Friday, July 25, 2014

And more done

Submitted grades yesterday after grading the finals. A few people in each class will be happy (and should be proud of themselves; earning an A in a summer class isn't easy because they move fast and are essentially a regular semester's material in half the time). There are a couple people in one class who will be retaking it, but that's kind of the nature of the beast: it's the "hurdle" class for pre-meds, and for someone fresh out of high school who maybe didn't have to work that hard to be the top of their high school class, it's kind of a shock to find out that yes, you really do probably need to spend a half hour or so every day studying the material in order to learn it.

I'm taking today off. I have some errands to run out of town, and despite my comment about enforced austerity, I'm taking myself out to lunch. (Because I get paid on Wednesday, and I looked at my checkbook last night and realized that the "OMB, I'm broke" is largely in my head. I mean, I shouldn't be *profligate* but some extra work I did this spring coupled with the un-spent tax refund (and, um, some money from my parents: my dad sent me a check to cover half the cost of the new furnace with the justification that he did something similar for my brother and sister-in-law - who, truth be told, have considerably higher expenses than I do and I don't think they make any more money than I do)

Tomorrow I'm going to try to force myself to go in and do fall syllabi, and also update some things like my CV.  (A CV - for curriculum vitae - is like the academic's version of a resume.) We're asked to submit updated ones each fall.

And I had a thought: I wish I knew if my chair was a Weird Al fan. If I knew she was, I would do a preliminary version of my CV in Comic Sans and send it to her. (Closely followed by the real one, of course, but I think anyone who was a Weird Al fan would get at least a chuckle out of that). I may just do a version for myself, for the laughs. (It would only take a couple minutes and it might be worth the amusement.)

Monday and Tuesday I'm going to try to work a bit on the manuscript. Though my fall looks a good bit less dire than I feared it would be - instead of teaching ecology, biostats, 2 lectures of PI, GIS, and two lab sections of PI on top of everything else (ecology has its own lab), because we have an adjunct who needs more hours, I'm not teaching any PI labs. So that means I'm only overloaded by 2 hours instead of 4. (I don't get credit for teaching GIS; it has to do with how team-taught classes are broken out, so every four years I get to teach it "for nothing." But that's okay.)

So I have Monday and Tuesday afternoons (and Friday) totally open at this point, and a gap from about noon until 5 pm on Thursdays, where I can work on other stuff. I've decided as much as possible in the two PI sections to coordinate, i.e. give exams on the same day, so I can use the same BASIC exam with scrambled questions. (The two sections are back-to-back and the chances of people talking to each other are unlikely though not impossible. But I will probably do forms A, B, and C of exams in those classes because they both look packed and you might remember I had an issue with a weasel in a section who actually gamed it so he could cheat. Not that it helped him at all...)


I'm almost done with the Lakkos cloche and I may try to finish the Hermione's Everyday Socks before I leave on break. I did finish the right front of the Belvedere cardigan while invigilating, so I will probably start the left front, and then take it with me on break, with slight hopes of finishing it.

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