Computer Science at Kent - School of Computing ...



Surveys for Tuesday 15 March 2011Uid 11Another Tuesday, so same classes as February. Attendances down, presumable due to other modules having deadlines sooner than Moving Image Technology. Met for coffee with colleague returning from 6 months off sick before lecture. For the second week in a row, I got the grand total of 7 students out of 100+ attending. As this is the last lecture I will give on this subject this academic year. As it is a coursework-only assessment module, students assume that lectures are not worth attending because there is no exam in the subject (despite the fact that I talk a lot about the practice of film-making...). Not only is this the last lecture in that subject that I will give this year, but my last lecture ever in that subject, as I have applied for - and been approved for- early retirement, as of 31st July. Interesting how light my step, how unfurrowed my brow, and how good my sleeping patterns have become. After the lecture to the select few, I met with another colleague to discuss a teaching and learning project in the Faculty, which needs to be implemented before I leave. Following this, I spent a happy hour throwing away paper that I will no longer have recourse to read ever again. There is lots more to sort through, even though I have tried to be electronically mediated as much as possible in the last decade. Finished off my teaching with a 2-hour long tutorial with few students again - maybe next week they will start to panic, as they will then have just over 2 weeks to make their two treatments of a film... Went home, did NOT do any work and happily dozed off in front of the 10 o'clock news. I fear that my reports for the rest of this project are going to be insufferably jolly - I appreciate how fortunate I am to be offered money to leave my job,and be able to get a lump sum and pension from theTPS. My timing to leave HE could not have been better, with all the talk about changing pensions and the attack on financing and staffing that will really start to bite next academic year.Uid 12I spent the day at a conference. It started with a keynote which basically "bigged up" Russell Group institutions and essentially wrote off some elements of the rest of HE in one fell swoop. A depressing picture of the future of HE that I hope won't prove as accurate as I fear it might. Thankfully the mood improved and the highlight for me was a session on student engagement, showcasing some great examples of actively engaging students in change with institutions, co-presented by the students themselves. At my own institution we have suddenly been charged with implementing a massive cross-institutional change at what feels like a completely unrealistic speed. Sadly I suspect student involvement in the process will be minimal and cursory - in spite of our emphasis on the "student experience". But it is good to know it does genuinely happen sometimes. Uid 13The day started early with taking my daughter in to school for a makeup Chemistry test before 7:30. Traffic was horrible, so I didn't get in until almost 9 (typically, it's about 25-35 minutes to drive in). Nobody came to office hours 9-11, so I worked on grading midterms in my data structures class. I realized that the programming task I assigned was far too difficult, so I began grading using a rubric that addressed the key issues, rather than asking if the code would work. The task involved making a copy of a doubly-linked list. Only two students (out of 30) wrote correct code. Most students stumbled on traversing both the source list and the returned list, so I gave credit for *recognizing* all the issues and including code for addressing each issue, even if the code was incorrect. At 11, we had a visting speaker in CS Education! Chris Hundhausen gave an interesting talk about the use of studio-based learning in CS1 and HCI classes. I met briefly with my data structures TA at noon. It was disappointing that *her* understanding of data structures is weak, so I am having to review her grading often. I continued to grade during my normal 1-2 meeting with one of my PhD students. She had a doctor's appointment. I met with my second PhD student at 2. We discussed his job search, as well as his most recent interviews. I graded until 4 pm, then went home. I ended up doing my email load that night when I finished grading.Uid 14Woke up at 6:30, which is extra difficulty with the change to DST. Did the morning routine of shower, cheerios, Web comics, news, and blogroll. At campus by 7:40 for my 8am class. Good class today. On Thursday, the students will pitch their six-week projects, which they will start next week and will take them to the end of the semester. First I gave them some time to form their teams, which happened predictably since students do not seem to like standing up and moving. I gave them an exercise to design a remote control as implemented on a smartphone, with no other constraints, and let them go at this for 10 minutes or so. After a brief discussion of our ideas, I introduced "Human-Computer Interaction" as a field of Computer Science and talked about User-Centered Design. (The course is supposed to include 1 contact hour of HCI as an intro to later in the curriculum. I do more.) I introduced a five-step iterative Design Thinking process, as formulated by George Kembel (Stanford d-School). Then they did the smartphone remote exercise again, this time explicitly addressing the steps of the process. After another debriefing we were out of time. One student, a senior taking this sophomore-level class as an elective, stayed after to talk about the university's IP policy, since his team's 6-week project is something he'd like to continue after the semester is over. It was a good discussion, and I think he was glad with what I told him and that I was on his side. 9:30, after class, grading. The students had to do an evaluation of other teams' submissions to the last project, and this proved to be useful. The results were good, partially because I gave a minimum word count and told them that both the idea and articulation would be graded. I will definitely use this exercise again. At some point while grading, I get a call that there's a prospective student on campus who would like to meet someone from my department, so I schedule a 1pm appointment with him. Finished grading around 10:10, giving me an awkward amount of time until my 10:45 meeting. Spring Break was last week, and I started up an Android project just to keep my chops. I am immediately tempted in this window to go back to that project despite the backlog of "real work" to be done. I am saved from almost certain temptation by a surprise visit by an alumnus, returning a book be borrowed over a year ago. He has 17 minutes on the meter, so we run over for a coffee and a chat. Great to see him, and that gets me right to my 10:45 meeting. Which, of course, is postponed. The guest, a high roller from the West coast, is missing, and no one knows where he is. One of my old students is working in the office where the meeting is to be held, so I chat with him a bit, then find out that the guest is missing, and then go to my office to catch up on some work. Of course, 5 minutes later, he shows up and I head back across campus. This meeting is really to impress upon the guest that my institution is interesting and doing good things in the mobile space. I show some work I did 1.5 years ago, which to me is stale, but he seems to like it. The folks organizing the meeting are happy to have me give a good presentation, I think. I try to be brief and punchy, emphasizing what parts have lasting value. After me, a student talks about a project she was involved with. I think I can safely say here that the results are embarassing. Five faculty were given load to team-teach a course of about 12 students, in which they worked with the city to develop a mobile application portal. "Amatuerish" doesn't even begin to describe it. It's painful not only to see the results, which are completely disconnected from the state of industry or best practice, and also the student's presentation, which is merciless in length and dwelling on insignificant details. In her defense, I can only assume that the five faculty involved really knew nothing about mobile experience design or app development, because there were problems galore. The visitor was amazingly accepting of the results, even praising parts of it, and I honestly could not tell if he was secretly as ashamed as I was that anyone calls this "applied research." (Many folks at my institution say that this is our strength. Today it hit me why this bothers me: applied research is industry. That's where that happens. The folks that make this claim are just looking for an excuse to not know what they're doing without the repercussions of dealing with the market, so the institution eats their failure costs.) I head back to my office at 12:10 or so to eat lunch, leftovers from Sunday night. I catch up on some emails and send a few to recruit students for a project taking place next Spring, and the prospective student comes by. Nice kid, there with his dad, very to-the-point: they are considering my school (mid-size university, primarily undergraduate) or the Big 10 school on the other side of the state. I talk about class sizes, grad school, interaction with professors, and undergraduate research, and I think they appreciate my candor. 1:30 they're gone, I do a few emails and head across campus to my 2:00pm meeting of my Future of Education Task Force. There are about a dozen on this task force, and by 2:10, there are four of us there. (Naturally, including the two people who I think are least qualified to be there.) The chair asks if we should postpone, and I suggest moving some of the work asynchronously to Google Docs. One more shows up and we start a discussion, and it turns out quite well. I'm happy my somewhat-selfish advice wasn't taken. Honestly, I was just tired---between the clock change and starting the work day so early, I just did not want to sit in that room for three hours, but I did, and it was fruitful. The end of this task force's mission is in sight, and I think we will have a powerful set of recommendations for the university's strategic planning commmitee... which I am also on. I get home at 5:20 or so, and my wife and visiting in-laws have just returned. I find out that my son was in trouble for misbehaving, so he's in his room for the night. So, they're all as beat as I am. I retreat to my home office to catch up on emails from the 2-5 window while they get dinner together, then I come down to pour beers and eat. Good conversation, some work-related some not. After cleaning the table I check my messages and see a quuestion from a student about the project pitches they're working on, so I make sure to send him a quick and appropriate response. I'm dying to play a new board game, but my wife is beat from the day, so we watch some fun sketch comedy on NetFlix, and then I come upstairs to work on this. Next: bed. EDIT: Nope, forgot that I have to evaluate a core course proposal since we're having a college curriculum committee meeting tomorrow. C'est la vie.Uid 17Daily Activity Log Tuesday 15 March 2011 This the examination week for the winter term, so there aren't classes scheduled. My class's exam is on Thursday, and getting it written is high on my to-do list. I'd be perfectly happy if I never had to write another exam in my life. I could happily go on teaching in the classroom, long into my dotage. But I find writing exams to be a lot of hard work. I mentioned in last month's report that a colleague of mine, someone who caught the teaching bug by being my "head TA" as an undergraduate and went on to become arguably the best teacher in our department, decided to leave the university in pursuit of greater financial security. The department has somehow found the money to hire a replacement (though they're only certain they can fund it for a year). At SIGCSE, I saw or met four people who would be fine candidates for this job, people who already have some successful experience teaching at the university level. I had been dubious about our finding anybody who could hold a candle to my departed colleague, but now I'm quite hopeful. The most senior of these potential replacement candidates, a mid-career guy at the main state research university of another state, has indicated interest in our position because it's closer to his family. I wrote him a lengthy message about our job and our program. I also dealt with a mountain of paperwork for travel reimbursements, four different trips in the last month (including SIGCSE). Early in the afternoon, there was a meeting of the task force to explore alternatives to our current lineup of first-year classes. Of the eight people on this task force, only I and one colleague have ever taught introductory CS courses; between us we have some 60 years of experience (70, depending on how you count); the rest barely have two years among them. I'm finding these meetings an extraordinarily frustrating experience; my colleagues are all smart, and they think that qualifies them to make decisions about first-year education. They have so little clue about what intro students are like that I'm finding it impossible even to bring them up to speed in the context of a committee meeting, where people speak for just a minute or two at a time. How does one distill the understanding gained from 30 years' experience into a sound bite? I think that the portion of the curriculum that I've developed over the past seven years or so is definitely along the right lines; I worry that any decision made by this committee will be a move in the wrong direction, and that I'll finish out my career teaching courses that are worse than what I'm teaching now. In preparation for this meeting, each of us is to gather information about the first-year curriculum at some other institutions. I gather the info for my assigned campus---a sister campus in our system, one whose curriculum is along the same lines as the portion of ours that I favor. Later, I meet with my department chair and someone from the fundraising office on our campus. The issue was determining the schedule and amount for disbursement of a scholarship in the name of a departed colleague (in both senses; he left us for a different job, and subsequently he passed away). Apparently our campus central fundraising office keeps the funds for these awards, skimming some of the interest off the top. Towards the end of the day, I looked at my schedule for the next couple of weeks. My daughter, who's away at college, will be back home for one week of her spring break, and unfortunately that coincides with the first week of our spring term. I have scheduled obligations on every day of that week, which makes me incredibly resentful of my job. This is about the only week I'll see her between January and next December, and it will have to be just the occasional stolen hour.At home in the evening, I continue work on my final exam for Thursday. Uid 21I did not keep a time long on 15 March 2011, because I spent theentire day at the Genome Assembly workshop. I woke up early (about6:20), and left the house by 7:30, arriving at the workshop by bikejust at 8 a.m. when it started. I spent the entire day listening toresearch talks, chatting with people about their research at breaksand over lunch, and asking questions---lots of questions.This workshop is in an area I've toyed with, but not done much seriousresearch in yet. It is one of two I'm considering switching to, bothof which I'll be teaching grad classes in next quarter (starting in 2weeks!), so I need to gather as much knowledge as I can.I got home around 9 p.m., watched an episode of "Whose Line is itAnyway?" with my family and fell asleep.Uid 2206:00 Ouch, horrible stiff in my back today. It's probably due to the heave exercising I've been doing lately. I need to be doing stretching exercises often today. At least once per hour. Look, it's ??’17?° today 06:30 Breakfast 07:18 Leaving for work 07:50 At work, checking email - I still don't agree with the angle of this paper, need to convince the other person that I'm right :D 09:00 Time to start working on the material for my online course in Python. Unfortunately the system the university has decided to use for these online courses is really bad - example: you can't have two windows open at the same time. Come on, it's not 1995!!! Avoiding the system and instead using a wiki installed on my private domain - in 15 minutes I'm able to do about the same amount of work that I'm able to produce in 90 minutes using the university system. 14:37:25 I like writing material for an online course using a wiki, it's really nice to be able to simply refer to a page that discuss a subject in detail and not have to try to make sequential story about the whole thing. So for me as the author it works nicely ?€? but I'm uncertain that it works for the students. I know that I have some problems learning/reading from a wiki so I'm pretty sure that I need to provide a sequential "baseline" with links into the wiki. Well, it's the first time I'm doing anything like this so I better be flexible and check with the students during the course to see how it work for them. 14:43:20 Opps, looks like I need to do some rescheduling of my time this evening. I hope the logistics work out for the whole family. Not that I'm complaining, I need to write something tonight and this would get me some more time to do that. Actually it's kind of interesting, I did some interviews last year and one of the persons I interviewed recently sent me an email asking me to write something about what impressions I got from her etc. Kind of fun but also difficult. 17:55:48 Back home again. Dinner done, relaxing in the sofa while waiting for the washing machine to finish. Watching/listening to the news from Japan, it doesn't look good at all. Spent the rest of the evening washing clothes and trying to write down my impressions of this interview - doesn't sound that difficult but it is. Son came home and announced that he was going to a Brazilian Ju-Jutsu camp this weekend ?€? which means that I miss my Iaido and Jutsu sessions this weekend, perhaps even the exercise session on sunday, in worst case my 5-6 sessions this week turn out to be 2 ?€“ not happy about that. Continued to think about how to use the wiki for teaching, the natural thing is to add a lot of facts about programming, how to do this, how to do that, how an if-statement look like etc. But that wouldn't work, they would never learn from that - so I'm currently thinking of having two types of pages, the reference pages that describe the "facts" and "tutorial pages" that takes you through the learning with links to the reference pages. I go with that for a while and see what happens. Watched an episode of House and then to bed.Uid 23I am getting distressed, and distressing, messages from our present and former distance study students in Japan, all of whom I e-mailed yesterday. They are shocked and worried. One had to lie on a supermarket floor as he could not stand during Friday's ghastly earthquake, on top of his young daughter to shield her as things flew off the shelves and they thought the ceiling might collapse...I lived in Japan many years ago and remember how disconcertng even small earthquakes were; this one must have been terrifying. Also, just had an e-mail from another student in Bahrain who should be taking an exam for us today but can’t because of the State of Emergency just declared there. We have former students in Libya too; goodness knows how they are faring in the awful chaos there... The world suddenly seems rather small and very frightening. Back in my secure bit of it, today was a busy teaching/meeting day in our Week 9 of 10 of this Spring Term and I’ve got also an ‘ethical’ decision to make. I spent 90 minutes this morning in a working party of our Uni Sub-committee for Student Support discussing how we can help personal tutors advise students with major mental health problems (chronic or in crisis). Universities do not have the resources to support students with these problems, but we are getting more and more of them... The usual issues arose: students are over 18, so how much chasing should we do if they do not respond to requests to meet? What is our duty of care? What about international students struggling with cultural issues/stigma re mental health? What about suspended students whose doctors/family say they are fit to return but then clearly cannot cope when they do? Etc. etc. We are trying to come up with some protocols and more detailed guidance/information for personal tutors. After that, MA students presented their 2-day simulation products. Fancy PowerPoints – much better than mine! I need to go on a PP course - or maybe my son can teach me! Some good, thoughtful products too. The choice of grouping obviously worked well (mixed nationalities/age/work experience). Worked through lunch (missing a PhD student presentation, sadly – just can’t do everything at this stage of the term), finishing preparation for my BA class, which ran from 2-4. We are discussing their literacy practices, so had some interesting discussion on what they think of Twitter and Facebook and the amazing changes in literacy practices they have seen in their young lives. The ethical issue came in here – we’ve been called to strike next week, over changes to our pension provision. This is on two days when I teach this delightful BA finalist group (their last classes) and have to hold an exam for the MA students based on the simulation products they have just presented. Also, I have PhD students, who work away, coming in next week for our PhD Conference on Friday, who can only see me on one of the strike days...What to do? I voted against this strike, as I think it will be a public relations disaster at a time so many people are losing jobs and our graduates are having a hard time finding any. I can just see the headlines about 'ivory tower academics', can't you? I’ve always supported the Union in the past, striking and picketing when necessary, but this time less than a third of those eligible to vote nationally did so (and at our Uni that was about a fifth); of those, about 2/3 voted for the strike (half at my Uni) – so not much of a mandate. Can I cross a picket line? Should I strike, but re-schedule my classes, so the students don’t suffer? Also, the Union rather lost my confidence when they balloted us on strike action last year for an 8% pay rise. 8%!! Only Vice-Chancellors and bankers think they can get away with that sort of pay increase in the current economic crisis! We finished the teaching day with a talk from a colleague from another university to our discipline-specific seminar group – very interesting topic, based on an ESRC grant. I know she has a very heavy teaching load. How does she get the time to do such good research?? Then finished marking an MA dissertation for a colleague. This got an extension in September and so missed the October exam boards. It has been neglected until now, because of our workload, and can't, in any case, be externally examined until June. However, we are supposed to return work within a month of submission. Also, we are failing this dissertation, so the lateness of the marking could become an issue, I suppose, if the student complains. We are just drowning in a backlog of work at the moment. Have eaten something that disagreed with me again so limped home at 7.30 and went straight to bed. Compared to many folk around the world on this day, I'm lucky to have a home/bed to go back to! All in all, a bit of arollercaster of a day, emotions-wise. What a year to be doing this Share project in!Uid 24March 15, 2011The day starts like many others, with my wife getting up first sinceshe needs to leave first. For me this is spring break (yeah!) butthere is still work to be done.I got the news this morning that my cousin has three blot clots, onein each lung and one is the leg. He's expected to be OK, but thatwas bit of a shock. He is 23 years my senior, could always fixanything, and was strong as on ox. Age and life affect everyone, itseems.Next thing to do: get my youngest off to school. Then I head in fora training session on our new registration/advising system. I spendquite a bit of time interacting with a student who is proving to bedifficult, difficult to the point where I have involved theinstitution's office responsible for student conduct.I thought a little about the project I will be giving my one classwhen they come back from spring break, communicated with my grader onhis grading of homework, and still start grading midterm examstomorrow.There were several other personal things to take care of, which areprobably not so interesting for anyone else, except that we had a gasleak at 23.00 and had to call the gas company to come a fix it. Thatwas a unexpected pleasure (!)Uid 25What is significant in my (academic) life right now? After months of dithering around at more senior levels we have had the green light to launch a new Diploma and Masters programme. This is an interestingly mixed message. At one level it is great,because it's intellectually exciting and also suggests that initiative is not yet dead. On the other hand we will have to grow it slowly becuase as a team we have absolutely no chance of scaling back what we do or recruiting extra people to help. This is part of being a tiny team with a central function. One colleague,a serial volunteerer (I recognise this in myself too) will burn out if she takes on any more, so there are tactful conversations to have to make sure she is not disappointed about not shouldering too much. And what if the whole thing is a massive flop? I must confess that 15th March is a crammed day,so I have started writing this on 14th March. I wrote no entry for 15th February because there was barely a nanosecond spare to think, let alone write.....Uid 26Ohhhh. Today was the first day back after spring break. Break was very productive as I worked several days on a grant project and spent the rest at my favorite conference. (Great to see you Sally!) However the big news of today was that I had to tell my department chair that I had been accepted into a PhD program and would be going half-time as of fall. I had already worked out the deal with the Dean, but chair knew nothing. Had to tell the chair today as he was getting ready to release the fall teaching schedule, and my plans disrupt the schedule completely. Considering that he's losing one of his best teachers and the coordinator of two programs, he took it pretty well. Although "stunned" is the first reaction, which lasted about 2 minutes. He still hasn't quite figured out what's going to happen to me in the fall (he wants me to continue on as coordinator, dean doesn't), but it will eventually be sorted out. Other than that, it was a pretty typical hectic day. Taught intro programming class at 8:30 where I returned a test where the average was 60.5. And I really thought the test was quite easy... Then we had lab, where, naturally, the undergrad assistant hadn't run through it yet so we were discovering errors during lab which I had to correct on the fly. Then lunch followed by prepping the rest of my teaching materials for the week (and meeting with chair). Also had an accreditation preparation meeting with the administrative assistants for gathering materials for display. Late afternoon was time for meeting with capstone class students. Groups came by to talk about issues, problems, progress. Running this course is like being a project manager for 6+ mini-projects. Not something I signed up for when I decided to switch careers into academia. Left work (30 minutes early!) and went to my Mom's house for dinner with the family. Quite nice to see everyone after my 10 day trip and catch up on all the goings on within the family. Plus it was good home-cooking, that I didn't have to cook. Then it was home to check email and plan the schedule for the next day. Talk to you next month...Uid 28This is the 9th week of the semester – it has all passed very quickly. Cycling into work was something of an ordeal this morning as my legs had stiffened up from hill-walking in Wales at the weekend. Climbing the stairs to my office was even more painful but it was all worth it for the wonderful, exhilarating scenery and meeting up with old friends. Jobs for today were sorting out an external examiner for a PhD; seeing an MSc student to discuss their dissertation; preparing and delivering a 1st year programming lecture; moderating some exam papers for the third time (sigh) and updating marketing material for the existing MSc courses. I delivered the programming lecture – festival week in town meant that attendance was poor. Those that were there worked on the weekly exercises. It has become more and more prevalent that some students can’t work for more than 10 minutes without checking their Facebook account. So far, I’ve not commented on this as it’s their choice. However, I’m starting think I ought to intervene. Concerns at the moment are introducing a new MSc course for international students, so we need to think of the staffing and marketing of this. We are also undergoing a programme revalidation – balancing efficiency of delivery and shortage of staff with the desire to introduce new and exciting modules and give students more choice. There is an ongoing debate about whether we should reduce the length of the final year dissertation to a single semester module, halving its current length. The University is trying to introduce efficiencies and recognises that supervising dissertations is expensive. On the other hand, students develop academically from completing a full dissertation. None of this will be settled without more debate, so I shut down my computer and carefully negotiated the stairs (going down is worse than climbing up with my stiff legs) to go home. Uid 30Spring Break is this week! No more pencils, no more books, etc. However, I did finish up a paper and submitted it today. There's grading yet to be done sometime this week. Husband could not get away this week, so I'm relaxing around the house, reading fluffy books. Graduation is a mere 8.5 weeks away! On a political note, here in Wisconsin, there's been an uproar recently about the Republican-majority state senate and assembly abolishing collective bargaining rights for public employees, including teachers and nurses, but not firefighters or police officers. What I have found surprising is the number of people who quiz me about the impact of all this on me and my college when I work for a private institution! They honestly thought all the private colleges and universities in Wisconsin were part of the "state system". With such ignorance as this, it's no wonder we have the government we have!Uid 30Spring Break is this week! No more pencils, no more books, etc. However, I did finish up a paper and submitted it today. There's grading yet to be done sometime this week. Husband could not get away this week, so I'm relaxing around the house, reading fluffy books. Graduation is a mere 8.5 weeks away! On a political note, here in Wisconsin, there's been an uproar recently about the Republican-majority state senate and assembly abolishing collective bargaining rights for public employees, including teachers and nurses, but not firefighters or police officers. What I have found surprising is the number of people who quiz me about the impact of all this on me and my college when I work for a private institution! They honestly thought all the private colleges and universities in Wisconsin were part of the "state system". With such ignorance as this, it's no wonder we have the government we have!Uid 31Morning includes a shower (dr appt today) and coffee out before my husbandleaves on his trip to Japan. Realize I have service work (ranking awardcandidates) due by noon today, which I should have done last night insteadof shopping online for a case for my new Kindle. Time management fail.I walk home from the coffee shop to put up my hair and grab a can ofsoup for lunch. I don't make it to the office until 8:45. But I prepfor my intro class in less than 15 minutes and try not to feel guiltyabout spending some of my "spare" time looking at Facebook.Decide to get the service work done with during my nominal research time,since I would just worry about it while attempting to write anyway.Hope no one comes to my office hours at 11 so that I can do somewriting then.Ugh, 32 pages of faculty and staff comments to read. At least they areabout how awesome these five students are.... OK, that wasn't too bad. Itwas pretty easy to rank them.In sending my ranking to the committee coordinator, realize I havedouble-booked my office hours against the committee meeting. Another timemanagement fail. I will let my students know in class and leave them anote of apology.Receive email from a student who wants to meet with me during office hourslater this morning. Darn.Do a bit of paperwork for the concentration I am chairing. Just as I am about to go to the bathroom before teaching class at 10, astudent traps me in my office asking "just a quick question". At 9:55,I ask me to email me her final question (of three questions). Run offto set up in my classroom, go to the bathroom, and teach class.After class, a student grabs me and I go to the lab to look at his code.This is a student who has been struggling. I ask him to explainhis algorithm to me. Remarkably, his algorithm is perfectly correct!I tell him this and then start asking questions about syntax.Back to my desk and writing this at 11:05. Respond to the first student'squestion by email.Read an article from Tomorrow's Professor about the challenges offirst-gen college students. Forward it to a colleague who is leadinga local effort to better support first-gen students. I know I shouldbe doing something else, but I read it anyway. It's pretty consistentwith my experiences with first-gen students, but I'm not sure how itwill help me teach and advise them better.Meet with student from Technology Studies class who is having a hard timefinding sources for his chosen research topic. Demonstrate that we canfind some popular/news/book sources; encourage him to seek help from alibrarian in finding scholarly sources. (I would be shocked if therearen't any.)Finish reading the Tomorrow's Professor article. Find the book it isexcerpted from and add it to my Amazon shopping cart. Maybe sometime I'llhave time to read it.Department meeting concerns major issues: chair election for nextyear, institutional discussions of the time schedule and assessment.I eat my lunch. The meeting is over by 1:15.My 4:15 meeting is cancelled; we came to a consensus without even talkingto each other. So, I email students who signed up for office hours tolet them know I will be on time after all.I regret not writing in the morning. It is so hard to focus once thatfirst hour has gone by. I clear my desk enough to stop worrying aboutloose ends and try to spend 20 minutes or so at least thinking aboutwhat I'm supposed to be writing.I succeed at sketching a rough outline of the section I am rewriting,and emailing my co-authors. That wasn't quite as hard as I thought itwould be. Maybe I needed some time away from it. I'm looking forwardto spending a long morning on it two days hence. It's now 1:50 p.m. I have a doctor's appointment at 2:30. My birthcontrol prescription is about to run out (while I am abroad for springbreak, of course), and it's time for a pap test. Also, I need to talkwith my doctor about stopping taking birth control pills. Now that I amcoming up for tenure, my husband and I have finally agreed that it's timeto start trying to get pregnant (or at least, stop trying *not* to getpregnant). I see a lot of friends and colleagues who've had babiespre-tenure - but somehow, we just weren't there yet. It's going to mean alot of big adjustments in our travel and work schedules.Multitask for ten minutes - email with a student who will cat sit for meduring an upcoming spring break vacation to Japan, and respond to an emailfrom a co-author saying something else we should add to our paper. I askhim if he has a good source rather than trying to find one myself.Leave at 2:00 to walk over for my dr. visit. Run into the photographerwho took my picture in the classroom recently for an article in the alumnimagazine of my alma mater; have to break this off so I am not late to myappointment. Arrive barely on time. Wait. Start reading the bookchapters I assigned for my 8 a.m. class tomorrow. Eventually get calledin. Read more while I'm waiting. Talk to the doctor. Turns out I do not need a pap test this year.He is happy to talk to me about birth control and pregnancy. He tells methere is now an ob/gyn in town as of this December. It's a small town,which has never had a full-time ob/gyn before, so this is very exciting. Go to the drugstore to fill my prescriptions and also the grocery store torestock my fridge, which is empty since I returned from a conference overthe weekend. Stop by home to put groceries away.Arrive back at my office at 4:20, five minutes late. Meet with a steadystream of intro students who have questions about the take home exam untilnearly 6:15. Then I finally achieve escape velocity and go home.I take a break for dinner until 7:30. Then I finish reviewing the readingfor my 8 a.m. class, go online to read students' reading responses, andmake up a lesson plan based on students' responses and my lesson plan fromthe last time I taught the class. I update the lesson plan to includecurrent events -- not the 2007 bridge collapse in Minnesota, but thenuclear power plant failures in Japan. I finish a bit before 9 and spenda few more minutes responding to work-related email.I putter around for a little bit and take my computer up to bed with me atabout 9:30, watching tv on YouTube until I go to sleep around 10.Uid 32Woohoo! Spring Break.. well, for the students anyway. OK, so I didn't go on campus today, I guess that was *my* break. I am using the break to get a jump start on the fall term. Today, I evaluated textbooks. For each book I needed to decide - is the technology more or less current? Is it written in such a way that it both makes sense and doesn't feel silly? Is the index / table of contents meaningful? Are there ancillaries? I can write my own labs and exams, so that isn't a deal breaker - but well written ancillaries mean that someone took the time to proof the book. Is there an errata web site? No book is perfect - admit it and post the typos! Is the book inexpensive enough that my low socio-economic students without financial aid can afford it? That is the deal breaker! I've gone with a less than ideal book simply because it was $75 cheaper than the "better" book. I looked through a half-dozen or so books and found the one I think I am happy with. Next step - plan out the schedule of chapters. The book is pretty good - this fell into place pretty quickly, an hour or so. Another hour of planning out some in-class discussions... what sort of things should we talk about? What is simple to me may be impossible to others - where is the line? After 90 minutes of this, I've had enough. I need to give myself a break. I have a stack of 'professional development' reading I should do. Instead, I read the 'for-fun' book that has been sitting on my table since the start of the term. The work will be there tomorrow.Uid 3415 March 2011 (all timings Zurich time: GMT+1) ============= 07:00-08:00 Wake up in hotel in Zurich, where I am attending the Workship on Cryptography and Security in Clouds. The hotel is an ETAP: part of the same chai as IBIS, but without the distinctive personality :-). Shave,shower, breakfast. 08:00-08:20 Bus to the IBM Forum. Actually free, since I board at a temporary bus stop that doesn't have a ticket machine, and the driver isn't equipped to sell me one. The look of frustration on the driver's face as she realises she is forced to let me on free is amusing (to me). 08:20-09:00 Registration (painless), and find one of the few power sockets in the room. Over the two-day workshop I will take 25 pages of typseset lecture notes (my habit these days). 09:00-18:30 Basically the workshop. A lot of interesting talks. One entitled "A Small Latte or a PetaCycle? You Decide" takes a refreshingly hype-free look at the economics of cloud computing. 12:30-14:00 (Buffet) lunch break. Information for the wireless LAN has arrived, so I also catch up on the comments from my 262 studets who have a assignment due in two days. 18:30-19:00 Walk to the TurbinenBrau, an old power station converted into a (not-so-micro) brewery and restaurant. 19:00-21:40 As one might expect, the Swiss organisers ARE capable of organising a piss-up in a brewery. Lots of useful chat. 21:40-22:15 Walk back to hotel, not getting very lost, even though this part of Zurich is new to me. All this discussion is actually very tiring, ad I go to bed almost immediately. Still unable to plug laptop into power in hotel bedroom: the sockets only accept very skinny plugs.Uid 35Tuesday, March 15. Well, it's now officially Thursday March 17, and the last two days have been a blur. I had no classes on Tuesday. But I did have meetings with students and a talk by a candidate we're interviewing that I had to listen to. Then I had a major presentation to make at church, followed by another long meeting and some people to visit in the hospital. Then I had to hurry to get home to pick up my wife and meet the kids (grown, and with a grandson) at a restaurant where we meet weekly and take them for a meal out. On the way home, I stopped at my office to finish making up a quiz for the next morning. Even though I'm supposed to talk about the 15, I can't resist talking about what happened in one moment on the morning of the 16th. So I was giving the quiz I'd made up the night before. One of the students in the class looked at the quiz and then told me he hadn't been in class the last day before spring break when we talked about this stuff. I told him we reviewed it Monday. He said he wasn't in class on Monday either. Somehow it must have been my responsibility to find him and teach him what he needed to know. Oh, need to mention it was a "homework quiz" -- the problems on the quiz are a subset of the ones assigned and posted online. Over break I attended SIGCSE and learned about Piazzza, a website that enables students in a class to talk to each other, ask and answer questions, etc. I've been trying all week long to get them to use the site. So far NO ONE has even tried. Sigh. I am really looking forward to my full year sabbatical starting next year.Uid 38The last thing you want to see when you open the newspaper before leaving for work is a picture of the university Principal looking sternly out of the page, especially when she is being interviewed on the subject of redundancies... Anyway, off to work, and quite an international flavour to the day. Had a meeting with representatives of a community college in the US who are sending some students over in the summer to do internships. Later on, had an online meeting with students from here and a university in Finland who are collaborating on an undergraduate group project. This is the first time we've tried this, and here are some pitfalls with the idea, largely due to different timescales for project completion in the two institutions, but it's an interesting exercise for the students. Unfortunately we've not been able to find funding for either set of students to visit the other campus and meet their colleagues in person. Share project day is on a Tuesday again, thanks to February, so there's a bit of Groundhog Day about this entry. So, I get another chance to moan about a long day as I do an evening class on a Tuesday. Actually, I really enjoy the class because it's interesting stuff (advanced .NET programming) and the students are very motivated. Most of them are working in industry and some have a lot of real software development experience - they learn a lot from each other (I learn from them too!). Uid 45This week is "spring break" here, meaning no classes, meaning I can get caught up on my grading. So here I am in the office. Last Saturday was spent napping off and on all day, and it was great! There is more to do than just grade papers this week. There are forms to fill out for the department chair, reporting nearly everything I have done for the last year. I keep a file all year of my significant activities so I can refresh my memory. It includes all campus events, all seminars, publications, presentations, "extra" or unusual classroom activities, and anything else. So, that is turned in today. Another faculty member and I are busy planning a trip to take 15 students to the other side of the state for an industrial field trip. It should be good experience for them. That will be next week, but this week includes making the final arrangements. Personal activities this week also, that I usually don't have time for. Had to get a new toilet, get new tires, have my garage door fixed, do my tax returns, and other misc. items.Uid 46Another Tuesday, lots of unbooked time to catch up on accumulated requests and focus on "real work". As I have supervised two final year projects devoted to complex event processing engines, it is clear that neither project will result in usable code within our EPSRC project. I have, therefore, over the past couple of weeks, designed, constructed, and thoroughly tested a PThread-based infrastructure for the system, and designed the CEP language for specifying state machines that are invoked when subscribed events are raised. I tweaked the language grammar this morning to support construction of sophisticated state machines that support time-interval logic in the behaviour clause. Now onto the action routines for compiling programs in the language for a stack machine interpreter. That will have to wait for another "free day". Spent ~1 hour completing the methodology section of an EPSRC proposal case for support. A colleague has finished the 1st draft of the impact statement, now the draft proposal goes out for internal critique. Spent supervision time with one of the CEP final year students and with my MSci student. The MSci student's project is coming along nicely, and will certainly lead to a decent paper targeted at the confluence of language runtime and OS support. Spent the usual 2+ hours trying to keep one step ahead of a Head of School's email deluge, then had to spend 2.5 hours in a meeting in which the consultants presented their findings with respect to "Research process" within the university. As is becoming more and more common, they then demanded audience participation to augment their findings. I am continually frustrated by two aspects of the University: 1) the leadership refuse to lead, instead foisting this responsibility off onto Heads of School; in particular, they allow each special interest to dump more work onto the Schools, leaving the HoS to prioritize; and 2) the support services refuse to take responsibility for their part in any process. In the end, it is always the academic that suffers from both, as they inevitably end up with more administrative load, and workflows that support their needs inevitably stall due to someone in the service groups dropping the ball. The open loop nature of the workflows then requires the academic to poll to find out the cause of the stall. I want to make a difference as Head of School. I work tirelessly to shield my colleagues from the continual barrage of additional work fired at us by the unthinking special interests at the centre. I spend all of my time firefighting. How do they expect to attract qualified individuals within schools to take on the HoS mantle? I am counting the (many) days until my sentence is completed.Uid 4715 March As good of day as any to have my alarm fail. That should make the day more exciting. 8:30 okay, we seem to be caught up from my late start. Now at school and trying to decide if I should work on the grant due next week or keep working on the self-study. I also need to answer advising email so I guess that comes first. (Advising period for Fall Semester started this week so I am getting plenty of email from students wondering which courses will transfer, etc.) 9:00 Okay, that was a lot of email. And in the middle of it I realized my course schedule was formatted incorrectly for my math courses, possibly giving them some excuse to not understand when the final will be. Corrected that! Now trying to get some things together for this grant meeting. 11:20 Grant meeting finished with plenty of tasks ahead of me, primarily around planning assessment and getting the other STEM faculty to make themselves available during the program. Returned to a waiting phone call from a search committee potentially interested in hiring away one of my math education faculty. This put me in a strange position because she's not really on track to get tenure here so this is a good thing... but what should I be telling them regarding that issue? I danced around it and actually the questions they asked make it sound like they might be a better fit for her than we are. Of course, that's what we thought about her versus her previous position when we hired here... The daily sinus headache has also started to kick in. 11:50 Is it bad when the faculty member you asked to schedule the courses asks about the schedule? Shouldn't she know it better than me since she did it? Okay, better take medicine or I'll go postal on someone. 2:30 Student issue discussed (not solved), computer science meeting successfully navigated, and the joyous discovery that the programmable lock on our lab door was replaced but the replacement "is not connecting to the campus network" so nobody can get into the lab. That helps security. The CS meeting was pretty good. I finished my summary of the alumni survey from the last five years and we should just use most of these quotes as advertisements for our program. One of the faculty said it brought tears to her eyes when she read the "things our program does well" section last night, such a welcome respite in a semester that also involves teaching statistics to a bunch of students who don't want to learn. We are now working on our direction for the next five years. All in all, the self-study of the CS program is coming right along. 3:30 Oh no, as I feared, learning to build a pivot table has made me a target for anyone seeking Excel assistance. It turns out not all knowledge is good! 4:15 Possibly a miracle: my advisee came to his 4:00 appointment slightly early and completely prepared. He had a good plan for his fall schedule and reasonable questions about a possible music minor. While it is unlikely all the other advisees will be this prepared (he was the first after all), it's a nice start. 6:00 I've been trying to research the radioactive materials being emitted in Japan so I can find the half-lives and use them in my elementary functions class tomorrow. We're studying exponential functions so this appears to be a ready-made real-life example to show some value to modeling data. 6:15 Time to deal with running the kids around to various things and feeding them, etc... 9:15 Kids are off to bed. We filled out our NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament brackets. (We'll have to do the Women's bracket tomorrow.) Time to go back to work on prepping class. *** much later: fell asleep prepping class. I hope they appreciate my effort. I could have just grabbed the notes from last semester, but with some luck this will be a more interesting and teachable moment for them. Uid 50This is the first diary entry for which I have no academic issues to report! I haven't touched work all day. (This might, literally, be the first time that's happened since the start of the term.) I was at SIGCSE in Dallas, which is always a whirlwind, and I returned to my week-long spring break. I have no shortage of academic work to do: Assignments and exams to grade from before SIGCSE, reports to write to my departmental colleagues, etc. However, I chose to spend the day working on house projects and visiting with an old friend who's in town. I'm actually sitting on my butt and drinking beer as I write this -- a very rare occurrence indeed.Uid 52I was in the office at 7.30 this morning. I have so many major deadlines before I head away to Iraq on University business next week. I started the day with a large cup of coffee and tackling my emails. I seem to be getting about 100 emails a day at the moment, which is such a strain on my ability to keep up along with all my other work. I would say between January and April I receive about 100 emails a day on average and that for the rest of the year I average about 80 a day and in July and August it reduces to a more acceptable 30-40 a day. I then moved on to finalising two conference abstracts due in tomorrow. One of them is a collaboration between 3 colleagues in the UK and 2 colleagues in Iraq so it is tricky to ensure everyone has their say and input, hence being so close to the submission deadline in getting to the stage of finalising the submissions. So I submitted both abstracts and informed all of my collaborators that they have gone in on time. My next task was to finalise some pre-reading and question prompts for the course we are running in Iraq next week. We are using the University Moodle as a way of sharing resources and I spent some time getting the Moodle looking ready and then releasing the details to all the participants of how to log in to access this online space. I am expecting the flurry of emails back in the next two days of people who are struggling to log in to the space. In fact I have only received one email along these lines so far. I am looking forward to this work. We are supporting a University in Northern Iraq to develop their curricular approach from one that is predominantly didactic towards a more student-centred approach. We have recently involved one of my PhD students as an active member of the team and she has added real value to the project already. As she is actively researching student-centred learning, she is more up to date with her reading and she has a great range of experience of teaching using student-centred learning. I also value her attitude which is one of enthusiasm in embracing new challenges and she is not phased by the idea of joining the team in Iraq later in the year to deliver some workshops. It feels really satisfying to be able to enhance our team and share the workload more effectively by involving one of my PhD students, but to do it in such a way that she feels excited by the additional benefits for her. My big task of the morning was to upload a range of course and programme proposal documents into our online course approval system. The software is infamous in the University for having so many gremlins in it that it could drive anyone to drink! So two hours later I had successfully uploaded 8 documents (yes I know, surely it shouldn't take that long to upload documents – sigh). As part of this redesigned programme we have consulted widely with previous, current and prospective students and it has been very encouraging to hear very positive views of the changes we are trying to make, as well as some very perceptive, constructive suggestions of elements we may need to enhance in our programme.I spent 10 minutes with a colleague checking train timetables and details for our trip to the Higher Education Academy tomorrow to go through a programme accreditation process. Train journeys have such potential in terms of being able to have discussion with colleagues or work on a myriad of things. However there are the unpredictable variables of how busy and noisy the train is. Meeting colleagues from other Universities on the train who you then feel you are being rude to if you say you need to work. Then there is the realisation that a lot of the things you want to work on - e.g. marking student work or assessing the recently submitted applications for University teaching excellence awards – are confidential and therefore involve a certain amount of subterfuge to be able to complete without the potential for mishap! I then spent some time printing some documents off for the train journey as you never know whether you will have internet access. After some lunch – at my desk – crumbs a plenty in my computer keyboard...I worked on a joint funding bid that I am writing with some students and then sent it back to them to comment on. Then I moved on to trying to organise some expert speakers for an event focused on assessment that will take place in our vet school in June. After this, I spent some time sending emails: congratulations to a colleague who has just won a prestigious award; details of meeting dates to a group of staff I manage; feedback from a teaching observation completed on Friday; information to help a colleague considering applying for a job in our department; and feedback on an exercise a member of staff completed because they had missed a taught element of our PGCert in Academic Practice. I then completed minutes from a teaching development meeting from yesterday and circulated these. This reminds me that one of the most challenging elements of my role is the massive variety of my work. Much of the stress comes from keeping up with massive number of different tasks involving different skills and concentration levels. There is also the unpredictability of things flying in at all times. I am very organised, but the level of demand does mean that occasionally something slips off the to do list (because it never makes it there before something else distracts and steals attention). I consistently seem to be trying to keep many plates spinning in the air at once without dropping any of them! The more and more pressured we have become in the past few years, the more likely it is becoming that we are going to drop plates. Mid afternoon I head off to another University building for a supervision meeting for one of my PhD students. This was a good meeting where we discussed a lot of the challenges of coding data. My student is at the stage where he has collected huge amounts of qualitative data and has the challenge of trying to make sense of it all! I co-supervise this student with a member of staff from the School of Education and we always have challenging, fruitful and enjoyable exchanges so I value these spaces for in depth discussion of learning and educational theory. It's Tuesday night which is the night for my Spanish class. It's held in the University which makes it really convenient for me. I love learning Spanish, I haven't been in a language class since school and I enjoy being a student and seeing how the teacher runs the class and types of learning exercises she uses. I kept putting off doing the class because I am so busy – academic jobs just seem to expand to fit whatever time we make available – but even though it is tough to fit it in and make sure I do homework and revision, I love it, and it is so enjoyable being motivated to learn and then being guided to develop new skills and insights. I left early from Spanish to catch the earlier train home as I will be up at 4.30am to catch the train to get to the Higher Education Academy in time for a meeting. However, because I am out of the office most of tomorrow, I still had to finalise a funding bid and respond to some urgent emails which took me until 10.30pm. Finally put my out of office message on... Uid 64Teaching this morning, 9.30 - 12.30. I still enjoy teaching, like so many of my colleagues, and I looked forward to this session. There was a last minute room change and we were bounced into a room with poor learning technology equipment. This resulted in some messing about trying to get the handheld response devices to run from a laptop. I had plenty of things for the groups to do in the meantime but it was very frustrating. Then when it came to show two videos I'd brought, I realised that there was no sound system available. Although our brilliant learning technology service always records videos with subtitles for those with hearing difficulties, I didn't expect the whole group to have to rely on them. It's hard not to get derailed by such things. In the afternoon I continued the mind-numbing task of reviewing validation reports to look for common themes, with a view to improving documentation for course teams. It was unbelievably boring and demonstrated how frustrating it must be for course teams to produce documentation which ultimately gives rise to these reports. I know we have to demonstrate that we know what good practice is but surely there are better ways than this box-ticking - or as in so many cases, not ticking the boxes and having to send documents back. At 4.30pm I'd really had enough and went for a walk. I felt better when I got back and finished off the trawling. Now I only have to write it up.... Uid 65A twelve hour day yesterday so I woke up at 0530h tired and wishing I could go back to sleep. 0700h start at work. A good time in many ways because I avoid the rush hour traffic and get at least two hours of uninterrupted work! I begin by preparing a lecture for first years – to support the residential field trip we will be having in a few weeks time. It is a two hour session and I began the session last week. It’s good to have the luxury of knowing that there are four hours in total – I don’t have to determine an artificial cut-off but can just allow the lecture to stop at the appropriate point. There is also more flexibility to change session as I go along. 0815 to 0930h I work on a cross-Faculty project and send a few related emails and arrange a meeting. I have an impromptu meeting with my line manager during this time and discuss the project. I also mention that I completed training a few weeks ago that ‘allows’ me to conduct Professional development review meetings with colleagues. I’m not really sure I want to do them since there is so much cynicism about their effectiveness, but it might raise my management profile a little….. 0930h I return to lecture preparation and despite thinking I had ages of time, I finish with just a few minutes to spare. 1100-1300h Lecture to about 26 first year students – there are at least six missing. How will they do the work on the field trip as effectively if they haven’t attended the lecture? I ask myself the question, why is it that when one of my slides is just a picture, i.e. has no text or bullet points on it, the students stop writing. It’s as though they think it is only what I have written is important, and what I say isn’t?! This is a particularly interesting question for me since a lot of my slides are visual and have little text. The lecture went well but the room is quite small, claustrophobic and very hot. It didn’t start well - the room was locked when I arrived and it took ten minutes for someone from customer services to come and unlock it (ironically they are called ‘Prompt’!). Then the data p[rojector took five minutes to load and then the semi-automated lighting dimmer switch decided to play games. All in all I started the lecture about 25 minutes late. I then rushed through it more quickly than I might have done which was a pity. The second part of the lecture has far too much of me talking - need to revise that part so that next year it is more interactive. I took 10 minutes for lunch at my desk during which I responded to a couple of emails. 1330-1500h Did shortlisting for a new e-learning post. It’s not often I get to be in meetings with two heads of School and little old me! On the way back from the shortlisting meeting I got collared on the stairs by a very distant colleague who bombarded me with loads of questions about e-learning. I don’t mind helping but I’d rather not be collared on the stairwell and be forced into spending 15 minutes dodging around stair-climbers while a relative stranger fires question after question at me. Not a particularly pleasant person. Or maybe I’m just irritable because my energy is now beginning to flag. I need to do a few more things and then leave for home so I have a reasonable evening today. Had a coffee with a colleague and then caught up with another on the VCs general staff meeting yesterday morning which I was unable to attend. Nothing major to report and no decision (at least not openly) about fees yet. 1600h Now going home. Uid 67This was my first day of teaching after a successful week in London with the students. I’m somewhat over my cold, but not 100% as I realised when I arrived at my 9am seminar and could barely stand. I persevered nonetheless and made it through a morning of confused students and an afternoon of surprisingly good 4th year work for a design competition. The primary worry is that the fourth years don’t seem to know how to explain themselves and leave out really crucial bits of information. Eek. There doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day – at all. Admissions hit recently and I’ve managed to get through 120+ applications and folios so far, but still have 80 more to go. I’m behind in some marking and the student exchanges I need to finish organising are getting left too late. I also had my performance evaluation this week and was surprised by the really good ideas I had for things to do this past year that I didn’t manage to do. There’s so much to discuss with my senior lecturer, we have to take two sessions to discuss it all. People give teachers a hard time because we effectively get summers off, but if they knew how stressful term-time was, they’d understand the need for a break. I feel like I’m trying to get up a very slippery slope and keep losing (or forgetting) crucial items along the way. I think I need a really good ‘to-do’ list, but don’t have the time to make it! Uid 71I've got a promotion! I have moved from lecturer grade 7 (starting point) to grade 8! A bit more cash in hand but actually more excited about actually getting a promotion. PGCHE is almost finished so I can feel like a bona fide member of staff. I have been in this job since sept 2009 (it's my first post after PhD). I suppose I feel a lot more confident now than I did before but this extra recognition means a lot. Before I get to do any teaching, I have a number of admin tasks to take care of. Submit assignment for PGCHE (only 1 more to go!); book conference: registration, accomodation, travel etc. I also get a note saying that my application for staff funding has been approved. Book classes to learn portguguese (for another conference in June). At the end of the day its only ?50 less but it's appreciated. Meet my PhD student. She is doing her Phd in a very similar topic to mine, although she is approaching it from a legal, rather than a sociolgical point of view. She is only 3 months younger than me which makes the dynamic kind of interesting. She has brought along a document outlining changes in policy. we plan to write a short journal article together. it'll only be 3,000 words which is a walk in the park (and not work much for the REF but I'm looking forward to doing it. Meeting in the staff room about the forthcoming strike. Solidarity is strong. I have never been on strike before but feel backed up and confident. Teaching later. I finally feel like I have built up a sense of rapport with the class (after a term and a half). they are increasingly self lead learners and are willing to argue with me. I like it! I tell them that there will be no classes next week because of the strike. Others are notifying by e mail but I really want to do it face to face. If the strike is not effective, it is likely that we will be refusing to mark exams so it;s important to have them on side.Uid 758:50am. I just opened my email to see the reminder that this was the share project day. I came in early today (arrived before 8am) because I didn't think I had achieved my objectives for yesterday. While reviewing a logic exercise that my tutorial students had to do for another class, I was called by an elderly friend from NZ. He and his wife had escaped from Christchurch to Auckland, and he just wanted to catch up. Christchurch has drifted off the radar a little with the events in Japan. Predicate calculus and logic are not my strong point and I had a little trouble understanding the exercise but with a little reading my maths knowledge is returning after a 30+ year gap. As I don't meet the students until Friday, I have put my review of the exercise aside so I can concentrate on other tasks that need finishing. The first is making changes to an exam to meet the QA requirements. The exam has too much reading... 9:36am Exam changes made. Now to look at the comments for the Final Year Project progress assessment. One of my Final Year Project students isn't responding to emails or meeting the targets that he has set himself. The range of different tasks that I worked on during the day is partly why I didn't feel like I had achieved my objectives yesterday. Today seems like going in the same direction but all of these little tasks have their deadlines this week. 11:30am Having completed the exam changes, I settled into coding some example Wicket/acegi/Spring code. This should be ready by Friday and I am really just getting started. Admittedly, I am not starting from nothing. We have already completed a Spring exercise that contains some of the logic and configuration files and there is a previous example that I can use to ensure that I am roughly right on the coding and configuration. However, there is a meeting with demonstrators coming up at midday so I will have to take a pause and when I come back from that prepare for a session this afternoon. It isn't a full lecture as we are really telling the students when they have to demo their games and giving them an opportunity to try out the room in which they will be doing their presentations. 2:00pm As I thought, I was distracted after the meeting to tasks related to the TJ course. Still have a slide to make for the session later this afternoon. This is a team course and the students have been using a central subversion repositories for their teams. I have been able to extract the statistics in their use by login. Gives a fairly reasonable idea of who is driving each team. Only one team from 21 clearly has one person do almost all of the commits (82%). I am sure there were more teams last year in which one person did the work and the others watched. We may have got something through about the importance of team work this year. Just checked my emails and see that I need to go and check the exam formatting so will go and do that now. 5:20pm What happened to those three hours? I checked the exam formatting and then returned to my office and worked on the ICW sample code. I did make good progress although there is a lot of stuff that I am not explaining in the development log. In some respects, I am just pushing the code in based on the example so we will have a code base for the students to work from. Not really very good. I would like more time so I could experiment with some of the coding options but that isn't going to happen. Just before 4pm, I headed off to the experiential learning room in which we will run the TJ demonstrations. Some of the teams got their games running but no one was able to get the networking running. It looks like they have closed down all the networking options in Windows Firewall other than those used for web browsing. I am going to have to talk with Technical Support to see whether there is a solution that we can use. Setting up a laptop as a wireless host might work but I need time to try before next Wednesday. Nothing is ever that easy. Now, I am heading home and probably won't look at further work as I really need a little bit of a break. I have been working some long hours and with a Workshop over the weekend, I didn't get a break from intellectual challenge. A little space and time out would help the intellectual juices. Hopefully back on the bike tomorrow. That always helps. 9:35pm I have spent the evening entering comments on a paper that I am reviewing for IEEE Transactions of Education. It is proving frustrating. At least, I have finished the review. It is just another one of those things that I do as part of the academic community. A community that I am really on the edge of.Uid 77Share March 15th 2011 Well I guess this project is half way through now and I am surprised how much I have enjoyed contributing to it; not only has it given me ‘permission’ to reflect on what I do, looking back over the last 6 months it has provided me with a record of my first 6 months in my current post, so thank you Share Project. Now to this month’s contribution My husband (a fellow academic) is away at a conference, so it is just me and my teenage daughter at home. My first appointment isn’t until 10am, and that is on the other side of campus from my office (but nearer home), so I have decided I’ll stay at home and go in direct to the 10am appointment. I have a pile of essays to mark, which will be easier at home. So 7.45 sees me sitting at the breakfast table in my night dress, with breakfast and a pile of essays. After about 30 mins I get up to stretch my legs, clean the sink and then return to the pile that isn’t apparently getting smaller! Another cup of tea, another 3 essays, and my daughter joins me; it is not often we get to chat over the breakfast table. She goes off to school, and I get another 3 essays read before going to get ready for the cycle ride to work. These are supposed to be reflective accounts of the student’s observation/ experience of team work. Many are essays on teamwork, with little reflection, and few have personal learning goals identified. Most of all I am irritated by their poor presentation; do students not read over what they submit these days? Do they not know how to write? Haven’t they yet learned how to reference correctly? (they [should] have been doing it weekly for 18 months now!) The 5 mile cycle ride clears my mind of these irritations, and I turn it towards the next meeting: today is mostly admission-related activity (with assessment, and meeting with ‘problem’ students thrown in), and a retirement dinner this evening. First meeting is to discuss the progress with nursing admissions; goes well though I have to see someone else about the ‘problem’ (in terms of recruitment). Nice to chat through some of the issues and the potential future developments. Back on my bike to my office on the main campus; I now need to turn my mind to this afternoon’s meeting that I am chairing, and need to prepare for. Over lunchtime I meet with 3 year 4 students with attendance/health/ attitude problems and discuss their problems, then rush off to a question review session (where we look over exam questions checking their accuracy and assessing their level of difficulty, then rush off again to hear a student practice a presentation she is giving next week in London. Also manage to arrange with another member of staff to enter as a Med Ed team in the student’s charity week event on Friday. This will require running 1.5 miles around the campus in fancy dress! All in the aid of raising money for UNICEF, not comic relief which considering it is ‘red nose day’ suggests a bit of planning blooper by the students union! Now back at my desk to finish both my notes from the student meeting and my preparation for the meeting at 2.30. Lunch? Not had time for that today, but since I am out for dinner tonight I don’t think my total calorie intake will be damaged! The 2.30 meeting on admission processes across the faculty lasted for 2 hours but it was interesting to discuss the how and why behind differences, and the added dimension for programmes funded by the Strategic Health Authority. You get the impression that the contract writer doesn’t actually know the standard processes, but want to impose their own; difficult to have two masters. And goodness knows what will happen next year when every other programme except these are subject to the proposed changes to the fee structure. One member of staff is playing her cards a bit close to her chest, at odds with everyone else. Back in the office again, catching up on my email before getting on the bike to go home. The dinner was better than I expected. It was nice to meet up informally with colleagues I have mostly seen across meeting tables; as the ‘new girl’, I was pleased to recognise, and be able to name everyone! Also able to catch up briefly on a couple of work issues that only needed 2-3 minutes face to face. I get back home just after 10pm, a quick check of the email for anything urgent (unlikely because most common sources of urgent emails were at dinner with me!)And a check through of my submission; I don’t want to be critical of students not proof reading only to be guilty of the offence myself! Uid 78Today was rather odd. (Though having now completed several of these entries I begin to understand that all 15ths of the month are odd.) I'm unable to drive at the moment so life involves lots of trains. It takes 3.5hrs to get, by train, from the West, where I live, to the East, where HQ is. Today's meeting started late, so that meant the luxury of a late train, the 8.29. The meeting was the 'letting off steam' kind in which lots of people had their say but we achieved very little, mostly because we are dealing with so many unknowns. I hate this kind of meeting. It's a good plan for us all to meet quarterly but I'm a 'get through the business efficiently' kind of chair myself. I appreciate that the chair of this meeting needs to allow this group of people to let off steam collectively but I find I build up steam as the meeting progresses which has to be let off after it finishes. That really isn't how it's supposed to work. Most of the real work of the day was accomplished on the train or when I ate with two colleagues in the evening. One of my postgraduates is submitting an essay to a competition. She's an excellent hard working student but this is the first time she has produced a complete piece of work. All her writing on the PhD project so far has been literature review, and sections of thesis chapters. I have been quite suprised at the difficulty she has had in producing a short (7k), complete piece, given that she has a masters degree. This draft is a great deal better but she has needed a lot of help with structure. We obviously need to set her other similar tasks. This evening we chewed over a rather good Indian meal and a couple of departmental issues, including how we replace a colleague taking early retirement, who cannot be replaced.Uid 82I had a trip out today in the name of visiting a resource that in the future we'll use with our students. When it's ready, it will come to it rather than the other way around. A local charity are restoring a bus from the 1930s/1940s. Not sounding interesting yet? This bus was one that belonged and was used by a local firm in order to transport workers to and from their workplace from around the local area. The industries that these routes served have long gone, as has the bus company in question. The bus has a long way to go before it reaches its former glory (or a former glory adapted for 21stC use), but when you walk around it, so many questions and memories start springing into your mind. For me, it reminded me of the joys of moving to London as an undergraduate and having to negotiate Routemasters for the first time (knowing when to jump is everything!) Undergraduate life is a lot safer these days, with easy access buses... It also makes you ask questions of who used these buses, how and why; who couldn't; how our behaviour around public transport has changed. What I want to do with my students in due course is to bring them on to this bus, so that they can sit, smell and feel the past, and to develop their historical imaginations whilst doing so. It's all too easy for history students (and lecturers) to forget that 'history' is a lived thing, because it is something that is learned and assimilated through textbooks and revision notes. So I'm hoping my efforts today will bear fruit in the future. Uid 95A fairly mindane day with lots of marking, recording marks and answering student queries. My Level 3 project student arrives for 10 am appointment at 10.15. He is a difficult student, full of confidence but fails to listen to advice. I ask him to make notes of the meeting but Know that he won't so I write them up when he has gone. We agree targets for the next week, look at the time line, and try to agree on priorities. He is looking at "Student experience" but for some reason has talk to his mother, a teacher, and gone off at a tangent to look at finances for students. I can only do so much but fear it will be a weak project. Level 1 tutees arrive at 11 am. Or at least six out of eight do. One seems to have so many external activities that he always has an excuse. The other has not attended the morning' lectures so I suspect a lie-in. I try to talk about the students' group project and find some are working hard but others are not participating. I have a dilema about group work when it appears that only half the group are engaging with the reporting work but there is little I can do, especially if they do not even attend the meeting. There might be some justification as there is an opportunity for peer marking. A couple of the group talk over me and one is texting frantically. I mention bad manners but it seems to go over their heads. When I was a student, the tutorials were valued as an opportunity to get help on tricky bits of work..... The rest of the day is mainly spent seeing individual students about coursework issues and advising on jobs. Little marking done and go home feeling I have little positive to show for the day.Uid 966am alarm as every day. Too lazy to cycle to work this morning. I use the fact that I think I might have seen a forecast for sleet sometime this week as an excuse. Not too lazy to eat breakfast (never!) but almost too lazy to shower. I think I might be tired, then. Oh well, when very tired do not beat yourself up about not cycling, be gentle. I get the bus. Arrive at work at 8:25 and check my emails. One from a third-year student who is having difficulty with working out the dilution of 4000 tonnes of pesticide spill into a coastal area of 120 x10^9 litres. I’ve given them toxicity standards to compare with which are in mg/l or ppm. The student can’t figure out whether she has to use some sort of moles for this, and when told not, still wants me to check her division, just in case x/y = z is beyond her, saying ‘maths is not my strong point’. I have only ever met one student who says she is numerate and capable of solving mathematical problems. Maths was my weakest subject at school but it seems I have always been infinitely more maths-confident than most of my students. Even arithmetic scares them witless. What’s wrong? I go to ask Security to open my classroom for 9am. It’s a skills room so technicians hold the keys and the technician doesn’t work for my programme so she doesn’t open the room for me. Academics have keys for nothing except our own offices, it’s a nuisance for all concerned. We have Trust Issues and Communication Issues in our faculty. At a recent faculty forum (which I didn’t bother attending because I didn’t feel I needed a dose of demoralising) the Dean is said to have asked the assembled: ‘Now, tell me what we can do to rebuild this trust {immaculate smile}’. ‘Give us keys!’, heckled an academic. Laughter. And no, we still don’t have keys. First class is a four-hour session on cranial nerves examination. My students look as tired as I am. Good, that probably means they won’t notice I’m tired, and gives me an excuse for avoiding any long demonstrations that demand concentration, breaking our practical into short bursts of me speaking followed by short bursts of their activity. We do one nerve at a time, which is easier because I can check my notes in between without looking daft. If I was on the ball I’d know this by heart (and really, EVERY practising clinician has to know it by heart so teachers have no excuse for not knowing it ourselves) but this morning I forgot the number of the room I teach in every week and had to go back and check. I don’t really trust myself. I manage to teach them the correct stuff, I even manage look lively and to be funny at times. One student had wanted to see me at lunchtime after class but she’s absent. I feel relieved, but guilty for that. I only have an hour before lab and I want to read over what we’ll be doing. A different third year class at 2pm. We should be recording the results of an experiment testing the toxicity of lead and copper to wheat seeds and setting up an experiment to test the toxicity of a pesticide to water fleas, but the water fleas haven’t been delivered by the time the lab starts. The technician (different technician) has phoned and been told they will arrive this afternoon. We start, but by the time students are finished with their seeds at 3pm, still no water fleas, so I send them off. I’m glad the creatures didn’t arrive because I’m tired, and lots of the students look the same. On the other hand, one of them protests about the lab being postponed because that means it gets a week closer to exams. Sometimes I wonder if the class rep protests just because she thinks it’s a good idea to protest. Instead of doing your water fleas lab report this week and revising later, revise now and do your lab report later, I suggest. I suggest to the whole class that they should use this unexpected afternoon to finish their write-up of the seeds experiment right away. They think this is a good idea. Tutor one; Student Rep nil. Back to my office. I should go seek out the head of school to discuss a problem that has arisen with a new programme I’m developing. Our articulation partner has been rather generous in their estimates of the expected number of students (ie overestimated by a factor of 3-5) and this rather puts a fly in our ointment. I would have to think about this and I can put it off until tomorrow, so I do. I reply to more emails and respond to the automated command to delete old emails (oh good, an excuse to do something mindless). I leave at quarter to five, unheard of. I intend to mark lab reports for my other third year module (third of three third year modules) when I get home, but then I find I’m too tired to cook except cheese on toast, too tired to wash up, too tired for a bath. I have second thoughts about whether my mental state can face the sight of a thick pile of lab reports. I can get pretty low when I’m tired, I prefer to avoid that state if possible, and the sight of a thick pile can weigh one down. I also have to produce a reflective portfolio for the last part of my PgCert Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, based on this programme I’m developing, and it’s getting close to deadline so I’m going to have to write something reflective pretty quick. Most of the programme documents were produced at something approaching (occasionally past) midnight so I generally didn’t pause to reflect on them before sleeping and getting up to start teaching again. I noticed I was thinking about the stupidity of the current student numbers problem on the bus on the way home [why did we not ask them what their numbers were based on? Because most of the estimates made in programme development seem to be wild guesses, nobody seems to care. I have complained in the past about universities being more like businesses but I take it all back. No business could ever be run in such an amateurish way as the way we go about making and enacting contracts worth lots of money. Frankly, I’d rather it was a bit more businesslike. And I didn’t dare question decisions that were made by my seniors, even when I think they’re baseless and capricious (ref. aforementioned Trust Issues and Communication Issues). I’m annoyed with myself for that.] I got into bed at 6:30, put a hot water bottle on my feet and a laptop on my lap, and typed out my reflection. Later I’ll edit out the bits I don’t dare say. I’m not sure how much reflection that will leave me with. It’s now 8pm. I might listen to a radio show as I fall asleep, but I expect I’ll be asleep before 9pm. Up until last week I wasn’t doing too badly for tired, especially considering it’s week 10 of a term that has 12 teaching weeks, and fatigue always gathers as it goes on. But instead of working last weekend as I have every other weekend since Christmas, I went away with some friends for a special occasion (getting Monday’s heavy lecture schedule prepared before I went away). The unaccustomed social activity has really taken it out of me. I’m hoping to spend this weekend at home with sleep and marking to recover. The weekend highlighted that I may be missing something by having a work life in place of a social life, but also that I really can’t manage both during term-time. Uid 98An easier day to day. Drive in with my wife, log onto emails from 0830 and general admin until my first lecture at 1000. A pleasant slot with postgraduate students. General admin (I have a backlog of emails requiring answers that are in danger of missing their slot enirely - like February's entry to this journal). Three tutorials with students wondering why they didn't get a better mark. Pleasant, non-challenging conversations with all three. Little work in the evening and just 6 emails from 7 to 10pm.Uid 102Tuesday is a day in the office. I plan to have a research meeting in the morning and a student support meeting in the afternoon. It is a long day as there will be a planning meeting 5pm to 8pm ish. Getting to the office was easy enough - I think the car knows it's own way now. My research colleagues did not arrive until after 10 which should have resulted in an nice quiet start but I just got stuck into all those admin jobs I never get time to do so by the time 10 arrived I was already feeling a bit jaded. A good meeting which resulted in me having loads to do - no pressure there then.Stats about how we support students - never my fav subject took up another couple of hours. Where does the day go? An eating meeting at the end of the day saw the planning of a couple of important events and started to feel a bit social. A chat over orange juice - and i was on my way home again by about 8pm. I got home to find I had recieved a speeding fine. Maybe I should not let my car out without me after all.Uid 105Not much to report here. My PhD defense will be next week and I've been preparing for that. Stress much?Uid 114Today should be my first day back in the office after three weeks holiday and a week working away in Nottingham, but I don't actually make it into work. I've woken up with a very high temperature and have no choice but to stay in bed. It's lunchtime before I even manage to get up and send amessage into the office and let them know. But I don't think I am really ill - simply tired, both emotionally nad physically drained. Whilst I was away my Aunt went missing. Last week I diverted on route to my meeting to visit her imeadiate family and became involved in the search. On a beautiful spring day I found myself with the police walking the canal towpath. I've walked this section of canal with my Aunt many times and it is a lovely walk, but today I can't take my eyes off the water, I'm looking for a body. I'm completely blown away when I visit the police incident room and see the scale of the search they are conducting. Door to door, helicopter, ground search teams, water search teams - there is no limit to the resources they are putting into looking for her. But that was last week, she is now missing for 16 days with no clues at all. I can't stop thinking about my Aunt and trying to work out where she might be. This afternoon I get the call I'd been expecting and dreading - they ahve finally found a body in the canal and it is probabally her. I knew this was the likely outcome, but it is still a massive shock. I can't imagine my lovely bubbly Aunt being so depressed she would want to end her life. But the reality is that she was very ill with depression and she'd had enough. Part of me wishes that they had never found her, that I could pretend forever that she'd run away and was living a new live elsewhere. But I would still know in my heart that wasn't true. I have to call my partner to let him know. He comes home to give me a hug. I feel bad that they found her body in one of the spots that I had been looking for her from the canal bank - I was looking in the righ tolace but just couldn't see her. That is probabally a good thing, but I somehow feel I let her down. Even though it doesn't matter, She'd already been dead a long time, a few more days till recovery doesn't really matter. I send out some e-mails to thank people who had been helping in the search. I spend a long time on the wording to try and get the right tone but eventually decide basic facts given clearly will work best. I wonder if I should talk to any familiy members but decide there is nothing to say.My partner tries to comform me that she is at peace now but it doesn't work. He's a devote catholic, I'm an athiest. I tell him that suicide is a sin, she's failed the entry requirements for heaven! Some days I am jealous of his faith and the support it offers him. But these situations strengthen my athieism - how can you believe God would let this happen? I have an early night - I need to go back to work tomorrow as there is nothing else to do. It I think about it too much it will just get worse. Uid 1168:25 AM: In the office an hour later than usual today. One of my goals for this term is to see if I can maintain the quality/quantity of my work while maintaining a sustainable time and energy commitment to that work. I was perilously close to burning out completely last term. As a newly tenured associate prof the idea of lifetime employment isn't very appealing if it means working 6.5 days a week and 18 hour days at least four of those. At the core, I love the sort of work I do. I'm going to try to stay under 50-60 hours a week this term and see what doesn't get done. 9:08 AM: Processed email and started the process of finding a meeting time for a task force I'm leading. Scheduling meetings is always a challenge, but sometimes a meeting is what's needed. 11:01 AM: Finished up course prep and taught my Formal Methods in Design and Specification course. I enjoy this class. It took a couple of iterations to figure out how to help the student connect to the material, but it works well now. The course divides neatly into three modules, so it's easy to make changes to one without changing the others much. I like that design because I can evolve the course over time without killing myself. I have two colleagues sitting in on the course this term in preparation for teaching it in my stead while I'm on sabbatical next year. It's always interesting to get another teachers perspective on the class. 12:46 PM: Work on course prep for Thursday for 45 minutes, then had lunch with colleagues. Topic of the day was the nuclear plant troubles in Japan. This is one of those times where working at an engineering school is especially great. At our table we had a former US Navy nuclear engineer, a mechanical engineer who designed and supervised the construction of reactor pressure vessels, an industrial engineer who supervised construction of multiple nuclear plants, and an electrical engineer who specializes in power generation. Fascinating conversation!1:55 PM: Finished prep for Thursday class session of my Formal Methods class. The biggest part of this was defining the "homework teams". I'm trying something new this term. I'm assigning teams of 3 students each to solve the homework problems together. I polled students for their confidence in each of three areas: proving statements of logic, solving programming problems, and producing written documents. From that I was able to assign teams the have at least one member who is somewhat or very confident in each area. I did not ask students who they prefer to work with or not work with. I know students will collaborate on homework anyway. I want to make that explicit and endorse it. Some students may hide behind their teams, but I think the majority will learn more from the interplay of ideas as they work together. I'll also have the students form project teams for three major assignments. I'll let them choose those teams, subject to the constraint that none of their homework team members may be on their project team. I hope this further causes them to confront misunderstandings and group think. An auxiliary benefit of the homework teams is a reduction in the grading load. I'm hopeful that this will be a win-win experiment. 2:20 PM: Caught up on some email. Off to teach a double-period CS2 class/lab. 8:03 PM: Class was followed by "Innovation Hour", a mis-named but interesting initiative of our new President. On the third Tuesday of each month representatives of two departments, one academic and one support give talks on what their departments do, then take questions from the assembled faculty and staff. Attendance isn't great, but I always seem to learn something interesting about how our institution operates. After innovation hour, I hit the track for 3.5 miles. I'm training for a half marathon in May. The experience of being disciplined about something that isn't work has been good for me. I expected to just endure the training, but I've actually been enjoying it. After my run, home for a quick bite to eat, some reading, and more email. 8:57 PM: Chatted with my wife, then sent some emails to keep the ball rolling on our sabbatical transition to Seattle. I'm realizing that for the second night in a row I don't have any work that _must_ be done tonight. This may be the first time in my career as an academic that that has happened. Nice. 9:52 PM: Made some progress on deciphering our insurance policy. We're planning to lease our house to students while I'm on sabbatical next year. That might create some complications for residency requirements with the state and our insurance company. 10:30 PM: Made arrangements with my wife's cousin to stay with them while house hunting next month. Looking forward to that visit. Time to call it a night. Uid 118This was a big teaching day - 3.5hours of child development for social workers in the morning, then two hours of value based practice for approved mental health practitioners in the afternoon. In between times I was sorting letters for students doing child observations, arranging placement visits and the usual photocopying and printing out as preparation for teaching. The morning session was being observed by two colleagues for two seperate reasons. One, a mathematician, observed me as part of the MA in Higher Education Practice that we're both doing. Haven't had the feedback yet, so heaven knows what he made of my teaching. The styles of teaching and assumptions about what students need to do is very different across different disciplines of course. The contrast between social work and maths teaching is particularly vivid. Uid 123Busy, busy week this week. On average I think I have been working 55 hours a week this semester with a focus on new module/course development and dealing with the fallout of the constant restructuring that seemingly all HE institutions are going through. This week is particularly busy as I have committed to a number of 'off-timetable' tasks, including facilitating workshops at other Business Schools - so travel time is also an issue. Tuesday, 15th March is the only day that I am here in my office. 8.00 Early start as I need to finish preparing and photocopying for a 3 hour workshop I am to give at Cardiff tomorrow. I often think I over-prepare for these external sessions, but I am always slightly apprehensive - so I have worked all day Sunday to make sure it is honed and after teaching and marking all day yesterday, now is the time to gather up all the materials I will need in preparation. 10.30 As I have spent every spare moment over the last two weeks marking, I need to catch up with emails that I have 'starred' but not done anything about. 12.00-2.00 Our 'extended senior executive group meeting'. I only go to 3 of these a year as I am not part of the core group. Indeed, I have just received a 'risk of redundancy' notice as due to the restructuring there have been changes in roles and jobs and we all have to re-apply. 2.00-3.00 Explaining and demonstrating some new resources to our Head of Postgraduate. In the end he is satisfied with both their quality and appropriateness. 3.00-5.00 Working on an abstract for ISSOTL conference. 5.00 Meet and greet Professor Graham Gibbs who is giving a session this evening for staff. 5.15-7.00 Graham Gibbs session and get together afterwards. 7.00-7.15 back to office to pick up stuff for an early start to Cardiff tomorrow. Uid 126Tuesday March 15th 2011 I wake to the continuing news of Japan. I find it unfathomable. And the demise of the English Cox’s Pippin... we are all apparently buying Gala apples. Not me. The dog is still alive and, though excited by the unhooking of his lead, is slow this morning out on the misty lane. I am glad I have my bags ready. The work seems relentless, not least because this is the time when students need added attention. They are out in placements and crack can show. The last two days have been full of long phone calls. On the way to work I listen to a CD of stories and songs for younger children. I am still preparing the drama option for the end of this term. It makes the journey pass. I seem to b the only member of the team here this morning. The others must be out in school. I tweak a presentation, put an annotated thesis section in an envelope for posting, make a list. So many lists, lists within lists so that I can try and get some purchase on the day. Try ringing a school but only an answerphone message. Check on student updates; all quiet on the office front. No post to speak of. I discover an important piece of information by accident. Why is everything done by stealth? Still no formal confirmation of what will prove to need serious attention. Am I able to tell colleagues? Probably not. Presentation to students in Speech and Language Therapy. The computer takes a very long time to log off and then for me to log on again. I have a pretty presentation and a fairly clear and not too long presentation about the course I run. Students fairly silent. They are in their final year and it is already too late for them to apply for the coming academic year. Two people have questions to ask. And one more as everyone gets up to leave. Hey ho. Back to the office and an interesting chat with a colleague about school uniform –yes, I am delighted when his undergraduates get in touch with me. IU have arranged to see two after Easter. On to a meeting of disability officers at the other end of the campus. It is in an underground room and I am glad to meet another latecomer as I go down the stairs. We are glad to see the chair person back after illness and to hear her getting back on track with energy and good humour. Major reorganisation in the university means that we are all concerned about student care –especially proper service for those with disabilities. More lack of information and transparency. Good that we will try and at least make a case; though bureaucracy has now started to roll so human voices may not have much impact. I buy a paper and have lunch alone. It does not take so long! Then what? A conversation with a colleague that makes me uneasy; an e-mail re disability; the beginning of a stationery order for the drama option; a meeting about ethics. We may have to change or at least modify some of our assignments to conform with new ethics regulations. All seems straightforward –and entirely ethical! However, there will be those who disagree. I meet a student who is having a wobble and tell her I will not give up n her without a fight. Her tutor arrives and addresses the problem admirably. I discover how to do another administrative task on our portal. I have an encouraging talk with one of our professors about a paper I want to write, a paper she is writing, and a general gossip. More e-mails, a quick chat about a student and some organisation for tomorrow’s Partnership Committee. I must arrange to send some skills audits to the students taking the drama module. I manage to send the skills audits and sort out some daily e-mails and talk to a colleague about a request I had made. At 6.15 I left the office and drove to the puppet theatre where I am taking a master class in shadow puppetry. It is quite a small group and the people and the teacher are friendly. It is such good fun and very playful. It is providing me with many ideas that I want to try out. Today we were working with transformations, using light and just simple materials to transform objects and more particularly out own bodies. I drove home listening to the rest of the storytelling CD and arrive home by 10.30. I have put a pie to heat and am just typing this up. I shall eat and then read a little. I need to look at some notes for tomorrow’s meeting and sort out the writing session for tomorrow evening. Facebook tells me that more people will join the writing group tomorrow. Such fun. I am so tired but even so, I love what I do. Uid 127Share Project Tuesday 15th March, 2011 I read with interest the overview piece from February for this project, and I will admit I felt a little anger at the contributor who left work early that day to spend time with his son because it was a lovely sunny day. I am fully aware of the joys of academic life, mainly the fact that I do not have to be at my desk at 8.30am (I am a complete Night Owl, and therefore incapable of surfacing effectively in the morning). However, the portrait he painted was one of joyous days of leisurely mornings and afternoons off, of 3–hour lunch breaks and early nights, and I felt it was a very unfair picture of how academics live their working lives. And then Tuesday 15th March came along… It was actually a fairly early start for me, in order to get my car into the garage for its MOT. But as a walked to work from the garage, I popped into a few shops to look for a new bag, to pick up some nappies, to buy a new notebook to record guitar tab. When I got back to my office, I answered emails for about an hour, before once again heading out of the office, into town, to have a session of massage therapy. On the way back, I met a friend for a quick coffee and finally got back to my office again by early afternoon. Admittedly then, I did have a couple of meetings with students, and they were not easy ones, but rather some quite emotional personal discussions about their future at University and so on, but they were finished in a couple of hours. So I grabbed my coat, took another leisurely stroll back to the garage to pick up my car (which got through another year, hurrah!), collected my son from nursery and headed home at a sensible hour to spend some time with both of my children before dinner, and a relaxed bedtime. Even better, I didn’t work that evening, and instead had some friends round for a bottle of bubbly, a box of chocolates and a good gossip! I wonder, if that same academic was asked to keep a diary of the 16th of February, how it would have read in comparison. Would he have had a 12-hour working day, no time with his family, and barely 4 hours sleep, like mine was on the 16th March? I strongly suspect so… We’re all allowed to ‘hit it lucky’ every now and again; it’s what keeps us sane…Uid 128Meeting with the Dean first thing - I don't often do this, but things here are getting so bad that I have to talk about it and make people aware of the realities.Why are we disciplining students whose only crime is being too honest (if they had gone off sick, rather than tell the truth, they would have got away with it)? Why are lecturers being allowed to destroy students confidence by ripping up their work, telling them they both their work and the student themselves are rubbish and not worthy of a place in HE? Why am I seeing students on a regular basis who name the same lecturer over and over again who belittles them in class, sends e-mails that are not only derogatory, but personal and (bluntly) extremely rude? Why is one of those students currently an in-patient in a mental health facility having come within minutes of dying from an overdose (and this is a straight A student with no history of MH problems)? Give her her due, the Dean listened, was honest when she said she knew there was something going on, but not the extent of it and agreed that something had to be done. However, and this is typical, it is me who has to do it - have I not been trying for about 18 months?!!! A few suggestions of how to approach the matter might prove useful. Everyone keeps asking how I am - it was my appraisal last week and, for once, I actually felt sorry for my manager. She had met with senior managers earlier in the day who gave her the task of telling me that the role I have spent 8 years building up was being cut and that there would not be any designated leader for student support in the brave new world of the new curriculum. It has taken all this time for students, particualrly those who are the most vulnerable and the most damaged by life experiences, to trust me and my team. Just today I had a 29 year old male student begging me to change his next placement allocation as he is being sent to work with sex offenders despite the fact that he was violently raped at knife point - it takes a great deal of trust for a young guy to share that with a female lecturer. If I'm honest - no, I'm not all right. I'm angry and I'm upset for myself. I'm also extremely angry and upset for students on our current course whose support system is just being removed without warning or rationale. And I'm angry and upset for future students who will have 8 different people to choose from and, at the end of each year will have to change from someone thay have got to know, and possibly trust, to someone new! Guess that is the joy of big organisations! At midday I go over to the library to man the academic skills centre for 2 hours. I'm not expecting to be busy, so I'm taking some marking with me. Why is it that, when I take work that urgently needs attention, I am bombarded with students?!! Only 2 of the students who come to see me are true ASC 'customers' ie those who need help with academic work / writing etc. One is a first year for whom English is a second language who needs help with tenses etc. The other is doing her top-up literature review and is struggling with analysis and comparison of studies. The rest of the ASC visitors are related to student support issues, so who is going to deal with them when my post no longer exists? One guy is so distressed he sits and just cries for half an hour - I rest my case! Back to the office at 2pm - student with an appointment turns up bang on time which means I can't eat my lunch. Someone is having a laugh today - this student is suffering nightmares following a really bad experience with a lecturer which was witnessed by about 10 other students. How do I show the powers-that-be what I do and how much it is needed? Finally eat lunch at 2.45 just in time to leave at 3pm to pop in to my clinical areas on the way home just to say 'hi'. All seems well so home and then do the vet run with a dog with a huge abscess. It's a month ago that my car was stolen (and, as I now know, trashed) so what happens on the way back from the vet - the clutch cable snaps on my borrowed car! Thank goodness for the AA and knowing that I can leave the car at a local garage who will sort it for me tomorrowUid 134Share Project 15.3.11 Will I actually complete and submit this time? After a few false starts I’m hoping so! I am writing this at 4.30 in the afternoon, having had no time previously to get started! Tuesdays are always a bit of a later start as I have a commitment outside of University at 7am. But was still at my desk before 9. The answer phone light was flashing, and my computer was frustratingly taking ages to update (like 15 mins) so I couldn’t access anything! Oh well....check the answer phone. 5 messages, but most had been dealt with last week/yesterday (I was WAH on Thursday afternoon and Friday and yesterday, attempting to get on top of my marking). One call took a couple of attempts to chase during the course of the morning with regard to organising some placements for a student from another Institution but who, for various reasons, is now living locally. Nice to talk to a former colleague, but can’t help for the next placement, as we are already scratching around to find placements for our own students. Not very unusual!! Gave up on the computer and went and had coffee with a colleague. I’d like to say we talked work....well we did for 5 mins, about feedback from some teaching on Friday...after that we caught up on our weekends! Computer working when I got back half an hour later...hurray! When talking with a colleague later in the day we remarked at how not having a computer can be pretty difficult in this job. The urgent emails still have to be dealt with sometime – perhaps later on from the computer at home! Printed off crib sheets for this afternoon’s practical session, then dealt with a dozen emails....still another goodness knows how many to go. The last few weeks have been so busy with teaching, marking, student visiting, that emails, other than the really urgent ones, have gone on the back burner. Then a meeting with a couple of colleagues – the one is moving out of our team, so needed to discuss a handover, identifying exactly his role and responsibilities. If we can get some more admin help there will not be too much to pick up. Thankfully we do have a replacement for him. But he will be sorely missed – the one guy amongst a team of women, and a man with many ideas and the drive to implement them. He’s been a great asset! Apparently he says he’s enjoyed working on the team too! Lunch was eaten with the practical crib sheets in front of me. And then I spent the next half an hour with the skeleton, preparing for the session...oh and sharpening china graph pencils for the students to use to draw surface markings on each other. Not my favourite teaching session – surface anatomy of the thorax. This is the fourth year I’ve done it and, whilst I dread it each time, I feel I’m getting better at it as I’m more confident. I’m not so afraid of questions, and feel I am linking the theory sessions and application to clinical much better. The students were very responsive, engaged and had clearly prepared and listened in the lecture last week. That’s encouraging! They’re a good bunch. And there was generally a good atmosphere in the group. So I have come away feeling more positive and hoping that they have learned something! And some stayed behind to finish off and make sure they really understood what they had been doing. Yes...generally a positive teaching session. We had 3 hours for the session, but predictably only took an hour and a half (there really wasn’t enough material for 3 hours – must feed that back to the module leader). So, an opportunity to catch up with a couple of other colleagues for half an hour. Again more social than work based, but I feel this is really important...I’ll count it as that lunch break I didn’t have! Am now catching up with emails and the endless task list! Have prepared evaluation forms for Friday’s teaching sessions. We have outside speakers who appreciate individual feedback for their own portfolios. That’s pretty much all the prep that needs doing for that now – will just need to put up the presentations on WebCT when they come through. 4.55 – I’m going to make a cuppa before tackling some more emails. 5.55 – well, have got through a few emails...just 41 unread and about twice as many still not dealt with properly!! And after a day off tomorrow (I only work here 4 days a week) and a morning marking on Thursday I’ll bet it’ll be back to 70 or 80!! But I do nevertheless feel some sense of achievement. Anyway, my stomach is growling, so will get home and grab some tea, before going out again...not work related, so that’s good, but the busy life goes on! Uid 134Will I actually complete and submit this time? After a few false starts I’m hoping so! I am writing this at 4.30 in the afternoon, having had no time previously to get started! Tuesdays are always a bit of a later start as I have a commitment outside of University at 7am. But was still at my desk before 9. The answer phone light was flashing, and my computer was frustratingly taking ages to update (like 15 mins) so I couldn’t access anything! Oh well....check the answer phone. 5 messages, but most had been dealt with last week/yesterday (I was WAH on Thursday afternoon and Friday and yesterday, attempting to get on top of my marking). One call took a couple of attempts to chase during the course of the morning with regard to organising some placements for a student from another Institution but who, for various reasons, is now living locally. Nice to talk to a former colleague, but can’t help for the next placement, as we are already scratching around to find placements for our own students. Not very unusual!! Gave up on the computer and went and had coffee with a colleague. I’d like to say we talked work....well we did for 5 mins, about feedback from some teaching on Friday...after that we caught up on our weekends! Computer working when I got back half an hour later...hurray! When talking with a colleague later in the day we remarked at how not having a computer can be pretty difficult in this job. The urgent emails still have to be dealt with sometime – perhaps later on from the computer at home! Printed off crib sheets for this afternoon’s practical session, then dealt with a dozen emails....still another goodness knows how many to go. The last few weeks have been so busy with teaching, marking, student visiting, that emails, other than the really urgent ones, have gone on the back burner. Then a meeting with a couple of colleagues – the one is moving out of our team, so needed to discuss a handover, identifying exactly his role and responsibilities. If we can get some more admin help there will not be too much to pick up. Thankfully we do have a replacement for him. But he will be sorely missed – the one guy amongst a team of women, and a man with many ideas and the drive to implement them. He’s been a great asset! Apparently he says he’s enjoyed working on the team too! Lunch was eaten with the practical crib sheets in front of me. And then I spent the next half an hour with the skeleton, preparing for the session...oh and sharpening china graph pencils for the students to use to draw surface markings on each other. Not my favourite teaching session – surface anatomy of the thorax. This is the fourth year I’ve done it and, whilst I dread it each time, I feel I’m getting better at it as I’m more confident. I’m not so afraid of questions, and feel I am linking the theory sessions and application to clinical much better. The students were very responsive, engaged and had clearly prepared and listened in the lecture last week. That’s encouraging! They’re a good bunch. And there was generally a good atmosphere in the group. So I have come away feeling more positive and hoping that they have learned something! And some stayed behind to finish off and make sure they really understood what they had been doing. Yes...generally a positive teaching session. We had 3 hours for the session, but predictably only took an hour and a half (there really wasn’t enough material for 3 hours – must feed that back to the module leader). So, an opportunity to catch up with a couple of other colleagues for half an hour. Again more social than work based, but I feel this is really important...I’ll count it as that lunch break I didn’t have! Am now catching up with emails and the endless task list! Have prepared evaluation forms for Friday’s teaching sessions. We have outside speakers who appreciate individual feedback for their own portfolios. That’s pretty much all the prep that needs doing for that now – will just need to put up the presentations on WebCT when they come through. 4.55 – I’m going to make a cuppa before tackling some more emails. 5.55 – well, have got through a few emails...just 41 unread and about twice as many still not dealt with properly!! And after a day off tomorrow (I only work here 4 days a week) and a morning marking on Thursday I’ll bet it’ll be back to 70 or 80!! But I do nevertheless feel some sense of achievement. Anyway, my stomach is growling, so will get home and grab some tea, before going out again...not work related, so that’s good, but the busy life goes on! Uid 134Share Project 15.3.11 Will I actually complete and submit this time? After a few false starts I’m hoping so! I am writing this at 4.30 in the afternoon, having had no time previously to get started! Tuesdays are always a bit of a later start as I have a commitment outside of University at 7am. But was still at my desk before 9. The answer phone light was flashing, and my computer was frustratingly taking ages to update (like 15 mins) so I couldn’t access anything! Oh well....check the answer phone. 5 messages, but most had been dealt with last week/yesterday (I was WAH on Thursday afternoon and Friday and yesterday, attempting to get on top of my marking). One call took a couple of attempts to chase during the course of the morning with regard to organising some placements for a student from another Institution but who, for various reasons, is now living locally. Nice to talk to a former colleague, but can’t help for the next placement, as we are already scratching around to find placements for our own students. Not very unusual!! Gave up on the computer and went and had coffee with a colleague. I’d like to say we talked work....well we did for 5 mins, about feedback from some teaching on Friday...after that we caught up on our weekends! Computer working when I got back half an hour later...hurray! When talking with a colleague later in the day we remarked at how not having a computer can be pretty difficult in this job. The urgent emails still have to be dealt with sometime – perhaps later on from the computer at home! Printed off crib sheets for this afternoon’s practical session, then dealt with a dozen emails....still another goodness knows how many to go. The last few weeks have been so busy with teaching, marking, student visiting, that emails, other than the really urgent ones, have gone on the back burner. Then a meeting with a couple of colleagues – the one is moving out of our team, so needed to discuss a handover, identifying exactly his role and responsibilities. If we can get some more admin help there will not be too much to pick up. Thankfully we do have a replacement for him. But he will be sorely missed – the one guy amongst a team of women, and a man with many ideas and the drive to implement them. He’s been a great asset! Apparently he says he’s enjoyed working on the team too! Lunch was eaten with the practical crib sheets in front of me. And then I spent the next half an hour with the skeleton, preparing for the session...oh and sharpening china graph pencils for the students to use to draw surface markings on each other. Not my favourite teaching session – surface anatomy of the thorax. This is the fourth year I’ve done it and, whilst I dread it each time, I feel I’m getting better at it as I’m more confident. I’m not so afraid of questions, and feel I am linking the theory sessions and application to clinical much better. The students were very responsive, engaged and had clearly prepared and listened in the lecture last week. That’s encouraging! They’re a good bunch. And there was generally a good atmosphere in the group. So I have come away feeling more positive and hoping that they have learned something! And some stayed behind to finish off and make sure they really understood what they had been doing. Yes...generally a positive teaching session. We had 3 hours for the session, but predictably only took an hour and a half (there really wasn’t enough material for 3 hours – must feed that back to the module leader). So, an opportunity to catch up with a couple of other colleagues for half an hour. Again more social than work based, but I feel this is really important...I’ll count it as that lunch break I didn’t have! Am now catching up with emails and the endless task list! Have prepared evaluation forms for Friday’s teaching sessions. We have outside speakers who appreciate individual feedback for their own portfolios. That’s pretty much all the prep that needs doing for that now – will just need to put up the presentations on WebCT when they come through. 4.55 – I’m going to make a cuppa before tackling some more emails. 5.55 – well, have got through a few emails...just 41 unread and about twice as many still not dealt with properly!! And after a day off tomorrow (I only work here 4 days a week) and a morning marking on Thursday I’ll bet it’ll be back to 70 or 80!! But I do nevertheless feel some sense of achievement. Anyway, my stomach is growling, so will get home and grab some tea, before going out again...not work related, so that’s good, but the busy life goes on! Uid 134Share Project 15.3.11 Will I actually complete and submit this time? After a few false starts I’m hoping so! I am writing this at 4.30 in the afternoon, having had no time previously to get started! Tuesdays are always a bit of a later start as I have a commitment outside of University at 7am. But was still at my desk before 9. The answer phone light was flashing, and my computer was frustratingly taking ages to update (like 15 mins) so I couldn’t access anything! Oh well....check the answer phone. 5 messages, but most had been dealt with last week/yesterday (I was WAH on Thursday afternoon and Friday and yesterday, attempting to get on top of my marking). One call took a couple of attempts to chase during the course of the morning with regard to organising some placements for a student from another Institution but who, for various reasons, is now living locally. Nice to talk to a former colleague, but can’t help for the next placement, as we are already scratching around to find placements for our own students. Not very unusual!! Gave up on the computer and went and had coffee with a colleague. I’d like to say we talked work....well we did for 5 mins, about feedback from some teaching on Friday...after that we caught up on our weekends! Computer working when I got back half an hour later...hurray! When talking with a colleague later in the day we remarked at how not having a computer can be pretty difficult in this job. The urgent emails still have to be dealt with sometime – perhaps later on from the computer at home! Printed off crib sheets for this afternoon’s practical session, then dealt with a dozen emails....still another goodness knows how many to go. The last few weeks have been so busy with teaching, marking, student visiting, that emails, other than the really urgent ones, have gone on the back burner. Then a meeting with a couple of colleagues – the one is moving out of our team, so needed to discuss a handover, identifying exactly his role and responsibilities. If we can get some more admin help there will not be too much to pick up. Thankfully we do have a replacement for him. But he will be sorely missed – the one guy amongst a team of women, and a man with many ideas and the drive to implement them. He’s been a great asset! Apparently he says he’s enjoyed working on the team too! Lunch was eaten with the practical crib sheets in front of me. And then I spent the next half an hour with the skeleton, preparing for the session...oh and sharpening china graph pencils for the students to use to draw surface markings on each other. Not my favourite teaching session – surface anatomy of the thorax. This is the fourth year I’ve done it and, whilst I dread it each time, I feel I’m getting better at it as I’m more confident. I’m not so afraid of questions, and feel I am linking the theory sessions and application to clinical much better. The students were very responsive, engaged and had clearly prepared and listened in the lecture last week. That’s encouraging! They’re a good bunch. And there was generally a good atmosphere in the group. So I have come away feeling more positive and hoping that they have learned something! And some stayed behind to finish off and make sure they really understood what they had been doing. Yes...generally a positive teaching session. We had 3 hours for the session, but predictably only took an hour and a half (there really wasn’t enough material for 3 hours – must feed that back to the module leader). So, an opportunity to catch up with a couple of other colleagues for half an hour. Again more social than work based, but I feel this is really important...I’ll count it as that lunch break I didn’t have! Am now catching up with emails and the endless task list! Have prepared evaluation forms for Friday’s teaching sessions. We have outside speakers who appreciate individual feedback for their own portfolios. That’s pretty much all the prep that needs doing for that now – will just need to put up the presentations on WebCT when they come through. 4.55 – I’m going to make a cuppa before tackling some more emails. 5.55 – well, have got through a few emails...just 41 unread and about twice as many still not dealt with properly!! And after a day off tomorrow (I only work here 4 days a week) and a morning marking on Thursday I’ll bet it’ll be back to 70 or 80!! But I do nevertheless feel some sense of achievement. Anyway, my stomach is growling, so will get home and grab some tea, before going out again...not work related, so that’s good, but the busy life goes on! Uid 134Share Project 15.3.11 Will I actually complete and submit this time? After a few false starts I’m hoping so! I am writing this at 4.30 in the afternoon, having had no time previously to get started! Tuesdays are always a bit of a later start as I have a commitment outside of University at 7am. But was still at my desk before 9. The answer phone light was flashing, and my computer was frustratingly taking ages to update (like 15 mins) so I couldn’t access anything! Oh well....check the answer phone. 5 messages, but most had been dealt with last week/yesterday (I was WAH on Thursday afternoon and Friday and yesterday, attempting to get on top of my marking). One call took a couple of attempts to chase during the course of the morning with regard to organising some placements for a student from another Institution but who, for various reasons, is now living locally. Nice to talk to a former colleague, but can’t help for the next placement, as we are already scratching around to find placements for our own students. Not very unusual!! Gave up on the computer and went and had coffee with a colleague. I’d like to say we talked work....well we did for 5 mins, about feedback from some teaching on Friday...after that we caught up on our weekends! Computer working when I got back half an hour later...hurray! When talking with a colleague later in the day we remarked at how not having a computer can be pretty difficult in this job. The urgent emails still have to be dealt with sometime – perhaps later on from the computer at home! Printed off crib sheets for this afternoon’s practical session, then dealt with a dozen emails....still another goodness knows how many to go. The last few weeks have been so busy with teaching, marking, student visiting, that emails, other than the really urgent ones, have gone on the back burner. Then a meeting with a couple of colleagues – the one is moving out of our team, so needed to discuss a handover, identifying exactly his role and responsibilities. If we can get some more admin help there will not be too much to pick up. Thankfully we do have a replacement for him. But he will be sorely missed – the one guy amongst a team of women, and a man with many ideas and the drive to implement them. He’s been a great asset! Apparently he says he’s enjoyed working on the team too! Lunch was eaten with the practical crib sheets in front of me. And then I spent the next half an hour with the skeleton, preparing for the session...oh and sharpening china graph pencils for the students to use to draw surface markings on each other. Not my favourite teaching session – surface anatomy of the thorax. This is the fourth year I’ve done it and, whilst I dread it each time, I feel I’m getting better at it as I’m more confident. I’m not so afraid of questions, and feel I am linking the theory sessions and application to clinical much better. The students were very responsive, engaged and had clearly prepared and listened in the lecture last week. That’s encouraging! They’re a good bunch. And there was generally a good atmosphere in the group. So I have come away feeling more positive and hoping that they have learned something! And some stayed behind to finish off and make sure they really understood what they had been doing. Yes...generally a positive teaching session. We had 3 hours for the session, but predictably only took an hour and a half (there really wasn’t enough material for 3 hours – must feed that back to the module leader). So, an opportunity to catch up with a couple of other colleagues for half an hour. Again more social than work based, but I feel this is really important...I’ll count it as that lunch break I didn’t have! Am now catching up with emails and the endless task list! Have prepared evaluation forms for Friday’s teaching sessions. We have outside speakers who appreciate individual feedback for their own portfolios. That’s pretty much all the prep that needs doing for that now – will just need to put up the presentations on WebCT when they come through. 4.55 – I’m going to make a cuppa before tackling some more emails. 5.55 – well, have got through a few emails...just 41 unread and about twice as many still not dealt with properly!! And after a day off tomorrow (I only work here 4 days a week) and a morning marking on Thursday I’ll bet it’ll be back to 70 or 80!! But I do nevertheless feel some sense of achievement. Anyway, my stomach is growling, so will get home and grab some tea, before going out again...not work related, so that’s good, but the busy life goes on! Uid 136I have had a few days out of the office - a meeting at the Dept of Health on Thursday then a weekend with family celebrating mum's 80th birthday. Work doesn't seem to stop so I have to catch up the three days work somehow. On the train this morning I tried to do some marking - final year undergrad and masters literature reviews - but sidetracked into reading the paper. I know people in Japan, and although I don't believe any of them have been directly affected by the events of the weekend the whole country seems to be in turmoil and I am concerned for their well being and that of their families and colleagues. Even though it is vicarious involvement, somehow I feel more attuned to this disaster than to those where I have known no-one. I resolve to speak to a colleague who was injured by the Boxing Day tsunami a few years ago and see how he is coping. I also scan the paper for news from the middle east - some friends from church have been working in one of the countries affected by the recent unrest and we haven't heard of their safety yet. Is no news good news under these circumstances? Somehow, pensions do not seem to be so important as they were last week. In the office, such thoughts get pushed to the back of my mind as the daily routine kicks in. I have specified time between 8.30 and 9.15 to see students but none appear so I catch up with a few e mails and go over my notes for my morning classes. E mails include two from students who will miss classes for one reason or another and want to know how they can catch up - these are the relatively easy ones. Another e mail train into which a colleague has copied me is more disturbing - a student who thinks she is being stalked. We send her to the 'campus cop' but are left wondering how far we can get involved in such matters. At 9.30 my first group of the day are considering the use of an on line data base and enough of them have done the work in advance that we have a reasonable discussion. There are more of them present today than sometimes - the cynic in me registers that this means they have no coursework deadlines this week! After class, several people to see and catch up with; good news from one colleague who has had her temporary contract made permanent, and a little light for the vocational programme in the offer of two funded sandwich placements if we can find students at short notice. I agree to moderate some peer-marked seminars on the MSc programme and just write it in my diary when I am told one of the new staff has volunteered to do it, so I take it out again and free up that morning. I update my online diary with the details of the exam timetable for April/May which has just been confirmed, and book a room to do a deferred in class assessment this afternoon. My e mail box has fallen over as the student in question has just e mailed me 40MB of pictures of his dad's injuries in support of his claim to do this deferred assessment. I spend a bit of time deleting things from my in box....... I then realise the time and have to rush to my first year tutorial class. They are frighted by the fact that there are only two more teaching weeks in the academic year - first year has passed without them really realising it. We discuss this for a bit then look at a case study as revision. Half an hour in the office to eat sandwiches while doing more e mails, then the student appears to do the assessment. We sit in an over-warm tutorial room and although I pretend to read a paper I secretly doze while he is busy writing his essay. Afterwards we discuss the topic, and I find out that his aunt suffers with the disease in question. He is grateful to have had the opportunity to learn a little more about the condition, and I realise again that this degree is not just about people getting jobs. Back to the office and more emails; I offer to help a colleague to get some pedagogic research published, discuss allocation of next year's project students,and find the reminder to write this. Ring home to say i'll be late and wonder if e mail is a good thing or a bad thing... Then read a forwarded message concerning the safety of people abroad and decide, on balance, probably good. Uid 138Started at 8 with ‘real research’ – moving data, organising data, copying data, preparing data for analysis. All 10 minutes of it, but had to be done so as to pass to a colleague so he could work on it today. Most of the rest of the day concerned with not-real-research: ‘expression of interest’ bids for the university’s Teaching and Learning Development Grants close tomorrow. Several things strike me: first: this is the second time in two weeks that I have had to “bid for the privilege to bid” for a grant – as if preparation of grants for which there is a low success rate does not eat up enough of my time already. Second: what started out as small sums to help enthusiastic and innovative lecturers do a better job of their enthusiastic and innovative teaching has now turned into a weighty process, where the research scholarship of the bid is more important than the on-the-ground student experience – these are grants to support research, not teaching (no matter what the university says in its publicity). Third, this means that it becoming increasingly difficult for me to sustain both: to keep up the level of scholarship and education-research required for me to get any support in my teaching innovations, and keep up with my ‘real’ non-education computing science research – which is still pottering along quite well. I used to be able to do both, but the requirements of each are becoming too demanding. And finally, on reflection, I realise that all the colleagues I know who get Teaching Excellence awards and get Teaching grants all only focus on education research, and are all typically University Teachers. So perhaps these awards are just not intended for people like me. So – lots of phone calls and emails getting people on board for our bid: everyone I call is delighted to be named on a bid that they don’t have to initiate or write. I am leading one bid, and co-investigator on another, and we need to be sure that they don’t overlap too much. Fortunately, my lovely colleague actually writes the bid while I am busy with seven student meetings during the day. Just sent off a draft to my co-conspirators, and feel more relaxed now I know that we have a fall-under-the-bus version. Meetings with project students: one of them diligently writes down everything I say, which left plenty of pause time for me to reflect while gazing out the window at the beautiful big snowflakes that have been floating their way downwards all day – yes, snow, on the Ides of March! It seems strange to have snow in ‘spring light’ rather than ‘winter light’. Not much time to get back to the ‘real research’ today, I’m afraid. Maybe tomorrow. The big news is the special meeting of Senate called for Friday (called by a group of academic staff who are unhappy with university management) – the big university ceremonial hall has been commandeered for the occasion as they expect a big turn out. The academics have put forward 9 motions for debate. All is not well. And then there is a UCU strike on Thursday – I am not a member of the union, but as Thursday is my designated research day, I can work from home all day with clear conscience. The best part of the day was a delightful meeting with a keen final-year student who showed me a demo of his ‘restaurant recommender’ system for groups: based on the individual restaurant ratings of group members, the system will suggest a restaurant that will suit the whole group. My partner and I are going out for dinner tonight – we will give it a try! Uid 139What on earth was going on then?? Although I had the reminder and it clicked with me that I was supposed to be getting something down for the day, it had escaped me on the day itself!! There was the 'normal' timetable that included an MSc taught class, but this ended up being changed a bit because we decided to start their design presentation session a bit earlier. These, on reflection, are a really quick way of getting students to know how they're doing, although it means they get put on the spot and have to do something that they might find a bit scarry. I didn't think much of the project they were doing as I hadn't set it and felt that it was a bit lacking in scope, but they ended up with some pretty reasonable results and demonstrated some pretty good thinking, even for such a narrow topic. So that was some of the afternoon. In the earlier bit of the afternoon I was rather bluffing it with them and starting off a topic on product developement where I sort of knew what I wanted to say and get them doing, but I hadn't quite had enough thinking time to get a coherent line of thought out. I guess these happen with everyone. And sometimes they work better than others. this one was working but not as well as it might have done. I think they knew that the presentations were coming up and what they really wanted to do was to get their presentations out of the way. So new thinking probably wasnt' the best thing for them at that point. Try again next week. The morning seemed to get taken up with loads of admin stuff. Yes, a bit of preparation for the afternoon session, but then rather a lot of trying to sort out the admin bits of this and that. Things like trying to sort out dates and tutorials for an industrial collaborative project we'er doing with second year students. In theory this shouldn't be too difficult but we have also agreed a little bit of a staff swap to get one of their engineering designers doing tutorials for us while one of our lecturers develops some drawing skills tuition for them, which should mae it all the more interesting. What, drawing skills for industry? Yes. Ther also seems to have been a bit of an in-office scrap going on about a student writing project that we're trying to get happening across the whole University. Well, it is happening, but there seem to be several prongs to it and whilst some people are happy with that approach, others want a strict protocol to be followed and get more than a little upset when it isn't and when the message appears to be appropriated by others (which sometimes means me). These things seem to take longer than expected as I have to see whether I can defuse the tensions and get a satisfactory outcome when I'm not really renowned for doing that sort of thing. Not enough time spent on preparation. But I managed. Not enough time spent marking, but some of it got done. How do we arrange marking so it takes minimal time and effort and students can develop their skills without so much... well, how to do me out of a job, of course.Uid 140The day consisted of listening to seminars by final year Pharmacy students. I was very impressed by the quality of their work. I spent half an hour talking to students whose project suprerviser was out of the country on University business. I wiosh the University would not do this. I left early to visit my father-in-law who is very ill in hospital. Ended the day watching the last episode of "Outcasts" on the i-player I am still concerned about next week's strike. I am disappointed that colleagues plan to fill in for me on an assessed coursework. As I see it, if I don't get paid, the work does't get done. Not the ideal time for a strike but we are fed up with being bullied by the government (deliberate small "g") and the UCEA.Uid 141Today was a totally different sort of day from normal. I had agreed to be a judge in a competition for schools being run by the local Rotary club at the National Railway Museum. So I had to be there for 8:45 - a real early start for me ;) Got my daughter ready for school double quick time. She was brilliant. Dropped her off early and went on the the NRM. Still late. Medieaval cities were not designed for 21st century traffic! Then the rest of the day was spent helping teams of school children to build a crane. They received the brief and all the building materials at 9:30 and by 1:30 had to have a working crane. Really hard challenge with a combination of gearing for the lifting mechanism, good strong structure, wheels and all control done at a distance of 1m. So there was me, a former mathematician specialising in psychology (of sorts) and working in a CS dept, advising on an engineering project! I really thought I would be out of my depth but teaching is teaching and it was a lot of fun. It was also really great to work with children - yr 8s so 12/13 yr olds. They were really great, enthusiastic and motivated (well most of them!). And the three teams that I worked with did really well, each in their own way. One of them came second for their age group and rightly so. So was it higher education? No. Was it research? No. Was it valuable? Definitely but not in a way that QAA or REF could count! Anyway home early as the event finished at 3pm. So tea, walking the dog, a spot of email, a trip to the pet shop all filled up my afternoon. Then into the evening routine with the children. At 10pm, I started doing some more usual work and treated myself to a bit of data analysis instead of adminny email stuff. And 11:30 came round really quickly :) So off to bed...Uid 142Woke up round 6:30, realising that the sore throat that had been imminent most of yesterday was well & truly here today. Called work - the departmental secretary suggested a throat spray (which works surprisingly well!) Failed miserably to call the Dr. after 44 calls I'd still not got through, though my phone decided that clearly the Dr. is my new best friend. Spent the day reading (none work!) and drinking hot lemon, honey & ginger. Managed to avoid putting the PC on/checking work email until just now - when it was really going on to email them to say I suspect I'll not be in tomorrow either - as I'm still feeling pretty rough - I'm neither wanting to make myself worse, nor for that matter, infect anyone else. A further day's enforced silence should help!Uid 149Hmm, Tuesday. It dawns brightly and I appreciate the additional light we’re getting as the days lengthen, which highlights how dingy everything has become over the winter months. On leaving the house I remind myself to go outdoors with a bin bag to pick the encroaching drift of litter out of the front garden. A ceanothus bush which became frost scorched in the cold weather before Christmas has given up the ghost and now appears shrivelled, as does a hebe in a pot. Maybe I’ll leave them a few more weeks to ensure that they are genuinely dead before disposing of them. Onwards to work, past the overflowing bins and upturned sofas in the front gardens, whilst patches of broken glass glinting in the sun disclose where cars’ windows were smashed last night. Ah to be in springtime now that England’s here. On getting to work, it is time to see some more students who are keen to discuss their ideas for final year projects next year and get me to sign their forms. Whilst explaining to them that I’ve already signed up a number of people for next year’s projects and I’m not allowed to take any more, I’m visited by my colleague who’s coordinating this process who ‘opens me up’ again so I can sign some more. A fortnight ago she told me off for signing too many. After they’ve handed them in on Wednesday we’ll be able to sort out who we’ll be getting and supervisors will be matched with students. Then it is time for a meeting about readiness for the Research Excellence Framework. We review outputs from colleagues in our division and it appears clear to me that we haven’t a hope. One of my colleagues is an optimist and is under the impression that some last minute burst of productivity will be our salvation. But I’m afraid I remain s sceptical because a great many of the more popular journals that people really want to be in are getting very full now, even though the deadline is at the end of 2013. So unless material is out already or accepted and in press, its increasingly unlikely that it will see the light of day. And so the conversation rumbles on. It seems to me to be best to try to place the more productive members of our division in other submissions for the current REF and try to grow the rest ready for the next one. But we take an hour and a half to crank through the issues. Afterwards, I have a really enjoyable conversation with a student who wants to talk about a piece of coursework I’ve set for a final year module and I’m refreshed by her enthusiasm. Meanwhile my email inbox has been filling and is now full of unread messages with attachments for me to read. I also need to find the documentation for the Faculty Research Committee tomorrow. At home I make a start on some of the reading – final year project drafts from project students, and bits of PhD thesis too. They take quite a while. In fact I don’t finish the day’s dose of reading, but come to a place where I can go no further and retire to bed. I’d better go out and pick the litter up tomorrow.Uid 1526-8am Getting everyone up, dressed etc and out of the house 8-8.45am Drop children at childminders and travel to work 8.45am-1pm Interviewing candidates for the UG programme Sept 2012 intake 1-2pm Lunchg with colleagues 2-4pm Decisioning candidates from our interview process - its really hard as we have had to reject such a large number that would have been prefectly capable of doing the course. The volume of applications this year has been unbelievable! 4-4.30pm Emails 4.30-5pm Travel home, collect children 5-6pm Tea 6-7pm Childrens' bedtime 7pm Pick up new glasses from opticians - thank heavens for late night openeing! 7.30-8.30pm Yoga - heaven, so relaxing :) 8.30-10pm TV 10pm BedUid 154Yesterday I had to defrost my car, today I can’t see to the other side of the road because of the fog. So it’s a less than pleasant trip up the motorway. By the time I get into my office on the 7th floor, the fog has thickened even further and I can’t actually see the ground. I have a feeling of being in the clouds or in the middle of the English Channel when the fog comes down. No fog horns but there are the ever present ambulance sirens going past on their way to the hospital. It’s 7.30 and I start my day with emails and then begin fiddling with a survey questionnaire that I want to send out as soon as I get ethical clearance. I want to do a bit of research which doesn’t really fit in to my usual field of interest – although it can be made to with a few tweaks. The idea for it came about as a result of a number of differently difficult doctoral examining experiences and I became curious to know how it was for others. I also reasoned that it might lead to a quick and dirty (as it were) REFable paper. I don’t actually need anything else – I’ve got what have been assessed as my 4, 3 – 4 star publications in the bag - but feel a constant anxiety that there needs to be more. Anyway – maybe this is something that could wait until the next assessment exercise, and the survey might provide a basis for a bigger project which could be submitted for funding. I shouldn’t be doing this really because I have enough research and writing already going on plus a number of deadlines to meet but occasionally one does get such an itch which has to be scratched. At 9 one of the people who I mentor, comes for a session during which we were supposed to be looking at some papers he is reworking following rejection. He needs to cancel – his son is ill and he’s just come in to collect some work to take home. I commiserate and then take the bonus time to go and talk to one of the secretaries who is a dab hand at Google forms and who has offered to help me with my survey. I haven’t constructed a questionnaire for my own research since 1980 when I was doing my doctorate and obviously the technology and options have moved on miles since then. Next is a two and a half hour teaching and learning committee meeting. Issues discussed include marketing, marking, feedback, problems around demarcation of what is to be done by support staff and what by academics, student representation, online resource banks, use of Turnitin, and general communications. Back to my room for more emails and a sandwich before a meeting at 1 with a guy from finance who has agreed to come and talk to me about my pension. Pensions are something that frighten me because I find it extremely difficult to work out what I should do for the best and even what provision I have got. My view has always been that I should put away as much as I can afford and this is what I’ve done. However, it now seems that maybe this wasn’t necessarily such a good idea in light of new policies and tax laws or some such. The University put on a couple of sessions last week for people who it was considered might be in line for large tax bills as a result of these changes and I thought I’d better go along. What the presenters had to say was as clear and as sinister as crocodile infected mud (partly to do with my inability to manage to understand the maths). We were told that tax law was neither fair nor logical and it was clear from the questions asked, and the body language and expressions of the audience that I wasn’t the only bemused and apprehensive person there. From what was said I could see myself needing to get some financial advice in case I needed to stop some AVCs or take other action to avoid (so it seemed) being taxed twice on the same income but I knew that my own calculations might be off beam so I took up the offer of a one to one to do my own particular sums. At 12.45 I nipped down to the common room to make a cup of tea and noticed there was a letter in my pigeon hole marked private and confidential. I suspected it was to tell me that I hadn’t been got an exceptional contribution award this year and I felt quite pleased about this because one of the things they’d told us at the pensions meeting was that having a promotion and pay increase could actually be bad news in terms of tax and that it could be better to ask for lump sums or some other sort of reward (like time off) instead. Back in my room I opened the envelope, pulled out the letter which was upside down and the first words I saw were ‘warm congratulations’ - yes, Sod’s law had yet again prevailed. As I was reflecting on the irony of this the finance guy arrived, saw the letter in my hand and said, ‘ah yes. I wondered whether you would have had it by the time I came’. Anyway, after three quarters of an hour of calculations, I received the news that I just came the right side of the large tax bill divide and that this year at least and in this respect, I wasn’t going to be one of the squeezed middle so I thanked the guy profusely, said goodbye to him and began to feel quite pleased that my efforts of the past year had been officially recognised. Of course, this concern about my own pension and pay increase have to be put in the context of forthcoming union action and the prospect for new academics. This is such a different world from the one I entered in 1978 when, fresh from college, I took up my first research assistant post and began paying into USS. In those days, retirement seemed another country. Now, 10 years away, it’s more like the next county, and in a couple of years I suspect it will feel like the next street..... The afternoon was taken up with a staff development session on CVs that I decided to go to more because I thought it might help me better advice students than be of benefit to myself. That turned out to be the case but it was useful By the time the session was finished it was 4.30 so I went back to my room for another couple of hours of emails, arranging examiners for vivas and so on. I had a conversation about research methodology with a colleague who wanted to pick my brains and a Skype conversation with my son who is in his first year at university and who was unsure about how to reference a particular work. I left for home at 6.45. The fog had lifted but it was drizzly and wet. I got home just as the Archers finished. No more work today. Uid 155Another mad Tuesday, although for different reasons. Managing academic colleagues can be like herding cats, and some do feel that the University owes them a living. For those who work hard and pull their weight I have nothing but admiration, but for those who earn substantial amounts of money for relatively little work it is very frustrating. I feel it more for those colleagues who are working really hard because others do the bare minimum, claiming they are busy undertaking 'research' while producing little or nothing. The usual fraught weekly meeting: the management team are increasingly frustrated at one member who seems determined to undermine the work of everyone else. In contrats, we had a student meeting in the afternoon, which was great - it is wonderful to hear the student view of the programme. It was especially pleasing to hear them saying that they have to earn their degrees; the university provides the support but they need to do the work (it was nice that we didn't have to say it!). Teaching in the evening which was, as always, a real pleasure. I often wonder why I went into management, as I so love the classroom. But I feared that without standing up and being counted there would be no students to teach - and that is the most important thing to ensure for the future.Uid 157It's heading towards the end of semester, most of my contact teaching time has been completed, the project students are out of the lab: it must be marking time! Spent most of the day unsuccessfully trying to find things other than marking to do. The marking itself is not so time consuming, it is the providing the feedback on each report that is. Quite rightly the students want to know what they have done right or where they have missed the point or gone wrong. They are not so interested in generic feedback sent by e-mail, posted on the VLE or given verbally during a lecture. They want to know what is right or wrong with their report and how they can improve. And so I spend a lot of the day writing lots of constructive (I hope) feedback on their reports. Spent a constructive hour talking with one of my project students about what all their experimental results actually mean and how to present them in their final report. When you got a motivated, enthusiastic and knowledgeable student it can make time spent with them, discussing their project, some of the most rewarding time spent with undergraduates. The rest of the day was spent answering e-mails and trying to catch up with a host of administrative tasks that always get pushed to one side when teaching takes priority. End of the day and quite a lot achieved, but the pile of marking doesn't appear to have diminished, the 'jobs to do' list is still just as long (if not longer) and there are still too many e-mails that demand replies. Oh well, there's always tomorrow.Uid 158In to work as usual, but once again I missed my Tuesday pre-office exercise. This time it was in order to get to an important meeting. Circumstances (fortunate for me but not for the chair) meant that the meeting was cut short. Much of the remainder of the day was spent with work on emails and teaching. One hour was devoted to an internal interview and another to a meeting regarding a schools competition. The latter finished at about 6pm. This was followed by another couple of hours in the office. I couldn't afford to lose too much time this week as I had a series of evening engagements for the remainder of the week - playing in a pit orchestra for a show.Uid 16815th March Another Tuesday, entirely different day. The big activity on this diary day was a trip to London to participate in a meeting of teachers and fellow academics to discuss potential changes to the National Curriculum (NC) specifications for our subject discipline. I was asked to attend on behalf of my HEA Subject Centre. The meeting was attended by about 30 people. Several I knew already several were names I recognised but had not previously met. The morning session was set aside to a fairly free-thinking discussion, the afternoon to a more structured attempt to produce recommendations to forward to the Government's current consultation on development of the NC. It is only four years since the NC was last changed. The 2007 version aimed to me much less prescriptive and to give exam boards and teachers more flexibility and creativity. There is now, however, a widespread feeling that the baby has been cast asunder with the bathwater. Although earlier versions of the NC were certainly cluttered and restrictive, the newer version did not contain sufficient guidance. The change of Government has also brought Michael Gove to the education brief and there is a perception he hankers after ‘good old-fashioned pedagogic methodologies. In truth, I found the meeting rather disappointing. I was not sure how much we achieved and there was a prevailing feeling that the Government already knew what they wanted from the consultation process and our influence may therefore be limited. On a personal level I don't feel that my contribution on this occasion justified the hefty price of the train ticket to get me there (the start time had necessitated a peak-time ticket). The potential for networking was limited, but the conversation I had with other earlier-arrivers was probably the most valuable part of the day. On the way back to the station I called in at a venue we had been considering for shooting some material for an educational video. Although the setting would be visually striking I decided that it's relevance to the VoiceOver would not be clear to a non-expert viewer (the intended audience) so - with regret (as Lord Sugar would say) - I decided it would not be suitable. The train journey home is a bit of a blur - I meant to do some work, but I suspect that I nodded off for parts of it (I certainly didn't get as much done as I had intended to). In the evening I attended a Bible study group that meets at our house. We were discussing a passage from the book of Ephesians and reflecting on it's relevance for contemporary life. Uid 171Once again, the 15th has fallen on my flexitime 'day off', which meant that I spent the daytime hours having quality time with my three-year-old. Good for the soul and good exercise too. But from the moment she went to bed (around 8) till about 3am, I was marking--or taking breaks from marking as I need many. It was my last stretch of a group of third-year essays, nine left. Reading them would have been pleasant enough, but I find marking incredibly stressful. The ones that are fantastic are so easy to mark. The ones that have completely failed to address the assignment are also easy--a quick failing mark (but none of those in this batch). But how to mark the ones in the middle--I just find that so hard. I know that the students will take the difference between, say, a 64 and a 66 very seriously, even though it makes little difference in the big scheme of things (an essay that's 30% of a module that's 9% of their final classification). So, how do I compare the one that seems to know the material but can't communicate it at all and the one that analyses some but not all of the data insightfully? We do have a markign 'grid' in which I mark various aspects of the essay (subject knowledge, analysis, communication), but these things are so tied up with one another, it's rarely clear. So, I take a half hour to mark an essay, then have a break for chocolate and facebook before facing the next one, and that's why it takes me 7 hours to mark 9 papers. I know, I know.Uid 172Whole moring in Senate (Academic Board) meeting, amazing that universities actually get anything done. Afternoon spent on: 1. Reviewing BA dissetation chapter 2. Consideration of two ethics committee applications 3. Review of proposed assessment calender from partnership institution 4. Assement of three peices of students' work 5. Submitted article to a journal 6. Thought about doing work on an accepted poster for a conference but gave up and went home!Uid 179Off to Seaside University today, but first is responding to an email from an MSc dissertation student. He's making good progress, but understandably needs a bit of encouragement for the final lap. Then reading another draft dissertation on the train, which I think will probably be a distinction. In fact, probably both of them will. A lecture from 12-2, a trip to the Library and then an open evening. Got called away just before 8 to pick up the eldest boy from Scouts on the way back. Worked for an hour or so after I got home. Overall, quite an easy day so it was strange that I felt so exhausted.Uid 182I arrived into my office today with a list with 27 small-mid-range-importance items to do in addition to 5 lectures, 3 meetings, writing two references, meeting two tutees about financial issues and spending a lot of time starting at my computer screen trying to complete an application for a research award to visit an archive next year. In the gap between two lectures, I managed to book a convenient cheap hotel for a conference during the summer so that felt good ticking it off my to-do list. A group of visiting lecturers from a partner university attended one of my afternoon lectures. While this class went well and I hope the visiting group enjoyed the session, it was still quite nerve-wracking being under the scruitiny of peers rather than students.... This particular visit was informal but despite my small case of nerves, it made me think of ways it could potentially be incoporated into course evaluation and staff review. I spent all of lunchtime talking with prospective students who want to go on Erasmus next academic year which was enjoyable but meant that the afternoon was then very busy. In an hour gap between afternoon lectures, I marked 4 essays (I had a slight feeling of achievement seeing the mountain of essays being chipped away at!) and had a phonecall with a writer I'm organising to come to my Department in May. I also wrote up the minutes of a society meeting and confirmed by email 3 small but sigificant logistical items for the upcoming conference we're organising. I'm going to the theatre tonight which I'm looking forward to as today felt unproductive and rushed.Uid 186Another early start. 8.00. or does waking up at 01.15 remembering something I have to do today count as starting then? Just had the Dean in "helping" with our admissions process. She always has good ideas, but I seem to be the person in the middle who has to try to convince the staff of that. Tomorrow will be the last class in a module that we have been running for 5 years. Over 2000 students have been through it, and it is disappearing as part of a curriculum review. It is a module that teaches study and other introductory skills to our students, which hits all the enhancement targets, but which other lecturers think of as a bit of a waste of time - if the students can't write or reference, that is the student's problem, not the lecturers. Looks like I will have to fight to find some space in the new curriculum for it. Just had a meeting about university centyral timetabling. Appraently there will be 15% fewer rooms this year, and we need to give all our requests in by the end of March, for 2011-12. Last year's timetable was a problem, this year's will be worse.Had to see a student for a disciplinary this afternoon. The part I like least abouit the job. As a student on a professional course they have certain responsibilities, and we can't be sure that the student is actually up to those professional qualities. Not really much to do with teaching, but got to be done. Uid 1876:35 AM - Alarm 7:00 - Got out of bed, dressed and ate breakfast 7:30 - Headed to campus 7:45 - Dropped bags in office and headed to the classroom for my 8:00 Intro to Computers class. Barely half of the class was present. Did they get lost on Spring Break last week? 8:55 - Back in office - checked email 9:15 - Headed to Intro to Computers lab 11:25 - Back in my office - checked email 11:35 - Had one of my non-traditional Intro to Computers students stop by my office to express his pleasure to me about a "small victory" he experienced a few days ago. It seems his (college professor) wife was frustrated not knowing how to set up a spreadsheet to organize/keep track of some data. He was able to say "I can do that; let me work on it for a few minutes." His wife was "amazed" and appreciative. The significant part of this story is that this student had never touched a computer until about five months ago. He has picked up enough skills to feel proud of his accomplishments. It made my day to know that I've been a part of his journey leading up to his victory. 11:50 - Headed to the classroom for my Noon Intro to Computers class. 1:00 PM - Met with a student to review his lab exam submission for Intro to Computers. 1:30 - email 1:50 - Headed to sit in on Computer Org and Design class to review the material and to observe how the current professor presents the material. 3:05 - Out of class - checked email 3:40 - Call to HP support. My wife's PC had been sent in for diagnosis/possible repair. Our house flooded a couple of week ago (4 inches of water in our first floor) and the LCD in her notebook appears to have been a victim of the flood. HP said it's going to cost $200 more to replace the LCD than we paid the the whole notebook new a few months ago. Guess we'll pull the old notebook out of mothballs for a while until we have the money to buy a new one again. :-( 4:10 - Research of cost for LCD replacement part. Just exploring if it's a viable option to do the replacement myself. 4:35 - Exercise 6:00 - Headed to my Mom and Dad's for dinner. (My wife is going out with some of her friends.) 6:15 - Dinner at Mom and Dad's. I also got to visit with our two cats that have been living at Mom and Dad's since our flood a couple of weeks ago. 7:15 - Performed some updates on Mom and Dad's PC. 8:00 - Headed home 8:05 - Visited with my wife 8:30 - Checked email 9:00 - Restored backup files onto my wife's old PC. 10:00 - Email and Facebook, etc. 11:00 - Prepared and loaded Intro to CS project 3 into Blackboard. 1:15 AM - Bedtime Uid 1896am Woke 6.40am car 7.45am Emails 9.00am set up class 9.30am teaching Part Time PGCE stds Noon Met a friend for lunch 12.45am Teaching PT PGCE- second grp 3.00pm Finished teaching...emails 4.00pm Meeting 6.00pm start drive home 7.15pm HomeUid 191This was actually written on the 18th which was the UCU strike day about pensions. Inevitably that colours my looking back at Tuesday. Seeme like there is this invidious creep in HE to hire people for their academic judgement and expertise and then try to force them not to use it. A bunch of papers came back from the Dean's office. They were reports on unsatisfactory students that were apparently done on the wrong form. It took 2 weeks for them to be returned. The students have been unsatisfactory for months (attendance). My colleague is fuming. Actually it isnt my problem - although this is yet another example of me getting things because I respond. But the general irritation falls out on everyone. Ditto the finance office has asked people with grants to account for every hour they spent on a new form (I believe this is going back several years) - despite the fact that they already gave in that information on an old form over the grant period. THEN the letter came from HR about the strike. We all have to fill out a form saying whether or not we worked and are being docked 1/260th of salary. This is in marked contrast to the last strike when only the strikers reported they were out, the old VC brought strikers tea, and we lost 1/365th in recognition of fact that we work all days asked. Quite funny but several people are saying they will now join the union. The fact that this VC is about to retire having been given a 15% raise and on the final pension scheme is making this even more galling (I probably mentioned that before). So general mood in department very bad at present - and it is a bit catching. In the morning there was a handin of an assignment that I plan to mark next week - first by seeing all groups demo their programs. This is problematic with next week's strike. Have finally decided that I will say I was on strike but actually attend the necessary tutorials. I am either an idiot or very dedicated! My day involved dealing with the inevitable assignment hand in problems, preparing the marking sheets and listening to colleagues moan. Maybe this is also fallout from the news from Japan which I find so depressing I cannot even talk about. So, Tuesday ended work early with a walk on the prom - The world may be going to hell in a handbasket but Spring is springing.Uid 200We are on Spring Break this week, but I have been sick since before SIGCSE, so it is not all that exciting. I spent the morning working on a colloquium talk I am giving tomorrow. I left my house at noon to drop by on my kids. They are staying at grandma's house while I am giving my talk. They were happy to see me, but I could only stay a 1/2 hour before I needed to leave. I was driving to the school where I was giving the talk and they are putting me up for the night and I am having dinner with some of the members of the department tonight. The drive takes about an hour and was uneventful. I checked into the hotel, got my stuff settled, took a shower and worked more on my talk. Dinner was at 6pm at a restaurant that specializes in organic and local products. The menu changes daily and I was impressed with their selection. I decided to stick to a safe selection - pasta. It was very good. I was happy with it and even happier with the dessert I ordered. Conversation was light at dinner, which is good because I'm still not feeling well. Luckily, dinner only lasted until 8pm. I was able to go back to the hotel to work on my talk some more. I worked until 11pm and then headed to bed. I *think* it is done. It's not like I didn't know about the talk beforehand, but I was so caught up with other things, I waited until almost too late to prepare properly. Reminds me of my students, always waiting until the last minute. What they don't realize however, is that experience helps when working last minute. Experience is something they don't usually have and most of the time is what keeps them from finishing. I did finish my preparation, and the talk went very well, even if it was more rushed than I would have liked.Uid 204An uncommonly early start today. My son's heading off on a major school excursion that required him to be at the school by 7am, so I drove him there. Then I went on to work, arriving at 7.15, and appreciating the extra time in the office. An email from a lecturer at one of our overseas campuses reminded me that I hadn't yet sent him the lecture and tutorial material he needs for Friday. Bother! I'm revising this course substantially, but like so much of what I do it's been ceding priority to tasks with immediate deadlines - so of course now it's become such a task. I spent the morning producing the revised materials, and sent them off by lunchtime. Tuesdays are my wonderful afternoons this semester. I'm teaching my first-year course to gifted and talented high-school students, some as young as 14. There are inevitably one or two who don't grasp the material, despite the best I can do to help them; but as a whole class they far outshine my normal university classes. This is a computer programming course, and one 15-year-old girl, not content with the exercises I ask the class to do, has decided to write a program that people can use to play noughts and crosses. Her approach is severely limited by how little we've covered in class (she's never programmed before, and we're only in week 4 of this course), but the way she has overcome those limitations is little short of astonishing. She thinks so clearly, so systematically, that I believe she'll do better in the course than even the best of my regular students do. As a bonus, she shares my love for words and language, something that doesn't always go hand in hand with skill in computing. Home at 6.30, slipping dinner between driving kids to and from their evening activities. By 9pm I was ready to start working again. I spent an hour writing the position description for a new lecturer we're hoping to appoint, 45 minutes dealing with the early stages of an academic misconduct case, and 15 minutes backing up my files. Finished work at 11pm, 15 and three-quarter hours after sitting down in my other office, the one at the university.Uid 207When creating this entry realised that I hadn’t entered anything for January and February =- looked back. Both intensely personal days dealing with elderly parent care. Probably it was too hard a subject to put into a diary even as anonymous as this. But looking back made me realise that what was important to me on those two days was the flexibility of academic life. I may have worked a 7 day week before and after but on those days that I needed to be away (a long way away!) from my work place I was able to without too much explanation. We now have an electronic ‘holiday card’ for academic staff – but for most of us this is just pointing out to us how much of our vacation time we don’t use! So this a 15th day. Wake early around 5.30 am. Drove home late last night from a giving a seminar and feel the lack of sleep. However have promised myself an early start and have breakfast over the e-mail from the day before. Get in for 8.00 am and have a quick coffee with colleagues. Important bit of the day. 9.00 – go and see our finance staff. I sent them an e-mail on Thursday asking for a PO to be ready for 9 am on Tuesday so that I could get some posters for a master class with AS level students printed out during the day on Tuesday – they haven’t opened or read the e-mail. Play nice and go down to my office to wait for 30 mins while they produce one and send it to me electronically. Get it to the print shop in time for them to agree that I can pick up posters the same day. Was there any other way of doing this? Grind teeth (why doesn’t print shop accept electronic orders/finance office have enough staff to open e-mails that say urgent) – but get on with stuff while waiting. 11.00 am Literature project student comes along for her weekly meeting. Unfortunately not able to give her too much feedback as the latest report update (normally e-mailed out on a Sunday evening) only arrived at 9.30 this morning (with many apologies but...) so there has been very little chance to read it through in its entirety. Go over a few obvious things and agree to send an e-mail update before the weekend with some comments. This is the first and last year this module will run so do find it a little difficult to be constructive about the process although working with this particular student is a pleasure and her topic is something that I need to know a little more about/update myself on so there is a good interaction. 12.00 A first year undergraduate that has missed two tutorials and been absent from labs and lecture is finally persuaded that he should come and see me. States that health of grandparents and family worries are affecting the time he can spend on work. Certainly looks exhausted – and did not have good first semester marks. Suggest gently that if there really are problems he must let student support know – and provide some documentation – and also that with only a few weeks of term to go a focus on work now and offering support to family during the Easter break might be effective. Have to avoid discussing the commentary of his fellow tutor group members that suggested that the health of his grandparents is not the overriding factor at present in how he is approaching his work – after all he may not be happy to discuss these things with them. 12.30 – lunch with colleagues. A rare treat but enjoy leaving my office and walking to the staff canteen. 14.00 Workshop – luckily it is an easy one and only half the students turn up for help – because my co-convenor colleague doesn’t turn up so have to run it as a one person effort. Show annoyance with two students who demonstrably lie about the fact that they have finished questions – requesting that I hand out an answer sheet to them. Suggest it’s not a good skill to try and deploy in such a small group – I’m definitely bad cop in this workshop series. 15.00 go back to office to phone call from print shop to say that one of the posters won’t open on their system – run back up there with pdf version on a memory stick. Take a dissertation I have to mark with me and wait until all 5 are printed and can be taken away - full day of meetings tomorrow before the session with the AS level students – don’t want to be running across campus tomorrow to sort things out. 16.00 Back to office and finally put in a few hours trying to get an advert and job spec/description ready to go to HR. Admin post that will make my life easier (maybe?) when appointed. 19.00 Go home via supermarket to pick up snacks for AS level student arriving tomorrow evening (17 year olds with empty stomachs don’t make good learners or listeners and this week they have to do presentations on their poster) and the swimming pool where I spend 30 mins plowing up and down in the not so fast lane. Good swimming pool at university one of the big advantages of my job. 20.30 Home, cook and an hour of mindless TV. ‘Tidy’ study in the hope that I will actually use it this week and get on with a couple of manuscripts – exhausted by 22.00 – bed – sleep. Uid 213Tuesday is my day off campus, but teaching for 6 hours (4 straight from 10-2 and then 3-5) on Monday means I'm pretty tired on Tuesday morning. I did some admin at home in the morning - I try to keep it separate, but it creeps in on my 'research' days. In the afternoon, I went to the London Library. My favourite place to work (the Lightwell Room) was full, so I sat at a desk that turned out to be out of reach of the wireless network. I suspect it is good for me to be away from the lure of constantly checking my email - just in case. Just in case what I'm never entirely sure, but I feel compelled to check it every few minutes. I've finished a first draft of a new novel, and this weekend I put all the chapters into one file. I read through the entire novel on paper, which I feel is the only way I can properly get a sense of the entire piece. Overall I was pleased, although I have a lot of work to do on it! I did go to a wired computer to check my email, and my 'just in case' email turned out to be making an appointment for my 6 month appraisal review before all the slots were gone. My heavy teaching load meant that I could make only two of the slots without coming in on my research days. I did get the one I wanted though. I've had a pretty good year since my appraisal in the autumn - I'm giving a conference paper (and got funding for the trip to the US) and I won some funding I applied for - so it should be a pretty easy appoinement. I left the library and bought a big atlas of Greater London (needed for planning my novel) at Waterstones and used my Lecturer's Loyalty card. The shop clerk had to wait for a manager to find out how to put the discount through - they clearly don't get many of those cards at the Piccadilly branch. Then I took the tube up to King's Cross and went to Pilates class. I love having that hour of not thinking about work, and it's definitely improved my posture, which helps in the way I present myself. I thought about that last week when I had two difficult tutorials back to back - first a mature student who was very irate (and quite rudely offensive about my impartiality) that she did not get a first, where I tried to keep my spine as straight as possible. The second one was with a student burst into tears because his friend is in hospital at the point of death, where I got him tissues and let the academic side of the tutorial go out the window, and didn't worry at all about keeping my posture upright. Home then for chicken pie and watching Silk on BBC. Oh, but first I immediately did some urgent student emails - the just in cases that piled up while I was at Pilates. That hour seems very short.Uid 214A beautiful, sunny day! The first real 'spring' day here, so as a (virtually) bald man I venture out without a wooly hat for the first time since the autumn - a small but significant 'win' in the quality of my life. To add to the pleasure of the sun it is a joyfully 'normal' day approaching the end of term here (we're in week 9 of 10), full of the small victories of academic life that make it worth doing. These victories include: classes with some lively first years (they laugh at my jokes, perhaps out of politeness, perhaps because I actually was being funny - who knows); a very small number of corrections to the proofs of a forthcoming book chapter (perhaps I'm responsible for there being so few errors, or perhaps the editors are - but again, I'm not going to question the good karma); the first sight of the cover of my new book (it must be nearly ready to go if the publishers are at *that* stage! And being a text book related to my research it wins on 'impact' as well as having the potential to make some money - a double-headed win); a mercifully short 'section' meeting (over in under an hour - a first?); and to cap it all a seriously denuded to do list/email list/admin list. The day ends with pilates and home-made chicken pie (so what if the pie more than cancels out the pilates: good pie is not to be ignored).Uid 217A slightly daft but, in the end, enjoyable day. Up and do e-mail till 9 and then go to the department, pausing to pick up a renewal-of-passport form because I'm off to a conference in the States in three weeks' time and have realised that they won't let me in unless I have a new passport valid for more than the five months remaining on my old one. A meeting with a slightly jumpy PhD student (the one I have mentioned in earlier entries) at 10.30; then with another PhD student who is taking medical leave for a year. Give lecture to a hundred and twenty first-years, with the usual fooling around at the start to try to persuade the projector etc to work for the powerpoint. Quarter of an hour to grab a sandwich. Meeting with MA student at 1.15, except that she doesn't show. Then a completely futile afternoon trying to get my new passport, which involved a visit to the passport office near a main rail station, two return visits to the photo booth to get the blasted photos right, and an absurdly overlong train ride due to the usual signal failure. Then back to the department at 6 for a paper on early American lit (not my field) given by a visiting scholar, an Australian who I met when I was myself a visiting professor at her university. We then drank far too much red wine and ended up eating late and drinking more red wine.Uid 2219-10 dealt with email 10-12 planning for a web-conference following week 12-12.45 lunch break, visited art exhibition 12.45 met with final-year student to discuss his project 13.45-14.00 bought sandwich and ate it 14.00-16.00 (important) Team meeting about radical changes to be made because university is re-organising in many areas 16.00-17.15 continuation of informal discussion of strategic points raised in team meetingUid 2247:45am It's exactly 3 weeks after the big earthquake that closed down our university, and this week we're finally teaching again, but without use of the our offices or lecture theaters. The temporary venue that we arranged for some lectures today got changed last night, so I phone first thing to re-book buses that were going to take students there from the main "campus", which is mainly a bunch of tents being used for lectures. The next hour and a half is spent driving around picking up people who went to the wrong place. 9:30am Drop by another temporary lecture venue which is in a motel restaurant to make sure it's set up for the day while their staff clear the breakfast tables. 10:30am Drop by the staff member's house that has become a temporary department office. There's a shopping list of things needed to make it a real office (we're not allowed to get gear from our normal building because it hasn't been certified after the earthquake), so two of us hit the road to visit stationery, computer and grocery shops (coffee is still essential to run a department!) 12:30pm Drop off the shopping and pick up gear for my 1pm lecture. 1pm Give my first lecture of the year in a restaurant to an enthusiastic class; it was supposed to be 3 weeks ago, but the earthquake happened 10 minutes before the lecture time! The students are very positive; they almost seem more motivated because of the unusual circumstances. 3pm Lecture is over, report back to the "office" and deal with requests, timetables and equipment needs. 4:30pm Meet a visiting lecturer who I'm working on a paper with. 5:30pm All emergencies sorted for another day, time to head home and deal with my personal complications from the earthquake. Our house got water back on today - but now it's off again. We've got internet, but not sewerage - garbage in, but no garbage out.Uid 226On Tuesday, March 15, I hosted a panel of scientists who reviewed grant proposals in the area of computer security. I had the relatively easy task of quality control. I proofread final reports and tactfully pointed out inaccuracies, inconsistencies and typos. I took part in the debriefing in the late morning, then went to lunch with two panelists. In the afternoon I met with one of the investigators whose project I manage. To my disappointment, he is retiring. We discussed how he will hand off his project since it is not likely to reach completion by his mid-summer retirement. I scanned through most of my 175 backlogged email messages and took care of a few emergencies before throwing in the towel for the day. In the late afternoon and evening I scanned my home institution email and read that backlog of 75 or so messages, taking care of most of the pending items. Last week I attended a conference and gave three presentations, then returned to supervise two days of proposal reviewing. Next week I travel and give presentations at two more conferences, followed by a half-day workshop presentation. I'm feeling a bit stressed. The time changes due to both travel and Daylight Savings Time this week did not help.Uid 227A quiet day for once. Managed to get through some of the piles of paperwork on my desk..... Undertook peer observation on one of my colleagues. I always enjoy doing this especially when I am interested in the content being taught. This seminar was well attended, students engaged and I had problems not getting involved in the discussion it was so interesting...... Then took my own seminar group – very engaged this week and vocal – worked well. As well s this tried to digest the Access Agreement details that we need to develop and what can and can’t be included. Trying to get through the tangle of not very firm regulations is not that easy. Uid 231Goodness, gracious, I am supposed to be on annual leave but so much to do. Found out yesterday that I needed to meet the Vice Chancellor (VC) about the Compact discussions between government and Australian universities to determine government funding for 2012. All very interesting, as the current VC is totally adverse to the unions (I am the president of the academic union) and this is the first time he has met with the union - still not sure why. Anyway, it sort of ruined the day as I had to spend all morning becoming an expert in higher educaton funding policy in preparation for the meeting with the VC. Having swotted all morning (8-12), I then attended a meeting and lunch with my research mentor about developing a major grant application on the future of casual academics (12.15 - 1.30pm) before speeding off to campus (12km away) to meet my new head of discipline - the meeting was a bit of a waste of time - lots of boys talking about themselves, but I was impressed with the new boss ( a boy but not so self obsessed as some of my male colleagues wanting to make a good impression - I liked him because he asked all the wrong questions! I thought I had a future friend at court. Rushed from this meeting to the VC - a meeting a little like out of a Monty Python movie - after an hour and half, we left with the VC saying his door is always open to the Union which, on reflection, was strange as he had never met with a Union representative since he commenced eight year ago and has never answered one of our letters and made it clear that he is against unions! Anyhow, times change.... After a debrief with the Union organiser who attended with me, I drove home via the home of my Head of School so she could sign a form for me. Arrived home at 6.30pm and straight away got into writing up my meeting notes from the meeting with VC and dealing with a days worth of missed emails. Finished at 9.30pm - had dinner while watching the devastation in Japan. Bed with sudokos at midnight.Uid 232Morning. In St Andrews meeting research students and catching up with bits and pieces. Visit to Abertay University in Dundee planned in the afternoon - no car today so planned to take bus - but so wet, ended up in a taxi. Presentations about SICSA - Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance to Abertay staff and discussions about more SICSA involvement. Home about 5.45. Evening spent catching up on emailsUid 234In the feedback sheet from February 15th someone said something very true – we have a great job. We have flexibility about what we teach, what we research and the hours we work. Today I am working from 7:45-2:45, because it suits me & my family. I got to disappear into the library for a couple of hours – I’ve found a cubby hole that is always quiet, well lit and has an available computer. I worked on PhD, and I’m preparing to take my PhD on a branch away from the main study. A study within a study, my supervisors love it – I’m hesitant! After lunch I returned to my office and then as predictably as night follows day I start to get bombarded with the business of being a lecturer. “Our competitors student numbers”, “Work load analysis”, “Admissions, rejections & confirmed offers”. Don’t get me wrong I don’t dislike these parts of the job, it’s just impossible to think about the business side of the job, whist trying to do research. I’ll return to my cubby hole as soon as I can. Uid 237Diary entry 7 Tuesday 15th March Context: Today is the 7th week of term (possibly 8th, have lost count) and I have no specific teaching at Institution A or Institution B so booked the afternoon to spend working on a research grant with a colleague. Feeling very tired stemming from Sunday, as was up until 3am Monday morning finishing a proposal for a first year elective for Institution A (which might potentially mean - if it recruits enough students that I may still have employment at Institution A past February 2012). Content: Woke up at 9am to missed text messages from my grant writing colleague who was requesting (at 7am) that I send her the latest version of our Case for Support because she'd managed to free an hour or so before meetings at 9am. So, I scuppered her plan by being so tired that I didn't get up when my alarm went off. However, it did give me a kick up the arse because I started working at 9am and worked solidly on my sections until 11am, at which point I realised I hadn't even had a cup of tea, or fed the dogs, or got dressed. Cue panic to get ready for the day in 30 minutes and get into work for meeting at 12. Managed this, had 3 hours of very productive collaborative working on the grant, and then had a meeting 3-4 with the faculty research support administrator. Went for a drink post grant-writing session with my colleague to talk about things other than work. Got home around 5.30 at which point started preparing a lecture from scratch for Institution B in the morning. Feeling pretty tired at this point, and in desperate need of sleep, however mustered the energy to write most of the lecture (helped greatly by the fact I prepared two dinners last night so I only had to heat one up today). 12 o'clock struck and whilst most of the lecture was done, I still hadn't provided feedback on a dissertation draft that I had promised one student (who couldn't carry on until I had given them feedback), so I spent the next 90mins reading a 66 page dissertation draft and managed to email that back to her at 1.45am, still with some of my lecture for the morning to write (and of course, this diary, and God knows how many other tasks which clearly are beyond the realm of this particular Tuesday). I finally go to sleep at around 2am, setting the alarm for 6am as have to leave the house for Institution B at 6.30am in order to give me an hour to finish off the lecture once I arrive. It is simply not enough, 4 hours sleep, but it's about all I can snatch at the moment. Uid 238Diary March 15, 2011 - A typical teaching day... 8:00am Stopped by store on the way to work to get some equipment for an experiment to do in one of my classes. It is easier to pay for small items out of my own pocket than to go through the paperwork for purchase orders. 8:30 - 9:00 read e-mail and submitted an administrative report 9-9:30 prepared for class, recorded grades, uploaded example program to web page 9:30-10:45 taught class - that was a little less polished than I like, but I can only do so much. There never seems to be enough time to do everything. I have too many preps (5) in a field (computer science) that is constantly changing - sometimes I feel like I am in a hopeless situation. On the other hand, I never get bored - overwhelmed, yes, but never bored! 11:00 go to post office to get physical mail. The department's projector needs to be replaced so I spent the next two hours researching the capabilities of different projectors. It sure would be nice to have a secretary to delegate stuff like this to. Worked through lunch (spouse will fuss at me about that) 1:00 -1:45 taught a shortened version of class since my cold was getting the better of me and causing me to cough when I tried to lecture. 1:45 -2:00 answered questions regarding internships and registering for next year's classes. 2:00-2:30 helped a student debug his program 2:30 Finally had a break to sit down and eat lunch! Gobbled it down in 5 minutes so I could get back to investigating projectors, check the amount left in the departmental budget, fill out the paperwork to have the purchasing department order it. Also need to order toner and printer ink and request a reimbursement for equipment I purchased with a personal credit card since company would not accept purchase orders for amount under $2000. 5:30 well, I didn't get to the point that I could make an intelligent decision about the projectors - will continue that another day - time to go home. 6:00 arrived at home and practiced playing my hammered dulcimer for a half-hour. I find that I need to do something unrelated to school work occasionally or I will go crazy. 6:30 - 7:00 fixed dinner 7:00 - 7:45 ate dinner with spouse exchanging stories about our day. 7:45 - 8:00 did a few household chores (gathered garbage, fed cats, etc) 8:00 - 9:00 allowed myself the luxury of watching a television show. 9:00 - almost midnight: preparing for the next day's classes. Uid 239Chasing my tail again. Late with writing this up. Loads of work to finish off before going off to a conference.Trying to put cover in place as well as just finding out I'm expected to host a two day event next week. Nice to be told in good time. Will have to spend the weekend revising my contribution to the event as what I was going to so no longer fits. Thought I was getting somewehere with everything when student crisis occured. Stop everything and try to deal it this. This took the rest of the day. Had tio try and catch up in the night. Went to bed at 2.0 am for a couple of hours then back at the computer at 4.0 amUid 241I enjoyed attending the SIGCSE conference last week. I brought papers to grade with me, but I didn't actually do any grading until I got to the airport on the way back. I was very guilty of procrastinating. I did attend presentations for all three days of the conference, and a workshop after the conference, so I was doing work-related stuff. On Saturday evening, I investigated the workshop-related material some more. I wish that I could be more like my husband with respect to grading.Uid 2448:00 kids dropped off at school, and now time to get back home to work. Have decided to work at home and try to sketch out the rest of a paper I am working on. 8:30 made the mistake of starting to read e-mail over coffee at home :-( of course there are suddenly several urgent things that I need to take care of. 9:00 - 11:30 Worked on setting up course information to address student uncertainty in one of my project courses. Hope this will work out well now. 11:30 had lunch 12:30 worked with conference organisation issues for a conference committee I am chairing in the USA. 14:00 done with the conference and start to think about my paper. The challenge is to write a paper that draws on several related areas of research, learning models (specifically PBL), learning theory (conceptual change theory) and constructive alignment principles to make an argument about how this type of research can inform and guide instructional design to help scaffold learners in the development of professional skills in engineering. 16:30 time to head off to get the kids from school, down tools, well really I spent most of the previous two hours reviewing literature I have collected as background to this paper, so I still really have not started to write, just trying to manage to get my preliminary thoughts and intuitions backed up and identify useful citations from the literature. 17:15 back home and cooking dinner, I guess no more work today, have made a decision not to work as much in the evenings.Uid 245Am on study leave. Writing a paper in the morning. Meeting of the social theory reading group within our Faculty. As ever a rather small and select group. I think the habit of filling time with bits of work is very deeply ingrained from the pressures of working in academe, but its an unhelpful approach when you actually have a good block of time to read and think. I expect by the time I have unlearned this way of using time I will be back at work.Uid 246This week is spring break, so all the students are out having a good time, and the faculty is scrambling to catch up. First thing after getting up with my kids, I had to deal with a personal issue regarding some close friends. Then I went to help a local charity load a shipping container bound for Africa until lunch time. Finally I made it to the office where it felt like I had a million things to do, all of them equally important. I finally settled into getting caught up on my email, sending out some last minute information to my Android workshop attendees (I led a workshop at a conference last week) and grading an exam. Oh, and I had to deal with a student who submitted a very poor senior research paper... I told him to add to it or take a huge hit on his grade. I really don't know what I'd do without a spring "break". Uid 250Tuesday, March 15th Last week was SIGCSE and Spring Break. So this week is just after a break for the students, but no chance to catch up on things for me. ---- begin digression into Monday, March 14th -------- ---- sorry, but yesterday was way more interesting --- Yesterday was lost to car repairs and an unexpected snow. My car slid off the road in the morning. No damage, but it took two hours of shoveling and salting to drive away. The unplanned off-roading prompted a trip to get car service. Timing belt, brake service, broken motor mounts, and more = $2,700 of work. I didn't make it to campus. Just keeping up with adminis-trivia via email consumed the time I had between getting the wife to work, car to the shop, and renting a car. We spend the night in a hotel to avoid morning snow / traffic. ---- end digression into Monday, March 14th -------- Due to yesterday's events, the wife and I spend the night in a hotel near her office. We're driving a rental car. But, we won't be concerned about a repeat sudden snow event. Thoughts of my class haunt me. The midterm exam in software engineering is set for two days from now; last week was spring break (for the students) - so, what should I try to accomplish in class today? I could forge ahead with new material, after all, we are behind in topics due to several "snow day" cancellations earlier this term. I want to forge ahead, but the students, most certainly, will be focused on the exam. So I decided not to introduce new material, and will spend the class period trying to get them to reflect on the first half of the semester. It might even help make the rest of the semester go better. I chauffeur the wife to work and get to campus a little later than I had hoped. I spent the first hour on campus dealing with email and adminis-trivia. There is always a pile of documents that need my signature. There are frequently electronic documents for me to review and authorize. (payroll, key control, activity reports, book orders, student graduation checks, p-card transactions, ...) At 10am the Chancellor gave his 'state of the uni' speech. I went to be seen (and hear). He usually gets to the point and covers the bases. He announced good news about budgets and possible merit pay increases - this was a surprise, a pleasant surprise. I left the Chancellor's presentation early to make it to software engineering. I gave the class a "study guide" that listed many topics. I brought an old exam to show them the format and to read some actual questions to them. We spent about 45 minutes talking about course/exam topics. The last portion of the class period was used by the students to form teams for the upcoming group project. Three teams were created by the end of the day. After class I met quickly with a student who had a pre-req problem. Shortly thereafter, I had an appointment with a student who is a dual major criminal justice and computer science. We spent some time mapping out how to finish the CS degree. He is a senior in CJ and a sophomore in CS. Interesting fellow. From that meeting I quickly transitioned into the regular research meeting for 'point-cloud processing'. We are putting the final touches on a paper accepted at a conference (yeah!). We talked about future work and publication ideas. Since January, I count 1 paper accepted, 1 poster submission, 5 papers that are likely to be submitted this year, and 6 more paper ideas in some state of work/completion. Three papers are due in 15 days. (I've got to keep this short, I've got a lot to do in the next two weeks) After the research meeting, I spent some time with a visitor to the department. The tour of labs and chatting was an investment of about 1.5 hours. Hopefully this was a wise investment. From meeting with the visitor, I moves to another research meeting. This meeting includes discussions of two of the papers due in two weeks. So, I make it to 5pm and I've barely been in my office. Thus, there is no midterm exam written for Thursday and there is a collection of email waiting for me. Since we have a car in the shop and the weather has been chancy, I've got to pick my wife up to get us home. She emailed to say to pick her up from a restaurant about 8:30pm. This is great news, I can work on the email pile until about 7:45pm before leaving for my chauffeur gig. I work until about 8pm, primarily answering and sending email messages, and then leave to get us home. Probably make it to bed about midnight. Better set the alarm early, I hope to make it to the gym tomorrow. (but it didn't happen) --- begin a bit about Wed. 3/16 --- Went to dry cleaners. Picked up the car. Went to campus. Much of the day is spent in informal and formal meetings. Blah. More email. Blah. I began working on the midterm exam around 10:30pm. Based heavily on a combination of prior midterm exams, it wasn't finished when I went to bed about 1am. Uid 256I started work at about 08.30. Remember, please, that I am a retired part-timer. What promises to be a somewhat fraught day began with my continued (after an overnight break) wrestling with a submitted paper which I have to review, and whose findings, frankly, I find unbelievable – in a field where I am quite competent. I did a bit of reading, not only in papers of the same topic, but in statistical guides, which I only found modestly helpful. Contacted the editor to flag my concerns. Conscious of the need to be careful about wording, lest litigation might ensue. Cleared one or two routine e-mails en-route, including an acceptance by a former student of the willingness to collaborate with me on a controversial paper on assessment. Work total (with a 30 min break to wash and shave and shower): 2 hours. 11.00 arrives Then on to a complete contrast. As a writer submitting a draft chapter for a forthcoming book, I am asked to offer constructive criticism of the submissions by two other writers. The first of these is superb. All I can do is say “excellent” and respond “None” when asked what changes should be made. Conscious that this makes me seem a superficial reader, which I am certainly not. Draft the very detailed responses which the publisher requires of me with care. Total 1 hr 30 mins. Suddenly worry about submission of assessment on a portfolio which has come in, circuitously, late. Check up on convoluted records. Note that it needs my attention now. Not necessarily today, but soon for me, I opine. 30 mins Lunch 20 mins Now prepare for what looks to be a dreary meeting in which the active second in command of my employers will look to an MSc student colleague and me to come up with bright activity, in which she expects to have a strong say with not too much to contribute, other than in her view. 20 mins. Travel to University, 20 mins. Totally tortuous meeting. Senior and junior wrestle for authority on the concept which is to be developed for the group. On several occasions I intervene to try to focus thought on whatever it is they consider brought us together. It takes a while to get there. Wearily I lift myself into leadership, and come up with an idea to which they both sign up. Maybe with the senior it’s to shelve action to me as a junior. Maybe to the other, it’s to shelve actions as she is very busy. I’m not sure. No-one is paying me for this. Why do I let myself be exploited? Well, I suppose it’s because I relish being engaged at the cutting edge, sort of. So that’s my payment. Stop thinking martyrdom thoughts, John. 1.30 hrs. Travel home. Scan e-mails. Complete formal return of the review of the excellent paper. 30 mins. Write up diary, 20 mins. Now on to the second chapter which needs a review. Reading and noting until it’s time for tea. 1 hr 10 mins. Now it’s 17.30! Good to have a break, and indulge myself with the News at six, and the Scottish news. Break till 19.00 Now engage in fuller detail with the second draft chapter. It’s an honest, too honest, account from a difficult situation. But it has nothing to offer the readers, or editor, of the proposed book. Wrestle with how to put that in a kindly way while responding in detail to the searchingly detailed questions of the publishers, and through them the editor. Break in the middle for social phone calls with family. 2.00 hrs plus 1.00 hours phoning, and watching TV news on Japan crisis. 10.00 pm. Almost time for bed for a tired old man. Uid 257I get up around 8.30am, look at Schools’ reports to the Faculty over breakfast and walking in. The little pond on the way has a few clumps of frog spawn, much less than last year, but with the limited resources of the pond maybe more will survive. I am in the office soon after 11am and catch up with email before joining the 12-2pm regular Philosophy work-in-progress lunchtime seminar, for which I had presented and led a discussion on the nature of academic practice last month. Today it is a visiting speaker from the US, introducing his latest account of the nature of moral value claims. I won’t use his thesis directly but it is usefully orienting background for the next class of my module, Philosophical & Theoretical Issues in Higher Learning - Friday’s session will be on ethical issues in relation to academic work. I head back to the office to have a snack for lunch while getting on with work. In the afternoon I manage to do some preparation for the class, get papers together for the meeting in London on Thursday of the Society for Research into Higher Education Postgraduate Issues Network (we convenors will have a business meeting as well as hosting the visiting speaker introducing issues about the doctoral viva), and do some work on the Enterprise funded project on developing new teaching materials before meeting my co-leader of the project (a Professor in Philosophy) over a beer 5-6pm for a review and planning meeting. I do another hour’s work on the above tasks and email correspondence, including on preparations for the UCU strike action days next week. I go out to the main refectory after 7pm for a cooked dinner and start moderating a sample of student assignments marked by another colleague who is the module convenor for this course. There is such a large proportion of the work that we do which is about pedagogy or otherwise teaching related but it all amounts to nothing of importance in the growing shadow of the REF. I return to the office to carry on and depart finally after 10pm, walk back to lodgings and retire just before midnight. Uid 258I can't remember being off sick in the five years I've worked at a University (although some days I've dragged myself in while obviously ill and probably infected several students in the process). However, last night I lost my voice. Luckily I wasn't teaching today but had a batch of student tutorials to deal with and to reschedule then would create more problems so I croaked my way through two of them (not really impressing my new dissertation students). Thankfully two other students cancelled (one was 'too busy' - pah, does she think I'm not?) Was very pleased that one of my dissertation students already has a cracking idea for next year's dissertation and has a clear idea of hypothesis, methodology, etc - which is a rare thing. Then again, we upped our A level points requirement for new students a couple of years ago, so maybe this is going to be the norm now. Apart from that I marked piles of student work, helped a colleague with a crisis caused by a sick part-timer, went for a run with a colleague (although I've lost my voice I feel fine) ... wrote a lecture ... just a normal busy day. Intended to do more marking in the evening although to be honest I didn't get to sit down until about 8:30 due to supervising 'bedtime' with small children (a tricky task with no voice and a husband abroad on a business trick) and had to have a large glass of wine almost straight away which really spelt the end of marking.Uid 260Today is a research day so I am working from my home. My wife returned from working in Hong Kong yesterday and I expect her to take the opportunity to catch up on her sleep and go to work late - but she arises at the usual time and departs on schedule. I gather my dogs and go for a walk. At 10am I settle down to the day's work-related activities. I read the current edition of Foreign Affairs for an hour and a half. I long since discovered that if I do not read incoming journals on the day of their arrival then I never get around to reading them. Foreign Affairs is nearly 200pp and I read all the articles in every issue - so I need to make a good start today. At 11:30 I have a coffee and then review the day's emails. I am pleased to note that I have received a belatedly claimed external examiner fee. It is agreeable to see that this fee is nearly four times as large as the fee I receive from another university where I am also an external examiner. Equally good news is a notification that I have been reimbursed nearly ??500 in travel expenses by a charity for which I do training. The fee (net of income tax) and the expenses are togther well in excess of ??1000. I shall have to reward myself with some kind of extravagance later this month - the Folio Society's limited edition facsimile of Edward Young's Night Thoughts illustrated by William Blake would take care of most of these spoils. I review e-mail submissions of proposed dissertation titles sent to me as external examiner. I review two internal Msters students' proposals for dissertations. I review and comment on a draft undergraduate dissertation I am supervising. I take a break and watch BBC News 24 for the latest on the Japan earthquake crisis. I listen to an interpreter interpreting the words of the Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan - I can hear his speech underneath that of the interpreter and am pleased to learn that I can actually understand a fair part (minus the technical words) of what he is saying. Three years of following the Rocket Japanese language course on my Sony Walkman while dog walking has clearly taught me something. I'm so pleased with myself that I switch Sky channels to NHK and do some more listening to interviews where the speaker's Japanese can be reasonably easily heard. I'm amazed to find that I can understand most of ordinary folks' descriptions of what has happened to them. I'm like a child with a new toy and won't leave it alone and get back to my proper academic work. I find myself cussing out loud that typically we only hear the first sentence or so of a speaker in Japanese before an interpreter kicks in and subdues the native speaker to near inaudibility. Luckily NHK has lots of interviews so cumulatively I get a fair dose of colloquial Japanese. After nearly two hours of this I have done no real work but am hugging myself with glee that I can actually understand real Japanese people speaking unscripted Japanese. I had no idea that my Japanese was this good - perhaps I should squander the external examiner fee and the expenses spoils on a vacation in Japan... I reluctantly return to the major task du jour - planning a bid to the FCO for some major funding. I work with a charity that provides specialist human rights training to practitioners so that they can do pro bono work abroad. I have suggested that we make a joint bid for funding and that our university develops a distance learning programme for volunteers. The charity likes the idea but we have very little time to get our act together and submit a detailed, fully costed bid - in fact it has to be in by the end of the month. The task would be a lot easier if I just took charge and designed the whole thing - but that would not be very collegiate and I want all concerned to feel ownership of the bid. The difficulty is getting other people to have a sense of urgency - chivvying them and chasing them is like herding cats. I ponder the limitations of our exisitng programme and put pen to paper with a draft training model. I send it out for comments - people always find it easier to adopt someone else's fully realised ideas than to come up with ideas of their own. I expect I shall eventually end up with a proposal which is 95% my ideas but it will take a lot of time to get everyone to respond and agree. I would welcome some good ideas from others but am not sanguine about the prospect of getting any. I prepare the evening meal and await my wife's return. After dining I set out to make the 110 mile drive to my flat in readiness for teaching tomorrow. I leave home at 7:40pm and arrive at my destination at 9:40pm - only to discover I have left my flat keys at home. I groan, phone my wife to tell her to expect me back in a couple of hours only to immediately depart again. I am clearly embracing the absent minded professor model too closely. I make the round trip again and eventually get into my flat at 2am. ... and so to bed.Uid 264(Written on the morning of March 16 for yesterday.) Yesterday I was sick. During my morning run I was wheezing and coughing so badly that my running partner asked if I was going to take some time off work to stay in bed and get healthy. I replied that I couldn't and that I had to be pretty-much dead to miss a lecture at the last minute when it would be too late to get a substitute. By the time my actual class came around at 2 pm, I was still blowing my nose frequently and my throad was still sore but I wasn't feeling so terrible anymore. The day seemed to disappear between lecture prep, meetings with a few students, one SIGCSE-debrief meeting, delivering a class and a little email. I did have time for coffee with my colleagues at 10 and 3 but as usual ate my lunch at my desk. I didn't make enough progress on my looming Thursdsay deadline for the final exam. It is so frustrating to have to generate the exam more than a month before it will be given and while I still have 3 weeks of lectures left in the course. All day yesterday I kept reminding myself to just stay focussed and buckle down and prioritize. By next week I will have submitted the exam, put out the last assignment, worked out the last lectures (so I can create the exam) and hopefully recovered from this awful cold!Uid 266Wake at 6.30 (OK, 6.34) and head off to start my new morning regime (one week old, slipping slightly but still working in principle): rather than getting out of bed and trying to start doing things straight away, I accept that I am extremely not a morning person and head downstairs, make myself a mug of tea, open the french window and stand on the patio listening to the birds and the traffic until I get too cold, then sit on the sofa looking out of the window sipping tea while my brain works its way out of the palaeolithic and into some sort of an approximation of wakefulness. Step 2 is turning the water to as cold as I can get it for a minute or so at the end of my shower, from which I thus emerge more ready than I used to to face the day. A bonus today - lowest body fat since the new year! Cutting out my furtive scoffing last thing at night (mature cheddar, oatcakes and port - a match made in heaven) appears to be beginning to have an effect. Wife goes to work at 7.45, I have breakfast with our girls, tidy, pack bags, off we go. In the car, try John Hupmhries, try Chris Evans, plump for silence. Wander through some of our recently built halls of residence between car park and office, note how the heretofore notoriously ugly 60s modernist dull brown boxy buildings at the heart of the campus are starting to look historical. If I live to 97, I'd like to come back and see what they look like at their centenary. Get to my office and try to decide what to do first - must be strange to be in a job (i.e. most jobs) where someone tells you what to do all the time, or there's a schedule of patients/clients/appointments to keep you occupied so you never have to think "what shall I do now?" Decided to have another crack at the data-that's-taking-for-ever-to-turn-into-a-paper rather than marking a UG dissertation - the REF monster is gallumphing ever closer and I need to kick the butt of the various papers I am forever promising myself are just around the corner from submission. Dance with my data for an hour or so, very gradually backing it into a corner where it has no choice but to metamorphose into evidence to support the paper's argument, but it's not going to go without a struggle. Then turn my attention to the last of my tutorials with my 2nd year UGs. Go to said tutorial, coffee and tea and biscuits have arrived as usual. They're a nice bunch and we pass the hour talking about preparing for a tough exam and reflecting on the year. It's nice to know they feel changed by the experience of being here and doing our degree. They ask if we can continue to meet, informally, next year, which I take as a sign that things have gone well. It's sad, really, how you get quite attached to them for a year or two, then they head off into the rest of their lives - if you love someone (in the broadest, entirely platonic sense, obviously), set them free, I guess. Floorball (indoor hockey, kind of) at 12 for an hour, big turn out today, so a bit of a jungle fever session - few goals, loads of body checks and scrapping. All very friendly and good fun. Back to office, talk to a student about his dissertation proposal and the dark art of writing a lit review - can't decide whether I'm instructing him in The Way Things Are Done By Those In The Know, or enabling him to engage, critique, synthesise and use the literature to express his ideas more clearly, deeply and with greater relevance. Hope it's the latter. Continue trading small victories and galling setbacks with my dataset in the afternoon, interspersed with watching emails float into my inbox, where I leave them to mature for a while. Manage to maintain my strict Lenten fasting with regard to non-work things on the web, though the Man Utd match tonight (when I stay in work late) may get special dispensation. Inexplicably, make the mistake of opening and reading the School's research e-bulletin. I hate these things with a vengeance: I suppose they're meant to celebrate success, but when they're celebrating others' success (i.e. my departmental colleagues) they read to me like they're emphasising my failure. So the 100s of thousands of pounds grants won by X, and the Nature paper published by Y, and the keynote at a major conference by Z put me in a foul mood, which I can only extinguish by going to the burger bar and knocking seven bells out of my calorie count for the day. Back to the office, rapidly downing the last of a creme egg before my food curfew comes into play at 6.30. This is a good time to do my daily dissertation marking - this one an enthusiastic but none too sophisticated tale about beaches and waves and sediment particle size fractions. Jogs along at standard high 50s most of the way, but raises its game towards the end to touch low 60s by the end. Rest of the evening is spent bashing the email inbox down to less than a page of messages. Wait for the end of the Man U game on the BBC live text, then head for home. Night all.Uid 268I did not contribute anything last month. Looking back I see a day full of meetings and tutorials. I wonder, though, whether the amount of STUFF to do was the whole reason. I am feeling less exuberantly ready to share experiences of this work. It has been a difficult term, not personally, but in a wider sense, collectively.Anyway, this month I woke up from a bad dream about marking processes. I can't find a foolproof way of making sure the postgraduate markers don't offer the occasional bizarre assessment of an essay, and I should really stop trying because in fact the institution does not ask me to do that, but to follow procedures. I just have this nostalgic wish to focus on getting things right, rather than focusing on giving the appearance of doing so. Anyway, I lumbered in to spend a memorable morning doing said monitoring STUFF. I paused to attend a lunch for posgraduate applicants and their potential supervisors and momentarily noticed that it was a gloriously sunny day. There was only one applicant there, a strangely dressed individual with shy, intelligent eyes. I ate the lunch, which was quite nice. I enjoyed the sunshine as I walked back to the office. I continued moderating. I had some tutorial slots but no one signed up for them, so I managed to complete the moderation process, which was a relief, although I still have the administrative frustration of printing it all out and attaching it and putting it in some darn order, which will take me quite a long time and make full use of my transferable skills, which are particularly notable in terms of organisation and administration and not losing my keys and other such challenges. Just before going home, I had a look at the lecture I was to give the next day. I put some reading materials up on the intranet to support it and sent an enthusiastic e-mail to the year group recommending a book I had just come across. I took some of this reading home with me and spent a really pleasant time reading it and eating crisps and drinking wine. My partner objects to anyone eating crisps in his presence, which makes it all the more enjoyable to hide away and crunch loudly and more importantly, it felt good to reconnect with the subject, rather than simply to torment myself with numbers and paperwork and the sort of awful policing feeling that I get from the whole process of assessment. I even took the book to bed with me and read some chapters that I didn't need to read at all.Uid 276Last minute meeting to complete emergency approval documentation for next year’s intake; last minute timetable submission for next year’s modules; last minute meeting for moderation and agreement of project marks: I’ve lost the ability to prioritise, as everything is urgent at the moment and there’s not enough hours in the day.Uid 281Arrived at work, as usual, at around 7.30am. Last week of term and therefore I know as head of department I will have a steady stream of students with problems coming through. Sure enough it's 8.30am when the first one ones, good student, personal issues, at least ten minutes of her in tears and we manage to resolve things (thank goodness). Continue preparation for tutorials and finalising stuff for the MA revalidation on Wednesday. 10am tutorials start - last tutorials of term are always hard as students are stressed and panicky but had a good chat with mine, got the first group into a debate with each other which was good. Finish tutorials at 1pm, grab a piece of bread and cheese and then settle down to update some of my ongoing research and consultancy work. Finish up around 6.30pm and head over to the hotel where the revalidation panel are staying - realise administrator forgot to arrange students for the student panel, quite important really, so have to quickly call in some favours from students we know won't fall to pieces whilst being asked questions. Then a nice catch up with a panel member who is also my former MA dissertation supervisor! Get home around 11pm and set alarm early to finalise some tabled documentation that the panel have requested. Sleep badly despite having a 6am start next day...Uid 282This is our Spring Break week, so I am at home working on an online module for the university system. Spent most of the day looking for resources to substantiate the concepts I chose to feature about the topic of "Instructional Supervision." The system received a federal grant supporting the development of these modules. Professors were solicited from across the system in educational leadership to develop them. It is a tremendous addition to my workload of teaching four classes in the fall and spring and serving as program chair. There is a stipend involved, which is nice, but I guess I really just enjoy the challenge of creating the module. We prepare future school principals in our program. When they complete the graduate degree, they can then take the state certification exam. Our pass rate is typically 90-100% consistently. I can't help but think that our focus on aligning the courses to the concepts tested is a bonus to the students. While across the nation, criticism has been levied on educational leadership programs, primarily because the professors teaching them have no professional experience in the principalship or superintendency. In our program, the two of us could be considered an anomoly. My colleague and I both have experience as school administrators. He was a superintendent and principal and teacher. I was a principal and teacher with no desire to be a superintendent. These are things I am constantly considering as I conduct research and fulfill the demands of my position as a tenured faculty member. Recently, our youngest daughter had a baby, her second son, so I have made myself take breaks in order to offer her assistance this week. Yesterday (the 15th) she called and asked if I would come over in time to go with her to pick up her toddler from child care in the afternoon. I did and then after also spending some time with him (pottying and playing), I headed home (about a 10 minute drive away). My husband called because he does not usually find me absent when I am in town at the end of his work day. So, he wondered where I was. I told him I was on my way home. We decided to go eat at a Japanese Hibachi style restaurant for dinner because he had actually been wanting to go for a few months. I didn't mind because obviously I did not have a meal planned. Then, when we got home we watched a DVD he had ordered of the leading Blues performers of the century, some of whom have died since the making of the documentary. It was fascinating to think about the way that music had kept those older black men and women alive and active into their nineties. As an academic, this is what I think of when watching this kind of show. My husband, on the other hand, revels in the music, some of which was actually taped in residences or outside in their yards. It was amazing. None of them had become rich or lived ostentatiously as a result of their creation and development of the Blues as a music genre. However, they had thrived and as a consumer of the music, we are the better for their accomplishments. Back to the computer, which has had an irritating problem lately of keys sticking on the keyboard. After trying to fix the problem and having no luck, I pulled out a laptop to work and did some reading, marking places I will use tomorrow. It was late when I finally decided to stop.Uid 289Started by going through emails and reacting to them. I also had to sort out payments to be made to guest lecturers we have had this term. As so often seems to be the case, there is more administration involved than there used to be – and than seems really necessary. Specifically, before we can pay them their paltry fee, we have to be sure that they are entitled to work in the UK. This usually involves them bringing their passport to give a lecture. At 11 a PhD student arrived for a supervision which was clearly in my diary, but I had not checked my diary. Nevertheless I was able to spend nearly a couple of hours going through her thesis with her. She is not a native English speaker and has had to put a lot of effort into the writing. She has also used a proof-reader – but nevertheless we are practically having to go through chapter-by-chapter and word-by-word. (How do you explain the definite and indefinite article to someone whose first language does not have them? It’s ‘the’ because it is!) However, I do feel we are getting there. We work together, viewing the text on a large screen, which works well. We get through half of the latest draft of the current chapter. Then we hit the heavy stats section and my stomach rumbles and it seems a good time to take a break. We agree to meet again tomorrow. Eat my sandwiches and read the paper. Chucking seawater over a nuclear pile sounds like desperation. Review a paper for a conference. I end up writing a long review of a poor paper. It cannot be published for lack of (statistical) rigour – but the idea is an interesting one and I end up feeding back ideas about the research to the authors. Practical class for my Web Design MSc module. It’s the last one, so the students are supposed to be demonstrating the website they have built this term to me and the postgraduate demonstrators. None of the ones I see have a complete site. Some are near to one, and evidently have the right idea – others are a long way off. Yet none of them seems to be worried about their ability to complete the assessment – which is due out tomorrow. They are going to have to build a website of similar complexity to the one that they are supposed to have just finished. They seem to think that a lot of effort over the vacation will enable them to pull it out of the bag. Debriefing the demonstrators afterwards, they seem to have fewer concerns, so maybe I was just unlucky with my group of students. We also talk over problems with the module this year and how we might improve it next year. We come up with some ideas – which I really must act on now, while they are fresh in my mind and not wait until next year! It is also the chance to hand out module evaluation forms to the students. We have dropped the on-line evaluations and gone back to paper as we seem to get a better response rate. I have a look at them after the practical and am pleasantly surprised. Given the low turn-out for lectures recently, I thought they were bored, but that’s not what most of them are saying. My practice over recent years has been to post all the feedback on-line and give my response. Paper forms mean I’ll have to type in the comments – which is a nuisance. Cycle home in the fog and try not to think about work. Uid 291I wake very late, after 9, but this hardly matters as last week I gave my last lecture before I retire this summer. After breakfast in the post there is a wine catalog for which i had been waiting as a colleague is organising a wine tasting and this merchant is a specialist in the region. Seems a good idea to do all the washing up as my wife is not feeling well. Then to the main business, reading e-mail. Many mails about Freedom of Information requests (FOI) clearly from a spammer, and what could be done legally to thwart such requests. I have been struggling with a bug in the FLOSS software I maintain. I spend an hour or so yet again failing to fix it. It is beginning to worry me as I have been failing for a couple of weeks, and I am not used to that. I realise that with retirement comes age and loss of skills. It has been a sufficiently leisurely morning that there is time to have my hair platted (OK I was a student in the 1960s and have always had long hair sine school). I like it that way but often there is insufficient time. Cycle into the University around most people's lunch time. After changing out of cycling clothes i talk to the software support staff, about, well software. I have always enjoyed systems code and so often end up with these guys. Then a partial lunch (ie a banana). A SL, research student and myself decide to conduct a visit to our new building. We are to move in about 6 weeks, and the current discussion is who will have which desk. It takes a long 5 minutes to get there and we get in with ease -- so much for security! A tour of inspection of the new teaching labs and a totally joke lecture room preceed looking at the administration area and social space. Finally to the top floor to the staff area. I have worked in an open plan office once in industry for a few months, but this is larger and with more light. I decide which desk I would like, but at the time there was no mechanism for decision. Inspect my studio which has a strong reverberation. Not sure what can be done about that, or how to get any sound treatment. In all we spend most of an hour in the building. I suppose there must be advantages, but things like where to keep my bike are uncertain. On the way back I trip on the stairs, and save myself with my tennis-elbow impaired arm -- very painful. So it is late before the real work (e-mail) starts. Update software and the usual stuff. Look into the problem of arranging a lab time for the year2 students who are requesting it. Looks like some times are possible for me, and some for the students -- with a null intersection. In preparation for the move (and retirement) I sort through part of my extensive book, paper and reprint library (and I wonder if any one else has such a thing these days). Some are for recycling, some for friends, and some for an historical archive; and some like my undergraduate text books are to come home -- maybe I will eventually learn that maths! At about 6 my office neighbour suggests that we open a half-bottle of Sancerre. Perhaps a little old, but had lovely long flavours. As ever a bottle is a signal to talk about research, students, the new building, and all that is on our minds. Eventually joined by a couple of others so very little alcohol but very pleasant occasion. Home late, as if all too frequent. Cooked supper, and usual late look at e-mail. Somehow a day with little success or even progress. Everything attempted failed or was blocked. I did not see any student other than the massed hoards walking about. Uid 298Tuesday 15 March For once I don’t work into the early hours getting ready for the day but my calendar for today shows entries starting at 11 am and going right through to 6 pm! Today looks like being busy. [9:15 – 10:00] Collect up PowerPoint files from past presentations of the research project that I am to present in this afternoon’s public seminar. Go through email for anything urgent before leaving for work. [11:00 – 13:45] I am having a first meeting with a PhD student and his supervisor this morning. This student Is a junior colleague’s first PhD student and the past two years have not been going well. The senior colleague originally appointed as a second supervisor moved on to a new post several months ago and I have now been asked to take on this role to give both student and my colleague some support. After over 2 years work we have a literature review which is at best mediocre and no concrete plans for the empirical study. My job is going to be to get things moving or recommend termination by the summer. I spent yesterday evening looking at his review and making notes. This is a difficult meeting - my colleague is frustrated by the lack of progress and find the student’s responses to my questions annoying because this is ground they have been over before. The student does not show the drive and initiative that I would expect of a PhD candidate. He appears to understand the weaknesses I find in the review and the need to be more pro-active about his work but the test will be how much he has achieved by our next meeting. We agree a timetable for the revised (for the umpteenth time!) literature review and the next chapter setting out a theoretical framework to test the research question. I try and end on the positive note that he has a good research question and has a good reason for pursuing this question as part of his career plan. [13:45] My research student (the complete opposite) sticks his head in to ask if I am OK. It appears that I have completely forgotten that last September I agreed to do a session on text analysis for the first year PhDs. Its not in my diary among all the other things for today and I am going to have to eat humble pie and reschedule it! [14:00 – 14:30] I am due to meet final year project students at 14:00 every Tuesday - if they need me. None of the ones I am expecting come but an MSc candidate who wants me to consider supervising her dissertation does appear. We discuss it briefly and I agree that I am willing to supervise her work on this topic. [14:30 – 15:00] Select the slides I will use to present the EU project for the psychology seminar this time. Focus on the cognitive elements of the project and how we used AI to support users. [15:00 – 16:45] I leave a note for my level 2 students saying I will be back in my office at 5 and go across campus to the second session of the public seminar. I get about 20 minutes to talk with people over the coffee break before the presentations resume at 15:30. Mine is the second one following a very interesting presentation on perception. My presentation is well received with interesting questions and a request to meet and follow up a possible spin off piece of research with one of the psychologists present. [17:00 – 18:00] Back in my department for a meeting with my level 2 project group and a discussion of the system architecture they have developed. I despair! I have been teaching design methods at this level but in the project activity almost everything I have covered that could be useful they have ignored. The project is a different module within the degree programme so the knowledge hasn’t leaked across the boundary. We are discussing not telling the students which lecture relates to which assessment! Perhaps an extreme measure like this will breakdown the silos of knowledge undergraduates assign to the discipline. Discussion of why they have built some code in the way they have reveals some dubious guidance from the teaching assistants supporting the students in the computer room. Perhaps we are as guilty as the students at putting material in silos. All in all a very mixed day with some positive highlights in the research seminar but rather more depressing encounters with students. It has left me feeling frustrated and annoyed. Every so often my neighbour gives me an invite to supper with the family instead of eating alone. Tonight I have an invite to supper and I can relax and forget some of the day. Uid 301A very busy day, with back to back meetings from 8am to 5pm. It's not the hours that are a problem, as I usually work longer hours than this anyway, but it was how unrelenting the schedule was, with not even 10 minutes for a break for lunch. This was partially my fault, as I scheduled student meetings to try to resolve issues live, and want to get as many done as possible on the days when I'm in the university. Still, having busy days in the college and then 'free' days for concentrated research at home, is still a better way to manage my activities than having these mixed and constant interruptions. First meeting was a faculty committee discussing ways to support entrepreneurship amongst students. With the ongoing financial pressures in the education sector and concerns with graduate employment, we are increasingly commercially focused in our education thinking. This is no bad thing, but it can be hard to also try to hold on to the concept of learning for it own sake and pleasure.The rest of the morning is taken up with student meetings that are at least diverse - a failing undergraduate student complaining about their low marks who still doesn’t ‘get it’ that signing up for the course is not enough to pass; a PhD student doing great work but just lacking confidence; a post graduate growing in capability and visibly brightening with a sense of accomplishment in their project work; another student who’s actually one of the best on the course, fretting over the upcoming exam. These are the lows and highs of teaching. Straight on the afternoon for more of the same, but at least I can hold one of the meetings in the coffee shop, so that I manage to get a brief caffeine fix. I imagine that this kind of schedule is akin to that of a local GP. A continuous stream of brief discussions that you hope help, but somehow never seem to resolve everything. Each session bleeding into the next, robbing time from one person to give to another. Half of the patients aren’t really ‘sick’, but just need reassurance. Like every institution, we’re making staff cuts. Change is coming and getting the balance right for meeting student expectations, building research excellence, improving teaching, getting more efficient and still having time for a personal life will be interesting. It may be a challenge but I relish it as I still love what I do. Uid 31015.2.11 Checked the emails early and fast. Lots of information about hotels and venues for a meeting in Latvia later in the year. Unfortunately most was in Russian, which challenged my monolingual skills, but then - a translation! Hooray for our European friends. Unfortunately the next email was less welcome. Strike called for 24th March. This seems badly timed, badly thought through and basically stupid. The vote was on a very low turn out and almost 50:50 for and against. I have always been involved and often active in Union matters, but UCU seems to be lurching ever leftward, which does not reflect the views of most people I work with. A strike will cost staff money, save the University money, create bad feeling amongst students, many of whom are supported by families much less well able to weather the current financial stringencies than us academics, and it will achieve nothing. That said, getting (2, identicle) letters to one’s home address from the HR director stating the University’s approach to industrial action, feels intrusive, and bordering on bullying. On to a training morning. Run by NRES, which often gets a bad press from health researchers, but this was excellent. Clear presentations, very well organised materials and knowledgeable and receptive presenters. Spent the afternoon planning a paper with a colleague who is just beginning to feel confident to write for publication. If enthusiasm is the measure we can conquer the world. Lets hope. Finally, took the entire evening to re-read and comment on the Department of Health ‘Liberating the Health Service’ consultation, for my professional body. The consultation is 78 pages long and very dense, so needed a lot of digesting. Typically, none of the questions are ones you really want to answer, as they assume that the changes are going to happen, it is just how to implement them. Kept half an eye on the doctors’ conference being reported on TV and their opposition to the proposed NHS changes. Maybe we are all reactionary, but root and branch change seems to be more about political than health realities. And the creation of several new quangos seems counter to the claimed wish of the government to reduce such bodies. Fell asleep in front of the fire and woke up at 12 pm. And so to bed! Uid 314woken up by spouse 6am. up 8am; get daughter to school somehow, answer emails... 9am get self up & in to wkr 10am in to office, read email, lend brother old phone for his trip to europe say goodbye to postdoc heading away 11am attend a seminar by doomed PhD student. Tried not to be too negative midday lunch w/ speaker 1pm do email; talked to a graduate student being evicted from the desk discover university's PhD policy now runs to sections called things like "4.3.2 (d) (iv)" 2pm talk to the school admin to find them a new desk. 3pm home for daughter's playdate. attempting to work. 4pm fail to work while not really supervising playdate. 5.30pm take daughters friend home. go shopping 6pm assemble dinner. drink most of bottle of pinot noir 8pm attempt to get daughter to bed. 10pm watch documentary on getting a phd while completeling reviews 11pm crash Uid 315It's the start of the first trimester here, and as always I'm tinkering with lectures. This - without fail - means that the night before a major lecture, I'm furiously revising what I'm going to cover, in the full knowledge that I could have easily have done this months back if I wasn't so easily distracted. It's also the time where final year project students are choosing their supervisors and projects, so I've had a few people swinging past my office. I've tried to leave my door open as much as possible, but sometimes it's necessary to gently let it swing shut with a well-placed throw of a ball. Mid-week tends to be the time I work 10-11 hours per day, but I tend to slack off on Thursday and Friday and get distracted on pet projects, so I can't complain - it's a great job, and with all the other people going through pain in the world, I wouldn't trade it for anything short of a multi-million dollar lottery win. Time spent today: 6 hours on preparing for a lecture - giving a tool talk on a tool that we upgraded to a new (backwards incompatible, completely restructured) version the day the course began. 2 hours meeting final year students, and a couple of hours sifting through papers for administrative meetings, and contemplating undoubtedly ill-fated attempts to "work smarter" for the coming months. Uid 318Still trying to catch up from overseas conference in February. It's my 25th Wedding Anniversary, but my husband has just phoned to say he's forgotten an important meeting he can't get out of - and won't be home until after nine. Bang goes the dinner plans, then! He's recently retrained as a teacher and in his first year as an Newly Qualified Teacher. He's working his socks off and as I'm still quite fond of him, I forgive him straightaway. He sounds relieved. I've had back to back tutorials all day and a queue of students waiting for me in the hall. I've seen about thirty students in five hours. I'm currently having a cup of tea before getting back down on the floor to sort through the second marking from a module. With four people in this office, there's not enough desk space to do it up here; it's a project module that tends to have bulky submissions. Most disturbing is an MA student who has only written three hundred thousand words of a novel she's meant to have been working on since October. She doesn't seem to think this is much of a problem, even when I remind her that she's got to turn in forty thousand of polished prose at the end of the summer. She doesn't have a plot for her novel and I get the feeling that she doesn't want to impose one on the narrative, hoping it arises from the writing. That she's not doing any writing might be a problem with this strategy, I suggest. She only writes when she's inspired, when she writes 'loads'. She's not been able to work regularly. I feel like I'm bullying her and I try to be encouraging; I talk a great deal about 'finding her process'. She leaves, I hope impressed with the urgency of her task, I fear with her confidence totally crushed. Bother. One of my modules is taught by an English Lit colleague who hates it. While waiting in a rare lull for the rest of my cohort on this module to come by for their tutorials, I check Facebook and find a student has posted that the module is 'the biggest waste of time module in the whole world'. I invite him to come and talk to me about it and he writes me that my colleague has been providing no content but just workshopping; first creative work and then workshopping essays. I am horrified and despondent. I check my email, too. I've been thinking of changing agents and sent the possible new one my newest manuscript. The email tells me why the agent wouldn't be interested in my manuscript. It is a familiar refrain. I write beautifully, but nobody will be interested in what I write about. I'm not sure how I feel after this. Deflated, for sure. And then another five students arrive at once. I say the same thing over and over about the assessment materials that I've already said in class, on the VLE and in emails. I am starting to feel that everything I do is rather useless. The truth is, the shadow of the Japanese coastal disaster has been with me all day. Last night, after a curry takeaway, my husband and I talk. It's being parents, we think, that makes this so worrying. Or maybe getting older. We were blithe about Chernobyl. Now, my husband is declaring what he'd do to survive a tsunami and talking about how eating seaweed can help you recover from radiation poisoning. I want to laugh, but I know he needs to believe he could out-think a disaster and save us all. But I have my own little disasters to deal with and the second marking pile at my feet must be sorted and tidied before I leave to meet my daughter's taxi. I wonder how my MA student is feeling. I wonder if an email would help. Uid 318Still trying to catch up from overseas conference in February. It's my 25th Wedding Anniversary, but my husband has just phoned to say he's forgotten an important meeting he can't get out of - and won't be home until after nine. Bang goes the dinner plans, then! He's recently retrained as a teacher and in his first year as an Newly Qualified Teacher. He's working his socks off and as I'm still quite fond of him, I forgive him straightaway. He sounds relieved. I've had back to back tutorials all day and a queue of students waiting for me in the hall. I've seen about thirty students in five hours. I'm currently having a cup of tea before getting back down on the floor to sort through the second marking from a module. With four people in this office, there's not enough desk space to do it up here; it's a project module that tends to have bulky submissions. Most disturbing is an MA student who has only written three hundred thousand words of a novel she's meant to have been working on since October. She doesn't seem to think this is much of a problem, even when I remind her that she's got to turn in forty thousand of polished prose at the end of the summer. She doesn't have a plot for her novel and I get the feeling that she doesn't want to impose one on the narrative, hoping it arises from the writing. That she's not doing any writing might be a problem with this strategy, I suggest. She only writes when she's inspired, when she writes 'loads'. She's not been able to work regularly. I feel like I'm bullying her and I try to be encouraging; I talk a great deal about 'finding her process'. She leaves, I hope impressed with the urgency of her task, I fear with her confidence totally crushed. Bother. One of my modules is taught by an English Lit colleague who hates it. While waiting in a rare lull for the rest of my cohort on this module to come by for their tutorials, I check Facebook and find a student has posted that the module is 'the biggest waste of time module in the whole world'. I invite him to come and talk to me about it and he writes me that my colleague has been providing no content but just workshopping; first creative work and then workshopping essays. I am horrified and despondent. I check my email, too. I've been thinking of changing agents and sent the possible new one my newest manuscript. The email tells me why the agent wouldn't be interested in my manuscript. It is a familiar refrain. I write beautifully, but nobody will be interested in what I write about. I'm not sure how I feel after this. Deflated, for sure. And then another five students arrive at once. I say the same thing over and over about the assessment materials that I've already said in class, on the VLE and in emails. I am starting to feel that everything I do is rather useless. The truth is, the shadow of the Japanese coastal disaster has been with me all day. Last night, after a curry takeaway, my husband and I talk. It's being parents, we think, that makes this so worrying. Or maybe getting older. We were blithe about Chernobyl. Now, my husband is declaring what he'd do to survive a tsunami and talking about how eating seaweed can help you recover from radiation poisoning. I want to laugh, but I know he needs to believe he could out-think a disaster and save us all. But I have my own little disasters to deal with and the second marking pile at my feet must be sorted and tidied before I leave to meet my daughter's taxi. I wonder how my MA student is feeling. I wonder if an email would help. Uid 318Still trying to catch up from overseas conference in February. It's my 25th Wedding Anniversary, but my husband has just phoned to say he's forgotten an important meeting he can't get out of - and won't be home until after nine. Bang goes the dinner plans, then! He's recently retrained as a teacher and in his first year as an Newly Qualified Teacher. He's working his socks off and as I'm still quite fond of him, I forgive him straightaway. He sounds relieved. I've had back to back tutorials all day and a queue of students waiting for me in the hall. I've seen about thirty students in five hours. I'm currently having a cup of tea before getting back down on the floor to sort through the second marking from a module. With four people in this office, there's not enough desk space to do it up here; it's a project module that tends to have bulky submissions. Most disturbing is an MA student who has only written three hundred thousand words of a novel she's meant to have been working on since October. She doesn't seem to think this is much of a problem, even when I remind her that she's got to turn in forty thousand of polished prose at the end of the summer. She doesn't have a plot for her novel and I get the feeling that she doesn't want to impose one on the narrative, hoping it arises from the writing. That she's not doing any writing might be a problem with this strategy, I suggest. She only writes when she's inspired, when she writes 'loads'. She's not been able to work regularly. I feel like I'm bullying her and I try to be encouraging; I talk a great deal about 'finding her process'. She leaves, I hope impressed with the urgency of her task, I fear with her confidence totally crushed. Bother. One of my modules is taught by an English Lit colleague who hates it. While waiting in a rare lull for the rest of my cohort on this module to come by for their tutorials, I check Facebook and find a student has posted that the module is 'the biggest waste of time module in the whole world'. I invite him to come and talk to me about it and he writes me that my colleague has been providing no content but just workshopping; first creative work and then workshopping essays. I am horrified and despondent. I check my email, too. I've been thinking of changing agents and sent the possible new one my newest manuscript. The email tells me why the agent wouldn't be interested in my manuscript. It is a familiar refrain. I write beautifully, but nobody will be interested in what I write about. I'm not sure how I feel after this. Deflated, for sure. And then another five students arrive at once. I say the same thing over and over about the assessment materials that I've already said in class, on the VLE and in emails. I am starting to feel that everything I do is rather useless. The truth is, the shadow of the Japanese coastal disaster has been with me all day. Last night, after a curry takeaway, my husband and I talk. It's being parents, we think, that makes this so worrying. Or maybe getting older. We were blithe about Chernobyl. Now, my husband is declaring what he'd do to survive a tsunami and talking about how eating seaweed can help you recover from radiation poisoning. I want to laugh, but I know he needs to believe he could out-think a disaster and save us all. But I have my own little disasters to deal with and the second marking pile at my feet must be sorted and tidied before I leave to meet my daughter's taxi. I wonder how my MA student is feeling. I wonder if an email would help. Uid 319aaagh, two days late again. So much to do, so little time. Marking, teaching, preparation, project meetings with students. Horrible weather, foul mood, not feeling at all well. Trying hard not to let any balls drop. FAIL looming.Uid 325Today is my research day because I am lucky enough not to have any lecture or meetings times scheduled on Tuesdays and lucky enough to be able to arrange my graduate student meetings to the other days of the week. Other than a seminar by a PhD student from another University in the city I get to work on writing papers etc in my office. I wish I had more days like this, but it seems like a harder and harder thing to obtain as the years go by! :-(Uid 333I took a day's leave on 15 March--a welcome break after a very busy term and a day long exam setting and checking meeting the day before. Up at 5.40 to write a quick document giving research context and questions for a project that I'm doing some consultancy on. The project has been set up backwards--the funders offered money and now the academics on the project are back-projecting a need for the project (writing research questions that show the money will fund the filling of a real research need/gap). Looks like creative accountancy, but it isn't a lie that there is a real project here. And how much more relaxing it is to write something having had the funding offered first--no questions asked--than having to put in time writing the academic case with the nagging thought that it it might not get funded and the time spent on compiling the case will have been time wasted. Travelled into London for my day out: lunch with a colleague over on Spring Break from the US who then suggested visiting the Douglas Gordon installation at the Gagosian Gallery. It was certainly interesting but I can't say I'd rush out to see Gordon exhibitions in future. And I found it odd that the rest of the people there were sitting on the floor in the darkened and disorientating room with the video and mirrors installation, as if they were at the cinema, when the installation clearly invited the viewer to walk around and interact with the different disorientating perspectives cast by the mirrors and angled screens. After the Gordon, I went with another colleague to the Gossaerts exhibition at the National: although this period and geographical area is nearer to my own research interests, if anything I liked it even less than the Gordon. Mediocre drawings framed as if great works and lots of un-erotic female nudes billed as renaissance eroticism. But I always think it's worth having gone to these things, even if they were enjoyable (I always try to impress on my student that enjoyment is not the only good in life--something these arch consumers sometime find hard to take on board!). One always learns something. The final social activity of the day was dinner with a friend from my graduate days who is now a GP, and whose patients include lots of university students from her local area. We had an interesting discussion about the morality of students getting doctor's notes for exam purposes. She finds that the parents come in and demand that she write notes that she doesn't agree with from a medical perspective. She feels under a lot of pressure to do this. As an academic, I am under complete pressure to abide by doctors' notes in aggregating examination marks (especially when papers are not completed because candidates are 'depressed' or 'stressed' or had insufficient help with their dyspraxia/dyslexia/aspergers). Now I know from friends who are medics (this particular friend is not the first or only one) that these notes reflect the pushiness of parents who are not willing to see their little darlings fail or want a medicalized explanation of why their second child hasn't done as well at university as their first. It's one of the ideological things: everyone knows that 90% of these medicalizations are bogus, but no one can say so without seeming to be an uncaring monster. Home by 11pm and straight to bed.Uid 343A fairly normal day. I give a lecture on invertible linear operators to final year students, and take a couple of tutorial groups. The first year tutorial is lively with the attentive students who contribute sensible answers and comments. However, my final year group is just the opposite - trying to get any sort of response from them is a battle. Is it that they really don't understand the work, or are they just sensitive about saying anything in front of their peers? I really can't understand how anyone can fail to be turned on by the Stone-Weierstrass Theorem and its application to Laplace transforms. In the late afternoon I go to a specialist mathematics seminar. I confess that I nod off once or twice during the talk, as I seem to do increasingly often these days. Is this a sign of overwork or is it old age creeping on? Most off my odd moments are spent producing paperwork for the new maths module for our Evening Degree. Trying to put together a course for people who perhaps last met maths 30 years ago at O-level or Standard Grade is quite a challenge, but I think that we should be able to find a few contemporary topics, chaos and fractals for example, that we can present at a very basic level. I spend the evening playing in a table tennis match which, to my surprise, my team manages to win. So at least I get some exercise.Uid 344I was quite tired today. I teach until 9pm on Mondays. That wasn't so bad when I didn't start teaching until 5pm. I could choose what work activities to undertake earlier in the day. However I now have quite a difficult group to teach in the 2-4 slot on a Monday and this is extremely taxing physically and emotionally. So, by the time I reach the 7-9 slot I am really very tired. The part time cohort in the 2-4 slot are disrespectful and disruptive. Many of them are spradic attenders. The have been required by their employers to undertake this HE programme to gain a professional qualification. I find them very hard work and this is not what I came to HE for. I know we have to take the rough with the smooth, but there is not one student in this cohort about whom I feel a sense of achievement. The module is taught in a block of 2 sessions per day. I stood my ground and refused to teach the 9-11 slot (despite being pressurised to do so). I am pretty sure it is illegal to require someone to work 12 hours in one go. A colleague teaches the 9-11 slot and I am nor sure she is quite up to the task.I am always alert to the fact that the students may try to play colleagues off against one another, but in this case I fear there may be a problem. Lack of leadership from our programme director means there is little chance of addressing this issue. Today I had had enough. The aforementioned problems are compounded by the fact that the university is making job cuts in quite a secretive way. I heard runours that our course just missed being cut, and therefore we can't really expect to survive much longet than another 12 months. So today I put in a formal request to take voluntary severance. I can't really keep up my motivation for teaching with the threat of redundancy hanging over me, and I do not feel valued by anyone at the university.Uid 347A day of contrasts. This morning I taught an unusually small cohort of 12 students and this afternoon was teaching in a brand new lecture theatre in a brand new building, which by clever design makes the 300 students seem a much smaller number and I have eye contact with them all. To make things even better I'm co-teaching with dynamic colleagues; there's an art exhibition by a world famous sculptor; a visiting colleague from Japan has joined us to learn about the 'innovative' course we are teaching; and the new VC was seen chatting informally to staff and students in the coffee bar area. A good day. Uid 3487.00 Coffee shop near school to visit. Making Ofsted lists - and wondering how I'll get it all done. Inpsection is imminent. 8.00 -11.00 Observing students in school. One is fine. The other suddenly presents very weak subject knowledge so whole visit takes longer than it should. 4.30 VEry hard to find time to write this today. Everything consumed by Ofsted preparation but the 'day job' goes on so students, tutors, emails don't go away (nor should they!). But I have done the unheard of and shut my office door. Every time I think I've got something completed something else pops up. My days have turned from 12 hours to 14 hours and the worry starts from about 3.30 am every day. No amount of Rescue Remedy helps! 6.30 Haven't stopped... realise how tired the team are too. And they are being so thoughtful about trying not to disturb me! We have too many bits and pieces of work coming in at the moment as well as heavy marking. No more time to write but this isn't over yet!Uid 352Too busy to do survey. Sorry.Uid 360Today i was having my six month appraisal review which was about developing learning and teaching as that is my role. It is interesting that although teaching is the main thing we do there is very little institutional support for developing it and for supporting colleagues to develop new initiatives. I would see change in this field coming through colleagues looking to improve their own practice - looking at their own area of concern and working with students to develop practice. Institutions seem to go for top down initiatives rather than embedding enquiry into L&T as part of what we do. There is a lot of emphasis on research and on research led teaching but not on teaching led research, which engages students in research and thinks about teaching and sharing research with others. I also worked with a doctorate student. I have 8 of these currently and it is hard work but interesting. Working with students who are leading their own learning seems different from in other contexts where the staff seem to do the leading. This links with the point above. Students need to lead learning, to do their own research. How do we do this in contexts where there are large numbers of students and not many staff?Uid 361I'm not feeling that well today there are a lot of respiratory infections going around at the moment, but I cheered up a bit driving in to work listeneing to the radio and trying to sing along (40-45minute journey) In work by 7am. looked through e-mails and replied. Then reading and preparation for meeting until 8:30am when I had coffee with colleagues and discussed students, clinical placements and assessments. 9:30am Team meeting. Lots to discuss and mostly interesting, although as a group we have lots of opinions so we can go off the point a bit. Lots of course and curriculum things to go through. Someone asked for a coffee break at 11:10am which I was in need of. Almost straight into the next meeting, but had time to check e-mails! 12;30pm Meet visiting examiner (for CPPD programme) over lunch to discuss work submitted and programme and how things are in both institutions. It's ?good to know that things are similar in other institutions 13;30 CPPD Exam Board Found the amount of modules and the use of the computer screen for seeing the results not particularly easy to work through. Board completed by 2:45pm. Then liaised with colleague re the sign off mentor session that I am covering for another colleague. 3pm Checked e-mails and work for tomorrow. 4pm Home Uid 362As it's Tuesday again, I had no teaching but there certainly was plenty of work to do. I've just picked up 15 3rd year essays and 41 second year essays (and I have another 19 first year essays to collect later in the week). So, I'm faced with a huge pile of marking - each essay takes about 30 minutes to mark - and they all have to be marked within 3 weeks. It's a tall order and one that I'm not sure I'll be able to achieve. As a VL I get paid an hourly rate that is supposed to include all preparation, marking, student support (both face to face and by email). The headline rate of pay is good but when I worked out exactly how many hours I work to provide a good experience for my students my hourly rate falls to about ?7 an hour. It's difficult to manage but, because I love the work and I'm a relatively inexperienced lecturer, I'm reasonably happy with the situation. As a change from marking I prepared my first year creative writing workshop - ludic and comic poetry - a bit of light relief!Uid 367Today was a usual day shortly before the new lecture "season" starts: most of the day was spent on proof-reading the exercises and slides for the upcoming first-term lecture. Hunting for issues in these materials, correcting them, and making sure all slides look fine, takes FAR more time than one might think... The highlight of the day was the farewell celebration for a colleague who has now left the university, after having worked there for 40 years! He will be sorely missed...Uid 3690700 - today's my research day this week. Should have been yesterday, but various meetings which I couldn't *not* attend were scheduled so I managed to clear today instead. Made breakfast, took it back to bed, and did work-email/read about the nuclear crisis in Japan. 0800 - urgent email now mostly cleared, had a shower then took the dog for a brisk walk. A horridly dispiritingly foggy day with big drips of water randomly dropping onto me from overhanging trees. Back home, phoned central heating co. to arrange for boiler service, and looked at my TeuxDeux list (this is one of my favourite iPhone productivity apps. I live by it). 0900-1230 sitting at my macbook, working. Today I need to complete a paper for a conference I've been invited to speak at in Rome in May. I'm a bit behind schedule on it, but luckily built in some contingency. If I get this finished today, then on Saturday coming I can start on a 7000/8000 work piece for a big Cambridge event also in May. Soon becomes clear I have way too much to say and am afraid that if I self-edit to fit with the spoken-paper's required length I'll forget the ideas, so decide to allow this paper to break its bounds for now. It'll all feed into the book I need to complete by September 2012, and I can edit the paper down for speaking purposes. 1230-1315 lunch; beans on toast plus an apple, wolfed down with R&R of a fairly brisk nature: some laundry sorting. 1315-1500 back at the computer working. This has been a frustrating day in some ways as the text I'm working on is proving more dense and occasionally intractable than I'd hoped, so my objectives keep slipping. 1500-1515 although I've put my 'it's my research day' auto-email-reply on, I have spent about a quarter of an hour thinking about the issues raised for some of our Distance Learning and overseas/split-site PGs who are caught up in the Japan crisis. I have determined not to reply till after working hours today. 1515-1535 Decide to go have a coffee and re-energise my brain briefly. 1535-1617 Back to work. 1617-1715 feed and walk dog, and sort more laundry, and start prep-ing dinner 1715-1800 take in shopping from Ocado delivery and put it away. I find it more time-efficient to have a big fortnightly shop rather than going to a physical shop, plus one spends less as one is not tempted by random things on the shelves. 1800-1930 deal with work email and work admin. stuff. This is what just deadens the soul. 1930-2015 go to drink gin and finish cooking dinner 2015-2130 slump in front of tv with food and drink 2130 go to bed, exhausted. I find it's the relentless drip-drip-drip of email that gets me down most. People expect one to suck up a 'tone' and 'service expectation' that would never be allowed/employed face-to-face. Increasingly I'm putting quite 'piss off if you want me to email you' auto-replies on my email to try to bump people into phoning me or coming and knocking on my door. I hate the fact that I feel mentally and morally worn out so much, and that so much time seems to be using my talents in a highly unproductive (and very un-value-for-money) way. I also find it wearying that we all seem so ground down by the 'systematisation' and standardisation of university life that we don't feel empowered to try to change it.Uid 370This was a relatively quiet day calendar wise. I had one hour of scheduled stuff - a student staff liaison meeting. I got to work around 8.30am and left work around 6pm. Its a hard week because I worked all weekend on recruitment activities due to a staffing screw up. Actually I can't remember the last day I took off. The morning was spent finishing off stuff from teaching - answering student emails, uploading teaching materials, checking up on students who've been absent from compulsory classes. I'm working on a big grant application which must be done in the next 8 days so that takes up all the time I can give it. Unfortunately there was a big setback in the research proposal - one of the assumptions on which the whole thing was based was wrong. Fortunately I found it before a reviewer pointed it out but I did spend an hour or two wondering how to move on from it. In the end I rewrote around 800 words and changed the focus slightly. Aside from working out the budget, there is very little support for grant applications. I can find someone to read it before submission but in the past they haven't given any feedback in a reasonable period of time. I wouldn't mind but for the fact that the institution makes a big thing of mentoring new staff in grant applications. I didn't really speak to that many people - only a couple of people made it as far as my office. That's quite unusual - some days I get nothing done because of the steady stream of students. There's quite a bit of gossip going around because we're looking for a department head. No one seems to want to take it on and its quite worrying because the current one is very good, leaving big shoes to fill. Its probably worst for new staff who have never known the department under someone elses leadership but combined with all the cost cutting that's going on, its very unsettling. Some of the day was spent gossiping! Once home, very little work was done - by this point in the term exhaustion is the only thing that happens in the evenings. I can't wait until the break. Uid 37515.03.11 I’d been on leave the day before (the 14th) with my partner for a brief city break. Despite that I had spent much of the 14th writing programme notes for a production a friend and colleague is putting on at the uni. We drove back on the 15th and then I was straight into an afternoon of listening to postgrad presentations. Felt others in the room were quiet so I made lots of comments and then worried a little because of another colleague who *always* makes comments and never shuts up (but who wasn’t – thankfully – there. His presence is so often intimidating in its relentless impropriety.). Got home at about 6pm and answered work emails. Ordered in pizza for supper because too tired to cook; didn’t meet the friends we regularly see on a Tuesday because – again – just too tired. In bed by 11.30pm. Uid 377This is the first entry I have made, and I have not planned this, it is purely by chance. I spoke to a friend who's doing this and it sounds interesting and valuable. Today I did not teach, no lectures. I manage all of the final year projects in my department. Some students emailed asking for deadline extensions. I had to quickly meet with their project supervisors, meet with final year director, get student information, and then email students a decision whilst being sympathetic and encouraging (even if they didn't deserve this). I had students emailing wanting to have meetings: project meetings (2 off) and meetings to demonstrate work (3 off). The students wanted to meet today or tomorrow. The students seem to imagine that they are busy and we are not and we are always there for them ... no problem. It was difficult keeping calm and detached when responding to the students but I think I did okay. Although I wasn't lecturing today I parcelled up the next assessed exercise for my 2nd year class, did a final check on it, and then emailed the class to announce the exercise, where to find it, and the deadlines. I also had to cancel Thursday's lecture as I have a hospital appointment (I am an above knee amputee and Thursday they will measure me for a new leg). So, I had to email the class about that (even though half of them do not attend lectures anyway). We also have feedback questionnaires. I had to get this on the web, set it up so students could access it, and then email all the students and kindly ask them to fill in those forms if they could ... pretty please. There is a strike on the 24th, one of the days students present their work for assessement. Our boss (head of department) hacked up a new schedule to avoid that day and I had to get it out to the students (more emails, more carefull inoffensive text!!!). I am not happy about this ... what's the point of a strike if it inconveniences no one other than those on strike? And it's 17.45 and a student has just emailed ... asking for an urgent meeting, admitting that he should have done this earlier but "... due to other assignment and ill health ...". I forgot to say: Wednesday I'm going to St Andrews to talk about research collaboration, Thursday hospital, Friday morning I'm at the doctor for blood tests ... running out of time, and I think I now get an email every 5 minutes. Maybe I should just pretend to be sick, take a day off, and ask for a "deadline extension".Uid 378Diary for Tues 15th March Today I should have been teaching a first year class. Actually, we would have been watching Gattaca because it is Technology in Society and it based around sci fi films. Then I would have had some supervision meetings with doleful Msc students. As it worked out, this did not happen because my baby had conjunctivitis and had to be off nursery. So I stayed at home to look after him and did some work during his nap times. I have a feeling of desperation about fitting in enough hours this week because I do compressed working hours anyway, and normally have Wednesday off. But this week I am missed today and also will miss Thurs due to UCU strike action. I know it will all be accounted for my holiday days or losing a day's pay but that doesn't mean my work just disappears when I am not there. It is piling up and waiting for me. So this diary entry is about what I did during the 3 hours or so when I was able to work. I finished off a document explaining to students how they would be peer marking each other's performance in a group assignment, and then put it on the VLE and mailed it to the class. Yesterday I consulted various students in the module on their thoughts about it to see whether it was fair. The reason I am introducing this assessment of group performance is because the students requested it, due to dreadful problems in their groups. This year I decided to allocate students into groups because I read a lecturing handbook suggesting that this was fairer on the weaker students. I am regretting it because it has caused no end of angst from stressed students. I have had two students cry in my office because they are so frustrated by their team mates. I have had endless rounds of meetings with groups trying to mediate in arguments. It's not clear to me how to allocate marks fairly without the peer marking for a couple of groups in particular so I decided to institute it. We will see if it helps. On a related note, I got an email from one of the students who is in a group with a student who has mental health difficulties and has not been attending group meetings. It is terribly difficult to know how to deal with this. I have tried various adjustments for him, but he has dropped out of touch with the group again, and they are wondering how they will be marked because they don't have time to do the work which he should have done. Damned if I know. I forwarded the message on to my colleague who co-teaches the module in case he has any thoughts on it. What counts as a reasonable adjustment in a case like this? What is the fairest thing to do? What makes the students think I know? I also arranged meetings with various students. It is the time of year when final year students want to interview lecturers for their projects. I usually get quite a batch of them because they know I am interested in educational technology and a lot of them do ed tech type projects. Another few students are doing a module where they have to teach their peers an advanced topic and I need to mark the quality of their teaching sessions. So there is a lot of diary taming to be done at this time of year. Also spent a bit of time contacting people who do trans skills courses for PhD students in case there is anything my research network can do to help them. The network supports people who investigate effective research spaces, and we are interested in social research environments, such as how PhD students are trained. Also did various more researchy things including setting up a contract extension and helping someone install our software for a conference, and arranging for equipment loans to schools. It is a bit surreal switching between these tasks and wiping the baby's poor snotty eyes! ................
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