Barely tenured

The professorette was grumpy at Commencement

I. Hey! You with the baggy plaid jumper, orange t-shirt, and purple stockings? Your daughter might have deserved that when she was 14, but she really doesn't today. Academic Honors Assembly, ma'am, that's what this is. She's been a good girl here, and you could have done better.

II. The name tag does not go over the nipple.

III. Parents asking about their child can reasonably expect unlimited amounts of praise. Go on, keep asking, and we'll keep talking. Grandparents? At least five minutes each, with amplification services provided as necessary. Aunts and uncles? At most two minutes -- and please do try to listen while we effuse to the parents and/or grandparents.

Keep your eyes and ears open as you walk the halls

I. "YOU TELL HER! YOU TELL HER, that SHE MUST NEVER EVER make this happen AGAIN. YOU TELL HER, that MY CLASS RUNS until THREE PEE EM." The student is a foot taller than the professor, his face blank as he absorbs blow after verbal blow.

I've made him angry myself, in the past. Sure, you can scream at your colleagues (the tenured ones, at least). But like this? At a student? Who doesn't even seem to be the direct target of the wrath?

II. Piled neatly on a side table: a lightly blue-penciled (yet apparently complete) draft of a job application cover letter.

Dear Ivy League Alma Mater,

Please hire me. I've been out here in the sticks for years, and even though the students are smart and even kinda hot, well, I just can't take it any more.

Look at my book! Look, I'm writing another one! And, yes, I'd give up tenure for even a tiny chance at returning to you, sweets.

Love,

Unhappy Associate Professor

I considered e-mailing the author, whom I don't know at all well, who doesn't even work in this building, to let her know I've rescued it. But the date is over two months ago. Not worth it.

III. Over by the window at the far end, a faculty member squints at her calendar and whispers hoarsely to her cellphone:

"Thanks for calling back... yes, I was wondering how long I should expect to be on Lupron before Day 1 happens?... well, last time it was 10 days. I'm an out-of-town patient and I'm trying to plan travel... well, I'm trying to make a plan where it will be the least likely that I'll have to cancel things, but there's a business trip that needs to happen either before or after the cycle... yes, nurse, the cycle will be my first priority... So, seven to twelve days is a not-unreasonable estimate?... Thank you, thank you."

Linkorama

So the Times alerted me to an utterly awful piece in Time. By a "doctor."

Susan had chosen me because she had researched my education, read a paper I had written, determined my university affiliation and knew where I lived. It was a little too much — as if she knew how stinky and snorey I was last Sunday morning. Yes, she was simply researching important aspects of her own health care. Yes, who your surgeon is certainly affects what your surgeon does. But I was unnerved by how she brandished her information, too personal and just too rude on our first meeting.

Every doctor knows patients like this. They're called "brainsuckers." By the time they come in, they've visited many other docs already — somehow unable to stick with any of them. They have many complaints, which rarely translate to hard findings on any objective tests. They talk a lot. I often wonder, while waiting for them to pause, if there are patients like this in poor, war-torn countries where the need for doctors is more dire.

Let me ask: is this really about Google, or about annoying hypochondriac patients? Sure, I can believe that easier availability of information makes those who misuse it harder to deal with. But I also can't imagine what it must have been like to do an IVF cycle in, like, 1990—to take that huge leap, make that huge monetary bet, inject those drugs and cry those tears—without knowing what it had been like, what it is like, for other people going through it. Do I ask my doctors more questions because of what I read on line? You bet. And that's how it should be.

What's really ugly about the article is the open contempt for patients. Sure, he changed "Susan"'s name—but I'm shocked the author left his own on the article.

Meanwhile, there's a James Lang First Person column that I—gasp!— sort of agree with. I'm using Blackboard for the first time this semester too, so far just for doing things I used to hard code on my own page, and it just isn't all bad. Some of the committees I'm also use it for distributing documents, and I'm trying to convince my department to do the same. (We're, um, not meeting enough this semester. No, really, we're not, and it's a problem, and having another forum for group discussions would, I think, be helpful.)

Teaching Ergo 101 again

It's been nearly seven years since I did. Back then I taught a whole lot of sections; it was how my department tried to make my life easier, by giving me lots of reruns early on. Yes, it's a service course, but a place to recruit majors too.

I like teaching first-years. They're so hopeful! You can get them to try anything! (Let's not think too hard about how that's probably even more true outside the classroom...) And during my first three or four years, I got to watch lots of students come in and grow and change (the haircuts! the confidence!) and graduate.

I'm teaching 101 again now. Back in the day I'd put together a pretty structured course, including a sharply choreographed first day: introductions, breakout groups, mini-presentations, discussions. So much activity planned, in fact, that it's now clear that going through the syllabus and expectations only used to take me 10 minutes.

This time around? 35 minutes. Yes, faculty grow and change too, and not always for the better. Those mini-presentations will happen at our, um, next meeting.

Response to a small crisis

A male student comes to your office extremely upset. During the conversation, he starts to cry.

Do you offer a tissue, or not?

(I didn't, but I'm not completely sure why. It mattered, though, that the tears came from academically-focused rage and shame, rather than grief over some outside matter.)

Is the professorette being sluttish, or coy?

I. Extra credit for attending a marginally relevant lecture by a famous visitor? Sure! Except: those points will interact with the existing homework rules so baroquely that if you can figure out that you're in bad enough shape to benefit significantly from the freebies, then you actually deserve some academic remuneration after all.

II. We're back at that decision-making/risk/imperfect-information/(ir)rationality point again, in my "pssst! wanna fulfill some distribution requirements, punk?" course. After we discuss some medical examples, an overconfident student comes up. "Isn't it true for pregnancy tests that like, if it's negative, then that might or might not be true, but if it's positive, then you're in trouble?"

I involuntarily take a deep breath, stare into space for a moment, then answer, "Actually, I know way too much about that example." Even this student isn't so oafish as to ask another question as I furiously gather my notes.

Speaking up

I just spoke at a faculty meeting for the first time. (This is my ninth year at Granolan.)

My point was politely ignored, and I was on the losing side of the ensuing vote, but a crusty near-emeritus introduced himself and shook my hand heartily—"That's what we meant!"—on the way out.

The world's not that small

So today I was planning to make a passing reference during class to this whole six-degrees-of-whatever phenomenon. (Isn't it sad that these folks have only raised $200K or so, after the amount of spam they sent out on Kevin's behalf? And sixdegrees.com has evaporated into a placeholder.)

I figured I should look up the original Milgram paper. Well, Travers and Milgram, actually.

And for a moment, when the Google list first came up, I misread Travers as Trivers. Both at Harvard in the 60's, right? which made it seem extra not-implausible. Boy, would those have been some late-night discussions, huh?

--------------------

Noted on Trivers's website, in a description of preliminary results on a study of bodily symmetry:

... Jamiacan children resemble British adults: women tend to cradle their babies on the left side if their ears are more symmetrical (but not other body parts) while men show no cradlng bias.

Too weird! I've always held Miss T. on the right, which is really sort of inconvenient, since I'm right-handed. And my ears are significantly asymmetric, enough so that it matters for fitting my glasses.

Returning to chaos

Beaker and Miss T. and I spent Christmas, and then some time after that, far away from the confines of Granolaton. First a week with the in-laws out in the country, then a week visiting Dr. Wow at his fancy-schmancy corporate consulting gig, then a couple of days visiting with friends. The social stuff was pleasant but tiring, and the work was bracing and difficult, and it was good to get back home.

But everything is such a mess here! My department's offices were vandalized while I was getting lost in twisty hallways full of overpaid Dockers-clad thirty-somethings. My office, my computer, may have been particular targets. We are putting the pieces together, we are assisting the investigations, and I am full of righteous indignation.

Except that when I sit down at my desk, with a list of crucial e-mails to write, or when I try to pull my wits about me and get back to the damn manuscript, I am overcome by tiredness. We'll never know for sure who did it, they'll never get punished, and the underlying security flaws are not going to get addressed by anyone, ever. Can I just catch up on my sleep now, please?

What not to say at an interview

"So, why are you applying for our crappy little one-semester temp job?"

"Because my advisor thinks I can't get a Research I job and should find out what it's like at a liberal arts school. Oh, and he's cutting off my funding next semester, too. Can I get health insurance here?"

Note: this is our only applicant.