Live blogging the sleepover, 3

They’ve moved on to decorating the plastic cups with glitter glue and chatting about Harry Potter and TV shows.  (Dee to the Snork Maiden: “You really need cable.  You’re missing out!”)  And which of their classmates remind them of characters in The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.  They’re in their pajamas already, so when they run out of cups, I guess I’ll try to move them toward setting up camp on the living-room floor and putting in a movie.

“You know what’s weird about Taylor Swift?  Her eye ends here, and her eye makeup ends here.“

Live blogging the sleepover, 2

When Dee’s and Kay’s moms dropped them off, we chatted for a little while and one of them mentioned that her daughter was “showing a lot of fifth-grade attitude,” and indeed there seems to be more back sass than usual around here, too.  The giant board game also seems like a fifth-grade activity: they’ve made a path of paper around the room, with instructions written on some of the sheets, and they’re rolling the die to advance around the room.  The instructions are all social in nature: e.g., tell about an embarrassing moment, say who you don’t like, what are you most obsessed with, etc.  This must also be a fifth-grade thing.

Live blogging the sleepover, 1

The Snork Maiden is having two friends, Dee and Kay, to sleep over tonight, and from a book of slumber party ideas they picked some ideas which Stubb very kindly helped them realize, including chocolate-peanut-butter-banana milkshakes and a facial made with bananas, oatmeal and honey.  I wanted nothing to do with the latter, but by the time Stubb had coated Kay’s and the S.M.’s faces with the mixture, it was time for him to go to theremin rehearsal and I ended up supervising the cleanup, which, as you can imagine, was messy.  The stuff slid into their hairlines and ears.  Dee declined–her mother had just spent two evenings braiding Dee’s hair, plus Dee is a very sensible person for a ten-year-old–and was merely entertained by the spectacle of the cleanup.

Now the question looms: what comes next?  Make a giant board game, decorate plastic cups with glitter glue, or watch a movie?  Giant board game seems to be winning.

Sick puppy

The New York Times reports on swine flu quarantine areas at U.S. colleges.  Assuming that there still is a New York Times in six to ten years, you know that there’ll be a Weddings & Celebrations story about a couple who met as quarantined students during the swine flu of ‘09.

When pigs fly

So, what kind of position paper did your institution put out about the H1N1 virus?  Anything that doesn’t boil down to “If you’re sick, stay home”?

Lesboprof, one of the early adopters (but, I thankfully add, recovering), points out that this might be a good year to cut back on the opening-of-school meet-and-greets.  We had one of those this week at NLNRU, and we have one later this week at SA.  It’s true, lots of handshaking and finger foods might not be a good strategy during the threat of a pandemic.  Any changes in your neck of the woods, or is it business as usual so far?

The human factor

Imagine that you have recently started a teaching job in one of the hard sciences at a SLAC affiliated with a Christian religious denomination.  (For some of you, this will not be difficult to imagine.  Even I have applied for more than one job that required a statement of faith.)  You are not yourself a member of this church.

At the start of your first week of classes, you post on your Facebook page, “Survived first day of teaching–intro bio at 9 am!”  Several of your friends post variations of “Congratulations!” and “Woo hoo!” since, after all, they are pleased for you and your new job.

And one of your friends posts, “Good for you, even if actual biology is wasted on the disciples of Jesus College.  Hang in there!”

To me, it sounds like they’ve disparaged your new employer, your new students, and your efforts.  Do you respond?  If so, what do you say? 

Does it matter whether you secretly agree?

Does your answer change depending on whether you think anyone associated with Christian SLAC is likely to see your posting?

Rendezvous

The Snork Maiden is in the kitchen, making oatmeal cookies to take to Bestfriend’s house for a sleepover, for she is going to stay with Bestfriend instead of at her auntie’s while I go to my meetup with Stubb this afternoon.  You know we don’t go out of town together without her very often, so I am a little jumpy about it even though geez, she is almost ten, and she loves Bestfriend, and there’s plenty of family backup here in case we need it.  And I will be gone a grand total of 24 hours.  Trying very hard not to infect her with my irrationality about it.  She’s in there singing parts of the recipe–”Now it’s time!  To add the dry!  Ingreee-di-ents!  Doo doo da doo!”

Looking forward to this little adventure, to connecting with Stubb before he gets home and the regular chaos of life resumes.  We are really on the threshold of the new school year–when we get back, the Snork Maiden goes to the dentist, and Tuesday morning I start having meetings galore at SA, and Tuesday night Stubb has theremin rehearsal and blah blah blah.

I’ve revised my syllabi, prepared one of two assignment sheets, and written one of two summer reading quizzes, which is significant advance preparation, for me; I tend to be more of a night-before person.  Part of my urgency is probably that I want to be helpful to New Teacher, whom I think I’ll call Maddie.  She has, as I mentioned, a college-teaching background (she’s ABD), and I think she really can’t quite believe that it’s normal and OK for other people to write some of the stuff that she’ll use in her course.  Dr. Tea and I have already said more than once, “This is the way we do it, honestly; you don’t have to invent everything yourself!  Steal from other people!  It makes you a better teacher!”  I think I wanted to get my first assignment sheet written before she spent hours and hours doing hers.  Now she can crib off mine as much as she likes, and even if she doesn’t use much of it, she’ll still have it for a sense of how much is reasonable to try to accomplish in the opening days. 

The other reason I have done so much already, though, is that I’m genuinely eager for the school year to start, more so than in most other years.  I have a bit more confidence that the NLNRU/SA split will work out, and having taught the whole year in ninth grade last year, I’m excited about deploying my new understanding of what we can and should accomplish in that year.  I’m also looking forward to seeing my colleagues and getting back into the swing of the year. 

We’ll see if the opening meetings drain me of all this energy!

The ten-year nap

My feeling as I left my NLNRU class tonight: the first ten years of teaching truly are the hardest.  After that you are pretty much ahead of almost all your students forever.  You know the subject, how to get the students to connect with it, the dynamics of the classroom, and your own personality.  Only a truly, determinedly difficult student can be a spanner in the works.  Or a debilitating condition of your own.  Or, you know, somebody blowing up (God forbid) your classroom.

Now, I know this isn’t really, permanently true; just last year at SA, I had a student who was pretty much a routine pain in the rear and a liar.  I can’t deal with liars–I suppose some people can, and most of them are substance abuse counselors and lawyers.  I also know that teaching is one of those jobs that keeps you humble because your next great humiliation or failure could be waiting for you around the next corner. 

But tonight, the class went on greased rails, and I can honestly say it’s because I know what I’m doing.  It’s a great feeling, and I’ve gotten to experience it increasingly often in recent years.

(In my experience, the first ten years of marriage are also the hardest, but that’s a subject for another post.)

Tell me a riddle

Inside the Philosophy Factory’s recent post about volunteering for a committee to develop student advising by faculty got me thinking about our situation at NLNRU.  We have a Student Services Advisor who serves all the (roughly) 100 students in our two-year (usually) master’s program.  The SSA meets with every student every semester regarding the student’s choices for the next semester.  As far as I understand it (and I realize that I may not understand it at all), the meeting goes like this:

1. Students meet in order of seniority with SSA so that those who are farthest along in the program choose their courses first.
2. SSA reviews each student’s degree progress with student and they jointly identify courses that need to be taken in order for the student to earn the degree on schedule.
3. SSA preregisters the student for classes for the next semester by writing them down on course lists.  SSA strives to ensure that students are given priority by seniority and genre; that is, if a fiction student needs a particular fiction seminar, that person takes precedence over a poetry student who would just like to become more well-rounded.
4. Students in their final year present SSA with a form signed by the faculty member who will serve as adviser on the thesis, and SSA preregisters the student unless the adviser already has the maximum number of students, which usually causes phone calls, discussion, and negotiation.
5. SSA sends all the students an email reminding them to register for the classes for which they’ve preregistered.

The only really disturbing thing is that most students are not also receiving any formal advisement by a faculty member regarding, you know, which classes will best prepare them for their actual artistic and career goals and for the theses they are planning to write.  Sometimes a student will say, in SSA’s hearing, “SSA said I should take the Russian Novel class this semester and I…” which SSA will always interrupt with, “I never tell students to take a class.  What I said was that if you took Russian Novel in fall, you would have enough Fiction prerequisites to take Advanced Fiction Workshop in the spring.”  Which strike me, as a faculty member, rather like an utterance of one of those seventeenth-level clerks in Dostoevsky: SSA always seems at pains to stay on the scheduling side of the line and never to venture into the admittedly fuzzy territory of what the students should be taking for artistic/academic/professional reasons. 

I can see that it’s good to have a person who puts the schedule and the students’ progress-toward-degree first.  I’m always reminded of SSA’s usefulness, too, when we are discussing something like raising the enrollment cap on one of our courses.  SSA is literally the only person at the table who is capable of staying focused on the fact that raising the cap on one course will suck students out of other courses and who knows which courses might be rendered vulnerable to cancellation if that happens.  (We don’t have to cancel a course that has three people enrolled, but someone will have to field an uncomfortable call from the dean’s office.)

However, we have got to get some decent faculty advising in place.  Some students get good advice informally, by asking other students and faculty, although I’m not sure that they outnumber the students who get bad advice by the same method.  It seems to me that the very act of formalizing the advising will improve it if we make the effort to document what was said, by whom and to whom.  If I advise Jane Student in fall of 2009 to take the Russian Novel course and I write on her advising sheet whatever it was that Jane said that made me think that Russian Novel would be an invaluable contribution to her development as a writer, surely we’re a little farther along than with SSA telling her that it satisfies a prerequisite and some tipsy fella she met at the opening mixer telling her that she’ll love Professor Petrovsky.  Right?  Boy, I hope so.

Look again

This might not matter to you if you read this blog in Google Reader, as I read most blogs, but I’m trying on a new theme, color scheme, etc.  Not sure it’s really me, but it’s certainly different.  Comments welcome.