Little things

The interesting thing about being a new faculty member is how much everyone else seems to not notice the little things that are rather, well, often embarrassing. Some of these things seem considerably unimportant to faculty but when seen through the eyes of the students, they can lead to problems.

For one, there are posters up throughout the department, some of which are quite a bit out of date. One of them (that is relevant to me) is about twenty years out of date, and sadly I just noticed it myself a couple of weeks ago. Of course a replacment is cheap and doable (we're in the process now), but it makes me wonder how much else is out of date. And since we as faculty know better, it's a lot harder to pay attention. Additionally, when you're at one place for long enough, then it is easy for things to blend into the background.

The other problem, and again, this is something that on some level I don't even care about but is a big issue for undergraduates, and that is with the lab manual for the intro science class here. This is taken by majors, non-majors (but still science majors), and non-majors that are fulfilling their one science requirement. The lab manual was updated a few years back (probably around ten years ago), and is very much in need of repair. The problem is that a lot of the labs were written so long ago that they were typed. As in, with a typewriter. While the lab is still fine (and for the most part written very well), it looks absurd in this day and age that they aren't all unified into a single style.

So enter my new project. This is something that looks very bad to the freshmen, quite honestly, and the look of the lab manual will definitely change (to some degree) the students' impressions on the labs they are performing. Considering much of our equipment is actually not that old, an update of the lab manual will make it all that more appealing.

I hope that in the future I don't become so complacent with the way things are that I'm not willing to keep things updated. Sadly, I know how I am, and it'll probably happen. So for the time being I will just enjoy the fact that at least now I care about these minor details.

Snow = class

So I think we are guaranteed to get snow (or a wintry mix) any day that I teach. We got more today, and luckily I walk to work. I have at least one student who lives up in Westchester, and well, she's stuck driving in. I know it saves money to live at home, but I do not envy this student.

In other news, it is finally real that we are looking at the applications for another faculty member in the department. That means that (most likely) I will not be the newbie as of next year. It's a little strange that I get any say in this, however, considering that I've been here less than a year. But alas, I will enjoy giving my two cents. There are only 73 to applications to look through, and there are some obvious cuts we can make (due to various requirements regarding this or that). This will lend to some exhilerating nighttime reading. Yay me.

Office or home?

Days like this make me again revisit the question of whether or not to work from home or go into the office. I have no scheduled obligations today, and the weather is biting (-1 wind chill right now). So working from home is appealing.*

The downside is that while I can get work done from home there is something that is very grounding by being in the office. In the evenings I do work while having the television on, so I'm less productive that way, but when I am home during the day, the TV remains off. But still there is the feeling that I'm in my home, and I think of other things that really should get done: cleaning, laundry, whatever (mind you, none of this other stuff gets done, but it's distracting).

But going into the office can get distracting very fast, with students coming to ask questions, other students coming to just chat, or my very least favorite, those coming to ask directions or bug me in some other way. My office is in the middle of the first floor, and students come to borrow my stapler for their homework they're turning in, or to ask where room 105 is (why the hell wasn't that room put in numerical order in the building? To irritate me, that's why.), or some other inane issue. I could close my office door but I have always been of the opinion that my door is (literally) "always open," so that would defeat the purpose. Plus if I kept my door closed, then I would have to get up to open it whenever someone came by. And if it were someone wanting to borrow a stapler, I would have to kill them.

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*Note that really this is not an option today because I have already told a student I would be on campus at the very least this afternoon, and well, they have homework due tomorrow so I should be around.

Not very much support

Universities are around primarily for two reasons (and I won't get into the argument as to which should be the primary function): teaching students and doing research to add to the base of knowledge that exists. This is something that cannot happen with just students and faculty in this day and age, and there's generally a larger number of people hired at a university or college that are the support staff.

This is composed of assistants (and here some do and some don't mind being called "secretaries"), librarians, janitors, etc. One of the groups that nowadays are vital is tech support. This is what I want to focus on. The problem is that of course if a professor doesn't do his/her job, then the school fails in a small way, and if students just stop coming, then the school is also going to fail. But what is worse is that the support staff is vital to things working, and quite honestly it has severely failed here.

My research entails a large amount of time spent using computers, both local "small" computers as well as supercomputers that I connect to remotely. So while I'm not an expert with computers, I have come to realize that I know more than pretty much anyone at IT here. It has been six months since I have arrived and my faculty webpage (which I wish to use for research) is not set up yet, and well, everytime something goes wrong, it takes a month to fix it. (I know partially why, and I'll get to that in a sec.) Getting software installed on my machine (that the school has a site-wide license to use) takes 1-2 months, and trying to get access to my office desktop from off-site is basically akin to asking them to up and move the university to southern California.

The base of the problem is that there is one number for IT, and they will forward your request to the appropriate person. But as I have learned (with the last request above), the appropriate person isn't the knowledgeable one. That person will often have to contact someone else, and everything takes far to long to happen. I know that for large companies (Apple, IBM, Microsoft, etc), a large number of IT issues can be resolved by someone who knows basically nothing and is given a little packet of troubleshooting guides, but with a smaller place, I would prefer to talk directly to the tech person him/herself. See, when that happens usually you are cut off in the middle of your sentence when describing the problem since he/she is actually intelligent.

As it stands I have to talk to people who I don't even think know that computers can be used for something other than email and the internet.

Do I really care?

So a friend on Facebook just posted that she was deactivating her account because she spends too much time on it, and to message her if anyone wanted contact info to keep in touch. This is something that is very strange to me.

I guess if I ever deactivated my account, I would just do it. The reason being that anyone who I would care to be in contact with already has my info. My phone number hasn't changed in over six years, and while my email has, I generally update people that matter (and quite honestly anyone with half a sense can find my email pretty easily online).

A significant number of my "friends" on Facebook are more like acquaintances. I haven't any real need to keep in touch with them, but I do actually like knowing what's going on with them. It's a daily "alumni newsletter" for various times in my life: high school, college, grad school, and so forth.

For a brief second I thought about emailing her to get her info, but while I like hearing about what's happening in her life, I would never email her privately for any reason. It's one of those things that makes me feel kind of sad, but then I realize that in about three minutes I'll completely forget about it.

Slackers

I just read three interesting posts over at Female Science Professor that incited a constant annoyance that I (and most academics) feel regularly. It has to do with professors (and specifically tenured professors) being lazy and getting paid a ton to basically do nothing, with no fear of losing one's job.

I can't do justice to the posts, so I have the links and quick summaries below. What I will say is that there is a belief that seems to be prevalent (I've seen it a lot, even from friends) that being a faculty member is not a real job, and that all we do is teach ("Must be nice to get summers off!"). I know that some of this comes from the fact that people don't really understand what research is (I'll admit that I don't quite understand how research takes place in the non-sciences, and I'm married to someone who is actively researching in the humanities), and from the myth that if one gets tenure he or she can never be fired. So I will now turn the floor over to FSP:

Do Not Reply
The first of the posts, in which FSP recieves an email from an author of a book that she criticizes in another article (last fall). This book, called "Higher Education?" is what sparks the issue here. It is what makes the argument of tenured professors essential being lazy money-sucking fiends.

Dear Andrew Hacker?:
This is her public response to the author's email.

What Would John Stuart Mill Do?:
A mention of a strange anecdote from the book in question. Actually, here I will copy the last part because this is something that really bugged me. She discusses that the strangest story in the book (and I have not read the book, but this is more irritating than strange to me) as:

My vote for the strangest part of the book is the paragraph in which the authors describe a "workingman" who "jumped on a subway track to rescue a child who tripped and fell." The workingman didn't think; he just did it. The authors posit that professors on that same platform would not have jumped on the track to save the child:

"We wonder if, had some professors been on the platform, would they have paused to ponder how John Stuart Mill might have parsed the choices?"

This is again a common problem nowadays: You are a bad person if you think, but if you don't think, then you are clearly a hero. This is a symptom of a larger problem, as we have a society that villifies intellectualism and forethought. Gut reactions here are considered always superior to well thought out reactions. It bugs me.

Plus, I didn't even know who John Stuart Mill was (thanks Wikipedia!).

Attack of the non-existent mouse

Saturday night I had a bit of a scare. An hour after I had returned from the grocery store, I heard a bunch of rustling and squeaking. It seemed to come at first from the hall but very quickly sounded like it came from the kitchen. I went in there and kicked the door under the sink (where the trash is), as I wasn't ready to see the mouse. Nothing. Eventually I opened the door, and there was nothing there, and no sign of anything. I let myself believe that it must have been my neighbor returning home with his shopping cart (I had seen him leave when I was coming home).

Then a few hours later I heard it again and figured it really must have been a mouse. I was very unhappy about this, but Sunday night on my way home I got a trap and set it, and waited.

Up to now, nothing. I think I have pieced together one of two possibilities (not including the one where there might have been a mouse but it left, since that's not as likely). One, since I heard the noise again last night, but definitely in the hallway, it could just be the mysterious shopping cart (which I still haven't seen while it's making the noise, but still). Also, although I don't hear a lot of noises from this, I think my neighbors may have a cat, as of last week, since now whenever we come inside, Dante immediately runs to their door, sniffing it like he's hunting something.

As long as it's not a mouse.