Brain is full

 (Far Side, by the great Gary Larson)

So, we have this thing. We have two days - and I MEAN two days, 9 am to 4 pm with a lunch break - of meetings. Sitting in a room being talked at. (Ironically, often some of the talks are lectures on how the lecturer thinks lecture is a bad communication tool or teaching technique)

First day's was today. So no projects photos, sorry, I just don't have the motivation to get up, change, put on the sweater I finished, and photograph it. Maybe later this week.

Anyway. It's exhausting to sit in a room, be on your best behavior (or at least I am, I'm too afraid of getting called-out by a higher-up. A more confident colleague than I in another department had her knitting along and was working on it), and listen to stuff, much of which is marginally related to your experience or what you do.

I don't even feel motivated to take notes. At scientific conferences, I do, because I remember the stuff better, and I feel like there's always the off chance some random talk I hear will have an application as a case-study in one of my classes, so it's good to have notes.

I will say I'm either becoming more cynical or less "permeable." In past years, all of the Be Moar Better Naow! talks got to me because I felt like a finger was being pointed at me. Or that because I was "mostly" lecturing (something I am good at, and I have the evaluation scores and student comments to prove it) I was somehow doing it wrong. But now, I'm looking at the talks and going either:

A. "Wait....I do that already." (A best-practices talk about things like having a syllabus that outlines what your objectives are and when you cover certain topics_

or

B. "This really doesn't apply to me," or "Wait, that contradicts other things I've read about teaching, that doesn't fit with my experience." and I can kind of ignore from there on out. (It did help that my Best Frolleague* Forever sat next to me for part of the talks and when something that made me go "what?" was said, I could look at him and could see that he was going "What?" also. And also sharing snarky comments at breaks....)


(*Frolleague: a colleague you also consider a friend. A little neologism from Ivory Tower Fiber Freaks)

There was the usual "OMG the upcoming generation are all such digital natives that they will REBEL if you want to use an actual, dead-tree textbook!" but the funny thing is, in my department, we have at least anecdotal information (from informally polling students) that many of them HATE e-books, and hate them more strongly than the e-book users dislike paper books. And the idea that we have to totally overturn models of teaching that have worked for generations because these new kids have shorter attention spans, and like to be entertained, and bla bla bla. And part of me is going, "But the good students in my department would consider that slander, and they're in that age group" and part of me is also going, "But why should we cater to someone's desire always to be entertained? Isn't part of becoming a functional adult learning to accept that some things are valuable to do even though they have zero entertainment value?"

(Also, given my experience trying to find the new-textbook-edition chapter art for my PowerPoints online, I really hate e-books. I couldn't find them after a good long time of looking and finally fetched up on a screen that seemed to imply that even though I was an Educator, and even though my university had adopted their textbook, I was still to pay $110 for the privilege of having access to the newest, most updated chapter art. Fine, fine, I'll keep using the previous edition's stuff from the CD-ROM the publisher sent us for free back in 2011.)

We have another day of meetings tomorrow.

Full disclosure: some of the talks were fine. The ones on cross-disciplinary collaboration were pretty interesting. The one on Bloom's Taxonomy was a good review, and it was heartening to hear the guy say, "just because these students are college-aged doesn't mean you can totally assume the lower levels are too low for them; they still need to be tested on Knowledge." One of the assumptions I've seen some make about the Taxonomy is that if you are teaching college students, 100% of your exam questions must deal with the top two levels only....and in some of our classes, that SO does not work.)

I think there are two things about the talks (and the ones in the past) that bugged me: first, the whole One Size Fits All philosophy: Lecture might not work well for you, so fine, don't use lecture. But that doesn't mean there aren't people for whom it works very well.

And secondly, and this is something that I see as sort of a blind spot among many in education and academia: the idea of change for change's sake. Not so much this year, but some of the previous years' talks were all about how We Must Change How We Do Everything Because. But no real reasons were given as to why. To me, change is useful in three situations:

1. When stuff is so bad that anything will be an improvement
2. When you're seriously in danger of burning out due to boredom, and the change you make will not have a major impact on quality
3. When it can clearly be shown ahead of time that the change is likely to be an improvement.

Other than that, meh. I played around a bit in previous years with more "active learning" type stuff (lots of in-class activities, doing stuff as "games," and the like) and it didn't work nearly as well as the lecture-and-question format I use now. Student scores on tests were generally poorer, when I did spot-checks on concepts they didn't seem to be getting them as well. AND my evaluation scores were poorer.  And I don't know. I can't figure out a good reason for changing something that works for my students, works for me, and doesn't bug me to do it. But there are some people in academia who essentially say that if you don't totally change your teaching every five years (or every year, in extreme cases), you're somehow doing things wrong. And again, I want to ask "Why?"

And I found out that on top of everything else, we're being asked/told to make time to view a 1-hour presentation (video, it seems) on How Not To Be A Sexual Harasser. I'm guessing this is because someone, very likely not even someone at my school, screwed up big-time and therefore we all must be "punished."

(I have a fairly strict definition of "sexual harassment," I have to admit: someone who is in a position of power over you making unwanted advances or repeatedly asking you out or making lewd and rude comments to you. An equal doing that I tend to classify as That Person Is Being A Creep and while they need a higher up to tell them to cut it out or else, it's not quite as skeevy as a boss doing it. And a subordinate doing it I classify as Wow That Person Is An Idiot because you don't want to insult the person signing your checks or writing you a letter of recommendation. I'm guessing though that the video covers all manner of Creep behavior and frankly, I'm smart enough to figure out what would be being a creep to someone, and compassionate enough not to want to do that to them. But I'm guessing 90% of the people are that way, the remaining 10% have 5% who are just kind of clueless and might be helped by the video and 5% are hardcore creeps who won't change their behavior unless threatened seriously...)

We had to do this 10 years ago. I hope it's not the same exact video and they're just casting a wide net to account for new hires.

Ah, the joys (not) of bureaucracy.