Category Archives: Academia

Students who can rock a midterm and make me laugh.

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I may have mentioned once or twice before that I really dig my student. Not only are they really committed to learning the stuff I’m trying to teach them (while working many hours, commuting long distances, taking care of families, etc.), but a bunch of them are also really funny.

That they can maintain a sense of humor while taking a midterm is already impressive. That they can produce really good answers that make me laugh is even better — especially since it makes my experience of grading 110 midterms in a sitting a bit more enjoyable.

Two examples from the most recent midterm that are too good not to share:

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What a nine-year-old doesn’t know about teaching.

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Last night, the younger Free-Ride offspring came upon me grading a stack of quizzes. (Suffice it to say that the younger Free-Ride offspring did not grab a pen and offer to help with the grading, although there was a bit of showing off by explaining the informal fallacies on the quiz to me. “Am I as smart as a college student?”)

But then things took a turn that reminded me that there are some pieces of my everyday experience that are total mysteries to a kid.

Younger offspring: Did I say the right thing to explain what was wrong about the reasoning?

Dr. Free-Ride: Pretty much. See for yourself on the answer key.

Younger offspring: (Noticing the answer key is handwritten, in purple ink) Wait, did you have to write the answers yourself?

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, of course.

Younger offspring: It’s good that you’re smart enough to know the answers.

Dr. Free-Ride: I’d better know the answers, since I wrote the quiz.

Younger offspring: (Eyes widening) You had to write the quiz yourself, too?

Dr. Free-Ride: Kiddo, where did you think quizzes come from?

Younger offspring: I didn’t know.

Video dispatch from the mouth of the cave of grading: why do we write the essay before the lecture?

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Another week, another stack of essays to collect (and read, and comment upon). This week, though, a student actually asked the question in class that I imagine many ask themselves: why are they writing essays on material before I’ve lectured on it, rather than after?

Because I’m too tired to type, I take on that question in a brief video dispatch.

Job opening to support STEM students who are low-income, first-generation college students, or have disabilities

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From Kim Hannula of All of My Faults are Stress-Related comes news of a position being advertised at her fair college as a director of a STEM student services program. Kim says:

We recently received a grant from the Department of Education, to provide support for science/technology/engineering/math students who are low-income, first-generation, or have disabilities. We have a similar program (the Program for Academic Advancement) for students college-wide, but this new program will support math, science, and engineering students. I’m excited about this program – our PAA program does a fantastic job helping students finish their degrees and move on to graduate school or the workforce, and I’m looking forward to working with the STEM3 program.

Here are the details (which you can also find here in the official job posting):

Director
STEM3 Student Support Services Program
Fort Lewis College
Durango, Colorado

Fort Lewis College invites applications for the Director of its new STEM3 Student Support Services Program (a federally funded TRiO program). The position is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education that requires application for renewal every five years. The Director is responsible for organizing and managing support services for 120 academically and/or economically disadvantaged college students. Services include tutoring and academic, career, financial aid, and graduate school advising for eligible students in the STEM disciplines. STEM disciplines include the Sciences (Agriculture, Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry, Exercise Science, Geology, Geoscience, Physics, and Psychology), Technology (Computer Science Information Systems), Engineering, and Mathematics. The Director will also be responsible for approving expenditures, maintaining budget control and responsibility for the appropriate use of grant funds; facilitating and overseeing development and implementation of effective, objective project evaluation; maintaining data collection and a program database for monitoring and tracking of participant progress and outcomes; working closely with the Dean of the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences and the FLC STEM faculty to ensure program delivery will meet STEM student needs; overseeing preparation of fiscal and technical reports for the U.S. Dept. of Education and Fort Lewis College; managing and supervising program personnel; providing intrusive academic advising and monitoring, and financial aid advising to a small caseload of participants; attending STEM Department Chair meetings; and serving on relevant college committees.

Minimum qualifications are as follows:

  • Masters Degree in Social Sciences, Education, Educational Administration, Student Personnel Administration, Counseling, or related field and a BS / BA in a STEM discipline (see above)
  • At least four years experience working with disadvantaged students (low-income, first generation, students with disabilities) in higher education
  • At least two years experience designing comprehensive programs that include courses, activities, workshops, tutoring or supplemental instruction, student monitoring, or other services that promote retention of SSS eligible STEM students at the postsecondary level
  • At least two years experience implementing procedures for delivery of services, data collection, program evaluation or similar procedures that enhance program effectiveness and promote student retention in SSS or similar programs at the postsecondary level
  • At least three years of administrative and supervisory experience that includes budget oversight and management.

Preferred qualifications include:

  • Experience as a disadvantaged (first-generation, low-income, or disabled) college student
  • Experience working with a TRiO program or other program with a similar mission
  • Ability to provide ad-hoc tutoring support, especially in mathematics
  • Successful grant writing and grant management experience.

This position is a full-time, 12 month position. Candidates must be willing to work flexible hours including evenings and weekends. Some travel is required to statewide, regional, and/or national meetings. Salary is $42,000 with full range of benefits. The position is anticipated to begin in November 2010. Individuals with experience as a disadvantaged individual or assisting disadvantaged students are encouraged to apply.

APPLICATION PROCESS
Interested and qualified applicants must submit: 1) a letter of interest detailing experience that meets the minimum and preferred qualifications, 2) a current resume, and 3) the names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers of three professional references electronically to:

stem3directorsearch@fortlewis.edu

Deadline: Complete applications must be received no later than 5:00 pm on Monday, October 18, 2010 to receive consideration.

Fort Lewis College does not discriminate on the basis of race, age, color, religion, national origin, gender, disability, sexual orientation, political beliefs, or veteran status. Accordingly, equal opportunity for employment, admission, and education shall be extended to all persons. The College shall promote equal opportunity, equal treatment, and affirmative action efforts to increase the diversity of students, faculty, and staff. People from under-represented groups are encouraged to apply.

If this sounds like your kind of job (and the qualifications sound like you), for heaven’s sake apply!

If this sounds like someone you know (especially if he or she is currently on the market), please forward this information.

As the new-ish semester kicks her butt, your blogger surfaces for a moment.

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Verily, the new semester is kicking my butt.

Lots of students means lots of name-face correlations to memorize (something I’m still working on), and, of course, lots of papers to grade.

A departmental edict against making more photocopies than are absolutely necessary means I need to spend extra time converting what once would have been handouts into PDFs and web pages, and making sure the links to them actually work. (Also, I need to convince the students for the Logic and Critical Reasoning course to actually bring copies, be they hard or soft, of the homework questions with them to our class meetings.)

It probably doesn’t help that soccer coaching is on my plate and that my team plays weeknight games as well as really-early-Saturday-morning games. (It does help that my team seems to have embraced teamwork from the get-go, so huzzah for that.)

As I’m treading water over here, a couple of things I’m pondering:

  • Sure, I’m saving trees by not duplicating and distributing full syllabi, detailed descriptions of assignments, and such. Probably without all those handouts more students are actually accessing the course websites (where I have always mounted electronic versions of the handouts). However, now I’m wondering whether the barrage of handouts at the first class meeting actually helped to scare away people who didn’t really want to take my class, thus freeing up spaces for the scores of people who were telling me that they were desperate to add it — not just because it filled a requirement for graduation, but because the subject matter really speaks to them.*
  • For a long time, I have graded student work in ink that is not red whenever possible, on account of gestures some of my pedagogical mentors have made to research suggesting that red ink on work they are getting back conveys to students OMG I did it WRONG! and am STOOPID!. This is not, as you might guess, a mindset that is conducive to learning more stuff. However, now I’m starting to wonder if we may be training a new generation of students to recoil from comments written in purple ink.

Things have to settle down soon. Right?

________
* I have my suspicions that the extent to which any of my courses “speaks to” people who want to add it might be contingent on how badly they need it to graduate, how swiftly their planned graduation date is approaching, and how nicely my course fits in their schedule. Not that I’m cynical or anything.

Back-to-school crankiness.

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For the Free-Ride offspring, this is only the seventh school day of the new academic year, and already the weekly newsletter from their elementary school has achieved a tone that could most charitably be described as weary:

This is a large school with over N students. Please consider the priorities of the school staff when making personal requests. It is unreasonable to meet with staff 3 times to make the same request, after you have been denied in person. Thanks you for considering the needs of the other N-1 students when making personal requests for your child.

My thoughts:

  1. If this (or really, anything the school does) succeeds in cultivating a bit more empathy and altruism from the parents, I will be impressed. And surprised.
  2. Was this item in the newsletter prompted by multiple parents engaging in this kind of won’t-take-no-for-an-answer behavior? Or just one child’s parents?
  3. If just one child’s parents, I’m suddenly curious about just what they were requesting, and why that request was shot down so decisively (not to mention why it was so important to keep asking after the first denial).
  4. Also, if just one child’s parents, I wonder if those parents recognize that this paragraph in the newsletter is about them.
  5. Finally, given the priorities of school staff, is what may amount to an admonishment to one set of parents (out of something on the order of magnitude of N sets of parents), a good use of scarce staff time?

Fasten your seat-belt. It’s shaping up to be one of those school years.

The future of higher education, according to the rumor mill.

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I’m getting this third-hand, and I’m always cautious about predictions of future events, but here’s someone’s vision of higher education yet-to-come:

  1. Professors will totally need to incorporate online elements, especially social media elements, into their courses if they are to have a prayer of engaging their students.
  2. They will also need to get students to accept the idea that since the jobs are being outsourced to other countries, they (the students) will need to be ready to move to those countries. (No word on whether students are to be prepared for the prevailing wages in those countries, or on whether those countries are likely to welcome our students as job-seeking immigrants.)
  3. The end of new tenure track faculty.

Excuse me, but I was promised a zombie apocalypse.

Start-of-semester paradox.

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Regular readers of this blog may recall that the California State University system, of which my fair campus is a part, is in the throes of a budgetpocalypse. The state of California just can’t put up the money it used to put up to support the educational mission we are charged to uphold, and one immediate strategy the system has taken to deal with dramatically reduced state contribution is to shrink our enrollments.

I recognize that this seems counterintuitive — you’d think more enrolled students would mean more tuition dollars coming in, which would bean more money available to pay for stuff like instructors and electricity in the classrooms and so forth. However, even with steadily increasing “student fees” (our euphemism for tuition in a university system which was set up to be tuition-free), the amount of money the students are putting up comes nowhere near the actual costs of educating those students. The money from the state is essential to even approaching those costs, so when the money from the states is reduced, it means we can’t enroll as many students. (My understanding is that this has jacked up the demand at the community colleges significantly, but I haven’t seen actual numbers on this.)

Anyway, from a faculty-eye view, the immediate impact of slashed enrollments was a first week of classes during which … it didn’t quite feel like the first week of classes on campus. There was not a line of traffic several blocks long to get into the parking structure. The sidewalks in most parts of the campus were not so congested with new and returning students as to be practically unnavigable. It was not practically impossible to grab a quick bite at the main campus eatery in a 15 minute window before noon.

However, from within my classrooms, you’d get the impression that enrollments have skyrocketed. I have had many more people asking for add codes (and many more students sitting on the floor or standing through the first class meeting) than in any semester I can recall here. I’m still waiting to see what the official policy ruling will be on how many students I’m allowed to add (since going over enrollment targets can lead to punishment of departments that do so).

I guess I’ll try to appreciate how much less time it takes to park, even if I end up having to use the time I’ve saved (and more) grading a larger stack of student papers.

A hopeful sign at work today.

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Seen on my colleague’s office door:

4 Days Since Last Robot Attack

I’m glad we’ve gone at least a few days without a robot attack, as the budget for responding to robot attacks has been slashed to the bone (and the paperwork you need to file after such attacks is terribly burdensome).