Week ENDs in mess

Being a chair means putting out fires and managing tragedy.

I tried to avoid going to my office today, instead hoping to be able to just go to the north campus to teach my class. Instead, I had to go to the main campus to pick up my class bag (I have my classes in separate bags by subject) and found an email message from a woman my administrative assistant said had been yelling at her about smoking.

Oi, don't get me started. I don't smoke. I hated that my mother smoked and that it killed her. But how much damage, really, can be done by walking through one puff of smoke in the freezing outside air? Control indoor smoking, yes. But outdoors? Sigh.

So this complainer left a long message on my phone, on the dean's phone, and is writing a protest letter to the state of Oregon about various violations on the COCC campus. She though my admin was an art teacher and condemned her for "setting a bad example." It's enough to make me want to take up smoking.

On the horrible terrible side, one of our faculty members had her cancer take a terrible term and is in the hospital. I've got to find a replacement or cancel the classes. Actually, this isn't as hard for me as you'd think because there is one person, a newly minted PhD and son of the admin mentioned above, who might be able to take the classes.

I will be SOOOO glad when I'm no longer chair. I'll be on my feet more in classes and working more, but it won't be as stressful.

Ice Day

After an emergency session at the highest levels, my school canceled all classes that started at 4:00 or after. I got email and phone messages on my cell (text) and home phone, not to mention the warning on the website (which seemed to appear rather late).

So -- I spent some time allowing people into my evening class and posting syllabus and schedule on Blackboard.

Sigh. Soooo exciting. Lead story at News 21.

Redmond at Night

I'm in a strangely shaped classroom in Redmond: thin and long from my left to right. There are only 30 seats so that will keep me from loading the class up. It's located in the building the college rents to the Oregon State workforce division. We have a little side door so they can lock up their lobby at night.

A few folks laughed. I worked the age thing better this time because I used a "nominal group technique" sorta structure rather than just having them meet and talk about the question.

Among the guesses at my age: 50, 47 ("we averaged them all out"), "don't look a day over 25," "none of our business," 55, "Older and wiser than us." One woman (who took the time to chat with me before class) said that it was a trick question.

"Why?" I asked.

"Well, because you're a woman. Because it's the first night. It's difficult to put into words."

"Let me see if I can put words in your mouth. 'you're a woman' ... In our culture woman are not supposed to tell their age because success is related to being young and pretty. So guessing age wrong could be insulting. And 'it's the first night' means that we don't know each other yet and you don't know how to respond, especially since I wield the economic power in the classroom. So, in that way, it's an unfair question."

She said that I'd done a good job of mind reading.

First Class

Well, last quarter I tried something new in my classes: I didn't read my syllabus aloud the first day. Instead, I threatened them with a quiz on it and then just had them sign a note that said that they had read it. Big mistake. I got questions about the syllabus all quarter.

Yesterday, I went over the entire syllabus after kicking out people on the wait list who couldn't fit into the class. I made some jokes. Then I had the students cluster and guess at the answers to three questions:

• Why is Huck teaching this class?
• What gives her the "right" to teach this class?
• How old is she?

That gave me a chance to introduce myself and also talk about decision-making and power relationships. We laughed about the age conundrum. (Guesses ranged from 41 to 59.) Nevertheless, I think I'll change the assignment a bit for tonight's class and give them a chance to work individually first.

Tomorrow

Winter quarter begins tomorrow. Ah, the beautiful chaos of first week! When we all like each other and our future together isn't predictable. It's also a time of nervous energy for me because I have some communication apprehension issues. Fortunately, our first meetings are heavily routinized so that we are free to let our minds wander across our feelings -- do we like each other or not? will these meetings together have purpose and will that purpose make sense? Will we each be committed to doing the work of making a class?

Day Two

What counts as "blogging"? For the purposes of surviving my resolution this year, I will be counting entries in either this blog or Another Bag of Poodle Papers. I will not accept Tweets as blog entries.

One of my Facebook friends turned me on to another New Year's idea: picking a single word for the year. I believe the idea comes from Christine Kane. My word for the year is "Metamorphosis." My New Year's Day ritual is to construct a collage vision for the year and then post that in our kitchen. The collage construction is never completely conscious. I just select images that seem to be necessary and that go together. I'll post a picture of my latest college later in the day.

Happy New Year

I fell down on the job last quarter. I didn't talk about the successes and failures of my classes. Sure, I thought about it, but, hey, I'm a slacker. What can I say.

Some of the data on blogger bloviating shows (?) that folks spend very little time reading any one blog entry. 2005 informal analysis by ProBlogger suggests people spend 96 seconds per blog. { http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/03/17/how-long-do-your-readers-stay-at-your-blog-length-of-stay-statistics/ } I've tried for the past half hour to find more up to date stats but without much luck.

This could be because people don't really notice the passage of time while on a blog, according to the qualitative study conducted by Baumer, Sueyoshi, and Tomlinson of Irvine. www.ics.uci.edu/~ebaumer/chi1132-baumer.pdf

Of course, such a study may be difficult because it takes a lot of work to go to blogger websites, contact them, and ask for their data collection.