Sometimes you look at the shared family calendar and find an entry like this one:
In case you can read it, the entry indicates that the twenty-third of that month (not this month) is "No-Pants Day".
I am nearly 100% certain that is not an actual recognized holiday. I am nearly 100% certain that we did not observe it by spending the day pantless.
However, if our family calendar was subpoenaed as evidence in a legal proceeding, I fear we might have some explaining to do.
From the Classified section of the student paper at my fair university late last week, the full extent of the listings under "Employment":
In case you can't read the text in the image:
$ $ Sperm Donors Wanted $ $
Earn up to $1,200/month and help create families. Convenient Palo Alto location. Apply online: [URL redacted]_____
Female Masseuse Wanted
For a private gentlemen [sic], no experience necessary.
Minimum age 18 Cash. [sic]
[phone number redacted]
I don't even know what to say about this. Except that I hope the Career Center has more options.
I know that some of you have been very good at resisting the siren song of The Twitters. I have pretty much turned right into the rocks.
Not that I'm tweeting 24/7 or anything. My tweets are primarily:
(1) Links to my new blog posts, when I manage to get it together to write new blog posts.
(2) Retweets of good stuff others have tweeted, especially links to pieces that I want to reread more carefully later.
(3) Passing thoughts about my job, my kids, my commute, or whatever.
(4) Occasionally, live-notes from a conference session I'm attending.
(5) Playing along with hashtag games (e.g., the recent #ReplaceLoveWithSoup).
My tweets, generally speaking, involve much less time and thought than my blog posts, and they are frequently more silly and/or smart alecky.
But here's the thing:
I've been picking up Twitter followers, as one does. Some of them are actually pretty famous and well-respected people in fields upon which my work (not just my blogging-work, but my actual professorial research/teaching/service-work) touch. Some of them are pretty famous and well-respected people in my home discipline. Also, not that it necessarily matters (but I can't rule out the possibility that it might), some of these famous-folks are a generation or two older than me.
... and now there's something like the possibility of meeting some of these famous-folk in real life (say, at a professional meeting) and having their primary information about me at that moment come from my tweets. And it's hard to anticipate how famous scientists and philosophers feel about replacing love with soup.
Or to know whether it should matter to me.
Are any of you in a similar situation? Does it influence how you tweet? Have you decided that your Twitter followers deserve what they get from your tweet-stream?
Overheard from the backseat of the Free-Ride hoopty as we were driving the Free-Ride offspring home from a visit to the Grandparents Who Lurk But Seldom Comment:
Younger offspring: Do you want to play dolls?
Elder offspring: No.
Younger offspring: Do you want to make fun of me playing dolls?
Maybe this is progress?
My fellow university faculty, have you ever felt that your official commencement faculty marshal badge is just too pedestrian to command the respect it deserves?
Me too.
Luckily, it's the kind of thing you can remedy. Observe:
For those of you muttering "Free-Ride has finally gone round the bend," let me put a few more facts into evidence:
1. All the graduating students at commencement who commented on my badge embellishments were also quick to comply with the lining-up, filling-out-photo-cards, and marching instructions I issued. (And, since they didn't look scared while so complying, I assume it's because they respected my marshaling authority, not because they thought I was about to snap.)
2. Two full professors in my college (both male, if that matters to you) borrowed similarly embellished badges from me so they could step into the faculty marshaling fray. (Bringing extra credentials to commencement is always a good idea so you can deputize other faculty members on the spot.)
3. Neither of them have yet returned these embellished badges. I'm betting I'll see them again next May.
(My better half, of course, insisted on referring to my spiffed-up faculty marshal badge as my "flair". We'll be meeting at Flingers for lunch to settle the matter.)
Two Fridays ago, I was poised to jump into what I hoped would be a very productive summer. I had submitted spring semester grades with time to spare (and then submitted the change-of-grade form for the one I had computed incorrectly). I had gotten my online course ready to be switched on for the summer session. I had gotten through some necessary committee work and made a plan to keep the rest from encroaching too severely on my research and writing schedule.
And then, walking my younger offspring to the car after swim practice, I turned my ankle, fell hard, watched it swell up for awhile, then looked away when the pain and nausea got to be too much.
I found out the next afternoon at Urgent Care that it wasn't fractured, just badly sprained, and that probably, if I was good, it would be better within four weeks.
I found out that if you injure yourself after 7:30 on a Friday evening Urgent Care will close before you can get there. I also found out that it doesn't matter much if Urgent Care opens Saturday morning when the only other licensed driver in the house now has to be two places at once (owing to my inability to get the kid to the swim meet and work our shift timing the heats, since being upright still provoked nausea).
I found out that it's worth hanging on to that old pair of crutches, but that propelling myself on them is a lot harder than I remember it being 20 years ago.
I found out that most of the tasks that were part of my daily routine are a lot harder on one leg than on two, especially when my hands are busy clutching the crutches for dear life. Making breakfast for the kids, or packing their lunches, suddenly requires serious planning just to get food items from the fridge to the work surface without mishap.
I learned that a bath feels less like a luxurious indulgence when a shower is not an option.
I learned that I have a hard time asking for help, or remembering that an egalitarian household arrangement probably shouldn't require that one do 50% of the labor when one is incapacitated.
I learned that my offspring are capable of operating the washer and dryer (and changing the settings as appropriate for different loads of laundry). I also learned that instructing them to avoid overloading the washing machine by leaving an empty space big enough for a particular stuffed animal will lead my younger offspring to use that stuffed animal to do quality control before starting each load.
I found out that using FaceTime to participate in a committee meeting from home is a mixed blessing.
I found out that my relatively high pain threshold makes it harder to remember to take regular doses of ibuprofen for inflammation.
I found out that making a serious effort to stay off my ankle has made the muscles and joints in the rest of my body angry with me. This week, as I eased back into Pilates to avoid total bodily collapse, I discover that it only took a week and a half to develop serious asymmetries that weren't there before.
I found out that I have some gnarly bruises that may persist even after my mobility returns.
I found out that my sprained ankle doesn't interfere terribly with doing tasks that don't require too much thought, like grading, or editing pieces of writing that are close to done. However, it seems to have made it harder for me to write anything new, or to do any coherent project planning. I found out that I feel bad about this because there doesn't seem to be an obvious physical reason why my messed up ankle should mess with my head.
I have long maintained that bodies are suboptimal vehicles with which to schlep minds around.
Most recent data point in support of this position: On Tuesday, I managed to hurt my knee in the course of grading papers. Grading papers! Come on now!
I guess it's also a data point in support of the hypothesis that if there exists an improbable way to injure oneself, I will manage to injure myself that way. (Ask me about the time I sprained my ankle stepping onto a bed.) However, if I weren't embodied, that wouldn't be the case.
* * * * *
Undoubtedly someone's going to want to know how grading papers resulted in a hurt knee, so here's what I think happened: I was sitting on a bed with a laptop and a clipboard on my lap, grading a bunch of online assignments. To create enough surface at the right height on which to balance both laptop and clipboard, I was sitting cross-legged. Apparently one of the knees was getting more than its share of the stress thusly distributed.
I anticipate I will be advised to sit at a table or desk like a sensible human being to get through long stretches of grading. The problem with doing that is that the available chairs in my Cave of Grading are hard enough that I can only count on about an hour and a half of grading before the pain in my butt from my "sits-bones" (as my Pilates instructor calls 'em) becomes unbearably distracting.
In short: bodies seem not to support grading as well as they might.
Within certain quarters of the administration of my fair university (and of the state university system of which it is a part), it is now taken as given that the classroom is a relic of a bygone era.
Lectures, it is declared, don't work. Besides, the Internet abounds with free streaming lectures (the ones from MIT, the TED Talks). What could we possibly have to add to that? So, it's time to phase out classes in classrooms and move our instruction online.
It's interesting to me that what is offered is a general declaration, rather than an identification of any particular lecture classes of ours that are not working. As it happens, the particular classes are what we offer, not some abstract generalization of "the lecture class".
Moreover, to the extent that lectures are a suboptimal delivery method for information and skills, this seems to be connected to a lack of opportunity to engage in what we in the biz call "active learning". This can be as simple as a pause for questions, or to have students work through a problem where they try to apply or extend something presented in the lecture. It might also involve a more elaborate small group exercise or a facilitated discussion.
Here's the thing: many (if not most) of us who teach "lecture" courses already incorporate a lot of active learning.
And, if the concern is that we should do more of it, or do it better, why would one conclude that the answer is to take this interaction out of the classroom and move it online? Why, especially, would one conclude that one should move it online while making class sizes much, much bigger?
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to conclude that the way to increase active learning is to make class sizes smaller?
Of course, that would cost more.
However, if the goal is really better pedagogy, not just cutting a few million dollars here or there, it might be worth remembering that facilitating active learning -- not to mention evaluating it to provide students with useful feedback and/or grades -- requires more instructor labor, not less, when it's done online.
Or, maybe the administration is only interested in improved pedagogy if the improvements (and whatever extra labor they require) can be had for free.
The whole thing kind of makes me wish the folks further up the org-chart than I am would just spell out exactly what they care about, and exactly what they don't care about. As it is, enough is left implicit that it's really hard to know whether there's any common ground for us to share.
So, Chemjobber (whose blog focuses on "[q]uantifying the chemistry job market" and "helping chemists find jobs somehow") wrote an interesting post on the supply/demand mismatch when it comes to chemistry Ph.D.s and how this might affect a person's rational deliberations about whether it's worth the gamble to pursue a chemistry Ph.D.
That post got me thinking (as good posts do), and I posted some of my thoughts about what we (in a sort of societal-level "we" that at least includes chemists and chemical educators, broadly construed, but that might also encompass higher education types and even society as a whole) might want to do about this supply/demand mismatch, and about how what we think we should do is probably connected to how we think about the point of education in the first place.
I went and read the comments. (I know, who does that?)
There, I learned:
1. Putting up a blog post that includes some typos (or maybe they were artifacts from the voice recognition software) means that your Ph.D. should probably be revoked. Immediately!
2. The existence of one commenter with a Ph.D. in chemistry who has an intellectually stimulating job that pays well means that there is no job crisis for Ph.D. chemists! (False alarm, kids! Come on back to the lab!)
3. The existence of one commenter who works placing interns for his university's STEM college and reports a 100% placement rate for students looking for internships means that there is no job crisis for Ph.D. chemists! (Even though maybe these are undergraduate students being placed? And maybe some of these internships pay less than what you'd view as a living wage, or perhaps nothing at all? Still, companies will welcome cheap transient labor from science majors, so the economy is totally fine!!)
4. Ph.D. programs in chemistry are probably way easier now than they were 100 years ago. (Whither intellectual rigor?) Maybe these lower standards are to blame for the glut of chemistry Ph.D.s.
5. On balance, it is a good thing when a sub-par chemist finds a job teaching philosophy!
Thankfully, we sub-par chemists can look to Fark comment threads for helpful examples when we teach logic and critical thinking.
And, because I count it as due diligence, I immediately emailed Chemjobber to alert him to the news that he's been mistaken about the chemistry job market. I expect by the end of the week he'll shift his blog over to providing photos of labware with hilarious captions.
Finally, given that the blurb that went with the link to my posts reads:
The market value of a Ph.D. in chemistry is now limited to asking 'Would you like fries with that?" On the positive side, chemistry students are bumping the hell out of English majors in the paper-hat careers
I could get all shirty about pointing out that my Ph.D. in a "useless" non-STEM field helped me secure a tenure-track job (and, ultimately, tenure) in a field where it's maybe even harder to get an academic job than in chemistry. (Look at me being a dumbass with my sunk costs and such!) And, there are no fry-o-lators or paper hats involved.
But that would just be mean of me.
I have just returned to Casa Free-Ride after a few days at a thoroughly engaging conference about which I'll have more to say soon. Getting home required air travel, this time on United.
There are many airlines that have so many levels of premium member stratification that they have run out of precious metals and gemstones by which to identify them in calling them to board. However, United is the first airline I have noticed that gets really tetchy about precisely which lane the non-premium members queue up in for their approach to the gate agent who scans the boarding passes even after all our betters the premium members have boarded. See, the premium lane has this special blue carpet on it that, it seems, is only to be trod upon by the feet of those special in the eyes of United Airlines. Indeed, on more than one leg of the trip I just completed, the gate agents actually halted the boarding of a plane to move everyone in the passenger-group-now-boarding from the fancy blue-carpeted premium lane to the economy lane.
Gate agents, the premium passengers have already boarded! They will not see the great unwashed swarm of economy travelers stepping on their blue carpet of awesomeness!
Anyway, on the last leg of my travel, the amplified gate agent (who was announcing which groups were invited aboard) was both distinct from the gate agent scanning boarding passes and several yards away from the boarding lanes for the gate. Thus, she tried to direct people to the appropriate lane by reiterating that the premium lane was the one on the left and the economy lane was the lane on the right.
It turns out USian air travelers cannot (or will not) distinguish left from right any better than your typical U12 soccer player. (How well is that? As a soccer coach, let me tell you: not very well at all.)
In short, it strikes me that United is:
I fear both of these attempts are doomed to failure (although maybe for different reasons).
