Category Archives: Passing thoughts

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).

Start-of-semester mad dash.

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Well, summer sure ended quickly (although suddenly the weather is downright summery — thanks, irony!). Less than 48 hours from the beginning of classes, my to-do list looks something like this:

  • Update syllabus for the “Philosophy of Science” class I’ve taught for several semesters.
  • Update web pages for that “Philosophy of Science” class.
  • Set up materials in Desire2Learn* shells for the two sections of that “Philosophy of Science” class that I’m teaching this term.
  • Finish writing syllabus for the “Logic and Critical Reasoning” course I’m teaching for the first time this semester.
  • Create web pages for “Logic and Critical Reasoning”.
  • Set up materials in Desire2Learn shell for my section of “Logic and Critical Reasoning.”
  • Update my homepage (primarily to reflect/link to courses I’m teaching this term and to list my current office hours).
  • Find out what the heck my college’s official policy on add codes is this semester, the better to inform the throngs of people turning up wanting to add my courses what (if anything) I can do for them.
  • Verify that textbooks are actually available in the campus book store (and not mislabeled and/or mis-shelved).
  • Verify that necessary classroom equipment is functional in my classrooms.
  • For each of my courses, create 1-page handout giving overview of course requirements and URLs for detailed syllabi, assignments, etc.
  • Make offerings to the deity that controls department photocopier in order that I may successfully photocopy the 1-page handout for each of my courses.
  • Put in request for the courses I’d like to teach spring semester.
  • Try really, really hard to dodge any new committee assignments.
  • Brace self for inevitable unpleasantness of the details about what else needs to be cut this semester in light of the fact that the budget assumed a 10% increase in student fees** and that student fees actually only increased by 5%.***
  • Bring a sweatshirt to office, which seems at present to be a full 30 oF colder than the ambient temperature outside. (Bring thermometer to office, to track meat-locker-like temperatures in which it seems I’m expected to work.)

By the way, these are just the items requiring the most urgent attention — the full to-do list is much longer.

We’ll see what I can get done before the last minute has passed.
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*Desire2Learn is a course management system, like Blackboard or WebCT (which Blackboard bought and assimilated). My university adopted it because it seems to do better on accessibility issues (like making content easy to navigate for students with visual impairments with a screen reader).

**In the California State University system, of which my university is a part, “student fees” is the euphemism for tuition. Tuition is spoken of euphemistically because until the early 1990s there wasn’t any. Now there is, and it seems to increase substantially every term.

***That 5% increase, however, is enough to make life really hard for a lot of our students.

Practical chemical engineering.

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It’s day two of my training course, and as I contemplate my mug of decaf, I am suddenly flashing back to a question that was rumored to be part of the chemical engineering qualifying exam in my chemistry graduate program. As it’s an intriguing problem, I thought I’d share it here:

In the dead of winter, a professor sends his grad student out into the cold to fetch him a hot beverage from the cafe. “Coffee with two creams, and make sure it’s HOT when it gets to me!” the professor barks.

Shivering from fear as much as cold, the grad student procures a 12-ounce styrofoam cup of hot coffee and two little containers (maybe 20 mL each) of half and half at the cafe. To maximize the temperature of the coffee when it is delivered to the prof, should he add the half and half to the coffee before he walks it through the cold or after?

Feel free to work together on this problem, and please show your work in the comments.

Just before I woke up this morning

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… I had figured out a really elegant way to test an hypothesis, complete with two separate treatment groups and a control group. While the population under study was blog readers, I had come up with a reasonable plan to protect the human subjects, even mentally drafting the IRB short form.

I was very excited at how well it was all coming together. And then I woke up.

Which means I have no earthly recollection of either the hypothesis or the clever strategy for testing it.

Sexiest scientific couple?

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The other day, a friend and I were having a chat about the curious inclination people (or at least bloggers) have towards compiling lists of sexy scientists, or sexy atheists, or sexy what have you. (I’m guessing it’s related to the same impulse to rate the “hotness” of one’s professors with the handy chili pepper icon on RateMyProfessor.com.)

That these lists are often assembled by men and populated by women obviously means there’s a certain narrowness to the definition of “sexy” in play. When the list is meant to identify the sexy (female) members of a profession that is largely male dominated, the focus on traits that are not necessarily viewed as enhancing one’s professional worth — indeed, traits that can end up being used by one’s colleagues as an excuse to discount one’s professional talents — can make them much more annoying than amusing.

Still, in the course of this chat, my friend jokingly suggested, “We should put together a calendar of the sexiest scientific couples!”

“There’s only one I could nominate,” I replied.

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Unprovoked YouTubery.

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It’s Friday, I’m still working on stuff that I was supposed to be done with by now, and the temperatures in the vicinity of Casa Free-Ride have climbed into the uncomfortable range that is more compatible with having a cold beer (or lying motionless) than with slogging through the stuff I’m working on.
This calls for some videotainment!

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In which Socratic parenting backfires.

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I’ve been busy in the three-dimensional world, where I am in the middle of committing an unnatural act for an academic: writing out every word of a lecture. (As weird as it is, it makes the video production of that lecture easier — more about that in the fullness of time.) In between such unnatural acts, however, I’ve been schlepping the sprogs to their summertime activities.
Today, during one such schlep, the following exchange occurred.

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