiement will actually work rather than if it sounds good to a non-expert on the funding panel)" because thinking is what I DO.
I am not great at selling myself, or the supremacy of my work - it's useful, it's neat, but it AIN'T GOING TO BRING ABOUT WORLD PEACE, CURE CANCER AND SOLVE THE FUEL CRISIS IN THE NEXT THREE YEARS. I'm not brilliant at public outreach. I'm a mad ideas, play with the data, spot the problems, poke at the assumptions sort of academic, not a sage on the stage I know it all type. I'm also fat, tired and not in the best of health.
I wanted to teach, and research. I expected to need to coach, mentor, write for a range of academic and interested-public audiences, present, explain, organise, manage budgets, plan logistics, design and redesign experiments and proceedures, design and explain course structures, engage in student support, help to run my department and to build community structures in my field. I expected, anticipated, that it would be fine that I'm the second-in-command/crazy ideas from the back room type. But it isn't. The selling, the shilling... I can't do it, and I am made to feel so STUPID for that. Why isn't it enough to be good at most of the job?
And why does promotion, and funding, seem to depend on success at being SEEN to be clever, not in actually doing good science and teaching well? Even the students seem to prefer the brash self-confident showy types, even when said showy types disappear for three weeks in the semester because they are SO IMPORTANT and just assume someone will cover their classes? Or ignore all the rules and give students bad advice and cause them to be late with their projects? But Dr X is so clever they say.
Pah!
Monday, April 09, 2012
if I were a moderately well off person...
Nicoleandmaggie over at grumpy rumblings have a post up asking what people would do if a) they didn't have to work (were financially independent) and b) for some reason had to cut all the ties with their current job/line of work. It's an interesting version of my usual conundrum, the question of what my alternatives are if the unpleasures of my particular job and its effects on my health come to consistently and noisily exceed the pleasures, noisily enough that I really have to face up to it?
For the sake of this thought-exercise, I shall assume the financial independence to be comparable to my current standard of living - enough not to need to count every penny and allow the occasional impulsive amazon-raid (oh kindle, you are so good at inciting those...), but not enough to finance a round the year round the world cruise or require/allow one to spend most of one's time looking after the money and finding good causes for it to support (which would be kind of scary, at first at least, I think).
I anticipate 6 months to a year of simple 'recovery time' - reading all the unread books, knitting, getting the house in order, watching dvds, catching up with friends, hopefully developing a better, healthier pattern of sleeping and eating and exercising which would generate a less substantial JaneB with fewer joint sulks and back aches. But after that - ah, that's the question.
The thought experiment stipulated that one should assume that for whatever reason one had to cut ties with ones current profession - I assume that means both academia and beach studies. My rather childish impossible dream would be to carry on studying - to do maybe a couple of degrees, to do another PhD in a wildly different discipline (dead languages or linguistics has a lot of appeal for various reasons, not least because the small, highly select (and highly eccentric) group of students taking courses like Anglo Saxon at InternationallyRenownedUniversity always seemed to be having so much fun. And I love to teach, despite the bureaucracy, but I'm not allowed to stay in the academy - so maybe I'd find a mix of volunteering or very casual work in some kind of training role (maybe with a gifted children's programme? or as a maths tutor? maybe tutoring home-educated kids in science?) and learning some other skill that I could teach, maybe knitting or T'ai Chi, something I could do with small groups.
I really like MarketTown, NorthernCity has many pluses (even for a non-city person like me) and I like living in the north. But would I stay here? Probably not - freed from the tie to the academy and to NorthernUni, I'd probably feel almost obliged to move towards my parents, to a distance where a day-visit is feasible. That would leave me in landscapes I don't like much, but near cities with good libraries - near rather than in given the budgetary constraints I've chosen, because the other criterion for a move would be to find a house with a little more garden and with a layout conducive to having two or more cats - aged about 8, I once solemnly told a teacher that I wanted to be an English Eccentric when I grew up, and Mad Cat Lady seems almost obligatory. If I'm only working short hours, I might consider having a dog too - something cat-friendly and low-exercise-demanding like a retired greyhound.
In the inevitable future which I try not to think about too much when my parents are no longer alive, I guess I might move again to a landscape I prefer. Perhaps to FavouriteIslands? Being an incomer would be a disadvantage, and most of my friends, my sister and niece and brother-in-law, would be a trek away. I wouldn't really want to be a dual home owner, but that might be the practical way to be. More likely, I'd just move back northwards, to hills and sea and sky - if I could afford to have somewhere which permitted me to continue to have cats, and to stroll to the shops/station/drs/other necessities when I didn't feel like using the car. That was a surprisingly coherant vision for me...
The purpose of this sort of thought experiment is to encourage you to work out how to incorporate some of the facets of this 'dream life' into the every-day now. For me, that's where the problems arise. I don't have the energy at the moment - whether this is a chronic health issue, that is that I'd always have less 'spoons' than the average person regardless of occupation, or related directly to my current line of work and stress levels I don't know, but I do know that doing enough to earn a living in this profession takes pretty much everything I have, and also makes me unreliable. A volunteer or evening class teacher or student needs to be able to do certain things at certain times every week regardless, and I can't. Some weeks, sure, others... no.
That uncertainty about my own consistency would determine what I'd do with myself after the few months of 'yay! Read All The Books Clean All The Things!' catch-up and holiday, in the end, and makes it hard to know what might work and what might not.
In fact, you know what I'd rather, if I had the income but not the 'cut ties with current employment' condition? I'd like to work maybe 2, 2.5 days a week, at my current uni or elsewhere. It'd be even better if I could earn 40-50% of my current salary, and turn 40-50% of the private income into a research fund - or be paid in research support rather than salary even, a PhD studentship or funds to buy research assistance as needed and travel and buy analyses and the odd bit of kit. Now THAT would be delightful - freedom from grant applications! Or at least, the knowledge that an absence of grant success would not prevent one from doing fun stuff...
For the sake of this thought-exercise, I shall assume the financial independence to be comparable to my current standard of living - enough not to need to count every penny and allow the occasional impulsive amazon-raid (oh kindle, you are so good at inciting those...), but not enough to finance a round the year round the world cruise or require/allow one to spend most of one's time looking after the money and finding good causes for it to support (which would be kind of scary, at first at least, I think).
I anticipate 6 months to a year of simple 'recovery time' - reading all the unread books, knitting, getting the house in order, watching dvds, catching up with friends, hopefully developing a better, healthier pattern of sleeping and eating and exercising which would generate a less substantial JaneB with fewer joint sulks and back aches. But after that - ah, that's the question.
The thought experiment stipulated that one should assume that for whatever reason one had to cut ties with ones current profession - I assume that means both academia and beach studies. My rather childish impossible dream would be to carry on studying - to do maybe a couple of degrees, to do another PhD in a wildly different discipline (dead languages or linguistics has a lot of appeal for various reasons, not least because the small, highly select (and highly eccentric) group of students taking courses like Anglo Saxon at InternationallyRenownedUniversity always seemed to be having so much fun. And I love to teach, despite the bureaucracy, but I'm not allowed to stay in the academy - so maybe I'd find a mix of volunteering or very casual work in some kind of training role (maybe with a gifted children's programme? or as a maths tutor? maybe tutoring home-educated kids in science?) and learning some other skill that I could teach, maybe knitting or T'ai Chi, something I could do with small groups.
I really like MarketTown, NorthernCity has many pluses (even for a non-city person like me) and I like living in the north. But would I stay here? Probably not - freed from the tie to the academy and to NorthernUni, I'd probably feel almost obliged to move towards my parents, to a distance where a day-visit is feasible. That would leave me in landscapes I don't like much, but near cities with good libraries - near rather than in given the budgetary constraints I've chosen, because the other criterion for a move would be to find a house with a little more garden and with a layout conducive to having two or more cats - aged about 8, I once solemnly told a teacher that I wanted to be an English Eccentric when I grew up, and Mad Cat Lady seems almost obligatory. If I'm only working short hours, I might consider having a dog too - something cat-friendly and low-exercise-demanding like a retired greyhound.
In the inevitable future which I try not to think about too much when my parents are no longer alive, I guess I might move again to a landscape I prefer. Perhaps to FavouriteIslands? Being an incomer would be a disadvantage, and most of my friends, my sister and niece and brother-in-law, would be a trek away. I wouldn't really want to be a dual home owner, but that might be the practical way to be. More likely, I'd just move back northwards, to hills and sea and sky - if I could afford to have somewhere which permitted me to continue to have cats, and to stroll to the shops/station/drs/other necessities when I didn't feel like using the car. That was a surprisingly coherant vision for me...
The purpose of this sort of thought experiment is to encourage you to work out how to incorporate some of the facets of this 'dream life' into the every-day now. For me, that's where the problems arise. I don't have the energy at the moment - whether this is a chronic health issue, that is that I'd always have less 'spoons' than the average person regardless of occupation, or related directly to my current line of work and stress levels I don't know, but I do know that doing enough to earn a living in this profession takes pretty much everything I have, and also makes me unreliable. A volunteer or evening class teacher or student needs to be able to do certain things at certain times every week regardless, and I can't. Some weeks, sure, others... no.
That uncertainty about my own consistency would determine what I'd do with myself after the few months of 'yay! Read All The Books Clean All The Things!' catch-up and holiday, in the end, and makes it hard to know what might work and what might not.
In fact, you know what I'd rather, if I had the income but not the 'cut ties with current employment' condition? I'd like to work maybe 2, 2.5 days a week, at my current uni or elsewhere. It'd be even better if I could earn 40-50% of my current salary, and turn 40-50% of the private income into a research fund - or be paid in research support rather than salary even, a PhD studentship or funds to buy research assistance as needed and travel and buy analyses and the odd bit of kit. Now THAT would be delightful - freedom from grant applications! Or at least, the knowledge that an absence of grant success would not prevent one from doing fun stuff...
Saturday, April 07, 2012
I am not like my students, but this doesn't mean I can't teach them
Dame Eleanor Hull left a comment on my "Formative Moments" post.
I WISH I understood why Certain Persons in my department will happily remind me of this whenever teaching matters come up (especially around my Unreasonable Expectations of students - I mostly ignore this, as I think it's worse NOT to have high expectations of learners, and since students feel free to tell me about their sex-lives (yuck!) and to happily complain about things like timetabling problems or things missing from the VLE, I think they'd also tell me if they felt overfaced - they do in e.g. statistics class, and they also know that I'll help if they are overfaced, whether by reducing the amount of work or by showing them how to do stuff more quickly), yet not accept that it should have anything to do with my ability to do admissions-related work. This is the thing I hate at the moment. I do not understand what happens in senior school, although I do try and keep abreast of things like state exam structures, and I REALLY do not understand a) how prospective students choose a university (apparently it's NOT by choosing the most rigorous academic course which best fits their interests and grades?? And they really care about having videos on the web sites and the night-life of the town?) or b) how to 'sell' what we do here.
I think our product at NorthernUni is good. I think the standard of teaching is generally high, that the curriculum will fit them well for a range of employment opportunities and for being informed citizens and better life-long learners, which matters more to me. The cost of living is low, the campus attractive and well-maintained, e-resources have improved the library accessions substantially since I joined the university and interlibrary loans are expertly managed, the off-campus areas where most students live have low crime rates, plenty of resources (from ethnic supermarkets selling all kinds of spices cheaply and thrift stores to coffee shops and night clubs), tree-lined streets and easy, cheap commutes to campus (heck, the local bus company offers a special low-priced student card) and the department is both friendly and genuinely concerned with students as individuals as well as as bums on seats (OK, maybe just over half the faculty act like that's true, but it's the prevailing ethos, and just over half is enough that students get great support and have to try really HARD not to be known well by at least a couple of academics - our more engaged students will typically be on dropping-in-to-say-hi terms with most people teaching their programme by their final year, and will continue to drop in for years after graduation). But it's not for everyone - if you are keen on sand-castles, sure! If you like the area and don't know what you want to specialise in, great, we have a wide-ranging programme! But if you already know that your passion is wind-surfing, surfing, kite-surfing and body-surfing, then I'm not going to suggest you come here where you'll get maybe a few lectures by a non-specialist as part of a general course on beach sports. I might even (gasp!) mention a few of our competitor institutions which have stronger programmes in all kinds of surf. If you are not sure that university is for you and are here because 'everyone else is applying', I will probably advise you to take time to think about it, and explain about gap years. And if you ask about percentages in employment and average starting salary etc. I am probably going to sounds really dodgy as I trot out the figures along with my usual spiel about how a good education changes your priorities and you'll probably want to do something pretty different at 21 than you do now at 16/17.
It seems to me that a lot of 'admissions', in a recruiting rather than selecting school, is about getting maximum bums on seats, not helping students find the right seat to park their bum on.
Add that to the social anxiety and the issues with pressure and all of that, and... I'm not good at recruitment. Largely, I think, because I have no idea what matters to the vast majority of these kids. Getting a JOB had nothing to do with going to university for me. I kind of assumed that I would get to read for three years, hoped I would be bullied less for reading and given a bit more encouragement by my new teachers to actually learn stuff, and was pretty sure I didn't want an office job. The point of an education was to become educated, it was FAR more important than just getting a JOB.
Once they start as students, I think I am a bit better at working with them. perhaps that's just because the admissions is SO dire?
I've offered to do an extra first year tutorial (generally widely disliked duty, since like 'comp' classes it's repetitive, painful and essentially about fixing deficiencies in school leavers not about teaching content - plus compulsory, homework intensive and unpopular with most students) in place of admissions next year. I wonder if I'll get away with it?
I was also a good student---one reason I have trouble understanding the people I teach, alas...And I do recognise that feeling. How often do we get told at teaching events etc. that we cannot expect all students to be 'like we were' (or like the rosy-tinted memories of how we were), that having become academics means we were NOT typical students? Maybe some of us were more typical for a year or two before our 'formative moment(s)', but not all of us - I happily self-identify as having been an awkward, bookish, nerdy, wanting-to-please, voraciously-reading student. Even among my friends who all had tendencies in that direction, even at a very selective-in-terms-of-grades university and in a traditionally academically focused college, undergrad JaneB was noticeably bookish, and academic, and free-ranging in that bookishness (for I did not confine my nerdiness to my discipline, or my discipline plus my religion plus my hobby, as was more typical, no, I read on anything that came vaguely within my orbit. Ah, the bliss of having a copy-right library a short cycle ride away! Of having a 24/7 halls library (this was largely a pre-internet era - we had four networked Macs in a basement room for the use of about 300 students in halls, or else one had to cycle to one of a small number of computer facilities open only at set hours) for those late-night tickles of curiosity or simply to borrow the next volume of Peyps' diaries or the Icelandic sagas in translation when one couldn't sleep! Presumably I DID do things other than binge-read as a student? I recall ice cream and singing and the occasional exam and tutorial, and talking about books, and doing some really fun maths, and making notes of what I needed to read more on during lectures, but mostly I remember the reading).
I WISH I understood why Certain Persons in my department will happily remind me of this whenever teaching matters come up (especially around my Unreasonable Expectations of students - I mostly ignore this, as I think it's worse NOT to have high expectations of learners, and since students feel free to tell me about their sex-lives (yuck!) and to happily complain about things like timetabling problems or things missing from the VLE, I think they'd also tell me if they felt overfaced - they do in e.g. statistics class, and they also know that I'll help if they are overfaced, whether by reducing the amount of work or by showing them how to do stuff more quickly), yet not accept that it should have anything to do with my ability to do admissions-related work. This is the thing I hate at the moment. I do not understand what happens in senior school, although I do try and keep abreast of things like state exam structures, and I REALLY do not understand a) how prospective students choose a university (apparently it's NOT by choosing the most rigorous academic course which best fits their interests and grades?? And they really care about having videos on the web sites and the night-life of the town?) or b) how to 'sell' what we do here.
I think our product at NorthernUni is good. I think the standard of teaching is generally high, that the curriculum will fit them well for a range of employment opportunities and for being informed citizens and better life-long learners, which matters more to me. The cost of living is low, the campus attractive and well-maintained, e-resources have improved the library accessions substantially since I joined the university and interlibrary loans are expertly managed, the off-campus areas where most students live have low crime rates, plenty of resources (from ethnic supermarkets selling all kinds of spices cheaply and thrift stores to coffee shops and night clubs), tree-lined streets and easy, cheap commutes to campus (heck, the local bus company offers a special low-priced student card) and the department is both friendly and genuinely concerned with students as individuals as well as as bums on seats (OK, maybe just over half the faculty act like that's true, but it's the prevailing ethos, and just over half is enough that students get great support and have to try really HARD not to be known well by at least a couple of academics - our more engaged students will typically be on dropping-in-to-say-hi terms with most people teaching their programme by their final year, and will continue to drop in for years after graduation). But it's not for everyone - if you are keen on sand-castles, sure! If you like the area and don't know what you want to specialise in, great, we have a wide-ranging programme! But if you already know that your passion is wind-surfing, surfing, kite-surfing and body-surfing, then I'm not going to suggest you come here where you'll get maybe a few lectures by a non-specialist as part of a general course on beach sports. I might even (gasp!) mention a few of our competitor institutions which have stronger programmes in all kinds of surf. If you are not sure that university is for you and are here because 'everyone else is applying', I will probably advise you to take time to think about it, and explain about gap years. And if you ask about percentages in employment and average starting salary etc. I am probably going to sounds really dodgy as I trot out the figures along with my usual spiel about how a good education changes your priorities and you'll probably want to do something pretty different at 21 than you do now at 16/17.
It seems to me that a lot of 'admissions', in a recruiting rather than selecting school, is about getting maximum bums on seats, not helping students find the right seat to park their bum on.
Add that to the social anxiety and the issues with pressure and all of that, and... I'm not good at recruitment. Largely, I think, because I have no idea what matters to the vast majority of these kids. Getting a JOB had nothing to do with going to university for me. I kind of assumed that I would get to read for three years, hoped I would be bullied less for reading and given a bit more encouragement by my new teachers to actually learn stuff, and was pretty sure I didn't want an office job. The point of an education was to become educated, it was FAR more important than just getting a JOB.
Once they start as students, I think I am a bit better at working with them. perhaps that's just because the admissions is SO dire?
I've offered to do an extra first year tutorial (generally widely disliked duty, since like 'comp' classes it's repetitive, painful and essentially about fixing deficiencies in school leavers not about teaching content - plus compulsory, homework intensive and unpopular with most students) in place of admissions next year. I wonder if I'll get away with it?
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Formative Moments
There is a sort-of-a-meme going around about special moments ("twists of fate", "formative experiences") in ones' studies and what academic bloggers were like as students. Tenured Radical and Comrade Physioprof wrote about particular moments which stick in their memories as turning points transforming their not-terribly-good-student partying selves into embryonic academics. Dr Crazy explains how she was what I guess we'd now call a highly straegic student, focused on college as the means to a better job, and identifies turning points including proving wrong a person who told her she wasn't good enough to get into graduate school.
I was a good student. Studying was the only thing that made school endurable really, books were friends and escape routes and doors into another world. Maths was a joy, and felt like art or music were supposed to feel. People were hard, teenagers were VERY hard, teachers could be inconsistent, mean or bored and boring, and I was often lonely, sad and confused, but I always loved books and the things in them. So for me its not so much a case of turning points that moved me from another route to the academy, more a case of opportunities opening or my own realisations of where I might be going. But here are some anyway!
1) Realising that whilst I was good at maths, I was not a mathematician - I was lucky, there was this guy in my final year at school maths set who was just so much better than I was, that although we both got As I just knew he had something I didn't, and went for a 'mixed sciences' degree instead.
2) Realising that the classic STEM discipline I'd done best at at school was rather different at university and that, whilst I still loved its subject matter, I did not like its practical methods at all (and was not just not good at them but actively bad).
3) Following my interests rather than common sense when choosing options - which led me to sit in an old-fashioned lecture theatre one day listening to a guest lecture from an elderly mumbling man in a mustard-coloured waistcoat and a tie with a tea stain on it who got his overhead transparencies all mixed up, and discovering a whole new area of study I never knew existed.
4) Going to CrowdedCapitalCity for a PhD interview in AmazinglySuccessfulGroup, and deciding I'd not take an offer because I found the urban setting dismal and because my smart and uncomfortable interview-wear seemed to be about the same level of smart as everyone's lab wear, so I couldn't see myself fitting in. Staying in the 'last hiding place of the hippies' (as certain wags referred to my PhD department) was not just a sartorially comfortable move - ASG was AS partly by training everyone into a certain level of conformity, and it used a particular technique which is very powerful for certain kinds of problems but over the last twenty years has become increasingly a power-struggle between two or three very big, led by superstar type research groups... which means that the politics are tricksie, and I do hate that. Being not-favourite in a rather eclectic research group set me off on developing a route and a specialism and a scientific identity which is all my own.
5) Working up the nerve to talk to my PhD supervisor about going to a conference and about applying for a post-doc. On both occasions he was all 'sure, of course, here's what to do' even though I was convinced he'd be all 'YOU? Why?? What makes you think you can do that?'
6) Picking a post-doc position (from a choice of two) just by going for the one with the longer contract. Turned out SO well. My PhD supervisor was quiet, introverted to the point of disability and did not believe in using unnecessary words such as positive comments or praise, and I was the resident regular winner of the (local equivalent of the) broken glassware award in the lab rather than GoldenGirl, but my post-doc boss was verbal, an extroverted workaholic with a passion for science, and believed in positive feedback even when things weren't going well. I try to balance the two - I'm an introvert, but I try to use a lot of encouragement and 'You Can' type statements with students, and to constantly point out that they all have different strengths - yes, A IS better than you at X, but you're better than A at Y, and this is how you can do X better.
7) Working out an exit route and a time limit for the academic job hunt quite early on in my third post-doc. This meant that I wasn't as panicky as I could have been when I was variously unemployed, passing the 50th and 100th and so on job-applications-made points and wrestling with multiple co-authors on tricky papers - I knew I had options and an end point, even if I didn't much want either.
8) Shifting my sample-focus to a less studied, more tractable system for my first few years as a PI, which allowed me to stay at the bench and produce papers based on my own lab work even in the work-fest that is a new academic job with minimal start-up, and which fortuitously led me to be invited to join InternationalWorkingGroup.
I'm not sure what I learn from looking back at all of this. Perhaps that, for me, it wasn't so much 'Key Moments With Specially Inspiring Teachers' that mattered, aprt from number 3? And he was not exactly a good lecturer...
I was a good student. Studying was the only thing that made school endurable really, books were friends and escape routes and doors into another world. Maths was a joy, and felt like art or music were supposed to feel. People were hard, teenagers were VERY hard, teachers could be inconsistent, mean or bored and boring, and I was often lonely, sad and confused, but I always loved books and the things in them. So for me its not so much a case of turning points that moved me from another route to the academy, more a case of opportunities opening or my own realisations of where I might be going. But here are some anyway!
1) Realising that whilst I was good at maths, I was not a mathematician - I was lucky, there was this guy in my final year at school maths set who was just so much better than I was, that although we both got As I just knew he had something I didn't, and went for a 'mixed sciences' degree instead.
2) Realising that the classic STEM discipline I'd done best at at school was rather different at university and that, whilst I still loved its subject matter, I did not like its practical methods at all (and was not just not good at them but actively bad).
3) Following my interests rather than common sense when choosing options - which led me to sit in an old-fashioned lecture theatre one day listening to a guest lecture from an elderly mumbling man in a mustard-coloured waistcoat and a tie with a tea stain on it who got his overhead transparencies all mixed up, and discovering a whole new area of study I never knew existed.
4) Going to CrowdedCapitalCity for a PhD interview in AmazinglySuccessfulGroup, and deciding I'd not take an offer because I found the urban setting dismal and because my smart and uncomfortable interview-wear seemed to be about the same level of smart as everyone's lab wear, so I couldn't see myself fitting in. Staying in the 'last hiding place of the hippies' (as certain wags referred to my PhD department) was not just a sartorially comfortable move - ASG was AS partly by training everyone into a certain level of conformity, and it used a particular technique which is very powerful for certain kinds of problems but over the last twenty years has become increasingly a power-struggle between two or three very big, led by superstar type research groups... which means that the politics are tricksie, and I do hate that. Being not-favourite in a rather eclectic research group set me off on developing a route and a specialism and a scientific identity which is all my own.
5) Working up the nerve to talk to my PhD supervisor about going to a conference and about applying for a post-doc. On both occasions he was all 'sure, of course, here's what to do' even though I was convinced he'd be all 'YOU? Why?? What makes you think you can do that?'
6) Picking a post-doc position (from a choice of two) just by going for the one with the longer contract. Turned out SO well. My PhD supervisor was quiet, introverted to the point of disability and did not believe in using unnecessary words such as positive comments or praise, and I was the resident regular winner of the (local equivalent of the) broken glassware award in the lab rather than GoldenGirl, but my post-doc boss was verbal, an extroverted workaholic with a passion for science, and believed in positive feedback even when things weren't going well. I try to balance the two - I'm an introvert, but I try to use a lot of encouragement and 'You Can' type statements with students, and to constantly point out that they all have different strengths - yes, A IS better than you at X, but you're better than A at Y, and this is how you can do X better.
7) Working out an exit route and a time limit for the academic job hunt quite early on in my third post-doc. This meant that I wasn't as panicky as I could have been when I was variously unemployed, passing the 50th and 100th and so on job-applications-made points and wrestling with multiple co-authors on tricky papers - I knew I had options and an end point, even if I didn't much want either.
8) Shifting my sample-focus to a less studied, more tractable system for my first few years as a PI, which allowed me to stay at the bench and produce papers based on my own lab work even in the work-fest that is a new academic job with minimal start-up, and which fortuitously led me to be invited to join InternationalWorkingGroup.
I'm not sure what I learn from looking back at all of this. Perhaps that, for me, it wasn't so much 'Key Moments With Specially Inspiring Teachers' that mattered, aprt from number 3? And he was not exactly a good lecturer...
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
It looks like a lovely day outside the window...
For March, this weather is ridiculous! (Map from the beeb).
But I have been indoors all day. I spent the morning on administrivia and the afternoon on clearing an area of desk about 1 foot by 2 foot (but about 18 inches deep in... paper stuff), and now the desk is all tidy apart from one pile of filing that needs doing (about an inch and a half thick) into one specific filing system, and is neatly constrained by a cardboard box. Will it get done? Don't hold your breath unless you LIKE being blue in the face, and really, woad or makeup is a much less unpleasant way to achieve that...
And I found some old book ads I'd torn out of catalogues and ended up ordering inspection copies, library copies, and even spending my own money on one... oops!
But I have been indoors all day. I spent the morning on administrivia and the afternoon on clearing an area of desk about 1 foot by 2 foot (but about 18 inches deep in... paper stuff), and now the desk is all tidy apart from one pile of filing that needs doing (about an inch and a half thick) into one specific filing system, and is neatly constrained by a cardboard box. Will it get done? Don't hold your breath unless you LIKE being blue in the face, and really, woad or makeup is a much less unpleasant way to achieve that...
And around the edges of all that, I met with people, answered queries, sent emails, disentangled one students' statistical issues via a long email exchange...
And I found some old book ads I'd torn out of catalogues and ended up ordering inspection copies, library copies, and even spending my own money on one... oops!
Oh well. Maybe tomorrow I'll do something research-like?
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Climbing walls
- Today began by writing a reference for a former student. A tricky reference, as Stu did not get good marks largely due to their own lack of engagement, and annoyed me a lot, but I have to write the reference. Then I tried to send it, but bothe the email addresses Stu gave me didn't work. Grrrrr..............
- Then I met with PDF to sort out the details of the final piece of this summer's fieldwork programme. Which should have been done a long time ago, but... I can't juggle everything, and she's been happy to let it drift. Not a good idea; the nearest available accomodation we've found so far is a 1.5 hour drive each way from the field site. Because we want to go during school holidays. It's at least partly my fault, but I am annoyed.
- Then I decided, OK, lets work on the data from the difficult student I talked about a while ago; their committee decided that I should do all the preparation and analysis of this student's data. So I work on it for about 5 hours, being Patient, but begin to notice some oddities. Surely, I think to myself, the student HAS given me all the data? Surely they haven't kept one vital piece to themselves? But yes! For some reason, I have details of all the sandcastles near the sampling location EXCEPT the one NEAREST to the sampling location. "Oh, I wondered why I had to measure that one" says student, "you see, there isn't a space for it on the standard form". I point to the space marked 'proximal castle'. "I wondered what proximal meant" says student, wandering off. Basically, I now get to start all over again on their wretched data, when they get around to finding their field notes and typing in all the data (they offered to give me their notebooks so I could look for it myself. No, Stu, that will Not Do).
- Whilst I was patiently reorganising data, multiple second years wandered into my office wondering when, exactly, I would have their work from last week marked? The work I picked up yesterday and told them would be available by Friday at the earliest...
- I am now marking said work, and it seems as if at least 60% of the students have not paid any attention in any class (there are some questions which are really similar to ones I asked on the first worksheet, went over in class, had similar ones on the second worksheet etc. - and this is the fourth work sheet and they still can't manage to use the right form of words and give actual evidence. Gah! This is basic statistics, the answers are highly formulaic (...t-test shows a statistically significant difference between temperature of steam exiting the ears of lecturers A and B (t=0.903, d.f. = 7, p = 0.003)...), it is TRIVIALLY EASY to copy and edit the model answer...
Today I do not like my job much. Please can I go home now???
Reading week
This week is 'reading week', a week when modules in Beach Studies do not have formal classes. Some groups are away on field trips or short industrial placements, the final year students are all working hard (well, we like to THINK they are all working, and working hard) on their dissertations (one month to go before handin), and in theory everyone else is catching up on their reading.
People have been wandering past sayiong 'oh isn't it quiet' or 'are you enjoying the peace?'. KhakiWearingStudent asked me that four times yesterday, and it would have been more if I hadn't selfishly shut my door. KhakiWearingStudent has not the faintest inkling that he is disturbing the little peace I have... because yes, there are no formal classes. Yes, nearly all the middle-years students are away. However, I have a mountain of grading, I have dissertation students seeking advice, submitting their permitted samples-for-feedback (at the last minute, of course), I have second years wanting their last statistics practicals back NOW, I have colleagues mithering for all the things I couldn;t do in term time, and I have to give more time to MScF and PDF since I've rather neglected them over the last few weeks thanks to the focus on undergrad statistics...
Yes, there are slightly fewer students around. No, it is not 'quiet' and there is little 'peace' to 'enjoy'. Especially since KWS is still around... sigh. He means well, he works hard, he has the social skills (and focus/completion of tasks skills) of a toddler, and he keeps dropping in to my office... hence I expect I will be reduced to 'sporting the oak'* again. It's keeping up a grand old academic tradition, right?
*AncientInternationallyRenownedUniversities-speak for shutting a door (strictly speaking, shutting the outer noise-proofing door of a pair of doors in a set of rooms opening onto a staircase) to indicate that one is actually serious about studying/whatever and does not want to be disturbed. If one leaves the door ajar it indicates an openness to interruptions, but the Oak, once Sported, is supposed to be respected...
People have been wandering past sayiong 'oh isn't it quiet' or 'are you enjoying the peace?'. KhakiWearingStudent asked me that four times yesterday, and it would have been more if I hadn't selfishly shut my door. KhakiWearingStudent has not the faintest inkling that he is disturbing the little peace I have... because yes, there are no formal classes. Yes, nearly all the middle-years students are away. However, I have a mountain of grading, I have dissertation students seeking advice, submitting their permitted samples-for-feedback (at the last minute, of course), I have second years wanting their last statistics practicals back NOW, I have colleagues mithering for all the things I couldn;t do in term time, and I have to give more time to MScF and PDF since I've rather neglected them over the last few weeks thanks to the focus on undergrad statistics...
Yes, there are slightly fewer students around. No, it is not 'quiet' and there is little 'peace' to 'enjoy'. Especially since KWS is still around... sigh. He means well, he works hard, he has the social skills (and focus/completion of tasks skills) of a toddler, and he keeps dropping in to my office... hence I expect I will be reduced to 'sporting the oak'* again. It's keeping up a grand old academic tradition, right?
*AncientInternationallyRenownedUniversities-speak for shutting a door (strictly speaking, shutting the outer noise-proofing door of a pair of doors in a set of rooms opening onto a staircase) to indicate that one is actually serious about studying/whatever and does not want to be disturbed. If one leaves the door ajar it indicates an openness to interruptions, but the Oak, once Sported, is supposed to be respected...
Saturday, March 03, 2012
bye bye week
Lots of things have happened, and most of them would make good blogposts (by my standard of good which honestly isn't that high). There are also lots of things I should be doing. But I can't be bothered, or can't make myself bother, or something like that. I guess it's a combination of still getting over that virus and having done 5 10+-hours-at-the-office days of work in a row when just getting over a cold... actually, now I put that it writing, it's pretty clear that I was rather stupid there. Gah!
Anyway, bits I remember and feel like recording.
Anyway, bits I remember and feel like recording.
- a student telling me "My Mum teaches Beach Studies at High School and she told me that this was the right answer, so why have you marked it wrong?"
- a truely depressing staff meeting: lots of lectures about what we haven't done, how we must do better, the up-coming REF (upcoming as in 'census date late 2013, paperwork due early 2014' as in two years of of steadily ramping up meetings, pressure, hysteria, fuss and busy work on top of all the stuff that happened already. Remind me how this is meant to ensure that the taxpayer gets good research in return for their investment in universities? Because I've lost that again under all the paperwork)
- and the other thing we did? Discuss how to 'rebrand', 'position' and 'spin' what we already do to present the 'most favourable picture' to next year's students who will be paying more. Not one mention of what is best for the education of students - it was all stuff like 'well if we said we'd definitely reply to all student emails for an hour every Tuesday instead of dealing with them as they come in that would count as an extra contact hour a week!' This isn't the department I joined, or the academy I joined.
- Anyway, the meeting was upsetting enough that I ended up sending the 'I can't do open Days any more and I'm going to Occupational Health about it' email to my Head of Department. Who, yes, has taken me off the rota (only had one left anyway) for this year, and who aslo said 'we should talk'. Will be very, very surprised if that happens.
- found myself googling nervous breakdown to see how that's different from the slow attrition of burn-out, depression etc.
- wondered whether the ethical thing to do was to quit, but then couldn't think of anything else I could do to earn a living or of another passion which would give life enough meaning and interest that supporting it with a generic job I didn't care about would be long-term viable.
- Got really, really narked with a certain grad student who does not listen to a word I say.
- he says 'this week I'm doing x and y'
- I say 'don't do x, that's not on your plan',
- he comes in a few hours later with questions about doing x,
- I say 'no, don't do x',
- he comes in with a really bad x, more like two sticks tied together with spit.
- I say 'why did you do this'
- he says 'because that's what we agreed in our last meeting'
- I say 'no, we agreed that you WOULDN'T DO X, here is the schedule you prepared'
- he says 'oh I was using this other list'
- I say 'that's the list that your whole committee told you to abandon three months ago, we spent an hour in that committee meeting working out a plan that gives you a chance of actually getting a thesis done on the time scale you wanted, we all agreed that there was no way that x would be relevant or necessary, and you personally typed up the list and mailed it around to the whole committee after the meeting, so why are you doing x?'
- he says 'oh I lost that, can I get a copy?'
- I say 'so, your plan for the rest of the week, do you need any help getting set up to do y?'
- he says 'oh I'm not starting y until next week because I haven't finished x'
- ::headdesk::
- ::headdesk:: is quite clearing for the sinuses actually
- We did find out why MScF is getting such poor results from her patient lab work. WierdBugMan and I picked a really, really bad target sample for her work, entirely by accident - there is no hint in the literature as to WHY people have not used this sample before for these analyses, and it was such an obvious gap... But kudos to MScF for having taken the initiative to try a really out of the way technique and find out that the problem exists, extra kudos for actually being rather happy and excited to realise that these samples are substantially different from the others and therefore won't work but "aren't these data nice!", and we have a meeting next week to come up with a new plan (and she has several ideas for new ways to analyse the same samples which might get around the being-different).
- Working with MScF means that sometimes just thinking of PDF's work makes me weary.
- PDF is working on a piece of commercial work this week - an opportunity has come up which might work out quite well for us both. We've been asked to do some pilot studies; if they work, the commercial partner will probably commission 6-12 months of work from us. It's highly skilled technical work... and in PDF's core area of interest. If the pilots work and we get commissioned, it would be possible for PDF to go part time on Project F (which gives us longer to finish reports etc., a boon to me as she's good at generating data without supervision but needs a LOT of input on analysis, so spreading it out makes it easier to fit around the rest of my job) and also work part-time on the commercial work, thus giving her an extra 6-12 months to work out what she wants to do with her life (and to make valuable contacts etc. The partner in question isn't large enough to hire a full-time Beach Studies person, but there are others that are). So I've taken the gamble of accepting the pilot work now. I think she's enjoying it, even if it is enjoyment tinged with a sort of masochistic 'see how hard I have to work' persona in front of the grad students!
- I so don't want to go on fieldwork this summer.
- There's been a lot of negative stuff about fat people in the news and internet lately, or maybe I've just been noticing it. You'd think we were worse than drug addicts because we COULD 'give up', we just 'choose' not to. I am, I admit, obese - and I would love not to be, but apparently not enough to overcome the short-term grab-for-food fix when I'm stressed or afraid or anxious or unhappy, at least not often enough for it to help. I ASKED for help, one GP told me 'buy a rowing machine' (incidentally, do you know how LOW the maximum recommended user weight is for rowing machines costing less than £1000? Low, I'm telling you) and another offered me appetite suppressants (a) I don't eat because of hunger, I know the difference between hunger and the need to supress a feeling or divert a panic thank you and b) side-effects: may make you feel anxious, heart racing etc. - um, I already take medication to STOP that happening NATURALLY, not sure how taking a pill that makes it WORSE would help...).
- The back part of my desk chair has started to slip, I'm having to reposition it a couple of times a day, but the university 'no longer buys that type of chair' and all the new options have the wrong shape of back for my particular conformation ('suits 90% of office workers'. Thanks, from the 10%...). All those 10+ hour days and my back is sulking anyway. Yeah, exercise is hard to fit in, especially when your leg starts to go tingly or get dead patches after a five minute walk (just that funny nerve getting trapped. But I can't face the weight lecture at the GPs, just to hear that they can't do anything anyway until it's worse).
- Fortunately, I had two practical classes towards the end of the week, which involved quite a lot of fairly low-pressure time chatting to small groups of students whilst they work on a problem sheet. It reminded me how much our students deserve what a university can offer - not just that they want to learn, but that they benefit so much from being pushed towards independence, from being taught by people with high expectations who will both ignite their dreams and help them attain them, just to have the opportunities university offers. Most of our students are the first generation in their family to study at university - cousins and siblings may be doing the same, but their parents and older relatives aren't, and in many cases the students seem to value this opportunity. They're nice kids, and many of them leave after three years as more open-minded, critical thinking, mature, thoughtful citizens, and that's worth while. I may be flattering myself, but I do think that the work I do with students is worth-while, and that I can do it well. Which is why I keep coming back, I suppose.
- Hmmm, wonder if HR has a code for 'nervous-breakdown-preventative-leave'? And no, that's different from sabbatical, which at this place is a hugely pressured 'carry on doing all this invisible work AND produce a few spectacular papers/funded grants or explain WHY to the Special Committee' time, a change of pace but definitely not a rest!
Friday, March 02, 2012
Why I dislike staff meetings, even if they sometimes make me take positive action
Our meeting-apologies-rate is about 30%, for a variety of reasons good, not great and distinctly 'speshul'.
There is usually a point at which someone senior says "I doubt that this applies to anyone here, but..." then proceeds to tell everyone off for not doing something or doing something wrong or having a bad attitude. I always feel really guilty about whatever it is, regardless.
Today we got 'told off' about not doing Open Day Duty with the proper level of professionalism, among a string of other failings (not getting enough grants etc.) and bad news (applications are down across the UK system, various changes in university policy which mean more paperwork for us, etc. etc.).
I came back to my office feeling really fed up, especially about the Open Days (because I am bad at them, for sure, but it's not like I don't try) and I emailed my Head of Department and said look, I can't do this well because I'm really really anxious and I am thinking that I should call the occupational health people and get some advice. A few emails later, I'm not doing that duty any more this year. What a relief!
Also some of my colleagues are both arrogant and D-U-M-B, but that's not something that can be solved by an email.
There is usually a point at which someone senior says "I doubt that this applies to anyone here, but..." then proceeds to tell everyone off for not doing something or doing something wrong or having a bad attitude. I always feel really guilty about whatever it is, regardless.
Today we got 'told off' about not doing Open Day Duty with the proper level of professionalism, among a string of other failings (not getting enough grants etc.) and bad news (applications are down across the UK system, various changes in university policy which mean more paperwork for us, etc. etc.).
I came back to my office feeling really fed up, especially about the Open Days (because I am bad at them, for sure, but it's not like I don't try) and I emailed my Head of Department and said look, I can't do this well because I'm really really anxious and I am thinking that I should call the occupational health people and get some advice. A few emails later, I'm not doing that duty any more this year. What a relief!
Also some of my colleagues are both arrogant and D-U-M-B, but that's not something that can be solved by an email.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
At last!
PowerhouseProjectPaper has finally been submitted! One more thing off my desk... and onto someone else's (referees)
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Ugh
OK, I 'called in' (electronically, having no voice).
But I need to have a chat with my Head of Department about whether this really counts as sick leave, since I plan to write three references for students (not their fault I'm sick), referee at least one paper, do a load of administrivia that needs doing by the end of the week, and hopefully work on writing of a research nature. Along with feeling sorry for myself, petting the cat and coughing a lot.
So when is a sick day not a sick day in our sort of work? Yes, I had to cancel classes - but if that's the only definition, then no-one should have to use sick-time if they're ill on a non-teaching day, which seems kind of silly. I can't teach but I can - and will - do other parts of my job, and probably get as much productive work done as on any day in the office. So... am I officially sick?
But I need to have a chat with my Head of Department about whether this really counts as sick leave, since I plan to write three references for students (not their fault I'm sick), referee at least one paper, do a load of administrivia that needs doing by the end of the week, and hopefully work on writing of a research nature. Along with feeling sorry for myself, petting the cat and coughing a lot.
So when is a sick day not a sick day in our sort of work? Yes, I had to cancel classes - but if that's the only definition, then no-one should have to use sick-time if they're ill on a non-teaching day, which seems kind of silly. I can't teach but I can - and will - do other parts of my job, and probably get as much productive work done as on any day in the office. So... am I officially sick?
Sunday, February 12, 2012
In which I can't do part of my job
Thank you all for commenting on my last post.
This week has continued to be A Bad Week with Open Day Duty yesterday - had to take double the anxiety meds, nearly had a panic attack (quite a lot of hiding in the loo for five minutes doing careful breathing), and thanks to the weather only two of the students I was meeting for informational interviews turned up anyway (we don't really select, we aim to recruit the best of our applicants, like most squeezed middle unis - so the informationals are meant to manage some combination of selling the place and acting like we select because Top Unis Select... I don't get it. I don't know how to do it. I don't want to think about it) so I spent most of the time having to do Informal Chatting with the families which I dread. And I still messed up, as in was inappropriately hyper, said the wrong things to the wrong people, was reprimanded (appropriately) for something dumb I did by a colleague who I can't stand, and generally did a bad job. I WISH my Head of Department would take me SERIOUSLY when I say I can't do Open Days and would rather take on some extra duty once students are here - there are plenty of unpopular things that I COULD do - or at the least want to be taken away from the 'informal chatting with families' and informational interviews... I could man the tea urn? Or run departmental tours? But no, those are jobs for student helpers or support staff. I'm good at tea urns, honest I am.
The one time I tried to talk to my Head of Department seriously about this, his response was that no-one likes doing it, and that he can't let one person off because then everyone would have excuses and it's not fair.
I just wish people would stop telling me I have to do it, and do it well, because 'it's out future' or 'think of it as keeping your job'. Because that doesn't help someone who already half-believes that she's going to do something so badly wrong she'll be sacked for it, who is about to try and do something that she is totally rubbish at (sales, glossing things positively, talking to total strangers... I mean, even if I was allowed to hand round sandwiches, THAT would help, but no... 'just go and talk to them and tell them how great we are!').
Doesn't help that, right now, I don't think we are that great. We do our best, sure, but we have so many issues, and unreliable colleagues, and honestly NorthernUni, Northern City, Beach Studies and any kind of university study are NOT right for everyone. But we have to hit our targets.
So basically, spent most of yesterday trying not to be anxious/get wound up, being very anxious and doing stupid things that made me feel worse and getting all hyper, trying to stop being all hyper, eating chocolate and feeling like a moron and trying not to beat myself up about it. I may have mentioned that this was a SATURDAY and that thanks to other people not doing their marking to schedule I didn't get a day off this week as I had to be in to sort stuff out and to teach my classes which all fell on days without stuff to sort out so I was in every day? And next week is another week without a day off thanks to class scheduling and meeting scheduling... and I have to write the first of the new statistics classes which involves teaching myself to use software I don't like and I should have done all that last week and basically, gah, I am so tired of myself being such a wimp.
This week has continued to be A Bad Week with Open Day Duty yesterday - had to take double the anxiety meds, nearly had a panic attack (quite a lot of hiding in the loo for five minutes doing careful breathing), and thanks to the weather only two of the students I was meeting for informational interviews turned up anyway (we don't really select, we aim to recruit the best of our applicants, like most squeezed middle unis - so the informationals are meant to manage some combination of selling the place and acting like we select because Top Unis Select... I don't get it. I don't know how to do it. I don't want to think about it) so I spent most of the time having to do Informal Chatting with the families which I dread. And I still messed up, as in was inappropriately hyper, said the wrong things to the wrong people, was reprimanded (appropriately) for something dumb I did by a colleague who I can't stand, and generally did a bad job. I WISH my Head of Department would take me SERIOUSLY when I say I can't do Open Days and would rather take on some extra duty once students are here - there are plenty of unpopular things that I COULD do - or at the least want to be taken away from the 'informal chatting with families' and informational interviews... I could man the tea urn? Or run departmental tours? But no, those are jobs for student helpers or support staff. I'm good at tea urns, honest I am.
The one time I tried to talk to my Head of Department seriously about this, his response was that no-one likes doing it, and that he can't let one person off because then everyone would have excuses and it's not fair.
I just wish people would stop telling me I have to do it, and do it well, because 'it's out future' or 'think of it as keeping your job'. Because that doesn't help someone who already half-believes that she's going to do something so badly wrong she'll be sacked for it, who is about to try and do something that she is totally rubbish at (sales, glossing things positively, talking to total strangers... I mean, even if I was allowed to hand round sandwiches, THAT would help, but no... 'just go and talk to them and tell them how great we are!').
Doesn't help that, right now, I don't think we are that great. We do our best, sure, but we have so many issues, and unreliable colleagues, and honestly NorthernUni, Northern City, Beach Studies and any kind of university study are NOT right for everyone. But we have to hit our targets.
So basically, spent most of yesterday trying not to be anxious/get wound up, being very anxious and doing stupid things that made me feel worse and getting all hyper, trying to stop being all hyper, eating chocolate and feeling like a moron and trying not to beat myself up about it. I may have mentioned that this was a SATURDAY and that thanks to other people not doing their marking to schedule I didn't get a day off this week as I had to be in to sort stuff out and to teach my classes which all fell on days without stuff to sort out so I was in every day? And next week is another week without a day off thanks to class scheduling and meeting scheduling... and I have to write the first of the new statistics classes which involves teaching myself to use software I don't like and I should have done all that last week and basically, gah, I am so tired of myself being such a wimp.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
