i don't get students...
One of my students from last semester (who is also my academic advisee) emailed me saying she was having trouble with one of her classes this semester and wanted to talk to me about it.
Which is odd really... because she never came to talk to me about the D she was getting in MY class last semester! And that was a problem I may have actually been able to DO SOMETHING about.
Wednesday, March 8
Tuesday, March 7
why my weblog is boring...
The problem is... I never DO anything anymore. My days are so booked, I never have time to walk to the Apple Store or the bookstore or the Asian place where I used to have lunch. I don't go to yoga class anymore, I don't do anything DIFFERENT on any day that would make it worth writing about. So my blog is reduced to...
1) I'm tired
2) It's cold
3) I have no idea what I'm teaching today
4) I sure need to do some grading
5) The kids are driving me crazy.
6) (repeat)
So...
This week is going to involve a couple of late-ish nights at work. I have a committee meeting today and a full-faculty meeting Thursday. Meanwhile the wife is having dinner with someone on Wednesday and going to the city with a friend on Friday. Hey kids! This is what life is like for your friends with DIVORCED parents!
What I should really be doing today and tomorrow is writing my midterm exams. Next week is the last week before break, and I have three midterms to give. So it should be a low-key week... no new topics to teach, just review sessions and tests. Which will actually be more of a break than the following week - the week of "Spring Break", where I'll have to GRADE these three stacks of exams and also get to work on the textbook project. At least the kids will be in school, so I'll have a few days to focus.
I was combing my HD for texts on relativity to help me jump start this textbook essay and I came across a draft script from my old job (fucking fuckers) that was really brilliantly written. It occurred to me that if none of what I wrote ever made it to their final script, I could re-use this stuff without worrying about violating any copyrights. So I emailed the one guy at the old job who I would ever consider speaking to again and asked him to pirate me a copy of the production script. Unfortunately, even though most of what I wrote has been gutted and mangled... it's all still there in some form or another, so using this draft would result in a text that was too similar to be safe. Fuck.
Guess I have to actually WRITE.
Meanwhile, the wife was invited to lunch with a local editor who subcontracts with freelancers and he offered her a steady salary. Which was interesting, but the offer turned out to kinda suck. For one thing, he was never quite clear how many hours he would be expecting. Second, he offered her the salary that she mentioned as her bare minimum. (Way to bargain, dude.) And finally he said something like "And obviously if you're working for me, any clients you have now will move over to the agency."
Yeah... right buddy.
So, she politely declined but agreed to continue freelancing for him. One thing she DID get from the meeting was a glimpse into this guy's workflow, which involves various macro programs and some kind of crazy 51-key add-on keypad thing to run frequent macros with a single key instead of alt-ctrl-shift-X or whatever. So, she's probly gonna drop $200 on this editing gadgetry, cuz she's all excited about it. Which is fine. She's probably due for some computer gadgetry (as he writes on his shiny new laptop!) She's also decided to get more into medical copyediting for this guy, since it is supposedly more lucrative. Which means a few hundred dollars worth of medical dictionaries and whatnot. So... we'll see where all this "investment" gets us. She's having a pretty good year. It'll be interesting to see how much money she makes once BOTH kids are in school and she can work 5 days and not have to lose 1/4 - 1/2 of her salary to daycare.
While I've been writing this, I'm listening to a podcast of some astronomy professor from some college in Ohio. I'm stealing some of his ideas for my lecture today. He's not a bad lecturer, but I think I'm better. More "gripping".
Heh. And modest.
Yesterday I lectured my modern physics class on black holes for the second day running. I swear to god... I'm gonna work up an entire course on black holes and time travel. There is no topic that gets students going more... I don't care if they are college students or 3rd graders. I could teach it as an elective and get 100 students to register. We could watch sci-fi movies like "12 Monkeys" and talk about closed-time-loops and paradoxes and whatnot. It would rock. I wonder if I could fill up a whole semester with that material? Maybe if we started as far back as HG Wells... read some books and short stories... 4 or 5 days worth of movies. We could do both special and general relativity. I could work in the second law of thermodynamics someplace. Hmmm... I think I have an open elective slot in... oh... Spring of 2008!
In other future-teachy news, one of my classes is being used next semester to pilot a new format for science lecture courses. My astronomy enrollment is going to be bumped up to 30-50 students (from the 18-22 typical of our "seminar" courses). This means I'll get a lecture hall, which is cool. It also means I may get a "grader" of some sort, which... oh man... how cool would THAT be? It would be like teaching at a real university. Anyway, I kind of volunteered for this, so... smack me when I start bitching about it in October. It was probably a bad time to start this experiment - when I'll be teaching three courses - one of them brand new, and in a field that is not really one I'm trained in. What else is new...? At least it's one more thing to add to my teaching portfolio. "Look at Dr. Dave! Always doing interesting and new things! Give him a 5 year contract!"
Interesting thing #168: Got an email from my Department Chair last night... somebody at the graduate school is interested in putting together some sort of Science and the Citizen program for the public, and they've asked us to be involved. This of course means administrative and organizational tasks, which are the thing I am WORST at in life, and least interested in, but I should really step up. I need to organize something. Something high-profile. It looks good.
Ok. Maybe co-organize.
Anyway, there is supposed to be a lunch meeting over it next week. I'll come equipped with some articles on the "Café Scientifique" movement that is taking off in so many cities. There are supposedly some in NYC... places where people gather on a Saturday morning to have coffee and listen to scientists talk informally about their work. The problem is... in NYC, we're competing with places like Columbia that have actual REAL scientists. I'm not sure what our little college has to offer on that front. Anyway... I'm guessing what will come out of it is a public lecture series focused on some kind of environmental issue. Zzzzzzz...
Ok. Well. That was the whole train ride. So... no less boring, but at least it's LONG.
The problem is... I never DO anything anymore. My days are so booked, I never have time to walk to the Apple Store or the bookstore or the Asian place where I used to have lunch. I don't go to yoga class anymore, I don't do anything DIFFERENT on any day that would make it worth writing about. So my blog is reduced to...
1) I'm tired
2) It's cold
3) I have no idea what I'm teaching today
4) I sure need to do some grading
5) The kids are driving me crazy.
6) (repeat)
So...
This week is going to involve a couple of late-ish nights at work. I have a committee meeting today and a full-faculty meeting Thursday. Meanwhile the wife is having dinner with someone on Wednesday and going to the city with a friend on Friday. Hey kids! This is what life is like for your friends with DIVORCED parents!
What I should really be doing today and tomorrow is writing my midterm exams. Next week is the last week before break, and I have three midterms to give. So it should be a low-key week... no new topics to teach, just review sessions and tests. Which will actually be more of a break than the following week - the week of "Spring Break", where I'll have to GRADE these three stacks of exams and also get to work on the textbook project. At least the kids will be in school, so I'll have a few days to focus.
I was combing my HD for texts on relativity to help me jump start this textbook essay and I came across a draft script from my old job (fucking fuckers) that was really brilliantly written. It occurred to me that if none of what I wrote ever made it to their final script, I could re-use this stuff without worrying about violating any copyrights. So I emailed the one guy at the old job who I would ever consider speaking to again and asked him to pirate me a copy of the production script. Unfortunately, even though most of what I wrote has been gutted and mangled... it's all still there in some form or another, so using this draft would result in a text that was too similar to be safe. Fuck.
Guess I have to actually WRITE.
Meanwhile, the wife was invited to lunch with a local editor who subcontracts with freelancers and he offered her a steady salary. Which was interesting, but the offer turned out to kinda suck. For one thing, he was never quite clear how many hours he would be expecting. Second, he offered her the salary that she mentioned as her bare minimum. (Way to bargain, dude.) And finally he said something like "And obviously if you're working for me, any clients you have now will move over to the agency."
Yeah... right buddy.
So, she politely declined but agreed to continue freelancing for him. One thing she DID get from the meeting was a glimpse into this guy's workflow, which involves various macro programs and some kind of crazy 51-key add-on keypad thing to run frequent macros with a single key instead of alt-ctrl-shift-X or whatever. So, she's probly gonna drop $200 on this editing gadgetry, cuz she's all excited about it. Which is fine. She's probably due for some computer gadgetry (as he writes on his shiny new laptop!) She's also decided to get more into medical copyediting for this guy, since it is supposedly more lucrative. Which means a few hundred dollars worth of medical dictionaries and whatnot. So... we'll see where all this "investment" gets us. She's having a pretty good year. It'll be interesting to see how much money she makes once BOTH kids are in school and she can work 5 days and not have to lose 1/4 - 1/2 of her salary to daycare.
While I've been writing this, I'm listening to a podcast of some astronomy professor from some college in Ohio. I'm stealing some of his ideas for my lecture today. He's not a bad lecturer, but I think I'm better. More "gripping".
Heh. And modest.
Yesterday I lectured my modern physics class on black holes for the second day running. I swear to god... I'm gonna work up an entire course on black holes and time travel. There is no topic that gets students going more... I don't care if they are college students or 3rd graders. I could teach it as an elective and get 100 students to register. We could watch sci-fi movies like "12 Monkeys" and talk about closed-time-loops and paradoxes and whatnot. It would rock. I wonder if I could fill up a whole semester with that material? Maybe if we started as far back as HG Wells... read some books and short stories... 4 or 5 days worth of movies. We could do both special and general relativity. I could work in the second law of thermodynamics someplace. Hmmm... I think I have an open elective slot in... oh... Spring of 2008!
In other future-teachy news, one of my classes is being used next semester to pilot a new format for science lecture courses. My astronomy enrollment is going to be bumped up to 30-50 students (from the 18-22 typical of our "seminar" courses). This means I'll get a lecture hall, which is cool. It also means I may get a "grader" of some sort, which... oh man... how cool would THAT be? It would be like teaching at a real university. Anyway, I kind of volunteered for this, so... smack me when I start bitching about it in October. It was probably a bad time to start this experiment - when I'll be teaching three courses - one of them brand new, and in a field that is not really one I'm trained in. What else is new...? At least it's one more thing to add to my teaching portfolio. "Look at Dr. Dave! Always doing interesting and new things! Give him a 5 year contract!"
Interesting thing #168: Got an email from my Department Chair last night... somebody at the graduate school is interested in putting together some sort of Science and the Citizen program for the public, and they've asked us to be involved. This of course means administrative and organizational tasks, which are the thing I am WORST at in life, and least interested in, but I should really step up. I need to organize something. Something high-profile. It looks good.
Ok. Maybe co-organize.
Anyway, there is supposed to be a lunch meeting over it next week. I'll come equipped with some articles on the "Café Scientifique" movement that is taking off in so many cities. There are supposedly some in NYC... places where people gather on a Saturday morning to have coffee and listen to scientists talk informally about their work. The problem is... in NYC, we're competing with places like Columbia that have actual REAL scientists. I'm not sure what our little college has to offer on that front. Anyway... I'm guessing what will come out of it is a public lecture series focused on some kind of environmental issue. Zzzzzzz...
Ok. Well. That was the whole train ride. So... no less boring, but at least it's LONG.
Monday, March 6
oscars...
Watched them, mostly out of habit, since the only two nominated movies I'd seen this year were "Wallace and Gromit" and "Walk the Line". At least they both won something. I guess I have to Netflix "Crash" now.
The show was ok. Jon Stewart was funny but not brilliant. The wife and I took turns drooling over various celebs. (Jake Gyllenhall and Salma Hayek, primarily.) But none of it was really worth the oversleeping that resulted this morning.
Anyways... busy-busy at work to day, so no time for the blog. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll get some stuff out there.
Watched them, mostly out of habit, since the only two nominated movies I'd seen this year were "Wallace and Gromit" and "Walk the Line". At least they both won something. I guess I have to Netflix "Crash" now.
The show was ok. Jon Stewart was funny but not brilliant. The wife and I took turns drooling over various celebs. (Jake Gyllenhall and Salma Hayek, primarily.) But none of it was really worth the oversleeping that resulted this morning.
Anyways... busy-busy at work to day, so no time for the blog. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll get some stuff out there.
Saturday, March 4
this isn't cool... this sucks...
Flipping channels tonight (something I rarely do in the TiVo age) I stumbled across MTV's Headbanger's Ball (yes, there is still such a thing) and caught the second half of some kind of awful heavy-metal answer to "We Are The World" from the '80s featuring everyone from Dio to David St. Hubbins, with lots of members of Quiet Riot (and way too much hair spray) in between.
It all seemed vaguely familiar, until I saw the name of the benefit - "Hear 'N' Aid" and it all became... well, slightly more than vaguely familiar.
Anyway... it was a very Beavis and Butthead moment.
Then it got to more "contemporary" headbangy music of a type that I wasn't even sure anyone was still making anymore. It was bad. So... bad.
Which reminds me!! Does anybody out there listen to "System of a Down"? Because I'm having a problem. It's a recurrance of my "Flippance Detector" problem. I think I've mentioned it before. The latest... I was driving in the car and listening to the hard rock station I discovered during NPR pledge week, and they played this song... and I was utterly perplexed. At first I thought it was like... Weezer or something... because the lyrics were all... "It's the most loneliest day of my liiiiife... yeah, i'm so loneleeeeey, oh a day like this shouldn't even exiiiiiiist... the most lonely of days ever that waaaaaaaas" and then the guitar would go CHOONK-CHOONK-CHOONK "the most loneliest daaaaay" CHOONK! CHOONK! CHOONK!!... and then the guitar solo went "wheedle-deedle-wheedle-deedle-wheedle-deedle-wheedle-deedle-wheedle-deedle...." and all the while I'm getting angrier and angrier and thinking - "IS THIS A JOKE???"
Because seriously... if it was a joke, then it's the funniest thing since Spinal Tap. But if it's not a joke... god help me... it's the most horrifying pile of crap that has ever been recorded. And then they back-announced the song as being by "System of a Down" ... which from what I know about them, doesn't really seem like a band with any kind of sense of humor. See... if it WAS Weezer, then I would KNOW it was a joke... but now I'm not sure and I'm very very afraid that it's NOT a joke. I mean - I know most "emo/screamo" stuff sucks... but... it doesn't suck THIS bad... does it?
I need a 19 year old boy around to tell me that it's a joke, becuase these kids today with their irony.... I just can tell anymore.
Flipping channels tonight (something I rarely do in the TiVo age) I stumbled across MTV's Headbanger's Ball (yes, there is still such a thing) and caught the second half of some kind of awful heavy-metal answer to "We Are The World" from the '80s featuring everyone from Dio to David St. Hubbins, with lots of members of Quiet Riot (and way too much hair spray) in between.
It all seemed vaguely familiar, until I saw the name of the benefit - "Hear 'N' Aid" and it all became... well, slightly more than vaguely familiar.
Anyway... it was a very Beavis and Butthead moment.
Then it got to more "contemporary" headbangy music of a type that I wasn't even sure anyone was still making anymore. It was bad. So... bad.
Which reminds me!! Does anybody out there listen to "System of a Down"? Because I'm having a problem. It's a recurrance of my "Flippance Detector" problem. I think I've mentioned it before. The latest... I was driving in the car and listening to the hard rock station I discovered during NPR pledge week, and they played this song... and I was utterly perplexed. At first I thought it was like... Weezer or something... because the lyrics were all... "It's the most loneliest day of my liiiiife... yeah, i'm so loneleeeeey, oh a day like this shouldn't even exiiiiiiist... the most lonely of days ever that waaaaaaaas" and then the guitar would go CHOONK-CHOONK-CHOONK "the most loneliest daaaaay" CHOONK! CHOONK! CHOONK!!... and then the guitar solo went "wheedle-deedle-wheedle-deedle-wheedle-deedle-wheedle-deedle-wheedle-deedle...." and all the while I'm getting angrier and angrier and thinking - "IS THIS A JOKE???"
Because seriously... if it was a joke, then it's the funniest thing since Spinal Tap. But if it's not a joke... god help me... it's the most horrifying pile of crap that has ever been recorded. And then they back-announced the song as being by "System of a Down" ... which from what I know about them, doesn't really seem like a band with any kind of sense of humor. See... if it WAS Weezer, then I would KNOW it was a joke... but now I'm not sure and I'm very very afraid that it's NOT a joke. I mean - I know most "emo/screamo" stuff sucks... but... it doesn't suck THIS bad... does it?
I need a 19 year old boy around to tell me that it's a joke, becuase these kids today with their irony.... I just can tell anymore.
things dr. dave did NOT need to know...
1) That professors can get accounts on the college student networking site facebook.com, since all you need is an appropriate name@college.edu email address.
2) That browsing the various profiles and photo albums reveals that a more appropriate name for the website would be "pictures-of-your-students-drunk.com"
1) That professors can get accounts on the college student networking site facebook.com, since all you need is an appropriate name@college.edu email address.
2) That browsing the various profiles and photo albums reveals that a more appropriate name for the website would be "pictures-of-your-students-drunk.com"
Friday, March 3
Thursday, March 2
it's usually temporary anyway...
I was messing around with various things on the computer this morning, and never got around to writing a blog post. I will only take this moment to note that for some reason I found myself in a very good mood walking to work this morning. I'm not really sure why, but I can say with confidence that it won't last, as we are supposed to get quite a bit of snow today.
Still... it's nice to know it's still occasionally possible.
(Postscript: almost the INSTANT I hit send on that post, I dribble-glassed half a cup of hot tea into my lap)
I was messing around with various things on the computer this morning, and never got around to writing a blog post. I will only take this moment to note that for some reason I found myself in a very good mood walking to work this morning. I'm not really sure why, but I can say with confidence that it won't last, as we are supposed to get quite a bit of snow today.
Still... it's nice to know it's still occasionally possible.
(Postscript: almost the INSTANT I hit send on that post, I dribble-glassed half a cup of hot tea into my lap)
Wednesday, March 1
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