Fuck Today (Part 1)

1048

Well, our old guy is now up in dog heaven. I really wish we hadn’t let him go on so long. Not that we could have predicted the rapidity of his decline in any case. I know this sounds weird, but the extent to which I got attached to him without meaning to makes me want to get a dog when I can afford it. It’s so weird to see his spot in front of the fireplace empty all day. It’s going to be weird for a while.

I’m sure nails serve a purpose, but I rarely notice mine except when they’ve been involved in a horrible accident.

Perhaps… they were really basic proofs though. I think the first one in calc III was prove the dot product of two vectors is commutative or somesuch. I couldn’t get it done because it didn’t “seem right” to me that you could just expand arbitrary vectors on both sides, do the operations, and show that RHS = LHS. It struck me as “too obvious” and I thought the instructor was looking for something way more profound. I didn’t think I was allowed to prove by demonstration in that way. I think I tried to prove commutativity from associativity, which is of course impossible. All my math professors seem to have commented to me that I tend to use too much “technology” or work too hard to relate disparate concepts.

18 Likes
1049

I’m really sorry to hear that. It is especially hard during Finals week.

8 Likes
1050

I’m sorry to hear that and hope you feel better sometime soon.

6 Likes
1051

I dunno… I don’t think I was “disinterested” when I was teaching, nor were any of my fellow grads, at least not most of them. But I guess you’d have to ask my students about that… :wink:

At my school anyway, part of the problem is overworked lecturers, who are teaching the majority of survey classes (tenured faculty is expected to teach survey classes, at least one a semester). Most of the upper division stuff is taught by tenure/tenure track faculty or senior lecturers (we have a lecturer track in the history department here).

Much more of the undergrad, survey type classes in recent years in many smaller colleges/universities without grad programs are taught by adjuncts, with little to no job security, as opposed to grad students. Larger universities depend on grad students, and depending on the program they are overworked and some of us are underpaid (my department gets nothing near a living wage).

And @chgoliz is correct about many tenured faculty not giving a shit about undergrad surveys (and in some cases, about upper division and even graduate courses). Then again, I’ve known lots of passionate profs who care about their students and work hard to make sure they get a good education.

6 Likes
1052

I suspect there may be some difference between the Liberal Arts folks and the Science-y folks. The vast majority of sciencey faculty I’ve dealt with (up to and including the Dean) are… not focused on teaching. Grants, yes. Teaching? Not so much.

3 Likes
1053

Agreed, it is different - and it’s different depending on the institution, too. From what I’ve heard from my colleagues in the sciences, they do have expectations for both teaching and working in labs for a professor - I’m not sure what they do more of, in general though.

As far as I know, at GSU, there are teaching requirements for most faculty across the board, which is probably a hold over from it being a commuter school historically. Also, GSU is freakin’ huge - easily the largest institution in the the University system of GA, even larger now since we just absorbed a community college which was pretty huge on it’s own. I think we have over 50,000 students now?

4 Likes
1054

That’s what took my kitty Molly. Her buddy Mason is on his way through the kidney failure stuff, too, though the good news is we reversed his diabetes so at least we no longer need to give him twice daily shots. I started him yesterday on the special kidney diet food; his weight is down so I hope this helps beef him up again. I miss Molly; she was just so calming.

(((hugs))) from one Kitty lover to another

9 Likes
1055

In general the lice will prefer the child with the cleanest hair and scalp. It’s a more congenial environment for them.

I took my last Calc semester 4 times, also. Eventually I got the right prof. The trick is to drop the course before you are stuck paying for it.

7 Likes
1056

Only got stuck the first one. Every time after oh same book, another grad student reciting the book again… yep outta here right away.

6 Likes
1057

Remember this? We’re going to finish fixing the phone system tonight! That’s right, tonight. Should be done in the wee hours of tomorrow morning.

But, wait, wait, I can hear you saying: how could it take so long to fsck a linux volume and restore the files from backup? Yes, I totally hear you saying that!

The answer would be: CISCO UCCE.

Cisco support does not allow customers root access to the very expensive Cisco UCCE phone systems the customers own (probably because they use the same root passwords and database passwords for all their customers, or some other similar incompetence they are afraid to reveal to the world). “Ooh, you might break it!”, they say. “Linux telephony is hard!”, they say. These people are preventing me from doing simple tasks while I’m sitting here wearing my penguin jacket I wore drinking beer with Linus and Alan, y’know what I’m saying? But they say if I single-user boot it and do something useful they’ll immediately invalidate our support contract.

Anyway, Cisco support wouldn’t consider the possibility that we might have volume corruption (like we did on the other linux systems that got whacked at the same time) for long enough that they outran their backup cycle. Yep, that’s right, the backups are all corrupt, and they’ve deleted the ones that weren’t. Damn good thing we made secret backup backups, I guess, and have 30 days instead of the 14 the system is set for.

But ANYWAY they’re willing to support us for a full reinstallation from .ISO, followed by a restore from backups made two weeks ago, so when the install blows up due to volume corruption they’ll have to finally face facts. And then our phone system will work again… and our call center will work again… and we can make money again! Gee, thanks, Cisco! You know how many characters you had to type to get this done right? Let’s see… fsck /dev/sda1, I count 14 characters, one for every day our phone system’s been broken, how cute.

Aiiiiiight, I’m outa here. See y’all Monday!

14 Likes
1058

“Not focused on” is not the same thing as “don’t care about”. Many - possibly most - faculty in any field work to become an expert in the subject because of their love of the subject. That includes both lifelong learning about it, extending the boundaries of the subject through research, and communicating it through both publishing and teaching. However, if you are in the sciences doing your own work often requires maintaining a lab, which in turn requires spending a lot of your time on grant-grubbing and management. Nobody likes to do that, except possibly people who are aiming for the administration track. They would prefer to be doing and even teaching science.

However, teaching is a lot more work than most students (and legislators) understand. Remember that oral presentation you had in that class in college? The one that you worked on for weeks? Lecturers do that several times/week every week, moreover their jobs depend on them doing a credible job of it. Even if you’ve taught something so often that you can give the lectures without notes - this is certainly true for me in Calculus - you are constantly adjusting your lectures, the curriculum is always changing a little bit, and the actual delivery of the lecture is still a big energy drain, especially for introverts (which applies to many faculty - not me, thank goodness). If you are also trying to find funding to support your grad students and lab staff, and also trying to follow your field, and also trying to do some research, that limits the amount of time you have for teaching. For many faculty, they would prefer that this teaching be for students that are seriously interested in the subject, that is, not gen ed or service teaching at the 100 level.

Me, I like teaching the introductory courses; in the current semester I’m teaching Calc 3 (including vectors) and a graduate seminar. Both are rewarding in different ways. And it is true that I no longer work hard to learn my student’s names in the Calc classes, so probably only know around half of them, but I’ve taught over 4000 students in 6 universities over the years, how much of my rapidly-diminishing memory capacity am I supposed to devote to this user database?

5 Likes
1059

So: teaching is hard. Yes, I’m deeply (and personally) aware.

But that’s what the students paying ~$40k/yr are paying for- high quality education isn’t about relaying data, it’s about helping students see connections and acquire skill sets. The students are paying- they’re the customers, and they’re being told (and sold) that they’re buying a quality education. Which is hard to provide, if the people providing it are distracted by all manner of things outside of that teaching.
Indeed, there are some profs who work very, very hard to teach well- and that’s deeply admirable. But it’s become bothersome to me that so many higher ed faculty have had no instruction whatsoever in education- no theory, no practice, no coaching. They’ve effectively learned to teach by mimicking their instructors from their own education. That is, it seems to me, a hard sell at $40k a year.

3 Likes
1060

I hate that everything is expected to be SDETted and that zero QA resources are being devoted to large software projects these days. You can’t automate every single possible thing.

2 Likes
1061

Yeah, our cat’s going to be put to sleep tomorrow.

9 Likes
1062

Oh, man. I’m so sorry to hear this.

Apparently, 2016 is a bad year for both musicians and the pets of BoingBoing readers.

11 Likes
1063

No, they’re really not. Never in the global history of higher education has this been the case, except for some highly questionable for-profit programs.

Most PhD programs nowadays actually put a serious effort into training of their students as teachers.

2 Likes
1064

Genuinely curious: where? Because I’ve never seen anything of the sort.

So… the students are paying for… what, exactly?

2 Likes
1065

In my field, pretty much everywhere. I don’t know where or how you’ve been looking. That doesn’t always mean sending students over to the Ed department to take classes, but it does usually mean close monitoring and mentoring as they gain increasing teaching responsibility, as well as exposure to new ideas in teaching.

Climbing walls? Highly-paid administrators? Pepper spray?

On the academic end, someone - not always the student - is paying for the student to have the opportunity to access certain intellectual resources in certain ways. It is only quite recently that students have paid anywhere near the cost of their education, and in some places (especially parts of Europe) they don’t pay anything. In fact, even today only at for-profit schools does tuition generally cover the entire educational cost, and they are hardly paradigms of quality.

Is the fundamental relationship between a student and her professor in Norway fundamentally different from that of a student and her professor in Michigan? If not, then you can’t call the latter relationship one of customer and merchant, as that relationship clearly does not apply in the former.

“Student as customer” is a simplistic trope people like to use that is really exhausting for those of us working in higher education, as it is inevitably coupled with an assault on our ability to carry out our fundamental societal role, which is the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge. When an administrator uses it, you can be sure it will be followed by an insistence that courses be taught by people chosen for their ability to work on the cheap, rather than their expertise in the field.

Of course there are things that universities spend lots of money on that bear scrutiny. It is something I pay attention to both as the father of a college student and as someone who is frequently involved with campus budgeting. Tuition in the US is too high and an essentially unfair way to finance higher education, but blaming professors for such problems is not helpful.

5 Likes
1066

I haven’t seen that, and I’ve completed all the requirements of a Psychology PhD from a major state university. (Course work and clinicals completed, dissertation submitted, waiting for dissertation acceptance and paperwork signoff.) Most of the people in my program aren’t planning to be teachers; I’d estimate that 70% plan to be (or already are) therapists and are only doing the PhD for increased income, status, or bureaucratic/administrative gain. The rest intend to go into research (as I do.) There’s only one I know of that’s planning to teach, and he took several courses to that end.

1 Like
1067

This notion needs to die a long and painful death, IMHO, especially if you want to continue to production of knowledge across all fields - it’s something that’s worth funding from the state level down, because it’s harder to commoditize. I honestly think that making education an economic transaction, as opposed to a means of bettering oneself and acquiring knowledge, does nothing to help one learn, actually learn. It’s also a 2 way street, as I’m sure you’re aware. It gets tiresome looking out at 46 faces and more than half of them think they have no need to be engaged in class. They seem to expect the prof/lecturer to fill their heads with knowledge rather than doing the hard work of acquiring that knowledge by paying attention to the lecture, doing the reading, asking questions, writing the papers, studying for tests, etc. I don’t think that paying $40k a year entitles someone to a grade. I’m more than happy to agree with you that many profs/instructors/lectures/grad students may suck at their jobs of teaching, but many students suck at their jobs of learning, too.

Honestly, there are two kinds of institutions you’re talking about here - research institutions and teaching institutions (smaller, liberal arts schools, communitiy colleges, etc). At a research institution the primary job of the tenured faculty is research, not teaching. Hence, the lower course load (2/2 typically) with sabbaticals for research and writing. Their primary job is the production of knowledge, not the production of graduates. This is probably more like at institutions where the students pay that much money for an education.

4 Likes