Academic Secret

Argh! (A Play in Infinite Acts)

2007-09-21T02:08:00.000Z

Adviser: Hey, I had a great idea! You could use Fancy New Method to address your thesis topic!
Dandelion: That would be fantastic if it worked, but given that it's New, it'll probably take months to set up and optimise. Can't I just try to get some results now that Slightly Older Also Cool Method is finally working after months of optimisation?
Adviser: Don't worry about SOACM, it would be so much cooler with FNM! And it'll hardly take any time to set up, I'm sure. Your results will be so much more exciting than the boring ones you're going to get this way.
Dandelion: It would be much more interesting. If you really think it'll work, it would be worth it. I'll try it.
Dandelion goes off to figure out how to use FNM and plan experiments.
Adviser: So, what's your plan for finishing up this project with SOACM? Can we publish this soon?
Dandelion: Um, what happened to FNM? I've been working on that.
Adviser: Oh, that's not going to work. It's too new and will take too long to optimise. You should try to get something published soon. Besides, you don't want to waste all the effort you've put into SOACM.
Dandelion: Argh!
A couple months pass. Repeat from the beginning.

If only her enthusiasm weren't so infectious and convincing... At least I've learned not to stop working on SOACM, while investigating the FNM of the day.

let sleeping dogs lie?

2007-09-18T17:56:00.001Z

What do you do when you "catch" (like it's difficult to spot) students sleeping during your classes?

Help! This blog is dying!

2007-09-13T20:01:00.000Z

Guys, where is everybody? Do you remember the fun we had back in the old days (I believe it was just a tiny year ago)?

Whatever happened to Clear and Plaid? Did they switch over to the dark side and said good-bye to their practice of posting witty graphic secrets?

And where is my friend Kodachrome? Have you been sucked into the tenure-track vortex?

Maybe we could expand the scope of this blog to make it about more than secrets and troubles in academia. After all, there are some things in this life that actually make it worth living, or am I just speaking for myself?

Well, I hope to see many of you back on a.secret...long live the lovely species of the blogging academic!

Where has all the time gone?

2007-09-04T20:06:00.001Z

Oh... to teaching, that's where.

I can't believe that just a few short summer months was long enough to wipe from my brain the time, energy, and commitment that the "teaching" part of my job takes. I don't even teach at a teaching school - this is an R1 school that values teaching. Uh huh. We'll see how that value gets translated at tenure time.

Granted there are always the semester start-up costs (adding and dropping students, dealing with the bookstore, teaching how to use the course management site, plus most of my students are freshman who don't even know where to get coffee on campus), but I haven't gotten anything substantial accomplished since classes began not-too-long ago.

Is anyone else having a hard time switching gears from research to teaching? Has anyone found a way to balance the two? I feel a little like I'm sixteen years old and learning how to drive a clutch. How can I balance the brake and the clutch without stalling?

twenty-four/seven academics

2007-07-22T15:27:00.001Z

I'm a seven days a week academic (well, really six because of childcare issues - but given the option, I'd be in the office seven days a week). This was typical at my graduate program, at least for a handful or professors and students. It's not typical here, at my first job. Don't get me wrong - I waste time like the best of them - but I'm here and ostensibly working.

I hear all the time, though, about these academics that are pulling 80 hour work weeks. Where the hell are they? I realize that one doesn't have to work at work, but I doubt that many of the people who I don't see here are working on anything "work" related. My co-workers are reading fiction, playing softball, remodeling their houses, mowing their lawns, creating scrapbooks, taking day trips to the big city or the beach. And this isn't just because it's summer! This is typical year-round - for people with and without tenure, with and without children, and with and without graduate school training like my own. It's not that I don't blow off work to go to the movies, read a good book, or watch some TV. It's just that I work a lot too.

Maybe it's healthier. Maybe they're happier. But I sure miss coming in on a Saturday and seeing others trudging along with me.

I guess they're all at the top ten schools... one more reason I should keep working through my weekends and holidays - then maybe I can get a job at a place where people work those 80 hour weeks.

Is the glass half-full, or half-empty?

2007-06-19T16:05:00.000Z

What is it with academics and summer?

While school's been out for a while, for reasons I can't blog about, my summer's just begun. Everyone else seems to think that summer's almost over.

As I see it, I still have more than two full months of summer left, minus a couple conferences or commitments here and there. Yet, inevitably, any chat with a fellow academic (fellow faculty, grad students, or friends) is about how summer is "slipping away" or is "almost over" or "has just gone by too fast."

Trust me, I'm not an optimist. Why do I feel like there's still so much more time left, that so much more that can be accomplished?

Summer, my friends, is definitely half-full. Every day I get to come into my office and work without students to cater to, lectures to write, papers to grade. There's no line at the campus coffee shop and faculty meetings are a thing of the past.

The rest of the world can continue to treat summer like it's on its last leg, but I'm going to enjoy this break for the half-full martini or margarita or mocha latte that it is. I hope you will too!

Hypocrisy!

2007-05-20T01:39:00.000Z

Here is my secret: I am a hypocrite.

Things have been bad in Academic Ella land, to the extent that I almost dropped out this semester. And I mean seriously. But I didn't, and the end result is that the stress of my particular situation caused me to lose 15 pounds in a month (and I'm not a large person to begin with, by any standard), stop menstruating, and develop an ovarian cyst that may require surgical removal of my ovary in my reproductive prime.

That's just great.

But yet, here I am, still.

So whilst suffering through the turmoil of this semester, I had to seek counsel from another faculty member. I really didn't want to, because I hate to come across as gossipy, but things were Bad, with a capital B. (I saw aforementioned faculty member a few weeks after our initial meeting and he asked me if things were going better. I replied, 'Do I look like things are going better?!' He said, 'Well, you don't look like you're packing, so that's better.' The scary thing is that he was only half kidding, I think.)

Packing aside, obviously one of his major suggestions to me was to find a new advisor. Which isn't as easy as it sounds, for reasons that I'm sure I don't have to explain to people here, but that other people outside of Academic Ella land (including my husband, to a certain extent) just don't seem to understand.

The obvious choice for a new advisor is a new faculty member with whom I've been working this past year and who I absolutely adore. And while working with her is a fully pleasant experience (she seems to approach life in a different manner than my advisor), I just don't think she would cut it for me as an advisor. I mean, like me, she has a young daughter, which means she isn't around very much, or at least not as much as some. Which means that when I'm in the middle of doing something and realize I don't know what I'm doing (which is always), she isn't there to help. Which means my experiments are often screwed and I end up wasting the afternoon away. The plus side is that she's always nice about it in the end, and she never goes off on tirades about how lazy and undisciplined I am. But the bottom line is that she doesn't work 24/7 and she's not a psychotic workaholic like my current advisor, which in this sick sort of way is what I seem to need.

Add to this the fact that there's this new graduate student wanting to start in my advisor's lab. All I can figure is that she wants to be with me, because her undergraduate degree is in a completely different subfield than my advisor's, and I really can't imagine that she was so charmed by my advisor that she just had to work with him. My advisor suggested that new student and I figure out a day when we can be in the lab at the same time this summer, which I would love, because aforementioned student seems very cool, much cooler than my advisor. At the same time, trying to work out a schedule with this new student has been ridiculously frustrating, because she has an infant son and she just isn't ready to leave him yet and blah blah blah.

Don't get me wrong, I understand, but I am also... annoyed. I understand that I am viewed as one of the Star Graduate Students, and therefore the poster child for 'You CAN have it all!' Thus my advisor's lab is view as The Kid Friendly Lab, which makes it a magnet for new graduate students with young children, or just children, or with just any semblance of a life whatsoever. And while I do want to be a mentor to anyone that I can be a mentor to (because mentors in our field are pathetically lacking), I don't have time to be a mentor because, hello, I'm also a mom. I don't really have the time to work around your pathetically limited schedule. And also, if you aren't ready to leave your kid yet, why in the F are you thinking about starting grad school?!

I guess life is all about balance. Maybe as a struggling graduate student with a young child, I need the rigor of a hellish advisor to keep me on track. I hate it, but I also realize that if I had a nicer advisor, it's quite possible that I would never finish, which I would also hate.

I've had the same sort of dilemma when it comes to religion. I am personally not religious, and neither is my spouse. Yet, we sort of want to rear our daughter religiously. We were both reared with religion--not really strict religion, but religion nonetheless. And while neither one of us has ever really believed in God, we do think that the fear of God has some redeeming qualities in a young child's mind.

To this day, I still fear the wrath of a God I don't believe in. And I fear that I'm going to burn in Hell for my hypocrisy. I don't want to teach my child about a God I don't belive in, but I want her to fear going to Hell to keep her from being bad. I don't want school to be my life and yet I want an advisor who is at school whenever I am, who answers my e-mails within five minutes, and who obsesses about my data as much as I do. I don't want an advisor who takes the afternoon off to be with her daughter, or a fellow graduate student who is never in the lab because her kid won't take a bottle and she can't leave him for more than a few hours at a time.

I understand these things more than anyone, and yet I can't tolerate them.

My only solace is that if I burn in Hell for all eternity for being a hypocrite, at least I have experience. Because my academic life right now is Hell, and there is absolutely no end in sight.

Grading Woes

2007-05-15T02:01:00.000Z

It's not really a secret at all, I assume, that most instructors hate grading. For me, it's not the commenting on papers that bothers me, because I actually very much enjoy doing that, and my students appreciate it. It's the deciding, especially at the end of the semester, what letter grade a student has earned, as if the whole 14 or so weeks -- all our conversations, their progress, their pitfalls, etc -- just boils down to this one thing. I always wonder what the student will think when s/he gets the grade, and whether or not that will affect how s/he feels about the class and the way it ended. Some people improve but still don't get the grade they probably hope for, especially in this age of grade inflation. I feel very strongly that I'm a fair-to-easy grader, and yet I still get occasional complaints that I'm a "hard" grader, even though it's extremely rare to get a "C" from me, and almost impossible to get below that.

Sigh. I just wanted to share. This time of year always makes me sad. I get so excited when I get a batch of new papers, so intrigued by what I'm about to read, but then at the end when I have to put a letter grade to it, I just feel a bit defeated. And no, I don't particularly think that doing away with grades altogether will help at the moment, since most students are motivated by their grades to do things like attend class and do at least some of the reading.

For the record, I also think grading grad students is a joke. Is there really a need to assign a letter grade to some of the most feedback-obsessed, masochistic people in the world? I've never heard a grad student say anything like, "I just want my A in this class, and then I'm outta here."

bad-minton

2007-05-02T15:35:00.000Z

It seems like my school is teeming with student-athletes and just about anything is considered a sport in this joint. I've become accustomed to notification from the athletics department about who's going to be absent and requests to be as accomodating as I can, and I've heard from students that I'm more sympathetic to the plights of student athletes than most.

That was then, and this is now.

A couple weeks back that all went to crap when one of my student-athletes lied to me about missing class for a badminton tournament. He asked to make up the in-class assignment, and I told him I'd check with the athletics office because I hadn't heard about the badminton tournament. Well, when I checked, the coordinator told me that there weren't any excused absences for the badminton team that day. I emailed the student her reply, and suggested he have his coach talk to me if there was some sort of error. I heard nothing, until today.

Today, when he emailed me about his grade that's stuck somewhere between a B+ and an A-. Today, when he who lied to me and I probably could have pursued it as academic dihonesty, told me that it wasn't fair because I hadn't offered enough opportunities for him to make up the work he missed (I dropped the three scores, but he wanted more). Today, when he played the poor-pitiful-student-athlete card. Today, when the semester is already over and all that remains is his final exam.

I am afraid that my view of student athletes is eternally tarnished - all because of the one bad-minton player.

Imagine a new kind of academic job market...

2007-04-28T19:41:00.000Z

...one that was formatted much more like the NFL draft.

Imagine the world watching as schools deliberate over who to hire this year. Will they fill the position that's weakest in their department, or go for the top pick remaining, or will they throw a curveball (I realize that's a baseball term) by choosing someone who is completely unexpected?

Imagine the candidates, dressed in their Sunday best, surrounded by family and friends (who just want them to go somewhere, and soon, and would never suggest that they try for a job at the community college close to home). It's okay to look nervous, to be apprehensive, and there are agents, there to walk you through the process and assure you that today is YOUR day.

Imagine the coverage, with people in the top of your field (or has-beens, or pretty faces), sitting around a table talking about every detail of your performance - the weaknesses in your vita, your stamina, and how you work under pressure - and offering agreement or criticism of every choice that schools made.

The worst, though, would be that 15 minutes that the schools have to choose, with the world waiting with bated breath, until they have to walk across the stage to a podium and "select" their choice to a round of applause or jeers.

I have no opinion one way or the other, but I wonder what it would have been like folding laundry in front of a bunch of fellow academics, exposing just how awful (and absurd) the selection process can be, regardless of your chosen profession.

At long last!

2007-04-27T13:32:00.000Z

Today is the last day of classes here at Mid-Tier-University, and I am indescribably happy! I am, in fact, probably even happier than my students, who are ecstatic about escaping the rigorous horror that they just realized was the difference between lower and upper division courses. Every time I think about not hearing "But why can't we just use numbers? there's an equation right there!" for the whole summer, I want to break into song. Better even than that, though, is the realization that, after grades are submitted, I have a summer -- an entire, complete, glorious summer -- to do research!

This has been an excruciating term, because for the first time I had students who resented having to think, to work, to meet expectations, who seemed to really believe that showing up was all it took (and who then seemed to think that it was appropriate to complain to my chair when it turned out that they were wrong). And then there's the gender thing -- "but you're supposed to be nice! and nurturing! Why can't I turn in late work? You're mean!" -- where they express levels of entitlement that they'd never show to a male colleague.

The term has also been excruciating because, as hard as I've tried, I haven't been able to salvage any time for my own research, so I feel as though -- in addition to wasting my efforts and care and concern on students who wouldn't even grasp that I was doing them some favors (yes, I'll teach extra evening sessions to help you understand the material that was a prequisite for the course, but, um, yes, you need to do the reading) -- I made absolutely no progress toward tenure. I expect my evaluations will be bimodal (about half strong, and half awful, really), but the time I spent focusing on the course will be directly counted against progress securing additional external funding.

I don't think I have ever been more thrilled about a term ending. Usually I'm pleased in a nebulous sense, because hey, a week of fluff reading and then more term! And I have all these great ideas for that term, and research too! (That last sentence isn't sarcasm -- it's a pretty accurate read on how I've felt in the past.) This term has taken too much out of me, and right now, the thought of teaching again -- ever -- makes me want to sob. So here's my secret: I don't want to go back. I never want to see these people again -- colleagues or students -- and I think I made a terrible mistake.

But the term's over. Small mercies, but mercy all the same.

permission to blog instead of doing my work?

2007-04-17T16:06:00.000Z

This post on Adam Kotsko's blog is absolutely hilarious. Highlights:

"For years now, in a blog tradition that is rivaled in its longevity and its enduring human relevance only by Friday Cat Blogging, I have been offering absolution to the tortured souls of the blogosphere. Offering permission seems like a natural compliment, and as I will argue in this post, it is grounded in an authority that I have already tacitly claimed as the sole authorized voice of the symbolic order -- that is, as the big Other's representative."...

"It is my belief that, in principle, any human being who is recognized by the symbolic order may function as a stand-in for the big Other. But in point of fact, it is precisely I, Adam Kotsko, who so function. On one level, that is simply a matter of "dibs," itself one of the originary functions of the symbolic order. But even though the final argument in favor of my office is simply my own claim to hold it, there are nevertheless good reasons why it should be me in particular, which I will gladly outline for you now."...

An indicator of trouble in academitopia

2007-04-17T15:45:00.000Z

This morning, as I tried to summon the will to get out of bed, this happy thought crossed my mind, "Oh, thank god, I get to do my taxes first thing this morning, instead of working on the research project that is ruining my life and potentially driving me out of graduate school."

When filing federal taxes* seems like a blessed respite from the emotional drama of my research project, there might be room for improvements in my work-life.

And speaking of that cursed project, I've reached the point where opening the laptop and trying to work on the project feels like sitting down to coffee with someone who has just dumped you but still want to be 'friends'. To paraphrase Dorotha Harried, why do i let 80's movies happen in my research projects? haven't i learned by now?

*which I know will result in me owing a lot of money because you can't have automatic withholding of fellowship money (?!?)

Forget blue. Color me red.

2007-04-04T16:47:00.000Z

I am pissed.

I was just blatantly disregarded in a decision that affects me directly because, I assume, of my status as a junior faculty member (and possibly as a woman). And, while I can't get into specifics for fear that it would threaten my anonymity, this is not a case where juniors shouldn't expect to have a say. This is where each person should be afforded the same respect and consideration as any other, regardless of rank.

To add insult to injury, it involves a student. What message does this send about who can be pushed around, who should be considered and who shouldn't, who can be challenged, and so forth?

Time Flies...

2007-03-28T13:16:00.000Z

Does anyone know where Spring Break went? I know I had it on my calendar. I dreamt about it and all that I would accomplish during five glorious, student-free days. Yet here it is, almost Easter, an indication that Spring Break is behind me, and I have no recollection of those glorious days and nothing more to show for it. In other words, I didn't get nearly as much accomplished during that time off as I hoped for. And now, like sands through the hourglass, Spring Break has slipped through my fingers. I'm destined to keep plugging, a little at a time, until summer, when I once again can work with the fervor that the tenure-track requires around here.

Next Spring Break, regardless of how much or how little I accomplish, I'm taking a day off, so that I know that Spring Break really happened. Or I could just not bother writing it on my calendar and getting my hopes up.

"It makes me want to ask [students], 'Want fries with that order?' "

2007-03-08T17:53:00.000Z

Some recent a.secret posts (the thankless student, the angry student, not-helpful-my-ass) seem to reflect the findings of a recent study reported in the LA Times and the Christian Science Monitor about the narcissism of the current generation of college students.

I wonder whether they really are more self-centered than they used to be...

The Angry Student

2007-03-02T19:42:00.000Z

I teach a very small (10 students) composition class once a week. I have a student who has, from the beginning, been very argumentative, mostly trying to bait me into debates but also debating the other students. In the beginning of the semester, he completely dominated class discussion to the point that hardly anyone else had the space to speak (to their credit, several students did bother to disagree with him on a number of points, though they often had to back down). This has all been frustrating, but bearable. I gently mentioned to him that I wanted everyone to feel comfortable speaking in class, and he seemed to acknowledge that he tended to dominate and would try to let others speak more, and for a week or two this seemed to be working to some extent (though he had a condescending attitude about holding back his opinion, and would say things to me when arguing like, “I’m not trying to make you mad,” even though I wasn’t getting mad, in order to make it seem like I was overreacting or like because I’m a woman I couldn’t handle arguments without getting "emotional").

Last week, though, apparently out of the blue, he decided not to speak in class at all. Not a word. Which might have been okay, but I could feel the energy from him. It was like he was seething. It was freaking me out enough that I considered jokingly telling him that he could speak sometimes without dominating, that such a thing is possible.

Then, this past week, things came to a head. We were attempting to discuss a text which I discovered only two students (one of them being the one in question) had read (which is another problem altogether, but I can deal with that one). Early on he said, “Frankly, I’m tired of only talking about the obvious things in the text,” one of the most insulting things a student has ever said to me in class. Then later, I was giving an overview of various critical readings of the text, and after one of them he snorted, saying “that’s so typical of academics, always over-analyzing things.” (He’s made a comment like this before, but not as direct.) I told him I thought that saying something like that was simply dismissive, a comment people make when they don’t want to talk about or acknowledge something in the text. He snorted and flailed about this, we went back and forth on it a bit, then I tried to move the discussion on. He called me on doing this, so I said, “Well, it’s just that we’re probably not going to come to an agreement on this and I don’t want to make everyone sit here and listen to us go back and forth.” He said, in such a sarcastic, hateful tone, “Well, it’s clear you don’t want to talk about this; you have an agenda, so tell us what we need to know.”

I have been angry with students before, I have had disdainful, rude, and sarcastic students before, but I can’t remember having a student who was so openly rude in class and so disruptive to the atmosphere. If I’m reading the feelings of the other students correctly, they seem to find him disruptive as well. I feel like I need to talk with this student outside of class and tell him directly how disruptive he is. But I really don’t know if this is the best way of going about it. Clearly he’s bored by the class; I don’t know there’s much I can do about that. And I don’t really have a strategy for suggesting ways to make him happier. I feel like I should address his anger and frustration, but right now I just feel anger and frustration toward him. I feel like he’s just a slightly unstable asshole and frankly, I don’t care that much about reaching him. However, we have two more months of class, and I don’t know that I can just ignore his behavior. I felt traumatized by this week’s class and really don’t want to go back. And even though I really do think he’s only bored because he sees things one way and doesn’t want to talk about anyone else’s reading of the text, my worst fear of course is that my class really is boring, and that it’s my fault.

Do you think I should talk with him outside of class? And what should I say?

Assets as Liabilities

2007-03-01T18:04:00.000Z

I am about to absolutely blow my top.

My teaching assistant, one of the "perks" of the job here, somehow has managed to make my job MORE DIFFICULT than it would be if I was doing it alone.

You know, he wasn't great last semester. I remember handing back the first assignment and realizing that they were all graded wrong. Clearly the assistant hadn't read the reading and only graded things correct as what I said verbatim in class after the students had turned them in.

As the semester went on, though, it seemed like things were getting better, and I was certain that this semester, since it's the same class, it would be smooth-sailing. I was wrong. The first test I thought that he was WAY too easy on the students, but didn't say anything. I strongly believe that you don't contradict what your TA says on an exam or the students will lose respect for them. But this most recent test, it's the opposite. He clearly didn't read, or read his notes, and doesn't seem to possess the knowledge on his own, and so he marked one essay question wrong over and over and over again, diligently writing the "right" (read: wrong!) answer above the students' answers. Then, he miscalculated the scores, giving everyone much lower than they should have earned. I am so flipping frustrated.

My partner told me to call him in and have a meeting and tell him that his work is unacceptable. I was going to go the other approach, avoid him, and try to keep myself from killing him before May, when he's out of here. Maybe it's because he's leaving and he's not invested in the department, but he's just getting worse every day. I'm scared to see how bad it can get before it's over.

How do you teach someone to say thank you?

2007-02-28T16:39:00.000Z

Serious question here. Generally speaking some students are not very good with the words "thank you". Leaving that aside, I have one student in particular who practically _never_ says thank you. In addition to my own ego, I'm partly concerned about this trait, because I think professionally it is not going to serve him well. I have heard him in conversations with others (people who far outrank me) and he engages in the same behavior with them. I have come to think that perhaps "Okay" is his "thank you", but I think I'm being too generous and giving him the benefit of the doubt on this one too easily.

I am not exaggerating. I have gone so far as to do a search on our email exchanges. Out of hundreds of messages, not a handful come up with the words thank you or thanks. I kid you not. And believe me, given the amount of time and energy I put into our email exchanges and collaboration in general, there have been plenty of occasions when a simple thank you would have been more than appropriate.

Is this something we can address in any reasonable manner? It drives me nuts and, again, beyond it being a personal issue, I really don't think professionally this is going to be in his best interest.

Unbelievable

2007-02-24T21:38:00.000Z

At a recent reception for a visiting scholar, I witnessed this conversation between a grad student in my doctoral cohort and a recently-retired senior faculty member from our department.

grad student: Oh, Dr. _______, I just found out the other day that you had a blog! I've been reading it. It's...uh...interesting!

retired faculty member: Oh, that, ha ha. It's nothing. I put it up because the consultant I hired to improve my web presence told me the thing I needed was a blog.

grad student: The consultant you hired for...uh...what?

retired faculty member: Well, basically I hired her to make my name come up higher on the list of google results when you search for things related to [academic specialty]. She said to start a blog, and use the same key phrases over and over and over, and then whenever anyone searched on those phrases, my name would come up in the google list.

grad student: uh...really...wow.

retired faculty member: Yeah. And she told me which other blogs to link to that would most increase my traffic. And she told me that there's this other blog, that's the highest rated in [specialty], that will link to your blog on their blogroll for a fee.

grad student: [stunned silence]...uh...wow...you're really making the most of....technology.

~~

Here's the worst part. The professor only recently started to get interested in the subfields he was talking about, and there are loads of other more knowledgeable researchers out there who have been working in the field for much, much longer. I went home and googled one of the phrases Dr.______ mentioned, and his name came as the 8th google hit. So his schemes have worked, and have boomeranged him and his ideas to the front of the virtual line.

a.secret maintenance

2007-02-19T19:02:00.000Z

Just a quick note that we realize the new Blogger is causing all sorts of headaches. We will be updating the system to the new one soon. In the meantime, if you are told that you cannot post a new entry, try logging out and then logging in again a bit later, that seems to work (on occasion).

How much profanity is acceptable?

2007-02-19T15:26:00.000Z

I very much wanted to title this post "Well, fuck you, too, you little, whining brat!" but I wasn't sure how that would go over. I also wasn't sure about that last sentence, but if it needs censoring, I'm sure that one of our guardian angels will deal with it.

I also thought about calling it "Not helpful my ASS," which is more apropos to the rant that's about to happen. But I'm upset enough that it needed to be stronger. So, here's the deal. I've been at my current institution for a few years now, but teaching only senior level or graduate classes, which means that my student demographic has not been the sort that uses RMP. I've been regretting this, looking forward to finally getting a rating, because my current course has a huge fraction of non-majors, just the sort to use RMP, and I'm damn good at my job -- all parts of it, even the teaching; sometimes especially the teaching -- and I had hopes of a chile pepper (I'm a geek, what can I say?).

But less than 1/3 (4 fucking weeks, before the first exam, even) into the semester, one of these new little cherubs (read "rat bastards") felt it appropriate to go and give me my first rating on the infamous site. And I got ones. Fucking ones. Even under "helpfulness" -- and I've had a total of 6 people in four weeks of office hours, so they have no way of knowing if I'm helpful or not because they won't use the supplied resources. I've arranged special tutoring assistance (free to the students) for this course which traditionally has no such thing, an evening study session out of my own time, and double the number of office hours everyone else gives. And I'm not fucking helpful? The level of pissed off I am is pretty much indescribable. I've managed not to take it out on the rest of the class, but it's hard. And if I weren't a damn good professor, I probably would.

That's the crux of the problem. I know I'm good. I know that I establish a rapport with my students -- even lecturing on extremely difficult material, I get rapid responses (often accurate ones), engaged questions, the whole deal -- I know I'm doing an amazing job with very advanced material. But these students are so spoiled and pampered (and spoon-fed, thank you very much to all the "professors" that had them before me) that they do not believe that they need to take an active role in their own education. My peer reviews are excellent; my student reviews are good; my past students come back and tell me that, even though it was appallingly hard (the nature of the material, not just me) at the time, I've made them stronger and other, later courses easier. These students come back to me for outside help, for advising, and, in some cases, to tell me that their graduate instructors (at top schools in the country) are extremely impressed with their preparation. And one lousy rating, from one under-informed, astoundingly lazy, worthless little drive-through consumer, and I feel like the floor's been cut from under me.

As academics, we're largely geeks. Performing in front of an audience is hard, and looking out at them, wondering (although I think I know) who did such a thing, who places responsibility for their education on somebody other than themselves, makes it so much worse. And damn, I want to know --- so that I can be vindictive to the right student, not to all of them. They think this is hard? Just wait -- I can make it so much worse: that the material seems at all easy is a testament to my not-inconsiderable skill. Of course, I am good, so it's only a fantasy, but its a wonderful one.

Forrest was right.

2007-02-15T15:17:00.000Z

Life is like a box of chocolates. So are students. Some of them are heavenly bliss, and others are total disappointing duds.

I find that with the undergrads in my classes I don't care one way or the other. Some stink, some soar, and it doesn't really affect my day-to-day life. But when you're working with a student one-on-one, or you're on one of their committees, or you have them in a grad seminar, and their work is like a chocolate truffle coated in stale coconut that scratches your throat on the way down and leaves a nasty taste in your mouth, that can really ruin your day.

Although I had issues this past week with one of my graduate students, I sorted that out by sucking it up and being more confrontational that I might normally be.

I think I basked in the glow of that accomplishment a little too long, because just when I was sure I had eaten the last nasty chocolate in my student box I got an updated draft of another student's thesis. First, the title is incomprehensible. Second, the thesis is only ten pages long. It was twenty pages when I first read it, before I started helping him, way back in October. It's due in April and is supposed to be 50 pages long by then. Third, the writing sucks. Sucks, sucks, sucks. Fourth, he still isn't citing the right way. In fact, his cites have not changed at all after extensive feedback from me on citing. Fifth, speaking of cites, the majority of his come from pages 1-6 in a number of books. Do you think that he reads past the introduction? Sixth... you know what? I just can't go on.

Why am I roped into reading this draft, commenting on it, and meeting with him to discuss my comments when I have other things to do, especially when he so clearly doesn't take a lick of my advice? It's exhausting. I would much rather be making myself sick on some real clearance-priced chocolate than shoddy work.

breaking the silence

2007-02-14T19:30:00.000Z

Come on, folks.

It's been so long since someone's posted (and that would be me), that a gerbil came out of the woodwork and might actually be my knight in shining armor.

There's got to be some secret that someone has to get off their chest.

....

Updated: Apparently thistle read my mind.

Contest! Contest! Commuting for Love!

2007-02-14T18:32:00.000Z

I received this in my inbox today:

Tens of thousands of academic couples are searching for jobs in the same city. Now Inside Higher Ed (http://insidehighered.com) introduces Dual Career Search -- a way for couples to conduct joint job searches. Give it a try, at http://dualsearch.insidehighered.com/interfoliorecruiter/?event=DualCareerSearch

To celebrate the launch of Dual Career Search, Inside Higher Ed is sponsoring the Commuting for Love contest. Readers are invited to submit stories of their challenging academic commutes -- 1,000 words or less. We'll post the best stories on Inside Higher Ed, and pick one couple to win one round-trip airfare between any two U.S. cities (up to $500).

To show a little more love, Inside Higher Ed will send a box of chocolates to the first five academic couples who report that they found jobs in the same city using the Dual Career Search.

~~~~

Wow! A whole box of chocolates! That's the incentive we've all been waiting for to launch a dual career search.

Can I get an "A" for effort?

2007-01-29T20:12:00.000Z

I recently got an internal grant to start a research project that could be the beginning of so many things. It's fabulous, fabulous news, but there's one small (yet significant) part of preparation for that research that I am unable to do myself.

Of course, knowing that I'm clueless about such things, I budgeted money to hire an expert (or at least someone with working knowledge) in that area, so I've got money to spend. But now I'm feeling a little like Julia Roberts on Rodeo Drive - I can't find anyone willing to work on the project.

I come from a place where people jump at the chance to make some extra cash. Here, it seems, no one needs it. So now I'm stuck, with money to spend and tenure to lose.

Where's Richard Gere, or at least a talented gerbil, when you need him?

Oh, the whining!

2007-01-25T17:30:00.000Z

I wish I could say, like Fraud, that I like my job, but my dirty little secret is that, at the moment, I don't!

My god, the whining, the never-ending whining. Most of it is from students that either can't or won't read simple instructions (much less the reading assigned for class!), and were apparently never taught the rudiments of polite behavior (hint, when calling a professor to ask a question, it is generally a good idea to preface the question in some way, perhaps by using the word "Hello"). These are upper level students, and I have to wonder how they made it this far. And that query is, at root, why I hate my job currently. Is that the ideal we are espousing? Because it's not what I signed up for -- I signed up to be a professor, not a teacher, to lead students to knowledge and make the introductions, not consummate the relationship for them.

I love the research part of my job right now, and, gee, it would be nice if I could do some of it instead of pandering to lazy little brats, covering for lazy old faculty, and teaching too many courses.

Someday soon, I hope that I can again say that I love my job, but right now the joy isn't here, just the overwhelmingness and overwork. I'm not bitter though, not at all. Because I'm sure that teaching is important for tenure!

Today's Secret.

2007-01-21T19:33:00.000Z

I think that I have a great job.

I was walking across campus today, coffee in hand, getting ready to return to a "bang-your-head-against-the-wall" task (I'm writing a grant proposal, and feeling so frustrated lately) and I was genuinely content. For a brief moment I thought to myself, "This isn't so bad." The thing is, I think that a lot.

A part of me thinks that as an academic I'm supposed to be stressed out, frazzled, miserable, over-worked, under-paid, and generally unhappy. Don't get me wrong, I perpetually feel 27 steps behind (although this doesn't seem to inpsire me to do much about it), but I also feel really lucky to do what I do.

I think it's the autonomy - the amount of control I have over what I do, when I do it, how I do it, and so forth - that's the opiate of academics, at least for me.

What makes you love or hate your own position?

(Maybe I should check back in tomorrow. This optimism might be fleeting. Maybe there's more of that unhappy academic in me than this post suggests, or it's just waiting to rear its ugly head).

Things that make you go, "Why?!"

2007-01-18T23:43:00.000Z

On a completely different note, I was walking toward campus this afternoon, and came to a fairly major street. There were no cars near, so I started across. Immediately afterward, a car turned onto the street from a crossroad, so I picked up the pace (even though, clearly, the pedestrian should not be held accountable for cars that turn onto the street s/he is crossing when gauging whether or not s/he can cross the street in a timely manner). Picking up the pace resulted in my keys falling out of my pocket, so I had to quickly stop, turn around, bend down to get them, then continue on my merry way.

So what does the driver of the car do? SPEEDS UP. I felt like I was trapped in a Frogger video game. Even so, I got across with about five feet to spare. Then the driver rolled down his/her (not sure which) window and screeched, 'I ALMOOOOST HIIIIT YOU!' This was undoubtedly followed by some expletives, only the car was already 50 feet away by the time the driver had finished reveling in the fact that s/he was clearly a superior person because yes, his/her SUV can go faster than a woman on foot burdened by a bag and a set of flying keys.

Now come on, was that really necessary? Granted, I was jaywalking, but everyone in this town does, and especially at the exact spot where I was. If you use the crosswalk, you have to walk pass the bus stop and get heckled by the homeless people. Sad but true. And it's not like I was slowly making my way across the street trying to be a menace to traffic the way the gaggles of high school students so often are. I mean, fine if you want to curse me under your breath as you pass by. (I'll be the first to admit that I say mean, nasty things about people all the time when I'm driving. Especially old people.) But was the energy you expended flooring your gas pedal, rolling down your window, and yelling at me really worth it? Did it really make you feel that much better about yourself to do that? If it made your day, I am happy to be of service, but geez, I sure feel sorry for you.

Why is daycare always the woman's responsibility?

2007-01-17T07:05:00.000Z

Hello.

It has been quite a while, but not without good reason. My good reason? I’ve had nothing to write about. My advisor has no life and expects too much of me, my research stinks, and I’m stressed about school starting again. No one here wants to hear about that sort of yadda yadda yadda. Welcome to the sad life of a graduate student, right?

But here’s something somewhat interesting. Yesterday when I was in lab, one of my colleagues came in to inform me that Sardine was sick, dripping green snot, and could not be at daycare. My first reaction was of course to be annoyed, because I happened to be working with radioactive compounds, and I get really stressed when being interrupted means possibly spilling something and mutating my DNA. I was also annoyed because Sardine goes to daycare once a week, and she got sick exactly a week ago, after spending 4.5 hours at daycare. If she isn’t allowed to be at daycare with green snot, then how is it possible that she actually caught the green snot at daycare? Yes, I know a bit about microbiology, you are contagious before the snot turns green, but it’s the principle I’m talking about.

But that’s not actually what annoys me most.

What annoys me the most is that the reason Sardine is in daycare at all is because of the colleague who came into lab to inform me that she was sick and had to be picked up from daycare. Said colleague (SC) and I both teach the same lab. SC has some seniority over me because he has been teaching longer and has already completed his degree; however, I have some ‘seniority’ over him because graduate students have priority over people who have already finished their degrees and are supposed to be getting real jobs already.

SC and I are on friendly terms because we’re both friendly type people, although we’ve butted heads on several occasions throughout the semester. One of the head-buttings was because we could not find a time that worked for both of us to do a lab prep together, and resulted in our supervising professor telling me that I needed to ‘stop using daycare as an excuse’ and be more flexible. Never mind that I had given six times I was available to do the lab prep, plus offered to do it alone if we couldn’t find a time that worked for both of us. Apparently SC didn’t feel that I was capable, and that he just had to be there to supervise me. Whatever.

Anyway.

When it came time to set our teaching schedules for this semester, SC took all the sections he wanted, which happened to be the same ones I wanted. When we got together to ‘discuss’ this semester’s schedule, SC approached it as: Here are the only times left, if you can’t do them, let the chair know so she can start looking for someone else. Which is total BS. First of all, graduate students have top priority for teaching positions for this particular class. Therefore, I can basically teach however many labs at whatever time I want if my teaching evaluations don’t suck too bad. So I just said, ‘Well, I don’t know if I can commit to those times yet so maybe I just won’t be able to teach.’ Of course he knows damn well that if I tell that to the chair, she’ll ask me what times I CAN teach and I’ll get whatever times I want (which is what happened last semester). I mean, I don’t really want to make waves and piss people off, and I do want to be as accommodating as possible, but it’s really hard to find child care in the morning, and teaching isn’t that important to me. I mean, I LIKE teaching, but I’m not doing it for the money like he is; my advisor supports me financially by paying my tuition, and my husband makes a lot of money.

SC knows that if I piss and moan I can get whatever sections I want, so in response to my ‘I don't know if I can do it,’ he said, ‘So what if daycare weren't an issue? What if my wife were to watch your daughter for you while you were teaching?’ It’s as if he anticipated my response to being stuck with the sucky lab sections and had a plan already worked out. Basically, his wife has an at-home daycare that just happened to have an opening for an infant during the times that I would need to be teaching. Honestly, I couldn’t turn him down. His wife offered me a good deal, mainly (I think) because my happiness with the situation directly affects SC’s situation and therefore hers and the family’s well-being.

The irony is that here is someone who complains to our supervising professor that I don’t have adequate care for my kid. He volunteered his wife as an affordable way out of my ‘dilemma,’ and yet yesterday there he was telling me that I needed to go pick my kid up from his house because of her green snot. It was okay yesterday, because school doesn’t start until next week, and in theory I could have left the lab to go retrieve my snotty baby. (Fortunately, my husband had the day off of work thanks to Martin Luther King, and could go get her.) But what if it had been a week later? Would he walk into lab while I’m lecturing and tell me I had to go get my kid, then complain to the professor about my inadequate child care situation?

The only good thing that came out of all this is that my advisor was in the lab while this exchange between SC and I was taking place, and I think it helped to clue him into the realities of life with a baby. As in, I’m not lying when I say that it really is hard to find consistent, reliable care for a kid. I’m not sitting at home eating bonbons and watching soap operas when you think I should be in the lab. Kids are a full-time time job. Deal with it, assholes.

Sincerely,
I'm really not as angry as I sound, but I could be if I wanted.

Clearly, nobody wants to have this meeting, so can we just skip it?

2007-01-16T23:40:00.000Z

I'm pretty sure I've complained before about the thesis committee meeting I should have scheduled about six months ago. I gave up on it at some point last year because I was sick of repeatedly being ignored by one committee member (the chair, in fact). I recently started trying to organize it again, after being threatened with not being able to register, but I feel like giving up again.
First, I sent out a list of 15 possible times and one committee member's assistant vetoed every one of them. Then, I emailed that assistant twice, asking for some guidance on what would be a better month before I spammed the whole committee with another long list of dates that wouldn't work. No reply. Today, I gave up on that idea and just sent a list of 30 possible times. Immediately I get a reply from the assistant who ignored me, saying only two of those might work (and pointing out that one of the dates I suggested was a holiday). I've still heard nothing from the chair, who I'm beginning to suspect doesn't use email at all. The phone number I have just rang and rang without even going to voicemail, too.
Any hints on getting three professors in a room together sometime before I get kicked out for failing to have this meeting?

Update: It's a miracle! I just got an email from the previously email-less chair! Maybe I should post here every time I have a seemingly insoluble problem. :)

Messed up

2007-01-14T22:12:00.000Z

I am overwhelmed with everything going on so I was just thinking: I need to take a mental health day today. Even though I have a bunch of things on my work to-do list, I may just skip work today. But I started feeling very weird and guilty about this idea. Is it okay to take a mental health day? The idea has never occured to me before and it's certainly not something I've ever done, not consciously anyway. I pondered this for a few minutes.

Then suddenly I realized that this whole line of questioning was insane. Why? Because it is Sunday AND I'm actually sick, as in physical ache and pain in my body due to some stupid bug. And despite all that, the only "excuse" I could come up with for not working was a "mental health day"!

I think this just answered my question: I am definitely due for a mental health day.

the turnaround

2007-01-04T21:28:00.000Z

One of the best things about winter vacation is the time for reading and reflection. I started by actually reading the book for my reading group (which means that I am allowed to speak - a written rule, one must read to speak - at the upcoming meeting, unlike the last one), and then read a few books tangentially related to my research and teaching that I've been putting off, and today I revisited an old self-help favorite, Loving What Is.

The Work is a process where you analyze a stressful belief by reflecting on four questions. A belief like, "I'm a failure" (hey, some fleeting beliefs we have are this outlandish). You ask yourself:

1. Is it true? (Uh, this paper got rejected for the third time. That sucks, but does it mean I'm a failure? Nah.)
2. Can you absolutely know it's true? (How does one measure "failureness"? If that can't be done, then I can't absolutely know I'm a failure.)
3. How do you react when you think that thought? (Well, it makes me want to go home, or close my work window and open Napster, or, most importantly, gives me an excuse not to send out this other paper I've been working on.)
4. Who would you be without this thought? (If I didn't have this nagging, negative self-belief I would be a confident academic, who could focus on their work and not on their faults).

My favorite part of the process is actually a fifth step (although it's not called a step), the turnaround. In the turnaround you do something to turn your thought around. You turn the thought around to yourself or another or to the opposite or to realizing it's a simple thought. So, if you choose the opposite option, "I'm a failure" becomes "I'm a success" (you could also turn it into "The paper is a failure" or "I only think I'm a failure" or something else). Then, as the second part of the turnaround, you ask yourself. Is that statement true, or truer? Using my own fleeting thought, and my own personal experiences, I have many important successes that trump my failures, and the turnaround is actually the truest of the two.

Sometimes we're so good at beating ourselves up that the more "comfortable" thought is the immediate one and the turnaround it a tough pill to swallow. It's worth it, though. When you're thinking to yourself, "I can't finish this paper," and it's actually that you know that you can finish the paper, it's both liberating and scary at the same time because you have to do it, and you know you can.

I went back and forth about writing this post, but I think that academics spend a lot of time in their own worlds, and that those worlds can sometimes get depressing and self-defeating, and for me The Work works to get me through some of those times (ice cream sometimes works too).

Getting a room at the inn...

2006-12-31T17:49:00.000Z

Maybe it's the time of year that brought this analogy to my mind, but how might the Christmas story be different if Joseph had been a hot-shot academic? Would Jesus still have been born in a manger, or would Mary have somehow managed to land a spousal accommodation at the inn?

I hate that word - accommodation. More than that, I hate feeling like someone accommodated me (or my partner) so that I could have the job that I do. It's one of those things that you can't complain about, though, because there are people out there who would kill to be in my shoes, who would give anything to be "accommodated."

The hardest part about my own accommodation is that no one will call it that - the party line is that I was hired on merit, because I "deserved" my position. Maybe it's just the "fraud" in me that can't accept that, or maybe I'm more perceptive than people take me for.

What does it mean to be accommodated? Does it mean that I'm less important than my partner, or just less worthy? Should I be happy that I was accommodated? Would I feel better if people were just honest about it? Is it selfish of me to think that I'm worth every ounce of my position, or is it just delusional? Most importantly, will I ever be able to hear the word accommodation without feeling my spirit weaken?

CFP

2006-12-29T17:59:00.000Z

We all know what CFP means: Call for Papers/Call for Proposals. Not here on a.secret though. Here it means: Call for Picture secrets! That's right, we're running low and awaiting your New Year's resolutions, whether high or low (get it?! oh, I'm such a geek to be making graphics puns).

Apologies to the person submitting the picture secret I just posted, it took me a while to get around to it. It's been patiently waiting in my mailbox for a while. I promise to be more prompt with these in the future.

Picture secret XXXV

2006-12-29T17:58:00.000Z

Academic Holidays

2006-12-27T18:39:00.000Z

Is everyone else feeling the pressure to work too? Even though it's break?

Are you all feeling as guilty as I am that I am not working as much as I should?

Maybe that is why no one has been posting in a bit. I mean sure, end of the term, grading, holidays -- it's a crazy time.

So I hope you are all enjoying your holidays, and not worrying about how you should be accomplishing more. Because I am, and it sucks. I do not recommend it.

Also, PSA, please send in more picture secrets, yah? They are fun!

He doesn't even know my name.

2006-11-30T18:52:00.000Z

No, not some adorable guy at the campus coffee shop, but another professor in my own department! It's not the first time we've talked. His office is close to mine. He knows things about me, he just doesn't know my name. If you know about someone's personal life, I mean beyond what most know, shouldn't you take the time to learn her name? I saw him look at the nameplate beside my door as he opened his mouth to speak. Ugh.

Of course, another professor who's been around here as long as the first (and has the same tenured, full professor status), and whose office is equally close to mine, has never even spoken to me. This didn't stop him from sending a student my way to have me head a thesis committee because, and I quote, "She's a new assistant professor and will have more time for work like that than I do."

I guess it's just the end of the semester stress that has me venting. Unfortunately, unlike my students, these guys don't go home for winter vacation. I can't wait to move up in the ranks, or until colleagues like these move up in the ranks enough to retire.

The crap people pull

2006-11-25T18:25:00.000Z

I am reviewing some submissions to a conference. These are supposed to be anonymous, but some people are not very good at anonymizing their manuscripts. I figure the goal of anonymity is that the reviewer not be biased by the identity of the author. So I then figured, once I have made a decision about a submission and the author was sloppy enough to leave their name in, it's not that big a deal to look them up. (Or is it?) To be honest, my main motivation came from intellectual curiosity. I had no idea what the proposal was talking about and was eager to see whether reading up on the person and their work would give me a better understanding. (And when I say I didn't understand the writing, I don't mean that it was too high level. It was simply incomprehensibly bad.)

So I looked up one such person the other day, a "Prof. Somebody" as noted by the author in the text itself. (First of all, who refers to either themselves or their advisor as "Prof. Anybody" in the middle of a paper?)

It turns out that this person is not a prof, but a student! So why refer to oneself as Prof X? I know, I know, to make the product seem more worthy. It was crap regardless so it doesn't matter. But what bs! I can't believe people pull this kind of crap. And of course, I can't say anything to anybody since it is an anonymous process. (Thanks to a.secret for providing an outlet though!)

Registration Woes...

2006-11-22T22:05:00.000Z

I can't wait for it to be next semester.

Let me rephrase that, I couldn't wait. I couldn't wait to start new. I couldn't wait to get semester #1 of my first year as an assistant professor under my belt. I couldn't wait, that is ,until I logged onto my account just a few hours ago only to discover that my worst student from this semester decided to take another course from me.

He's not my worst student ever. I mean I've had some doozies. It's just that they never came back. Coming back for more, well that's like a zombie or something. Or like a cat. You know, "and the cat came back, the very next day..." I'm allergic to cats.

Maybe it will be like the one other time when I had a student (who I had failed for cheating) who took another class from me and ended up invaluable. Maybe, though, it will be like a bad zombie movie and either he, or the fear and dread I instill in myself just thinking about his presence, will make my skin crawl and the spring semester creep by just as slowly as it has this fall.

What about your color?

2006-11-21T11:58:00.000Z

So I was wondering the other night when I couldn't sleep about what I could and couldn't blog about, for fear of anonymity purposes.

And I couldn't think of anything for here that I could share. Partly becasue I have been really wrapped up in this one project and my life has been lame as a result.

But anyway, the question that came to mind was this, why have people chosen the colors/names they have on this blog? Does it say something about you academically? non-academically? does it say something or nothing? basically, why did you pick your name?

I'll start and tell you why I picked strawberries, and why.

Strawberries are my FAVORITE fruit. and I love red, partly because it looks great on me with my hair color. But also, its my favorite person in the world's favorite color, and so I have always liked the color for because it reminds me of that person. But what does strawberries mean to me?

When I think of strawberries I think of babies with their rosy red cheeks, and I love babies, and they are so cute, and I want babies. But of course, in order to have babies, I would like to have a husband, and well, I'm lacking in that area. And also, though it is *way* to early to be worrying about this... I know that it will be super hard to have cute starberry cheeked babies as a professor, if I want to stay at home at all with hypothetical baby strawberry, and that brings up all those things that I worry about, the difficulty of getting my desired job in desired place as a woman, and how hard it will be to try and get tenure as a woman with a baby/child.

And what does being a strawberry say about me? Well, strawberries, while the best fruit ever, are also quite fragile. They must be packed specially, especially for transport. And I am also very fragile. In life outside the ivory tower, I am known to cry quite a bit at sad situations. But also when hurt by people. Inside the ivory tower, I lack confidence. Sometimes I have it, and sometimes, I don't. Usually when I need it, it's not there. Just like you can get a good strawberry that has made it though the transport process, sometimes I feel more like a slightly bruised strawberry who wants to be the best tasting one in the bunch.

But of course I didn't think about all this when I picked strawberries. That day, I looked at the other colors, read their names. Saw pumpkin, thought, mmm, I like pumpkins. I also really like strawberries and red cheeked babies. And red is nice. I'll be strawberries.

What about you?

Risky Business

2006-11-16T17:12:00.000Z

Is it just me, or are more and more of our colleagues turning to blogs?

In recent weeks there is increasing blog-buzz around my department. I don't know where it came from, but I am scared to death of being found out.

I ask myself if I post risky things here, or if I would be fine with my name being tied to my musings. Maybe it's time to read the archives...

...and to begin using more caution when deciding what to post, and where to post it.

Is anyone else feeling the pressure?

More job market secrets

2006-11-14T02:21:00.000Z

Here’s *my* job market secret: I don’t want to go on it.

Well, that’s not exactly true. As distasteful as the process sounds, I think I will be able to adapt to a lot of it. Even though I hate the idea of “selling” myself, I can live with doing it (or trying to do it). Of course I want a job, and this is how it’s done.

But I haven’t yet told my advisors that I’m not willing to “go anywhere” for a job, the way you’re supposed to. And I think I’ll continue to keep it to myself.

I feel like I’ve been fairly dutiful with most of the professional activities we’re supposed to take part in – going to conferences, publishing, serving on committees, etc—and I’ve even enjoyed those experiences. But this is one thing I don’t think I can be dutiful about. Not only do I feel there are certain parts of the country I truly wouldn’t be happy living in, but there’s this itsy-bitsy problem of having a life partner whose career is location-specific. (I can’t go into what the career is if I want to keep my anonymity, but let’s just say it’s not like being, say, a lawyer, where you might have to give up a great job in order to move but you could probably work almost anywhere. Let’s say, for the sake of (silly) argument, that his career is slaying vampires, which only live on the hellmouth. Or something.)

To be honest, I’d be almost as happy adjuncting forever as I would be in a tenured position. As long as I got to teach, I’d be ok. I know it’s about other things too, like retirement and health insurance; I know I’ve got to consider that. But I’m just not willing to give up living with my partner, and it makes me mad that I should have to consider it. And before anyone suggests that he should be willing to change his career for me, please note that he dreamt of having this career since he was a kid (whereas I was in the “finding myself” stage for years before grad school), not to mention that he has been helping support my little grad school habit, and now (after years of service) his job pays better than even a tenured position would. As a feminist, I’ve always made sure I was financially independent (believe me, it’s my name on the loans), but he has provided a lot of extras, such as vacations, I would otherwise do without. (Just fyi, we don’t have kids, and don’t plan to have them, but have been together for almost 10 years.)

Once, his mother tried comforting me by reminding me that neither of us is in the military, where couples have to live apart all of the time, but with the added burden of being, you know, in the military. So it’s all relative, I guess.

Job market secrets

2006-11-08T01:14:00.000Z

I'm not on the job market so I'm a bit late to this, but in case others haven't seen it, I thought you may find it of interest.

People in Astrophysics have been tracking the job market for years. However, recently social science disciplines have caught on as well. Sociology has a rumor mill as does the field of International Relations within political science. This article from the Chronicle has links to a few others.

It's interesting to compare Sociology to IR. The latter seems much more sophisticated. Then again, they've been around longer. Plus I'm not actually sure if it's "more sophisticated" to be listing the names of the candidates. What do people think? Is it a good idea to have this information out there this public? Why or why not? I can't decide.

I wondered about such possibilities when I was on the market.. but nothing happened that year. Maybe it's just as well. I think some such information exchange is definitely beneficial, but after a certain point it may not be so good for one's health. Then again, the academic job market process generally speaking is pretty unhealthy.

What to say?

2006-11-03T19:00:00.000Z

Late last week my advisor gave me a copy of a manuscript he and a colleague are submitting for publication. The paper relates to the project I'm working on, although I didn't contribute anything because all the results were obtained either before I was on board or while I was lying in bed for four months trying to keep Sardine from arriving early. I thought he was giving me the manuscript in a sort of "FYI" type of way, and I didn't look at it over the weekend because I was busy talking to prospective students (a job he helped me get suckered into), working on a take-home exam (which he knew about since it was from his class), and, oh yeah, having a life. To tell you the truth, I completely forgot he had even given it me.

On Monday he asked me if I had read the paper and I had to admit that I had not. He seemed disappointed, and added, "Well, try to get to it this week because I really want to know what you think." I really want to kow what you think. Uh. Okay. Realize, this is coming from someone who tells me to write up results for a poster and then replaces it all with his own stuff. It's a miracle if a complete sentence of mine survives his rigorous editing. And he really wants to know what I think about his manuscript? Or was he just being nice? Or did he think that if I read the manuscript I might think, "Hey, I could come up with something this good!" and get more motivated to get my arse going on my own research? It was quite puzzling.

Of course I went home on Monday and read it all, and it was basically, well, what I expected. Okay, so I'm not a huge fan of questions in the middle of paragraphs or short little sentences that could be easily combined into the preceding sentences, but does he really think I'm going to tell him that? After all, I've put up with several years of PowerPoint presentations done in Comis Sans MS (what does the "MS" stand for anyway?) and managed not to tell him how much I despise this font. You say potato, I say pototo. So on the one hand, when he asked me about it again on Wednesday, I felt like I should just say, "Yeah, I read it and it was great." On the other hand, I thought that if I didn't say anything critical, he might take it as a sign that I didn't care enough to read it carefully and be insulted. Then again, criticizing could also come off as insulting.

In the end, I ended up saying that I liked the paper and didn't have any trouble understanding it, but then mentioned that maybe they could give a little more background on part of the experiment in the introduction. Fortunately, I also managed to find two typos, which I pointed out as proof that I had actually read the paper meticulously. My advisor seemed happy enough with this, but I felt really awkward.

So to all you professor types: If you were to give a manuscript to a grad student to read, what type of feedback would you be expecting?

Yet another boring thesis no one will ever read

2006-11-03T11:28:00.000Z

When I was first being introduced to my new colleagues here at SuckyU, one introduced me to her thesis student (undergrad).

He wanted to do his thesis on X in the region. Think, Oranges. No that might actually be interesting, cause you could always do an economic analysis and then talk to the people who are picking the oranges and their different experiences, and the growers of the oranges and the eaters. See, it could be interesting. Ok, X is kind of like, hmm, houses that are painted blue. So student was going to do his thesis on houses that are painted blue.

To show interest and because I am sort of a nice strawberry, the first thing out of my mouth was a supportive “wow, how interesting.”

Colleague says: “But he didn’t do that.”

Strawberries says, “oh why not?” I has just begun to warm up to the idea of blue houses. Maybe there was some significance or something. Plus, people may think my own research is like blue houses, so who am I to judge.

Colleague looks at me like I am a more than a bit weird. “Because he could never have finished the project, I mean that is like a doctoral dissertation.” Please shoot me if I ever advise anyone who wants to concentrate on Blue Houses for his/her PhD. Frankly, it seemed a bit easy to me. I mean count up all the blue houses in the region, which I am sure the data already exists, it's not like poor student has to actually travel to each blue house. And then write some sort of [boring] history on blue houses.

“So instead he did it on Blue Houses in the tri-city that were stolen.” (Now the stolen metaphor really doesn’t fit with Blue Houses, and goes better with say, Oranges, but remember, Oranges are more interesting than Blue houses. So just pretend that the CIA came with all their super-duper equipment and stole some blue houses). And this student is going to write about the ones that were stolen. However, since it was the CIA that stole them, and frankly, when are they going to ever let a student researcher into their archives, student can’t say much more than: There once was a blue house here. It was built in 1783 by Miss Peacock and then bought by Col. Mustard, until it was stolen in 1974 by the CIA. Oh, and look over there, there used to be another blue house that…

Sounds kind of boring to me. But anyway, that is not the point of this post.

What got me was the professor telling the student that he coudn't possibly do all blue houses in the region because it was impossible and that if he wanted, he could get his doctorate in Blue houses. Now, many times students are interested in something, say Gender, but they really can’t do a thesis on that. You have to focus it. But not just because of time restraints, but also because Gender is really broad. Blue Houses present in the region is not broad, just boring. So are stolen blue houses in the city if you’re keeping track. I was just surprised that this professor would say that this was not feasible when it seemed very feasible. I mean this kid had a year to do Blue Houses. Sure, stolen blue houses might be nominally more interesting than all blue houses, but couldn’t it have been a subsection of the thesis?

Which brings me to my final point/question. When do you tell a student that they will be unable to study X? Shouldn’t advisors rather explain that it might be a more in-depth project and it would be doable but hard rather than say outright, nope, you can't do it? There are times when advisors should discourage students from studying Y in favor of Ysub1 because it would be more feasible. Ok, if Y was lets say Education , and Ysub1 was Education of Women and how it has been defined by Z. But this was clearly not the case.

So now what? Student has produced one heck of a doorstop on stolen blue houses. Sure, even blue houses would have been a doorstop, but what is important here is the experience.

If someone told me I could not do it, I would not give up right away, and maybe ever. What sort of service are we doing to students who want to do something and are instead told they cannot?

Facutly Behaving Badly

2006-11-02T21:08:00.000Z

The other night I (doctoral student) was asked to go to a reception for prospective doctoral students in our program, to mingle and answer questions. Some faculty were also at the reception. A very professional-looking, together prospective student sought me out because she had questions about my advisor and the specific topic I study. We were in the middle of a pretty detailed conversation when a faculty member came over, introduced herself, and began trying to convince both of us to choose the program (that I'm currently in). The faculty-member didn't realize I was a current student, and kept contradicting things I was saying. I would say, "well, one challenge you'll face is that we don't offer coursework on xyz" and the faculty member would say, "oh no, we have some great offerings in xyz".

The faculty-member is from a completely different part of the field, knew nothing about the specifics of what the prospective and I were talking about, and was wrong, but seeing as she thought I was only a prospective student, there was no way she was going to let me knock the program. I kept trying to the let the faculty member know I was a current student, but she wasn't paying any attention, and didn't get it for like ten minutes. The prospective, meanwhile, kept raising her eyebrows at me as if to say, "WTF?" and "Why won't this weird lady in irrelevant-subfield leave us alone so we can get back to talking about the questions I have?".

The kicker is that the clueless faculty-member and I served on a committee together last year, but she didn't recognize me because she ditched all but one of the committee meetings.

The Weepy Little Professor

2006-11-01T21:35:00.000Z

This semester, I noticed a group of students who basically sit in the back and laugh the whole time. Turns out (perhaps sadly), this is nothing new. But for some reason, it's bothering me a lot. It feels like they're lauging at me.

As a result, I'm finding myself growing more and more self conscious, and I'm losing my lecturing mojo. I'm constantly checking my fly, touching my nose, the whole nine. It's stupid, but it's bothering me.

The thing that's so weird about it is the way they laugh. They look at me, but turn their heads, and put their hand up in front of their faces to whisper something to the others. Then they all giggle. While staring at me. With their hands over their mouths. Imagine a 7th grade lunchroom, and you've got the idea.

The thing is, they're not really disrupting the class, just themselves and me. I once made a joke directed toward the entire class to the effect that the lecturing stage was not, in fact, a television, and that I could actually see them chatting. The class laughed. For once, the little group did not.

But they also didn't stop. I'm not sure how to handle this - I don't want it to be obvious that I feel bad, because that's unprofessional. Or is it? Gah, what do you all think?

The power to walk away

2006-11-01T18:14:00.000Z

I almost got sucked into a really unnecessary online discussion about some topic that's close to my heart. Does everyone here know what trolls are? Trolls are people who seem to be engaged with you in a discussion seriously, but in reality are just trying to derail the conversation. They are to be avoided. The only outcome of engaging in a discussion with a troll is rising blood pressure and major frustration. Oh, plus lots of time lost. So stay away from them.

I am so proud of myself for having removed myself from that discussion just in time! I had to share this with my fellow a.secreteers.

And how is everyone? Are people walking away from a.secret? No secrets to speak of these days? Everything is going great for everyone?

Statisticians Rock!!!

2006-10-26T23:18:00.000Z

I normally frown on the use of multiple exclamation points, but I'm making an exception today in the title of this post because this open letter from the President of the American Statistical Association is very cool. It's cool because:

1. An academic discipline is reaching out trying to make the world a better place on an important issue with timely, practical, and reasonably cheap solutions.

2. Voting is a crucial right in a democracy, but a lot of us feel helpless about how to fix the problems with voting, especially now that there are stupid voting machines that can be hacked. The key breakthrough idea that the ASA is offering is that you can use random audits to provide data to estimate the size of the problem, instead of relying on anecdotal evidence or trying to find universal fixes. The idea of sampling is definitely under-used in public policy, which is almost always stuck in an entire-population-or-nothing mentality.*

3. The letter discusses the need to look at multiple sources of error at each step along the chain. The reality is that officials need to be focusing on minimizing error instead of devising systems that are completely error-proof, because it isn't possible to be error-proof. The point I'm inelegantly trying to make is like the debate about the census v. sampling for getting an accurate picture of the American population.

4. The president of the American Statistical Association is a woman. (I'm assuming that because the President is named Sallie).

______
* example = No Child Left Behind which mandates testing for every kid in the nation, when sampling approaches would allow testing with higher validity (like not multiple choice) and be a lot cheaper and not waste the time of millions of schoolkids.

Hey

2006-10-25T17:31:00.000Z

Why don't students realize that "Hey" is not an appropriate way to address a professor? In fact, it's not really appropriate for communication with anyone when it is your first note to them. Does anyone point this out to students? If yes, how?

IM or "I am"?

2006-10-23T14:41:00.000Z

I went to class the other day a bit frustrated with the quality of my students' papers. One paper I'd just read had relatively good ideas, but the writing (cuz, lower case i, fragments, etc.) completely detracted from it. Unfortunately since I have them submit these assignments online, some people seem to think that they're IM-ing their friends. I don't teach English, but I expect students to write a quality essay. So I gave the students who had not yet submitted their papers a bit of advice - treat it like a real paper: with paragraphs, full sentences, and without the IM language.

Fast forward to today, when I'm sifting through all of them and grading those who heard my advice before writing. Almost all the papers (in an assignment, mind you, where the students are supposed to write about themselves) are in the third person, not the first ("I am").

This is what happens when you mix over-achieving freshman who actually know the difference between first and third person with a clueless professor who thinks students spend time on instant messenger.

Calling all secrets!

2006-10-20T09:46:00.000Z

Dear colors of this lovely secret society,

I am writing to ask for some procrastination material. I love reading this blog, and let me tell you I cannot go a week with no new posts! Of course dear colors, you are probably saying, why strawberries, why don't you post a secret!?

Here is my quandary. I had some lovely (read: annoying and frustrating) academic experiences this past week, that I would love to share with you all, but here is the problem. I already told my real-world friends. As this is a secret society, and well, I am always very careful not to post something that I have already told my friends about, in the off-chance that they come across this blog and figure me out, and well, that would not be pretty.

So this week, as my frustrations were exceptionally high, I spoke with many friends in other institutions/locations and revealed to them the sadness that is my current institution. And so, I cannot tell you.

So please, help a strawberry out. Tell me what's going on in your colorful worlds!

And since I cannot but leave you with a secret from right now, though it is not academic, here is something to keep you procrastinating by invoking laughter and thinking about how weird this member called strawberries really is:

I am currently wearing a flannel dress and a T-shirt over it. Yes, you read correctly, a flannel dress. My defense? It is oh so comfy and well, comfy clothes lead to productivity no? Or was that blog reading....? Anyways, I am wearing comfy clothes I cannot ever leave the house in, or ever be seen in, in the hopes of eventually accomplishing some work today.

Your secret correspondent anxiously awaiting your secrets so she can continue to put off work,
Strawberries

Teaching Tag Team

2006-10-13T18:41:00.000Z

I've long recognized that one of the ways I am suited to academia is what a friend once called "high solitude needs." Given such solitude needs, spending days in relative quiet, reading and writing often suits me quite well.

At the same time, academia sometimes demands what is for me excess solitude. To be sure, the scope conditions of "excess" are shaped by life circumstances external to my work (e.g., I am, as of late, getting used to being single for the first time in a long while...). However, in general, it is not uncommon for me to check my email (too often!) or read the newspaper online when I'm supposed to be writing, in search of human contact (however virtual) and/or ideas other than my own.

When I began teaching, I thought that classroom time would probably so tap my extroversion quotient that excess solitude would no longer be a problem. As it turns out - and as I should've known! - facilitating seminars (even really interesting seminars! even seminars with smart graduate students!) is not the same as meaningful and intellectually stimulating social interaction with ones peers.

This is not to whine, however, as a really wonderful solution to this conundrum seems to be emerging. Specifically, a small group of the faculty in my department have begun experimenting with different modes of co-teaching. At an informal level, we are guest lecturing in each other's classes. We also are experimenting with occasionally combining our smaller classes and tag-team teaching them. At a formal level, we are setting up courses that we will co-teach over a year or more, with each of us counting the course towards our teaching load on a rotating basis.

I am really excited about this. Selfishly, it's both interpersonally and intellectually fantastic for me. I have great colleagues and now I both think with and teach with them far more than I would otherwise (prepping for class has never been so deeply interesting!)! Moreover, thus far, our students seem really excited about the more engaged, more interactive mode of learning that becomes possible when 2 or 3 faculty are co-leading classes. Even if they don't fully get the synergy that so excites me, I think they realize also that they are getting "2 (or more) for the price of 1" and are happy for more interaction with faculty. Also, we are having fun...and what's more contagious than fun?

So, I'd be really curious to hear of any ways y'all have experimented with co-teaching...successes, elations, frustrations, failures, ideas not yet implemented?

Thanks...and happy weekend!

President Bush's War on Science

2006-10-12T16:01:00.000Z

Bush opened a new front in his ongoing War on Science in a press conference Wednesday, when he claimed that a standard social science survey methodology has been "pretty well discredited".

Bush was responding to a question about a study appearing in Lancet estimating the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the war. The study used cluster sampling, where survey respondents are chosen from specific communities rather than at random from the population as a whole.

Now, I'm no expert, but every book on sampling I've ever seen talks about cluster sampling as a valid approach to large-scale surveys. And it's my understanding that most national social science and education surveys right here in America use some form of cluster sampling. This is because the SRS (simple random sample) you learn about in Stats 101 isn't feasible to generate for a national population.

Bush went on to insult the scientists behind the Lancet study by saying of the number the study arrived at, "600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just -- it's not credible." (emphasis added)

A considerable amount of work from a large team of professionals went into that "guess". I find that "guess" more credible, in fact, than the Bush administration's guesses about whether there were WMD in Iraq before the war, whether their diplomacy with North Korea has been effective, and whether the mission was really accomplished when Bush stood on the carrier in a flight suit.

But demographers and public health researchers be warned, you are now evidently part of the Axis of Academic Evil, along with global warming researchers and believers in evolution.

GrumbleGrumble

2006-10-11T19:12:00.000Z

So, I happen to be a visiting scholar somewhere presently. At first, I told myself, okay, different system, must get used to it. No use comparing it to other university I was at...

Day 1: Printer is out of ink. Can't get ink, since it requires filling out so many forms, and then where will the money come from, etc etc. Ok, fine I think, I will use the other printer. Things are laid back here, I like laid back.

Week 3: Colleague, who treats me as less than colleague, suggested that I find other person in other department to talk to re: certain thing that is his specialty. Ok, will do. Each department has a secretary/gatekeeper here. I go and ask for him, when he receives appointments, etc, as you can't actually get to the offices unless you get past the gatekeeper. Gatekeeper says: He's not here, I don't know, try another day. Fastforward to today. I see colleague and she asks if I met with him yet. I explain the situation.

SnarkyColleague: So is this how you do research?
Me: (What did I just say wrong?) I'm sorry, what?
SC: You just give up? You should just tell the gatekeeper where you are going and ask the dept. secretary for office hours.
Me: Oh, well I don't really know the system here, I didn't realize there were two
gatekeeper/ secretaries... (Shocked that she thinks I am a poor researcher simply because I
believed the first gatekeeper that person was not in when he called his office)
SC: (Proceeds to explain in a very condescending way how exactly one gets to this place, finds this person, what one asks to obtain this person, etc.)

Week 3, Later that same day: Go downstairs to the secretary person for our dept. and explain that I need to get some books that they do not have in their library. How does one get them from the other libraries? Do I need a card? (I have yet to receive one and my dept's library books are signed out by hand). Is there some sort of ILL situation?
He looks at me, seems frustrated. Oh I see. He has to start his computer again to find out. It is 3 hours before he leaves but he turned it off because "its so loud and annoying, sometimes you just need some peace and quiet."

What did I get myself into? I thought this would be dream position....

Can I sue for emotional damages?

2006-10-10T15:39:00.000Z

My university IT people keep messing around with the email servers. Over the last couple of days it's been 50/50 whether my email was working. At one point, I didn't receive email for twelve hours. This interrupted a tense email exchange with my advisor.

I'm so codependent with my advisor that not knowing whether she had emailed me back and knowing that she was mad at me sent me into a panic attack. I almost called her to say that my email was down to prevent her from thinking I was ignoring her.

I want to drag the IT people into my therapy session this week, so they can see the devastation they hath wrought.

Update: 23 hours later
My advisor got over it, and we are now back to being the best of friends. We had a super productive substantive meeting yesterday. The kind where you realize your advisor is actually smarter than you, and knows amazing things.

Perspective

2006-10-07T18:13:00.000Z

A week or two ago, I was going to post the secret that things are not as bad as I sometimes make them out to be. I complain a lot about not doing any work and letting my advisor down and so on. Lately, people have been responding to my complaints by encouraging me to think about what I would do if I dropped out of grad school (or got kicked out). At first, this took me aback. For all my whining, I hadn't seriously considered quitting, and my suprise and indignation that people actually believed that I might be at risk of being forced out suggested that I might have been exaggerating for effect. Or at least, I thought I was exaggerating. I always assumed that at some point I would stop being lazy and unmotivated and be the relatively productive student I like to think of my "real" self as (never mind the fact that that "real" me has never existed outside my head).

When I was thinking about writing that post, I was having a couple of productive days and it seemed like the problem was my representation of my situation. I decided I should stop misleading people about being on the edge of dropping out, since everything really was going to be all right in the end. Unfortunately, that confidence didn't last long and now I'm feeling worse than before, because I'm taking people's reactions to my complaints more seriously. If everyone I talk to gets the impression I should be looking for alternative careers, maybe there's some truth to that view.

I wish I had a better sense of perspective. It would be good if I knew whether to believe my own Chicken Little-esque views, or my more optimistic moments, the post-doc who claims I have good data, or the well-meaning people who assure me that there is life outside academia.
I hesitate to include this, because I don't want to be making excuses for my lack of productivity, but I wonder as well how much of my pessimism and apathy is due to depression. I'm nowhere near as depressed as I was a year or six months ago, but my motivation is still gone. Is it just laziness at this point, or genuine loss of interest, or will it come back?

I started writing this post as a comment to Orange Ina's post about students who constantly let their advisors down. The posts about writing recommendation letters for mediocre students made me feel similarly guilty. This is the downside to reading academic blogs. It's all too easy to imagine the snarky posts my advisor would write about me, if she had a blog, and weren't as loath to badmouth anyone as she is. Perhaps the disappointed and concerned posts I can imagine her writing would be worse.

Do the students their advisors complain about ever manage to become productive and get decent jobs? I'm starting to imagine the half-hearted recommendation letters I might get (if I even ever make it far enough to graduate) and wondering if I should just give up now.

Codependency

2006-10-07T17:26:00.000Z

The relationship between a faculty member and said faculty member's advisees at times is way too heavily based on codependency. And I am strictly talking about professional relationships here. Let's take a student who keeps disappointing. It's like a romantic relationship where the partner keeps cheating or lying or whatnot. Nonetheless, the codependent other half continues to go back to the partner. How many occurences of disappointment will lead to a permanent fracture in the relationship? Too many.

That's the somewhat abstract version of where I'm going here. Take a student who disappoints time and time again. The faculty member has a talk with said student directly addressing the concerns and offers suggestions for how said situations should be handled in the future. Student thanks faculty member for advice and all seems good. Until the next time. When said student disappoints again not even in a new realm, but repeating the same old mistakes.

And Salmon, before you freak out and suggest that this must be how your adviser sees you, etc, from everything you have told us I can confidently say this has nothing to do with your situation. I am talking about very simple things here, like returning emails in a timely fashion, keeping others abreast of goings on and everday little whatnots of that sort.

Testing

2006-10-06T01:57:00.000Z

The blog's not showing up. This is an attempt to see if we can kick some life back into it.

What is YOUR degree in?

2006-10-04T03:58:00.000Z

One of my hugest pet peeves is when people equate having certain degrees with having certain knowledge about certain topics. And I'm not talking about specialized academic topics; of course, your average biology major should be able to explain DNA replication better than your average sociology major, and your average French literature major probably knows more about A la Recherche des Temps Perdus than your average just about anything else major. I'm talking about more general things, like child-rearing.

For example, I often browse the baby-related sections of Craig's List and see numerous college students looking for babysitting jobs. Many of them emphasize the fact that they are majoring in child development, as if that somehow makes them more qualified to look after your kid. I guess I can see how that might make them more appealing candidates to some people, but let me tell you, I've spent several semesters grading the papers and exams of numerous child development majors, and some of them don't even know what a uterus is.

Last week I was in a store buying diapers for Sardine, and I could not help but notice how the overzealous owner managed to bring up several times in the course of our conversation that she has a degree in child development--as if that should somehow make the items in her store more appealing. My favorite was when we were talking about the advantages of having just one kid and she said, "People say that the second kid is easier, but it's not as if I don't know what I'm doing this time around. I mean, I have a degree in child development." I seriously almost laughed out loud. Do any of us parents know what we're doing? My roommate my first year in college was the product of two pretty famous child psychologists, and trust me, she was a freak.

Today I returned to the store to buy more Happy Heiny's, and as I sat on the floor and fussed like an art major over which designs I liked the best, Ms. Child Development sat behind the counter swearing at her computer, all the while declaring, "I was a child development major, for God's sake, so I don't understand a lot of this computer stuff!" I mostly managed to ignore her until I had to actually make my purchase. Since I had previously bought four diapers and was now buying eight, and she had promised me a 13th diaper for free, I also got to see first hand that apparently having a degree in child development prevents you from learning how to operate a cash register, too. The problem was that she wanted to give me the 13th diaper, but she also wanted to enter it into her register, and for some reason she couldn't enter it as "no charge." Finally she ended up multiplying eight by the price of each diaper and then dividing the total by nine and charging me the resulting amount per diaper. She gave me this long, drawn out explanation of what she was doing and why, lest I think she was ripping me off. Of course her explanation was accompanied by the disclaimer that she was a child development major and so didn't understand some of the more business-y aspects of running a shop, as if charging me $15.95 per diaper for nine diapers instead of $17.95 per diaper for eight diapers was some complex concept requiring a Ph.D. in mathematics to comprehend.

On and on she babbled until I finally smiled at her and said, "It's okay, I get it." Then, because I couldn't help myself, I added somewhat snarkily, "My degree is in economics."

the multiple personalities of reviewers...

2006-10-03T19:09:00.000Z

I got a rejection letter today. It's not my first, and it won't be my last.

My main complaint about reviewers continues to be that there are so many who clearly don't read the paper. To make matters worse, I think that the people who are least likely to read the paper are often higher status individuals whose reviews editors weight more heavily (particularly if the editor, who has a lot on their plate, didn't read the paper carefully themselves).

That's not today's gripe, though. I'll save it for another day.

This wasn't my first rejection of this particular paper. In the previous round of reviews (from Journal A in the specialty area of Politics of Primates) I got, "This research is an example of a much larger and more interesting phenomenon, focus on that." So I did when I reframed the paper. This time I got (from Journal B in the same specialty area), "This research claims to be looking at this much larger phenomenon, but what's more interesting is the specific example that it highlights."

Argh. Why couldn't I have had those same reviewers that second time around? Or even better, that second set the first time around? How do you decide whether you cater to those reviewers before you send it out again, or if you just send the same thing out and hope that it doesn't go to the same person? This is a game I haven't learned to play yet.

Is it okay to tell students to leave the class?

2006-10-03T11:02:00.000Z

Over at See Jane Compute, there is a discussion about how to tell rude students who are talking in your class to be quiet without losing your cool. There are some interesting ideas, I was especially intrigued by the suggestion to use humor.

But what if none of those approaches work? I have wondered in the past, is it okay to tell students to leave the class? After all, if they are paying for it, can you tell them to get out? What if it doesn't say explicitly in your syllabus that you expect people to be respectful and quiet unless they are contributing to class discussion? (And how often does one explicitly add that to a syllabus? Hmm.. I wonder if I should in the future.)

Is that something you would ever say to a student? Or do you think that may be problematic? If it's problematic and the other methods don't work, how do you get students to be quiet?

Picture secret XXXIV

2006-10-03T05:05:00.000Z

It's the end of NPR as we know it

2006-10-02T04:35:00.000Z

I'm a total NPR addict. It's one of the reasons I've become middle-aged before my time. NPR's normal target audience seems to be the older end of the boomer range. So imagine my shock when the 'local' sponsor of Morning Edition last week on my public radio station was 'And I Feel Fine: Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987'.

While I love REM, and am happy that there is a newer (older) version of Eponymous, I'm a little weirded out that REM has anything to do with NPR, MarketPlace's bad-ass music selections notwithstanding. Even stranger, the way they said it, the album itself was the sponsor - not the band, not IRS records, but the album. I can't get my head around an album being the local sponsor of a radio station, especially since albums are now more conceptual than tangible in the age of IPOD. It's kind of like the War On Terra, except benign.

Things that make you go "Hmm..."

2006-09-30T22:19:00.000Z

Let me preface this with a reminder that I am a new assistant professor, a divorced mother of a school-age child who only sees his father a couple times a year, and live with an academic who never takes a day off.

Here's a conversation that I had with a neighbor the other day. He's up for tenure this year at the same institution, in a discipline much like my own.

Neighbor: "How are you? How's the term going?"
Me: "Eh... really, really busy and stressful. I guess it's just the life of a new assistant professor."
Neighbor: (skeptically) "Gee! That busy, already. The term just started."
Me: "Yeah."
Me: "Hey, what's it like having a pot-bellied pig? Do they take a lot of work?"
Neighbor: "I don't know. You'll have to ask Julia (his stay-at-home partner). She takes care of everything around here."

Picture secret XXXIII

2006-09-30T18:35:00.000Z

When IRBs Attack

2006-09-29T00:26:00.000Z

I do social-science-y type research, for which I need to file a human subjects protocol with my Institutional Review Board before I'm allowed to go ahead with my research. My project should be "exempt" from review given pertinent federal regulations, but at my institution you have to file an exempt protocol and let them review your application before they agree that you are, in fact exempt.*

Even though my research has nothing to do with health or experiments and mostly involves asking professional people questions about things that happen as a normal result of their work, I have to file a RIDICULOUSLY long and complicated protocol form. The protocol is submitted through a web application, which won't let you move forward or submit your protocol until you have answered every single question.

So, pretend my research was about interviewing members of congress about their past votes.** In filing my exempt protocol, I would have to answer questions about***:

-what I plan to do in case one of my research "subjects" needs medical, psychiatric, or other professional treatment as a result of the research

-whether there are other treatments that would be better for the "subject" than the one I am giving

-what I'm going to do with x-rays and lab specimens after I'm done with them

-why I'm excluding minors from my study

and, my favorite,
-whether my institution could make any money off a patent from this research.

The whole protocol form for "exempt" projects is over 10 pages in length of these irrelevant questions.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for review boards in general and I think that protecting human subjects is a really important and vital thing in research communities. It's just that the actual risks to the "subjects" of my research are not addressed at all by these questions, and that the IRB makes people who do social science jump through all the same questions as the drug-testing people, and doesn't let us skip any questions. I would really like to see a protocol review that gets at more pertinent questions, like:

-Are there at least 3 other people, besides yourself, who are likely to care about the outcome of your research?

-How are you going to ensure that your research does not turn into a massive waste of government and/or funder money?

-Please explain what protections you have in place to prevent the oppression of graduate research assistants.

Oh wait. I would probably have to answer "no" to the first question, and except for the fact that the sums involved are miniscule, would have no answer for the second. So maybe I don't want those questions on there after all. Bring on the disposal of biohazard material questions instead!

____________________________________

* This leads to very silly who's-on-first conversations that go:
A: did you file your protocol with the IRB?
B: no, we're exempt
A: but you have to file an exempt protocol before you can be exempt and start your research
B: but if we're exempt, doesn't it mean we don't have to file a protocol?
A: no, you're exempt, so you file a protocol and wait until you get Exempt Approval
B: if they call it "approval", in what sense is it exempt from review?
A: Well, you're not exempt until they say you are exempt.

** All research fields and disciplines have been made up to protect the privacy of the a.secret society.

***The actual wording of these questions is hilarious, but unfortunately I don't want to reveal what institution I'm at, so I'm paraphrasing.

Arrrrgggg! or "Bite Me!"

2006-09-26T22:01:00.000Z

I tried to figure out how to make this a picture secret, but couldn't make it strong enough.

Here's a recommendation to all those "adminstrators" and other morons: if I have already identified myself as a member of the faculty, do not say loudly -- in front of the rest of the panel -- that it's nice to have young faculty on board, even if looking like a graduate student. It's nothing but insulting, and unless I'm wearing pasties or something my appearance has nothing to do with my position (for the record -- no pasties, just a nice, ironed button-down shirt, jeans, and dress shoes, and I was sitting down).

This plays into the larger climate issues at this institution, at which women are marginalized and minorities ignored (and sometimes attacked). It does nothing to encourage retention or the development of a first class research program. Nor, for the record, does giving a talk on conflict-of-interest issues wherein every example in some way involves the faculty member's wife*.

*Hint: not all of us are men, not all of us have partners who are female, not all of us are married.

The silliness of ETS and GRE's

2006-09-25T20:28:00.000Z

I have long been a protestor of standardized tests -- even when I took my first PSAT when strawberries was a mere small red dot on the vine. Not because I have never been one of those "I never study and get a 1600" types, but because I do not think they actually measure ability to do well.

Take the GRE for grad school. Now, in my discipline, there are never multiple choice situations. And the quantitative aspects are statistics, complicated statistics that are handled by stat programs. Sure basic math skills are important, but when ever has an academic really figured out an important geometry problem, and then, without a calculator.

Ok, so the verbal section. All important, sure, in theory. But when one is entering a grad program, they should have a) done well in undergrad, b) have demonstrated a capacity to conduct effective research, and c) ability to write well.

The reading comprehension asks questions about what is the next logical paragraph, or title. Then in those lovely books prepared by ETS, they explain that only Y can come after X. I disagree. First of all, writing has a style. An argument can be explained effectively in more that one way. Perhaps Z after X goes better together, even though chronologically Y comes first. This is all a question of style, journal preferences, and topic. And don't get me started on the Writing Analysis section....

And then the ridiculous emphasis that NSF and other organizations place on these scores -- NSF Doctoral Grants /Research grants should not take into strong, if any, consideration standardized tests, but research capability, etc. Maybe the SAT is needed to generalize across different school systems and their grading, and since students still do not know what direction their studies/life will take, general capability is good. But in a specialized field?? I back the idea of subject tests, but carried out in a different manner.

With all the test prep books, the test prep classes, and the test prep costs, it seems to me that aside from being almost useless in determining success in graduate school, it is just one big money making scheme.

Young Ph.D.'s Say Collegiality Matters More Than Salary

2006-09-25T12:32:00.000Z

Junior professors care most about respect and the climate of departments

Holy Sh*t!

I want to add that departments with bad culture for junior faculty MIGHT also underpay junior faculty, so getting out doesn't necessarily mean a pay cut, even if reports of average wages by rank and discipline at the various universities would seem to indicate that would be the case. My experience is that departments with bad climate often have outliers in their salary distributions mucking-up the big picture. I would also think the argument should be extended to women, people of color, international scholars, and several other classes of minorities--both from the perspective of caring about climate and compensation and from the perspective of actually getting compensation from a department with bad climate.

Miss, Ms. or Mrs.?

2006-09-21T15:32:00.000Z

Where is the check box for Dr.?

Is this Murphy's Law? I spent my entire grad student teaching career correcting students when they called me Professor, or Dr. Fraud, and now, this week alone, I have heard Miss Fraud, Mrs. Fraud, and Ms. Fraud (interestingly, all from women).

I came up with a plan of action for when this occurs in a phone call. When the student says, "Is this Miss Fraud?" I'll reply, "Yes, this is Dr. Fraud." But how do I deal with the interactions in the classroom, hallway, or my office? Or what if they don't ask is it's me on the phone and just launch into "Mrs. Fraud..."

I'm convinced this is one of those annoying forms of unconscious gender bias. A male colleague, who intestingly isn't even a Dr. yet, said that he's never been called Mr. Know-It-All. Students always call him Professor or Dr. Know-It-All.

Nonmatch.com

2006-09-17T17:03:00.000Z

Here's a post having nothing to do with academia. We've been told those are okay, right?

I'm trying out an online dating service and wondering: if you get an email from someone who doesn't sound like much of a match, is it better to simply ignore them or is it better to write a short little note thanking them for the contact, but saying that you're not interested?

At times like this, it can be helpful to think what you'd prefer. But I'm not sure. If I didn't hear back, I'd wonder. But if I did hear back only to read that the person's not interested, would that really help?

Would you rather be rejected in a cryptic manner (in which case you can always make up some other excuse) or would you rather be rejected outright?

Down with the Man in Europe

2006-09-16T20:19:00.000Z

A happy hello from strawberry land!

I apologize for my absence and will inundate you with excuses, ahem, I mean reasons, right away. I can't have you thinking I spent all this time "finding myself"or some other such nonsense. I easily gave that up after two days of grading and realized, who cares. So, after some grading hell, some getting sick, I decided to take up my friend on a spontaneous vacation with those super cheap tickets. While much fun, I came back to too much work, behind-ness, and a conference to attend.

All's been said and done. Conference was attended. And here's my problem -- It was one of those lovely European conferences that are often hard to understand, but that's not it. It was the hierarchy. Now I know EU universities function differently, and that its not about tenure and starting as assistant, and then associate, etc etc. and that people actually collaborate with grad students here. Oh my.

The profs did not even speak to the grad students. Nor to the researchers. Who aren't simple research assistants, but actually teach classes. And when it was time for question asking, it turned into more of a here is what I think since I'm so egotistical, I mean intelligent. And only the profs would ask questions. And they would ask them all in a row. So the same 5 people would tell you what they thought consecutively, and then the presenter would get two minutes to "answer".

The hierarchy was disgusting and disheartening. And then in a field where you would hope axes of power would be examined, all of the profs who spoke were men, and only 10% of the presenters/speakers were women.

On the bright side, these EU conferences really do know how to organize field trips! And they're not the corny tourist tour through conference city, but EACH day a lovely field trip to place that had to do with application of discipline in that city. Oh, and did I mention the food? And each night, an organized entertainment for our benefit.

So, would I go again? Yes, but skip all the presentations and attend every field trip. Until that, down with the hierarchical man.

Reproducing a.somethings

2006-09-15T21:40:00.000Z

Some (many?) academics seriously lack social skills. Some really really lack them. Occasionally this translates into (or is the result of?) some type of egomania. The problem is, if said academics have advisees then their advisees may "grow up" to think that being so unbelievable egotistical is the norm in academia and not only is it okay, but it is desirable. While in some cases it may have positive outcomes, in most it does not. So what do you do to the young scholar being mentored by such a person? Do you pull him aside one day and say "Look, this is not okay, you really do NOT want to immitate your advisor. Seriously, for your own good, don't go there."

Said advisor's students don't necessarily get great jobs. But one of them a few years ago landed a very good job. It had nothing to do with the advisor, it turns out, but naturally, being the egomaniac that he is, he attributed it to nothing but himself. Unfortunately, it also probably leads his students to think that the advisor is helpful. His students since have only done okay, if ending up with a job at all. If only that would suffice as a hint to future generations.

PS. Don't tell me, "advisor" should've been "adviser" in this entire post? I never got that.
PPS. The "a" in the post's title does not refer to academic, rather, a certain cushy part of a person's bod. The "something" refers to something else.

Picture secret XXXII

2006-09-13T17:25:00.000Z

The Crying Game

2006-09-13T17:00:00.000Z

Until today, I'd never had someone cry in my office. I guess, technically, I've cried in my office, but this post is about undergraduate students, not the torment of grad school or the stress of being an assistant professor.

Today, though, my kleenex box got a little lighter and my heart a little heavier.

What the hell am I doing to these students? Most of the people who came in to talk about their papers were upbeat. They came in confused, but with my guidance left realizing where they'd slipped up and, most importantly, with a better understanding of the concepts to carry with them from this day forward. One was a little angry, and left even angrier, but somehow I can deal with that psychologically. Maybe I'm used to that. The last student, disguised as a member of the upbeat club, soon showed her true colors. Her chin started to quiver and tears formed in her eyes. Despite all the jokes I made to my male counterparts in grad school about those crocodile tears just being a game girls played to toy with them, I wanted to cry too. Her emotion seemed so raw, and genuine, and I remembered moments in my own undergraduate career where I wanted to cry (I couldn't remember if I had or not).

Maybe it's a game. Maybe it's the stress of being at a competitive school. Maybe it's being a freshman. Maybe it wasn't about me, or the paper, maybe it was something else. But regardless of what it is, I'm going to have to work on my game face.

Little Miss Can Be Wrong

2006-09-13T04:48:00.000Z

A graduate student reported to me that her advisor showed her a draft of the letter of recommendation he has written for her for the job market. He asked her to look it over and make whatever corrections seemed appropriate. Overall, the letter was very nice and complementary. But the version also had some corrections of his own. Namely, at the very end of the letter, he wrote, "In my view, this is a 'can't miss' prospect." He had crossed this out.

Behind Door #6: Me

2006-09-11T20:27:00.000Z

The semester has started, and the hallways are suddenly filled with imminent dangers: Advice-seeking students, administrators who want to dump committee work on me, lost people who want directions, more students, book buyers (who deserve a posting of their own). To make things worse, it's Monday, and you know how much I hate that day! First I was torn between marking my presence (see, unlike some of my senior colleagues, I actually make it to school when I don't teach!) and getting some work done. Now that I've given up on the presence thing (I need to get some work done!), I'm sitting behind my closed door, anxiously waiting for inspiration to kick in. I feel like I've set myself a trap...and I desperately need to pee. Help!

A Bad Dream of a Different Kind

2006-09-11T02:03:00.000Z

Measuring Up: The National Report Card on Higher Education has just come out for 2006.

Some highlights:
1) The Sky is Falling. Our nation is in dire trouble because we are falling behind and global competition is going to kick our behinds.

2) College costs too much. Only 1 state shows improvement on a majority of the indicators for affordability.

3) It's hard to measure college learning with standardized instruments. But 9 states are praised by NCPPHE (National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education) for trying anyway. Coming soon: the one standardized uniform national college exit exam.*

This year's NCPPHE report card is likely to be overshadowed by the release later this month of Secretary Spellings' Commission on Higher Education final report (happily, not in the form of a report card). insidehighered.com has had great coverage of the work of the commission, including an excellent article on how the Dept. of Ed is trying to enact the report's recommendations even before the report is released. Without congress.

The scariest part of the nightmare that is higher ed policy in the US currently is Secretary Spellings' comments on the release of the report card. To the people at NCPPHE who put out the report card, she says “I’m glad to have you with me on the side of the angels,”. Evidently, the angels support standardized learning outcomes assessment, strict accountability and performance indicators, and decreased Pell grants. I personally don't remember the angels saying that in the Bible, but I could be wrong. Maybe it was Charlie's Angels. Whoever the angels are, they seem to have been involved in writing the Commission's draft report, given that the first sentence is about puritans and ministers. PURITANS.

To be fair, there are parts of the NCPPHE and the Commission's agenda that I agree with, like tracking the rates of participation in higher education of people from different ethnic and racial backgrounds. But the overall thrust of the report card and the Commission's report is that the liberal yahoos that have been running higher education into the ground need to get out of the way so that accountable, hard-headed, right-thinking people can get down to the business of assessing what students are (not) learning and laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of the latte-drinking liberal elite secular humanists** where it belongs.

* Ok, this is a bit of an exaggeration. Even the most assessment-happy folks think there should be at least 2 or 3 different tests.

** Not angels.

Naked Nightmare

2006-09-08T14:39:00.001Z

As classes are getting started for many of us, I was just wondering if anyone has had that dream where you're naked in front of class, and perhaps you also forgot your notes?

I haven't had it yet, but I know it's on the way. It happens every year.

Confession

2006-09-08T07:12:00.000Z

I spent 5 hours straight tonight watching Law 'N Order reruns on TV. I think this definitely qualifies me as "resident slacker" of a.secret for the day- or at least for those 5 hours.
The truly sad thing is that it wasn't even my favorite Law and Order (Criminal Intent), but the stupid original. Oh - and the truly, truly saddest thing? I've seen a couple of tonight's episodes before.

Behind Door #5: The Newly but Distressingly Increasingly Absent-Minded Professor

2006-09-08T02:40:00.000Z

A graduate student e-mailed me earlier to report the following interaction with an elderly faculty member. A few days earlier, the Professor had returned a copy of Student's vita and statements for the job market with suggestions for a revision. Then:

Professor: Can I have a copy of your vita and statements for the job market so
that I can use them to write my letter of recommendation?

Student: Sure. But I haven't made the changes you suggested yet. Would you like
me to make those revisions first or to give you another copy as is?

Professor: Just give it to me as is. I just need it for reference.

Student prints documents and gives them to Professor. Then, 30 minutes later, Professor returns and hands the documents to Student, having marked them up with virtually the same revisions and comments as the versions given and returned a few days earlier.

Professor: I have a few suggestions for you. I'll need another copy of these so that I can write my letter of recommendation.

I may not be a full professor...

2006-09-07T12:10:00.000Z

...but coming from a family of people with little to no college experience, I heartily relate to this article from today's Chronicle.

It's even got a little something about how much money we (as academics) make, which is clearly an issue close to our hearts.

Koda's European Adventure

2006-09-05T14:41:00.000Z

Pa ha ha ha! I just got a Call For Papers in my mailbox, and I actually read it because I suddenly have twice as much travel money as I've ever had in my whole career. (Tragic stories omitted.) But these European CFPs crack me up. They are like: We're having a conference. There's no topic. Your fee covers sherry, tea and cookies. There will be a starlight cruise. Send your paper to Fred.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of a shipboard panel under the stars (though I may have overstated their plans) and I often find long meals and big breaks more rewarding than endless panels, but I don't understand how to interpret the CFP or how to compare one European conference to another. If I knew "Fred" or if I had the guest list, I might see this differently, but no. Instead, they read as though all I need to know is what kind of amenities will be provided. Is it possible that the amenities really do offer the necessary clues and I just don't have the secret decoder ring--like Hegelians drink port and real men don't eat cookies?

behind door #4: The Cowardly Angel

2006-09-04T21:12:00.000Z

I knocked on Angel's door, but there was no answer. I knocked again. Nothing. But I just saw her walk in, and unless she escaped out the window-- I went to my office and rang her phone. Busy. Maybe that explains it. Thirty minutes later the phone was still busy, so I returned to the door and banged vigorously. "ANGEL open the door!" The door opened. "Oh, I didn't know it was you!"

The Angel puts her home phone number on her syllabus and gives her cell phone number to every member of the faculty and staff at the university. She is warm, friendly, open, and accessible. Everyone loves her, and everyone thinks she is their best friend. That's why right now she's hiding in the dark listening to the knocking and the ringing. She can't make it stop, and she can't possibly do all the things people want her to do. It's not humanly possible.

The Cowardly Angel is not a gendered identity, either (though the hiding-in-the-dark strategy might be). The first person I met like this was a powerful male figure in my discipline. College deans and university presidents are often like this, politicians, too. Still, I never really understood the phenomenon until the day I stood outside Angel's door and discovered that she had the ability to sit there in the dark and listen to the knocking.

Disclaimer: Although I do think that all those people have some breaking point or way of dealing with the bottom line, I think their strategies vary, and this hiding in the dark is not the strategy of a famous person. Those people are behind door #3.

Why I Think I'm Overpaid

2006-09-04T00:07:00.000Z

My previous post can be read as suggesting that professors, in general, are overpaid. Let's forget that for the moment. Certainly, for those of you who are professors, I do not know how much you specifically are paid and do not want to appear to be passing judgment on whether it is more or less than what you deserve.

So, consistent of what I'm fond of doing anyway, let's just talk about me. Let me amend my statement to say just that I'm overpaid.

More precisely, I'm in a strange position. On the one hand, I would argue--passionately, if I've had a few drinks--that I am presently underpaid relative to certain specific others in my academic proximity. On the other hand, I would argue that I'm already overpaid in abstract moral-justice terms. Why? Because I've found myself at various times being willing to stand at cocktail parties and hold forth on each of the following six propositions:

1. Income inequality in the United States is too high
2. Income inequality worldwide is (way, way) too high
3. Student tuition is too unaffordable for working-class families
4. Graduate students who are teaching assistants or lecturers are paid too little and commonly (depending on institution) deserve better in terms of health care and tuition benefits
5. Academic staff (e.g., secretaries) generally are underpaid for what they do
6. Government spending on people both needier and more deserving than myself is too low

And, thus, even though Scarlet is the official color of passion, icy-blue logic makes it hard for me to be comfortable following these assertions by then joining other professors in complaining about my salary by endorsing that:

7. Your Secret Correspondent Scarlet is underpaid

Because, I ask myself, where do I think the extra money to augment my standard of living should come from? Once I get past the intraprofessoriate comparisons--if their paying him $x, they should be paying me $x--it's hard for me to see how I justify deserving a bigger feeding from the Great Economic Trough.

Oh, and: Happy Labor Day!

Happy Secret

2006-09-01T20:48:00.000Z

Clear noted that there are a lot of complaints as secrets, so I thought I'd share a happier one: I love my advisor! She's always so enthusiastic and interesting and supportive. It's a secret because all the other grad students I spend time with constantly seem annoyed or frustrated with their advisors. Sometimes I feel like I have to find something to complain about, so as to not be left out of the conversation, or inspire jealousy. Luckily, there are some things my advisor does, like turn every 5 minute meeting into an hour-plus discussion about the state of our field, that I actually enjoy, but other people conveniently interpret as a bad thing.

It's unfortunate that it seems much more socially acceptable to kvetch about excessive demands and lack of guidance, than to say anything complimentary. My advisor is generally known as one of the nicest people in the department, but surely the other professors can't all be that bad.

Of course, her being so nice makes me feel even worse about my lack of productivity, but this is supposed to be a happy secret, so I'll ignore that for now. I did just write 750 words today! I was tempted to put it off again, but I wanted to be able to show my advisor something for a change. Maybe I should try to focus on making her happy as a motivational tool.

Behind Door #3: No One

2006-09-01T12:30:00.000Z

This is what kills me about my particular work environment. I'm in a part of the building where in the abstract six other nicely-paid professors have their offices, and on the typical day I see maybe one or two of them. More commonly than I ever would have imagined when I took this job, none. They come in to dispatch their obligations and then go home, because they "work at home." My guess is that 20% or so of professors actually are more productive working at home, and they provide the rationalization for the astonishing ability of the rest of us to collect salaries far, far above the median for a full-time worker in the United States and yet get to stand in the hallways and complain like a war crime has been perpetrated upon us if schedules require us to come into our workplace more than three days a week.

Yes, I know, the best thing about this job is the autonomy. I agree. I know that academia favors those who are keep-to-themselves-types (even as it simultaneously favors those who are build-large-social-network-alliance-types). But, still.

I am sure it would bother me less if I wasn't single. If I had a family, I would love that I could come into the office and have Total Solitude Time. (And, yet also, I'm sure I'd have less of an opportunity to come into the office and have Total Solitude Time.) Not to sound pathetic, but it's just not much fun to come into work and see no one and then go home and be by yourself as well.

A weird thing about this is that my institution gets very concerned about space and the balance between the principles that office space should be given based on (1) seniority vs (2) specialty area. The argument for the latter is that you put people with similar interests next to each other and soon you'll need to wear sunglasses to work for all the blinding intellectual synergies that ensue. To which I have to physically take hold of my tongue to keep from screaming, "What the hell does it matter? No one is ever here!"

behind door #2: Hair Boy

2006-09-01T05:51:00.000Z

Hair boy is a junior faculty member of our department who uses ken-doll good looks and blow-dried hair to charm his way out of teaching service courses. Hair boy is a shameless self-promoter who will do anything to add a line to his CV, including stealing ideas from his masters-student advisees. I think hair boy's charisma will get him tenure, even though his scholarship is mediocre.

behind door #1: The Conscious Pig

2006-08-31T09:41:00.000Z

I have a colleague who loves to apologize for his misogynistic comments. To begin, he'll say something completely moronic, or something completely understandable--doesn't matter. What matters is that his incredibly astute and sophisticated understanding of feminist linguistic politics sends up a flag for him (go ahead and read something into that, if you can manage not to lose your lunch over the idea). The opportunity to bask in the glory of his brilliant realization overcomes him and he stops, always mid-sentence. "I'm sorry. That was sooo mis-aaaah-gynistic." The ensuing conversation always involves at least three more opportunities for him to say misogynistic and at least one, but probably two opportunities to say some form of the word patriarchy. For a kicker, he always concludes that his original stupid-ass point must stand and that he has a bona fide need for the allegedly misogynistic term or concept. (This is just what the world needs, linguistic BFQs.) Listening to his self-congratulatory musings on the oppression of women is one of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon. (Can you see me batting my long luxurious Sienna eyelashes?)

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I've been lurking around here for a long time but haven't managed to put up a real entry yet. Does this make me a slacker? That would be interesting since just being here seems to make everyone else a slacker. Nevertheless, I feel like a slacker for failing to post. So I thought I'd debut with a theme that might provide me with more ideas for secrets to reveal later. If you're brave enough to join me in this game, just jump right in with "behind door #whatever.comes.next". My plan to help muddy the identity waters is to draw from lots of places and previous experiences, with just a dash of a pure fiction. That way the personalities won't add up to anything identifiable, or if they do add up to something-- You know the standard disclaimer.

Picture secret XXXI

2006-08-30T17:20:00.000Z

How to be diplomatic when writing letters?

2006-08-29T18:17:00.000Z

[I was almost done writing this post when my computer rebooted for no reason and so I lost it. This may make for a shorter post than the original, possibly missing some points.]

It's that time of year when students start requesting letters of recommendation. I have a few coming up for graduate students. Some are not a problem at all, but one has caused some concern for me lately.

I am on this student's committee, but other than his participation in one of my classes (which, to be fair, was very good), I have had little exposure to him. He hasn't responded to any of my comments about his dissertation. (Granted, his main advisor said that my requests weren't that important so the student has backing in not following my requests. We'll leave for another time this issue of committee members disagreeing.) The student had expressed interest in working with me (three times over the years), but never actually came through with any work when it came down to giving me something concrete.

So overall, I don't have a lot of great things to say. After all, I think the main project is definitely lacking and I haven't been super impressed by the student's motivations either.

So what to do? It's not really an option for me to say I won't write the letter. But then what do I say? Obviously I don't want to say anything bad, but how much good can you say given the above?

Is Comedy the last bastion of social criticism?

2006-08-28T13:17:00.000Z

That's the question Jon Stewart posted Friday night (I think it was Friday night) and it was one of those jokes that he delivered just unable to contain himself. He was so proud! Of course it's not true that social criticism doesn't happen other places, but that's where the audience goes. I'll be the first to say that if it weren't for Jon Stewart (and Oprah Winfrey), the American public would be duped more completely than they are today. These entertainers did something important, but they also changed our jobs, to some extent. So today, I'm looking at a.secret and thinking, "Quick! Say something funny that does something important!" But I think I'll save my energy because I have to teach today and there, the expectations are the same: Be funny and be entertaining, otherwise, my students won't be so receptive when I disassemble their worlds.

Just say no?

2006-08-26T06:45:00.000Z

How easy is it to "just say no?"

In a former life, I was an instructional web designer. As in, I actually had a job with benefits at a major research university. With this job, I was able to buy a house, start a retirement fund, and all the other things that go along with having a "real" job.

Fast forward.

Now I am a graduate student. For some reason unbeknownst to me, a while back, I volunteered to update my advisor's web site for him. Suddenly it became apparent within the department, "Hey! Salmon knows how to make purdy web sites!" And next thing I know, my advisor has volunteered me to redo the department web site (which, by the way, seriously needs to be redone).

The thing is that redoing an entire web site the right way is a ton of work. I mean, it's not a question of just slapping something on the web to show that we are indeed a part of the 21st century. The department currently has a functional web site; it's just that the chair wants something with bells and whistles and whatnot to show that not only are we aware that this is the Information Age, but we are also cutting edge. Considering how much my advisor complains that I don't spend enough time in lab and how pissy he is over the fact that I am teaching this semester, rather than devoting all my time and energy to researching, it's mind-boggling to me that he thinks I have time to redo the department web site. But whatever. I've given up trying to make sense of what he is thinking at any given point in time.

When he told me back in February that "I might get the chance" to redo the department web site, I must have given him kind of a funny look (there's a reason I got out of web design, and it's not as if I'm looking to build my resume), because he then offered that his understanding of the situation was that the department was prepared to pay someone "fair market value" for the job, and that "You should not sell yourself short." With that in mind, when the department chair approached me about the job and asked me to let her know, among other things, "how much pay I required," I gave her a bid that, in my estimation (and in the estimation of my web design cohorts), was completely down the middle in terms of "fair market value." (Whoa, sorry for the extreme overuse of quotes.)

So blah blah blah, I won't bore you with the details of the saga (ask if you're interested), but months later, she finally approached me and told me there was no way she could pay me X amount as a student; the most she could pay me was Y amount (which was 1/2 of X amount). She then looked at me woefully, as if I were supposed to volunteer and say, "Okay, well in that case, I'll do it for Y amount."

However, I didn't. I stood my ground and explained that I pay my babysitter Z amount, and that I'm not willing to work for Y amount anymore. She feigned understanding, but still, I sensed some extreme lack of comprehension. She acted as if the only reason I wasn't willing to work for Y amount was because I have a new baby and not much free time, and not because Y amount is far, far, FAR below market value. She then concluded our meeting by saying, "Well, maybe you can do it next year." I felt like saying, "Why, yes, next year I'd do it for X x 1.25," but instead, I just smiled and nodded my head and said, "Yeah, maybe next year." But when I walked out of her office I was steaming--I mean pissity pissed pissed!

In my opinion, it's insulting to be considered a "student assistant" for this type of job. Yes, I'm a student and yes, I'd be assisting, but in this case we're talking about a job that I once made a living doing, as a professional. If she didn't have the money to pay anything above and beyond a student assistant wage, then she should have said so, up front, in February, when I told her how much I would expect to be paid for such a job.

Now within the department there seems to be this sort of "war" going on. On the one hand, some people--for example, the professor for whom I'm TAing--think the Higher Powers are just trying to take advantage of me, and laud me for standing my ground. In others' opinions, it seems that doing this type of thing is something that a lowly student "should" do. Unfortunately, the people on my side seem to be the ones who are really low on the food chain. On the other hand, certain other people think I'm just being greedy and can't really understand why I would turn down a job for $12/hour. My advisor seems to be somewhere in the middle--in a way he seems kind of happy I have more time for research now, but in another way, it seems to be this huge issue that I'm not willing to help out the department by doing something like taking on their web site. This whole thing has put a damper on my semester because I feel as if I'm creeping around the hallways now avoiding certain people.

What, if anything, should I do?

The good, the bad, the semi-secret

2006-08-25T18:59:00.000Z

I read this article today and wondered where something like this leaves us?

Is sharing our secrets here good or bad? Are they part of our identities or can we keep them stored away safely? Do we engage in conversations here only to preserve our tenure chances, academic safety, and reputability, or to preserve our selves too?

Is sharing your secret with a stranger - or as a stranger - different than sharing it with someone you know intimately?

Resident Slacker Challenge

2006-08-24T18:32:00.000Z

I was very excited to get an invitation to join academic secret, but I've been feeling twinges of impostor syndrome when trying to think about what to post. I'm not a real academic (any moment now someone will realize they made a mistake letting me into grad school) and I'm certainly not cool enough to be part of a secret cabal. After rereading the archives, however, I'm feeling more confident because I'm pretty sure that I can beat all y'all at something, even if I have to bring up an old argument to do it.

Salmon Ella first claimed to be the “resident slacker of academicsecret” back in July, but didn't seem eager to fight for the title when thistle challenged her*. I'm ready to take you on, though, thistle! Thistle's pretense to the title: “There are many weeks when I only manage to work 20-30 hours at being a graduate student, and I don't even have a baby.”

Ha! I laugh at your “20-30 hours”! A day when I do 2 hours of vaguely work-related activities is a day of astounding productivity for me. Usually, it takes all my motivation to do the bare minimum required to keep my model organisms alive.

Let me share a typical day with you:

8-9am – alarm goes off, hit snooze (repeat)

9am - read email/blogs
10.30am - realize my dreams of one day getting to work before 11am are about to be shattered, yet again
11.30am – start getting ready to leave
12pm - arrive at work, read more blogs (or at least hit refresh until something new shows up in my feed reader) until everyone else leaves the lab
6pm - realize that my organisms are going to die if I don't feed them
7pm – finally drag myself away from the computer to feed my organisms
7.15pm – go home

Anyone think they can top that for slackerness? Bring it on!

Pre-post update: Sadly, since I wrote the first part of my post, my advisor managed to kill my sense of achievement. She came by to ask for an update on my progress and after I mumbled my excuses about shipping delays (read: forgetting to place the order) and lack of facility access (read: not getting around to returning the signed forms), she started talking about all the exciting new ideas she has for my project. She seems to be feeling bad that my project is having problems (it does have some that aren't entirely self-induced) and is sure that once I get some results I'll be moving ahead much faster! I couldn't bring myself to confess the real reason for my lack of progress. She'll just have to learn the slow way that I can bring errors and delays to the best of projects...

Why does she have to be so nice and supportive and make me feel guilty? And why can I not just do some work??

*Turquoise Stuff also mentioned the title fight, but I'm not sure he(?) is a serious contender. I mean, he has a list!

The Pompocity Factor

2006-08-24T14:48:00.000Z

After years of trying to help my students learn how to decipher the way other people evaluate them (just one of the many life-lessons folded into my courses), I think it's time I took the plunge and developed a grading rubric for my written assignments. I don't want to for several reasons, failing to teach them how to read their environment is one, flexibility is another. But on the flexibility front, I'm especially worried that I'll forget to include something on my rubric, like, "Oh! You can't use the religious text you've been studying since you were three years old as the only source for this paper." Now, I'm trying to brainstorm about those invisible spaces. But the thing I'm most anxious to include and be explicit about is a set discount factors. At the top of my list will be a thing I learned from a colleague I never met who ran a writing boot camp for some of the greatest 20-year-old political minds in the [name a region] US. I taught a class that attracted many of his students and they would come in groups of three or four to tell their tales of woe from those seminars. And this is where I found out that you can actually cure a student of his-or-her-but-usualy-his sophomoric writing style. My colleague who ran the political honors group didn't use a grading rubric, of course, but he excelled in teaching humility to gifted youth who had yet to learn exactly how big the world really is, and he would not hesitate to just write it across the top of their papers, "Your pompocity score is off the charts." Oooooh! That makes me happy!!!

A Supposedly Useful Tip That I Thought I'd Pass Along

2006-08-23T00:34:00.000Z

A friend of mine was recently at a major conference for his discipline, which included a number of one-on-one conversations with people that stretched well beyond his genuine-interest attention span. He's been worried that in such conversations he loses focus and his uninterest becomes more obvious than he would like. So he came up with a strategy for it this year that he's been going on about ever since.

What he does first is to imagine some ludicrously hideous thing he could say to the other person. The point is not that it's anything he wants to say or thinks is true; indeed, he claims it's better if it's not. The key thing is that it has to be something that, were he to say it out loud, would certainly ruin his relationship with the other person, and very possibly his career. Knowing him, my guess is that it's usually something over-the-top sexual, perhaps involving livestock.

Then, as the other person is talking, not only does he think this thought over and over again, but he imagines trying to project the thought into the other person's mind using some hitherto undiscovered telepathic power. All that while, he maintains the appearance to the other person like they are having a normal, friendly conversation and gives no indication that he is really devoting all of his mental energy to trying to communicate some sick message to them by extrasensory means. Even though this ultimately means he's listening to the person even less than when he was merely bored, he's convinced he now does a better job of looking like he's paying attention, because this makes appearing to be an attentive listener an active challenge.

His other goal, of course, is to have some moment in which the other person gets a puzzled, disturbed, and confused look on her/his face that would indicate that he had succeeded in breaching the brainwave communication barrier for a brief moment, but so far he reports no success in that regard. Then again, he has a few decades of meetings ahead of him during which he can hone his technique.

I'm thinking about trying it, but I'm worried I'll have trouble not laughing. Or looking deranged. Or, worst of all: deranged laughter.

a little less fraudulent

2006-08-22T20:31:00.000Z

I want to take a moment to clarify my Fraud identity. I might feel like I'm undeserving of my current position, or that people think that I'm more capable than I am, but I believe whole-heartedly that I am bright and capable. These past couple weeks I've also learned that I am great at getting things done.

My partner, adept in all the ways I feel inept, is brilliant. His vita looks like a full professor's (and he doesn't even have his PhD yet). He reads incessantly, and now writes as much, and has the broadest understanding of anyone I know in his field. He does have one kryptonetic weakness; he is really bad at getting things done.

We're both new faculty at our institution and both of us had more orientations than any human should endure and more luncheons, retreats, and gatherings than I think is necessary (despite the usually excellent food, and sometimes booze, served there). I RSVP'd to each of them, and gave my menu choices. I balanced my time and wrote them in my calendar. I arrived at each and every one on time and prepared. I got things done. My partner, on the other hand...

It won't get me tenure, but I derive some sick sense of pleasure that I was able to juggle it all (plus kid, who's mine) and not skip a beat, whereas Mr. Brilliant couldn't.

Maybe it was trading in my denim for some dress pants for the first day of teaching, but I'm feeling a little less fraud-like today.