Everything is OK now

http://make-everything-ok.com/

CRAP! A two-body problem problem I never imagined.

Hub and I are in the same field. We go to the same meetings. When we go to out of town meetings, how do we take care of the kids? For an upcoming meeting, I was taking for granted that we would use the meeting-provided daycare and stay together as a family in a hotel. You can get morning, afternoon or all-day slots for your kids, therefore we must figure out our itineraries to determine when we can tag-team and when we will need to hire coverage. If we choose to put both kids in the meeting-provided daycare, for all day, that is
2 kids * $100 * 4 days, or $800!!!!
If we can put them in half-day, by tag-teaming then its
2*$55*4= $440.
Still very expensive out of our pockets. And probably very exhausting to be both babysitting and meeting all day.

The options I see now are 1. Tag-team the meeting. Pay the $440. In the case there is a conflict, keep equity as to who has to sacrifice a session. 2. Leave the kids at home and ask the exchange student to stay alone with them for 4 days (compensated, of course). 3. Fly in the single underemployed Uncle who has very little child care experience.

Can you help me think of other options?

Tenure App countdown- 4 days

See here and here for more about my upcoming bid for tenure.

I need to:

1. Update my CV
2. Arrange for two colleagues to sit in on a class and evaluate your teaching. I did, they haven't visited yet, though
3. Find my statement of faith and revise at applicant's discretion.This is an essay I wrote during the hiring process to see if I was a good "institutional fit", aka one of their denomination or somebody who doesn't thoroughly disagree with it. Not revising; too low on priority list.
4. Include my annual progress reports from the last three years. We have to write a "Did I meet last years' goals? What are this year's goals?" report every spring. I have only found two, had to embarrassingly ask the Provost's office to scan the third. I must have saved over it in using it for the following years' update.
5. Finish my "How I include my faith in my teaching" paper (UGH)
6. Collate all of my course evaluation summaries. What a hassle! They're all paper except for the last year. So that's six courses a year, three sections for some of those courses, and six years of courses... I'll need to photocopy (or delegate) all of those. Update; a work-study student did it for me in about 20 minutes.
7. Rank myself and justify my rank on a rather squishy scale from incompetent to outstanding. This is tricky, since you don't want to shoot too low, but your colleagues must also review your rank and agree or disagree to it, so you can't be arrogant.
8. Write a cover letter
9. Accumulate any supporting evidence at my discretion, such as syllabi, pubs, letters of recommendation, etc. We'll see what I have time for.

My goal is do do the best I can with what I've got (energy-wise) in the time I have. And be satisfied with what I hand the evaluation committee. I may have mentioned this before, but I'm not afraid to lose my job (see this article about tenure at a PUI), but I do not want to negatively impress my colleagues, the dean or the provost.

 

 

Fatalism Epiphany

Please see here and here for backstory. I am trying to triage the help I give to floundering students because I need to know for whom my help will be effective and for whom my efforts will be wasted. I don't want to give up on anyone, but this work must be personally sustainable.

Wednesday was the students' first exam. I busted butt and got the exams graded and back to them on Thursday, their lab day. During lab, I noticed that the students whose grades were the worst on the exams had turned in the worst work on the labs. No surprise there. I also noticed that of all the students who were doing poorly before the exam but were able to pull their scores up after my warning had a qualitative difference in the details of their lab work. If you asked a student who didn't improve their score, "Why is the sky blue?" they will answer, "Because it is blue", which will get them a poor score in lab.  A student who could at least answer, "That's the color of the light coming through", would still get a poor score, but would be trainable to learn more in depth --- that "the atmosphere filters all colors of light except around 470 nm, which enters your eye and strikes your retina where it is converted into neural impulses that is perceived by your brain as blue", which is the expectation for a good grade.

This is my new working hypothesis; that students who can do the lab write ups (which are open book) to a minimum degree are trainable, but that if they are failing the lab write-ups, AND they avoid my help otherwise, I cannot spend enough effort to rescue them from their own failure. I know that in the large state school where I got my undergrad, there would be no such discussion because there would not be any "chasing" of the struggling student by the Prof. But here I do a little. The standards are very high to pass, but the support is there for students who want it. Not all students want it, and the students who need it the most are unwilling to seek it. I want those non-seeker students to succeed too, despite their fears or background. But you simply can't do it for them.

Your reading assignment

For discussion soon:
Small School Science (published in Nature Jobs)
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/110908/full/nj7363-239a.html

Fatalism Followup

This is a follow up to this post in which I e-mailed students in grade trouble in my freshman level course. Several of the students I e-mailed "snapped-to" and showed up to office hours, signed up for tutors, and asked for study tips. That was rewarding. I paid special attention to one of the students I did not hear back from in lab. Though I did not explicitly address her by saying " Did you get my e-mail?", I sat down with her and directly but kindly offered her a critique of the work she was doing at that moment, saying she could improve her grade by doing such, and this, and adding more detail right here. She basically said "mmn, hmm, sure, whatever". And made no changes at all.

You hear these stories about students who achieve despite difficult circumstances because "they had a teacher that believed in them". The weighs on my mind though the easy route would be to classify this student as "uncorrectable". I am especially concerned because she is of the demographic that has poorer outcomes in college and I want to lessen the achievement gap in my own tiny little way. So I don't want to "give up on her" but the practicality of the matter is that I have limited time, and those who ask for my time will get it. I won't be able to chase the students who don't come to me. I really am rooting for her, but she'll have to do it on her own.

Fatalism Denied (sort of)

I just did something I've never done before: I sent notes to students and their advisers (separately) if they were getting a D or F in my class after a couple of quizzes and labs.

These are mostly Freshmen. There are students out there who have no clue what college demands of them, and if caught in time, can turn things around, although those students aren't the majority.

From my own life, I know several things; 1. The lies we tell ourselves about our own performance can be whoppers indeed. 2. We have far less power to change our own behavior than we think (and what our American culture tells us).

I hope that my intervention can help dispel 1. For number 2, I feel pretty hopeless sometimes, about myself and my students. Kinda fatalistic, I guess. If you've got great behavior-changing power, please e-mail me and tell me how you do it!!!