University of Kent



Surveys for Wednesday 15 June 2011Uid 13Wednesday June 15 was a really dull day to Share on the Day Survey. Our semester ended in May, so it's Summer break now. My family and I visited family for a wedding in Michigan on June 18. We packed the morning of June 15, and left that afternoon. We drove until 11 pm. During the drive (when I wasn't driving), I did work on Powerpoint slides for my textbook and finally finished the User Interface chapter.Uid 14Yet again, I forgot about this until days later, so I hope that my recollections are accurate. It is "Summer 1" semester here, during which I am not teaching any formal classes, though I am supervising an independent study. Several months ago, I got a Facebook message from an alumnus---a good friend---who was trying to link me up with another friend of his in town who enjoys board games. Nothing ever came of that, but then a few days ago, I received an invitation from this friend-of-a-friend to meet up for coffee to discuss the job opening in my department. We had a tenure track faculty member retire, but he announced too late for us to do a search, so we have a one-year contract faculty position open. It turns out this guy who I met for coffee at 9, whose name is Bob, is also an alumnus, holding an MS from my department and a bachelors from another department in my university. He works in industry and is generally happy, but he has been considering a transition into teaching, something he can do to share his passion and not spend all day behind a monitor (ha ha!). I laid everything out on the table for him: that it's a one year position; that we really need young people in the department, especially folks who understand and can teach the practice as opposed to the theory; that the pay is meager for contract faculty; that a doctorate is necessary for a full-time position; that I would rather hire someone who loves the community than not. We talked about the system, and after the meeting, I wonder if I was /too/ honest with him, regarding departmental politics and the directions of the university. After about an hour together, I walked to the office and did some work on my computer. I had downloaded vmware and was hoping (beyond reason and expectation) that I might be able to run some game engines with reasonable responsiveness on Win 7 using my Linux desktop as a host. The installation was flawless, but the technology did not work well, as I expected. As I was wrapping this up, around 11, there was a knock on my door and in came VT, one of our contract faculty members. A few days earlier, the chair had forwarded a message from the dean about the need for all departments to audit their master syllabi due to impending legislation regarding a mapping from credit hours to expected workload. The chair's message asked each faculty member to submit their course description to the appropriate committee for review and potential change. The contract faculty member's question was about the timeframe: when would we submit these, how soon would we have to review them and take the review into account? A good question it is, and not one I had thought about. I serve as undergraduate program coordinator and am given a "release" for this service. However, I am not paid over the Summer, and so I don't work for free. Sure, I'll help from time to time, but by and large I try to avoid sinking my attention into that quagmire. Summer keeps me sane. As I was talking with the contract faculty member, the chair came around the corner and butted in, as he is wont to do. They were both in the doorway of my office, and their conversation transitioned to matters of no import to me, so I tried to tune them out and work on my own stuff. At this point, one would hope that they would notice that they were speaking---loudly---in my doorway, and they would take this down the hall or to one of their offices. No such luck, which is again par for the course in my department. So, I wrapped up what I was doing and pushed myself into the hallway, closing the door behind me. I wished them both a good day, and neither one acknowledged my presence. Lunch at home with the family was nice. In the afternoon, I finished playing Splinter Cell: Conviction, which had a nice non-twist ending after some foreshadowing of a twist. I probably played about 1.5 hours. After this, I started working on an experimental integration of Ruby with Java. There's a specific kind of Java class I keep having to write for a project, and I thought a Ruby DSL would work well. I worked this up, with a break for dinner, and mostly completed a blog post about it before I was interrupted by our evening guests. It was a good experience to try writing something real in Ruby, and I can see why people like it. However, using the libraries to do things like file I/O was clunky because so much of that is just a matter of remembering function names. I am so much more productive in Java just because I remember all the libraries I use regularly. In fact, that was my grand conclusion at the end of the experiment: an internal Ruby DSL didn't implicitly have any greater expressiveness than an internal Java DSL, considering I am the target audience and I can write idiosyncratic Java at blazing-fast speeds. The guests were two students, one to be a senior in Fall and one who was graduating at the end of the week. They are two who have come over before frequently in larger groups to play board games, and this was the excuse for our gathering. We ended up sitting in the living room from 8 until 12:30---much later than I've been up in ages---just enjoying each others' company. On one hand, it's sad we didn't have a good game together, but it was a great way to spend an evening, especially with Maker's Mark old fashioneds and my wife's mulberry cobbler. For what it's worth, I finished the blog post and published it in about 15 minutes Thursday.Uid 213:30 a.m. woke up and couldn't get back to sleep. Thinking about different approaches I could try on assembling amitochondrial genome that has been causing me problems for thepast few weeks. I have over 90% of the genome assembled, butthere is one repeat region that the assemblers have a lot ofdifficulty with. I may have enough data (the mitochondrion had176x coverage in the Illumina run), but the DNA fragments may betoo short to disambiguate the repeats.I couldn't work on the project, since the computer is in the bedroomand I didn't want to wake my wife. Eventually I went to the livingroom to read for a couple of hours.Around 6:00? Went back to bed and slept.10:30? got up, had breakfast, read yesterday's Science Times from theNY Times.11:30: checked my e-mail, responded to a comment on my blog, checked areport that the web service at work had failed (seemed ok tome), started this time log.11:40-13:05worked on the mitochondrial assembly. Theearly-morning idea was a complete failure, doing a worse job thanapproaches I had used previously.13:05-13:20responded to e-mail and blog comments13:20-14:10lunch and read NY Times14:10-14:15read e-mail14:15-14:37shower and get dressed14:37-14:40read e-mail14:40-15:02walk to drugstore to pick up prescription15:02-16:26more attempts at improving the mitochondrion assemblyusing hand patching of contigs16:26-16:28check e-mail16:28-16:47more attempts at improving the mitochondrion assemblyusing hand patching of contigs16:47-17:41prune ollallieberries and mow front lawn. I've beenputting off the mowing for a while, so the grass andweeds have gotten pretty long, so the mowing tookquite a while, even though the patch of lawn is small.I'm dreading doing the back yard, which is larger andwhich has grass over a meter all now. By the end ofthe mowing of the front yard, my nose was all stuffedup---I think I'm allergic to whatever is growing onthe leaves of the sycamore trees, since this happensevery time I mow the front lawn.17:41-17:55read the newspaper on line17:55-18:20read Comic News and drink tea18:20-19:52more work on hand-assembling contigs19:52-20:42dinner with family20:42-21:58more hand assembly of the mitochondrion. I managed toclose the circle (sort of), but I still have a coupleof low-coverage regions in the repeats that indicatemis-assembly. I may be able to make some guesses andset variant bases differently in different copies ofthe repeat, but I don't know if that will be enough tofix the problems.21:58-22:04read email22:04-22:18read blogs22:18-22:25sit-ups and leg lifts with my son22:25-22:43read blogs22:44-22:56took pills, brushed teeth, and prepared for bed22:56-23:00read a bit of a fantasy novel before falling asleepUid 22Strange sleep - was sweating one moment, freezing the other. Yep, I got a cold. Today, big "end-of-school" day today. Daughter finished 6th grade which means a new school next year and one of the sons 9th grade which mean high-school for him. Of course the schools had managed to organize the celebrations at the same time and since it's 20 km between the schools ... Anyway, one of the parents was there ... in wheelchair. He got a some kind blood-cloth in a nerve center a few months ago which means that he now can't walk and have problems using his arms and his fingers. Must be pretty hard to go to bed as usual one evening and wake up partly paralyzed. Makes you think. Well, trying to work at home for the rest of the day ... which turns out to be pretty difficult since daughter and friend apparently must be "talking" constantly to know where their heads are <DEEP sigh> Tried a learn more about JavaScript until it was time to go into town and have dinner to celebrate. Became dead tired at the restaurant and almost fell asleep. When I come home I fell asleep in the sofa.Uid 23Week 8 of 10 in our Summer Term. Not sleeping well, keep waking up at 4.30 am thinking of all the work that needs doing - and have given up trying to get back to sleep. So spent a couple of hours or so giving feedback on the latest PhD student draft before breakfast. Started the working day with a BA Special Cases meeting to discuss students with major problems affecting their studies. One lass has not produced the evidence we need of a major crime against her, and we are beginning to wonder if it is true, given some other circumstances. If it is true she really needs our support - aggghhh, so little time to spend on these things that are so important for the individuals involved. Without our recommendation she'll fail the year... Then an MA student advice session on writing a dissertation - piloted some materials that arise from my research project, which worked well. This was followed by an MA disseration project presentation to the whole group by one of my supervisees who missed our MA conference as she was away collecting data. A garbled rush - such a pity as she had some good points to make... Spent time at the end arranging an evening they can all come round to my home for dinner. I always do that for our MA and PhD students at this time of year. Thought of not doing it this year as I am exhausted, but feel that is Being Pathetic! Anyway, sods law, the only time they can all come is next Monday, so it'll have to be then, even though next week is HORRENDOUS on the work front. Next: office hour tutorials with an anorexic BA tutee who really worries me, and a failing international student who has to resubmit work to me for two failed modules. This person brought me a huge box of chocolates and told me they'll lose their job if they don't get the MA. Could not reject the gift, as it would be so rude in the student's culture to do that, so accepted it on behalf of all the team... They will fail, I am pretty sure - ghastly situation all round... Then more feedback on PhD draft chapters. Oh, and I'm supposed to be writing a review of my work for my Staff Development Review with someone who does not know me or our programmes in the other wing of the new mega-department we are in. What's the point? I am sure she wants to do it as little as I want to have it. The only point of SDRs as far as I'm concerned is if the person reviewing you knows you and your work and can Be Appreciative and Make Suggestions! Grrr - sounding miserable. I am not really, just feeling it is all relentless and can only get worse next year with more students and fewer staff...OK - so I AM miserable, but the real reason for that is the cancer diagnosis of a much respected colleague and dear friend of many years...Uid 24I am creating my entry for June 15th a day early, as I will be traveling overseas for a short visit to my mother and sister. I will be in airports or in airplanes all day long. While I don't relish the airports/airplanes, perhaps I can catch up a little on my pleasure reading! Uid 28My morning meetings were both held in a different campus to my usual workplace. The journey there ends with a long hill to cycle up that always leaves me breathless when I arrive. I kid myself that it is getting easier but I think I just know what to expect now. The first meeting is to discuss recruitment of Indian students to post-graduate taught courses. We have an hour or so of discussion, centring on the provision of summer schools providing bridging modules (which my colleague from another department seems confident of staffing, though I wonder how we are going to support this extra workload in our stretched department, denuded by voluntary redundancies). The international recruitment officer then informs us that Indian students will not come to the UK after the suspension of the Post-Study Work Visa. We decide to strategically suspend our recruitment activities for a year and attention turns to possibilities of recruitment in other parts of the world. I am invited to a further recruitment meeting focussing on a different country but am now losing the will to live and luckily have a different meeting to attend. This is to finalise a presentation at a conference the following day about Flood Heritage. Our collaboration is multi-disciplinary, where I and a colleague provide the technical perspective while others are more interested in the conceptual underpinnings. We have an outline presentation but some of the graphics are very clunky and I volunteer to improve these. The ride back to my own campus is through a park and along a cycle path which is normally full of dog-walkers, parents and toddlers but the threat of rain and promise of lunch keeps them indoors and I have a clear run. I have been out of the office on external examining duties for the previous two days and have a back-log of emails to catch up with. Masters students are worried about producing their dissertation proposals and call in to discuss them; I catch up with colleagues about the latest proposed restructuring plan (do more work for less money) and our indignant response and counter-suggestion (senior management should show a lead by taking less money themselves, first). There is also discussion about some research and development work – now that teaching has finished we are starting to have time to think about such matters. It is late afternoon by the time I start on the presentation and as usual it takes longer than I expect. I arrive home at about 7.30pm to an empty house. My husband is on a visit to the local sewage works – fascinating. I hear over dinner that the publicity officer does not feed her children corn-based snacks as she noticed they survive the journey to the sewage works intact. What do they put in them? Uid 31Today is a Wednesday. It's summer.I wake up when the alarm goes off at 6:30 a.m. At the beginning of thesummer, when classes ended, my husband and I decided to keep our alarmclocks set for 6:30 a.m. so we would still put in a full day's work eventhough I no longer have 8 a.m. classes to teach. (He works at home;his schedule is flexible all year.) However, our mornings are decidedlymore relaxed during the summer. He dozes while I am in the bathroom,and doesn't get up until I'm done. I pick out my clothes when I getdressed in the morning, instead of laying them out the night before. Wedawdle over breakfast and the newspaper (and my husband, his iPad) andfold a load of laundry together before my husband walks me over to myoffice. I arrive a little after 8:30, which has been my usual thissummer, and wave hello to a colleague at the other end of the buildingbefore kissing my husband goodbye and heading upstairs.I spend the morning working on a journal article that probably should havebeen written a year ago...but I needed some distance from the work to seethat there was, indeed, something interesting to say about it. Andfurthermore, conference publication is the norm in my field; I've neverwritten a journal article before. I'm feeling some pressure as I wantto submit it before I come up for tenure in the fall. Miraculously, lastweek's article on the Tomorrow's Professor mailing list was a week byweek plan for how to write a journal article in 12 weeks. I decided tofollow it and I'm feeling much more confident about how to approach it. Ispent last week choosing a paper to revise. I had thought I had knownwhat I was going to write, but surprised myself with the realization thatthat idea was not ready yet and a different conference paper was beggingfor revision. So I jotted down ideas last week. Yesterday I wrote thefirst half of the abstract for the paper - I've never written the abstractof a paper first before. Today I wrote the second half of the abstractand I feel really good about it. I also started putting new sectionheaders into the paper since I am significantly shifting its focus.Tomorrow I'll start fleshing out notes on what will go in each section.I got a little distracted by a problem with my revision control system---Ikeep all my papers and my bibliography under revision control---but stayedon task for the most part. I rewarded myself by leaving a bit earlyfor lunch, at 11:30. I also put a star on my calendar to record thatI put in my writing time for today.I had lunch at home with my husband. I cooked up a quick dish---cornfritters---and left my husband to clean up while I went for a walk,watching the time carefully so I could get back to work by 1:30.I know...that was a two hour lunch...but I never seem to exercise exceptby taking longer lunch breaks. I probably should go to lunch at 11:30more often. I love having the flexibility to take long lunches, and Ilove living so close to my office (a five-minute walk).I returned at 1:30 for the Daily Scrum with my summer research students.This is a short meeting, part of our agile software development process,where we each answer three questions: 1) What have you done since the lastDaily Scrum? 2) What do you plan to do between now and the next DailyScrum? 3) What is blocking you? I report out along with my students. Asusual, my students are blocked on some tasks. One is a question aboutscheduling an evening meeting with our project client. Another concernscoding standards - naming files and variables. A third is a smalltechnical problem. I sit down with one student after the Scrum and wedebug the problem in about five minutes. Finally, they need me to playthe participant in their pilot usability study, which I had earlierpromised to do. But they aren't quite ready yet. So, I catch up on my email---I hadn't looked at it in the morning while Iwas busy writing---while they are preparing. I see that there is finallyan agenda for the faculty development workshop I am participating in nextweek, so I print it out, look over the materials, and make sure it's allon my calendar. My students come to get me in the middle of composingan email to a committee I chair for my professional organization, butthat is okay.The pilot usability study is fun. I really enjoy doing these things.I role play the chatty participant, ignorant of design and just focused ondoing the task my way, while occasionally breaking character to suggesttips from my experience to make the study run more smoothly. (It is theirfirst study of the summer---so I expect there were more of these todaythan there will be in the future.) I have some further suggestions afterthe study is over. But overall the study went very well, and I tell mystudents so. Their first "real" participant is coming tomorrow at noon.I go back to my desk to finish composing the committee email. But soon aherd of students stampedes past my office. I see it is 3 p.m. - time forthe weekly Science Tea. Indeed, my students have left the research lab.I follow them with $10 in my pocket in the hopes of making change forparticipant compensation from the donation jar. Indeed, I get the $8I needed (leaving $2 in donations). I spend the half-hour talking with apeer in math; we end up deciding to go out to lunch next Monday and Iwrite it on the palm of my hand so I don't forget between there and myoffice. I also had a conversation on the way there with anothercolleague. I've served on a committee with her before, and I'm interestedin her research, so I asked her what her summer students are doing. Wetalked again about collaborating in the future; maybe trying to go to arelevant conference together in a couple years.On the way back, I go to the college bookstore to buy envelopes forparticipant compensation. Once I get back to my office, I take theenvelopes and cash over to the lab and count it out, asking my students tokeep the envelopes in a safe place for tomorrow.Finally, I return to my office to the committee email I started composingmore than an hour ago. I finish that and add some faculty developmentworkshops I had forgotten about to my annual Faculty Activity Report,which is due at the end of the month. And I start writing this diary,spending far longer than I probably should. By this time it is 4:30 p.m.I take a break by going to my institution's homegrown social networkingsite, where I keep in touch with alumni and students away for the summer.In posting my own news about writing a journal article, I discover a groupfor academics. I waste far too much time adding some of my favoriteresources---including, ironically, one on productivity---spending morethan 45 minutes in all.I need to figure out how to be more productive in the afternoons.I decide to work on a project I am hoping to finish up this week -migrating a research-related web server off my desktop computer so thesysadmin can finally update the OS. I'm still testing the site on the newserver, where it seems to have acquired various bugs. Fix some problems,choose content to hide, start slogging through security updates. I shouldhire a student to do this.It gets a little out of hand with module dependencies and I end up stayinguntil 7:00 - an hour later than I meant to. Oof. And oops.When I get home, my husband is making dinner and fixing one of the kitchencabinets. He is the complete package. I change from work clothes into"play" clothes and we have dinner on the back patio. Afterwards, I pickstrawberries---throwing away more than I keep since it has beenraining, and aquiring one serious mosquito bite before putting on bugspray---and clean them at the kitchen sink while my husband tidies upthe dinner dishes and then reads on the patio. I waste an hour or soreading web comics and blogs on my laptop, then pick up my Kindle andstart the next novel in the series I am reading, and finally take a showerto wash off the bug spray before bed. Lights out a bit after 11 p.m.Uid 3415 June 2011 ============= 00:01 - 01:00 Work on a script to process automatic marking results from MatLab into a format capable of being uploaded into Excel and hence into Moodle. If only students would obey the instructions on what to call their coursework! 01:00-01:30 Write reference for a colleague in the Computing Service 07:00-08:40 Wake up, breakfast (do an e-mail task for a colleague while it's cooking), shave, shower etc. Kitchen sink is blocked. 08:40-09:00 To bus stop via Waitrose to buy "Mr Muscle". Meet former Medical centre receptionist, and discuss my visit to a mutual friend last weekend in San Jose last week/weekend: first time I'd been in a four-robot household. 09:00-09:10 Bus to University 09:10-09:45 Buy coffee, answer e-mail etc. 09:45-10:45 Discussion with research student and other supervisor, interrupted by having to lend spare house key to a colleague who has locked herself out. 10:45-11:00 Confidential discussion 11:00-11:40 Briefing from PVC(T) on the Open Day next week. There is still a lot of "current plans are ..." and "unless Government policy changes ..." 11:40-12:10 See colleague with bullying problems (but she's not there), book train tickets for tomorrow (seminar in Canterbury) and buy lunch. 12:10-13:10 UCU Local Association meeting (I'm pensions rep., and the USS changes have been formally announced) 13:10-14:10 Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting. 14:10-14:30 Walk back to my office via buying a cup of coffee 14:30-15:00 Check exam scripts 15:00-15:10 Brief HoD on Open Day meeting 15:10-15:45 Weekly progress meeting with part-time research student & colleagues 15:45-16:00 Query from morning's research student 16:00-16:15 E-mail US expert introducing afternoon's research stduent and her query: hope they meet at the conference in a couple of week's time. 16:15-16:45 Discuss marking scripts (see 00:01) 16:45-17:30 E-mail reading, mail trains times to Canterbury etc. 17:30-17:45 Research student (morning) 17:45-18:15 Trip to Canterbury - find campus map etc. 18:15-18:30 Discuss marking scripts (see 00:01) 18:30-18:37 Administration - Department Review Report. 18:37-22:45 Bus to town (meeting Professor of German & discuss student recruitment), then Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting, and home via station to collect tickets (see 11:40); start dinner. 22:45-23:15 e-mail: mostly catching up with a redundancy case I've been advising on. irregularities admitted, but case dismissed. 23:15-23:22 work on dinner 23:22-23:37 paperwork related to consultancy, and more e-mail. 23:37- Dinner! TRAC return: 11.5 hours work; also 3.5 hours AA and 10 minutes consultancy. Uid 38This is the time of year when people say to me "Are your students finished now? So you're on holiday until September". Well, no actually, I'm as busy as any other time, if not more so - hence the fact that I'm submitting my diary entry even later than I usually do. Diary day is the third day of a Microsoft .NET CPD course I'm delivering to other members of staff. This is a pilot run for a new course which I'm committed to deliver to real clients soon. Delivering training courses is a very different process from teaching students - easier in some ways, no exam papers and no marking, for example, but harder in others. The material can be very concentrated and "techie", and the audience can be very demanding. It's useful to be seen to be generating income - we have a new Dean and so far I haven't heard him utter a sentence without the word "money" in it. Traing was cut short today, though, by the need to attend a program leaders' meeting to discuss induction arrangements for next session, and a department meeting. This may be the last meeting of this particular department, as we are Reorganising - we don't yet know what department we are going to be in or who is going to be the HoD. Finally, the evening was spent running the usual taxi service for kids, and then getting round late on to preparing for the next day of the training course. On holiday until September, indeed...Uid 45Some faculty don't darken the door in the summer, but I have so much to do! Reports about the student computer club must be submitted by August 1. I must prepare for a fall course that I haven't taught in many years. Working on a textbook that might be finished someday. Must work on some other publications, also, before fall arrives. Signing forms for students. No teaching this summer, but when would I have the time?Uid 4715 June 2011 8:45 am Some mornings can't be described. I made it to work, so that's something. 9:30 Reviewed the job description narrative for the department secretary. Human Resources is conducting a reclassification process which appears to mean that Human Resources hires a consultant, the consultant tells all of us to rewrite the job descriptions into a new form, and then nothing happens. They'll probably do this every few years. 10:50 just became obvious that the edits I did on the secretary job description were ignored by the secretary when she put it into the online form required by HR. So why did she ask me to look it over and make changes? 10:55 Oh god, now she sent it back for further suggestions. Do I suggest she use the edits I originally sent? This is why being a manager sucks. 11:30 Finished today's grading for my TR evening course. Looks like exponential functions are not everyone's friend and it was clear last night that power functions aren't so great either. Some re-trenching may be in order for tomorrow's class. Time to prep, I guess. 11:50 How is it possible that a student asks a question about a grade within two minutes of my posting it? That's incredible! And the question was whether I meant to record it in the wrong category, so nice save. Also, trying again with the secretary position description. This time I tried to be more clear that I had attached a document and that I want this to be what is used. I also changed the name of the document so it couldn't be mistaken for the same file just because it has the same name. I'm either not cut out for management or I'm just so tired of being department chair that these are the kinds of stupid things that drive me crazy. 12:30 Dealing with office space issues. It is nearly impossible to get anyone to commit to giving us space but I have two new people coming into the department this year and they need someplace to park their rears. 1:30 Might have a plan for office space but I still don't know how to cover all of the fall courses with the staff I have, unless an adjunct is willing to teach at both 8:30 am and 4:00 pm. I met with my new full-time visiting faculty as she winds her way through the hiring paperwork. It turns out I don't have her transcript because they sent a link electronically and it ended up in my spam folder. So it goes. My daughter is now visiting, reading quietly in the corner. I guess one of the plusses of working in academia is the ability to have her at work when necessary.2:30 Giving up on figuring out the fall schedule. Trying to write a quiz while evaluating transfer credits and dealing with parents who want their children to have the ideal fall schedule, which of course is never the one they already have. Time to send the daughter off to visit the doctor. 3:45 Today is the day for massive interruptions. Finally finished the quiz while dealing with an onslaught of advising questions, helicopter parents, the occasional, "just stopping by to say hi," and updates on my daughter's doctor visit (for the historical record: her allergy medicine isn't working and she probably isn't sleeping well as a result). Prior to today, my summer has been pretty quiet and I could easily schedule time slots to work on course prep, administrative tasks, and office cleaning (with a glimmer of hope to actually get some research done in the future). Today it has blown up in my face. 4:50 Forgot to prep some material (a summary sheet of concepts and formulas) for my evening class; looks like I've got it done just in time to run off and teach for a few hours. 8:10 Let's sum up this evening's class: utter disaster. In lower-level math classes I like to use problems from the textbook in class so when they do homework they can see that we did similar problems in class. This particular problem came up about 2.25 hours into what should be a 3.25 hour class, so in prepping the class I consciously decided to not calculate the values, just leaving boxes in my notes -- gives us spontaneity, they know they really need to give me the answer (and this far into the class they should be able to), we really work the problem together -- it generally works well for me. But everyone got an error as they calculated. Okay, the formulas are complicated and this is a *very* low-level math course, so try again. Hmm, still errors. So I pull out my calculator and, whoops, I get an error too. Haha, try again. But no, this error isn't going away. Yeah, eventually I pull the problem apart and realize the error is a real error -- the problem doesn't fit the case we're studying. By this time the students are mentally out of the game and getting through anything else was nearly impossible. And all I would have had to do was calculate the values while prepping -- which I consciously decided not to do. This fits my overall day which has careened from one task to another, filled with interruptions and resulting in little of value. But I hate having that experience happen to my students. I understand all the cute life lessons I could claim they gain from this, but these are adults, they already know life throws crap at us so having this hit them in the face does not add value. So now I have to design homework to reinforce the concepts of the lovely classroom learning we just experienced. 9:05 Homework written. Now I really need to prep the class I teach tomorrow. (This is the class that I wanted to start prepping at 11:30 am this morning.) 10:30 Wife calls wondering if I'm coming home. Not quite done prepping. 11:00 Class prepped, homework written. Get me out of here! Uid 52Today was the final day at a conference for me, so we had a useful set of meetings this morning, before tackling the 6-7 hour journey home. Most of the day was spent sitting in the passenger seat of a car getting a lift home from a colleague. However, this opportunity to sit and chat with a colleague from another institution and discuss relevant academic issues at both our institutions was very welcome. Whilst we also talked about non-academic things, it was still very useful to have the opportunity to ask about contrasting ways in which our institutions do things. Unfortunately much of the discussion was dominated by talk of redundancies and restructuring. Home quite late and over a hundred emails to catch up on before checking over my plans for an assessment event I am running tomorrow.Uid 53I'm on paternity leave this week for our second child - this is towards the end of the second week - so of course, it's all plain sailing now :-) I"m getting used to doing most of the looking after of my son, while my wife looks after the new baby. I'm even getting time to work on a load of things that need attention in the flat, only three months after we returned from the US. I'm (almost) not reading work email at all. It seems to have broken on my laptop anyway, so I can only get it on my iPhone, and I can't do anything serious on that. My wife commented today that the pretty-well complete break from work, to be replaced with the solving of entirely tractable problems around the house, seems to be doing me a lot of good. Is there a lesson in here for me? I love to fix things. Yet so many of my work projects seem to be either hugely open-ended, or impossibly broken. Hence not much completion going on! But now I look at it that way, i can see that my approach to the projects is actually the problem - I've slipped into impossibility. Rather than viewing them as open-ended or broken, I need to identify and take a step at a time. Oh, and of course, simply drop the ones that I discern to be really truly broken! (Potentially) simple, really. Good stuff, this diary writing. I'll let you know whether I've made any progress on my work projects, as well as my flat projects, next time!Uid 60On June 15th, I taught graduate students from 7 to 10:30 pm. Therefore, I spent the morning preparing for class and clearing my mailbox. In the mail, apart from the usual queries from students and notices from administration, there was an invitation from the Head of the undergraduate school to join Yammer. So now we have a university social network site and I have one more daily task to monitor the discussions among colleagues. I barely get time to surf Facebook and do not quite relish the extra demand on my time, even if it is meant to "increase productivity". I spent the afternoon attending a press conference to launch a Business-IT business plan competition among local universities. I am all for strengthening the links between local businesses and students. It gives an opportunity to our students to do summer internships and opens up their eyes to local career prospects. It was time well spent to meet industry leaders and educationists. My graduate class is everything I hope for. My students are smart, funny, and enthusiastic. They are so different from my undergraduate students. It is so much more challenging to motivate the undergraduates. The graduate students are all working professionals and bring a refreshing perspective to the issues we discuss in class. Two weeks to summer vacation and hibernation! Uid 64I was away from the university on Tuesday, so had to get up at 4.30 to get back to campus for 8am. I'm teaching all day - we run professional courses at this time of year. Spend the two hours on the train finishing off the afternoon session planning. Not an ideal situation, but it has been a busy year and I'm not as organised as I would have liked. In to the office by 8am, which gives me time to organise the resources I need before going off to the main campus for teaching. I'm encumbered with whiteboard markers, flipchart sheets and coloured stickers. It's like a flashback to the early 90s. I have a break at lunchtime, but use it to see a dissertation student. Then, three more hours teaching in the afternoon. Just as we are due to finish, the heavens open and everyone is tempted to stay for another half an hour. I wish it was due to my wonderful teaching, but I think it was probably the weather.Uid 65An early start today (again). Up at 5.30am and at my desk in work by 7am. After dealing with my inbox and collecting up some paperwork, I leave for the train to York. I haven’t been looking forward to today – a grey, dry meeting is anticipated, around a process that I’ve only been peripherally involved in. I arrive at the station to meet one of my colleagues to find that the other won’t be coming as she is sick. This is alarming because I perceive her to be the one with all the answers and experience. Ah well, we will just have to wing it – something I have become expert at since becoming a lecturer in HE. I spend the day at the Higher Education Academy in a small meeting / workshop around accreditation. It’s a very relaxed environment, very supportive and encouraging, and I find myself really enjoying the experience. Contrary to my expectations, everyone else is in the same boat – in fact we are somewhat ahead of the game in many respects. I find that I actually know much more about the process than I thought I did and come away with a boost to my confidence. I even enjoyed the train journey with my colleague, with some good conversation and debate. I arrive back at the office around 6pm and determine to go straight to the car park, not venturing into my office for fear of collecting up more jobs on the way. All in all, a good day - not at the office. Uid 67For a change I was barely in the office today. We’ve had lots of ‘it’s nearly holiday time’ meetings preparing for the next academic year. Our department is in flux and it’s uncomfortable. They’ve interviewed for all the posts but no one’s been appointed and there are worries that the new dean’s misogyny will play a part in making significant changes to our managers. One wonders how someone who stares right through women assuming they all work in admin and have nothing intelligent to say could be appointed to head of school in 2011, but then again, nothing surprises me at this stage. The meetings were followed with a research seminar that was interesting, but not quite as inspiring as I’d hoped. The discussion that followed the presentations was far more interesting than the presentations themselves but the ideas it inspired were nothing new. I returned to my office to late applications and recently submitted digital portfolios only to be interrupted by a colleague who was about to take her holidays. A couple hours later, it’s nearly 7pm and we’ve discussed a range of subjects in our uncomfortable office chairs. I kept thinking, we really out to leave the building and continue somewhere more pleasant, but it would’ve interrupted the flow. But, this is one of the highlights of this time of year, the chance to talk to your colleagues at length without anyone having to rush off to teach. So often it is about work, but sometimes it’s just about life and it’s a welcome break. Still, with only one more working day before I too take my holidays, I keep thinking there's something else I should be doing or that I've forgotten...but I guess that's always the way. Uid 71A ridiculous day. I commute to work and stay at a colleagues house regularly. It's great fun and I owe her many favours. This morning she has to go to a meeting in another city so I take her toddler to nursery. This is the first time I do this but it will be a regular thing for awhile. I am really pleased that she has this new project on the go. It is a real marker of esteem and I am pleased that it has gone to her instead of a (senior, male) academic. I am sure she will do a very good job. Taking her child to nursery is a new thing but it reflects an unspoken form of solidarity amongst the women. They are much more likely to volunteer to help each other our, especially when it comes to balancing personal life and work life. Today, a colleague organised a post graduate conference on ethnographic research. I agreed to speak about emotions in research. I had not really prepared that well. I spent some time the previous day trying to write a script but found writing about my emotions very difficult so decided to wing it. I got a bit emotional in the middle and my colleague asked if I wanted to stop but I carried on. The discussion was really really good. Supportive and probing and it felt like a very productive experience. I had to leave before the end of the conference so didn't hear students reactions. My colleague texted to say that the feedback was good. I had to run off to hear my PhD student do a presentation (which is routine at the end of her 1st year). She is in a different faculty. She had come to my office the day before to run through the presentation and was not her usual self. We had a good chat and she is a bit depressed and can't wait to go home for the summer. I hope she felt better for having a chat about it. After that I had to (literally) run for the train. My mother came to visit (this journey takes about 8 hours) - a surprise visit! This was really appreciated but this was the worst time to come as it is such a busy time. By the time I arrived I was feeling a bit frazzled. A gin and tonic then out for my birthday dinner. I'll be 30 this weekend!Uid 72Working on various admin tasks from 9:00-11:00, firstly at home then at the Univeristy. See research students from 11:00-12:30ish, then a resitting project student for about 10 minutes. At 12:30 the first of our external examiners arrives to look through material for the exam board tomorrow. I take the examiner to lunch at around 13:00 and then return to go through some of the exam material. I see another research student for around 30 minutes at 14:00, then return to talking to the external examiners until about 15:30, when I go to a research discussion group, arrive slightly late, until about 17:00. Then I spend another hour or so talking to the examiners and travel into town with them. I go home for an hour or so, then head out to meet the examiners for dinner at about 19:00.Uid 758:50am Off to a slow start today but I have been since shifting house two weeks ago and now I am looking at moving to a new permanent position at the end of the month. My contract was to run out here at UoB at the end of the month and they did offer a six months extension but Aston offered an interview for a permanent position almost at the same time so the permanent position has won out. I will still supervise MSc project students over the summer for UoB but that works both ways since they need supervisors and I have a personal interest in some of the projects. It was also a slow start this morning because we went out last night to celebrate with the demonstrators who assisted with the Team Java module. They are a good group and we had a good time. A bit sad that there won't be another celebration. Into a bit of tidy up mode initially this morning as I sort through papers on my desk and work out what should be kept and what can be thrown. As I look ahead to the day, I have a series of meetings with MSc students so I should be kept fairly busy. Facebook tells me I have a spammy link. Strange but I don't click on many links so who is doing the spamming? Facebook by any chance! 11am First project student meeting completed. She needed a lot more assistance than I had expected. 11:21am I thought I had a meeting with the lecturer who was going to take over one of the courses but he doesn't seem to be in. Never mind, I have used the time to sort and discard a back log of notes. 1pm The other lecturer turned up and we talked for almost an hour and a half. Again disappointment expressed that I am moving on but understanding that a permanent position is better than short term contracts. Still we had a good talk about the team work course and how it has been structured and what I might have done differently had I been running it again. 1:30pm Second project student meeting completed. Difficult to determine whether this student understands what is required. Language barrier is part of the problem but the student does seem confused. Had to emphasise the importance of understanding the theory behind the model that she wants to implement and not just understanding the case that she hopes to model. 3:30pm Two more meetings with project students completed. One was concerned about whether his project was appropriate. The other just needed to clarify the direction of the project. Most do not consider evaluation when they are preparing these proposals. In the gaps between the meetings, I have managed to send the Head of School a draft proposal for a computing education paper. I am not sure what will happen to it now that I am moving on. 16th June, 9:10am Didn't get to complete the entry yesterday. The last student meeting happened at 4pm and then it was off home for a quick meal before coming back to pick up a student and head to the Wolverhampton Track Cycling League meeting. The student is one of my project students and is looking at a training system for track commissaires. He had never seen track racing but had watch some YouTube videos. I ended up as the chief commissaire for the evening. Its a role that I enjoy because you are more focussed on riding technique and whether fair racing is occurring. You still have to do the administrative paper work at the end but that isn't that difficult. A good organiser makes it even easier and these leagues have good organisers. Last week had been a road race with another student as my scribe. It had also been a fairly easy race to commissiare so didn't really give a feel for the problems that a commissaire might face. Still both events seemed to give the students an idea of what is involved.Uid 77Share: 15th June The only problem with this project is that is illustrates with monotonous regularity just how fast the year is moving. Is it really a month since the last time I completed this? Quiet morning at home; the only crisis was the lack of orange juice (so driven rather than cycled to work so as to fit in a visit to the supermarket on the way home). Met a colleague on the stairs and briefly discussed a career development issue of common interest, before even getting to my desk. My email inbox has crept up to 200 again! So the first task this morning is to weed out those I no longer need. The main task of today is my role in a University event for 16-18year olds from local schools. They come to the campus for the day to find out what University is all about. As admission tutor I have to give a 45 minute talk on my subject (Medicine). However, I have to repeat it 4 times! I am not sure whether the large bouncy castle that I saw sitting next to the student bar yesterday has anything to do with the event. So several emails later (about 25 removed from box!) mostly queries relating to admissions; the whole range about application for next year, feedback on unsuccessful application this year, and what to do about someone to whom we are considering making an offer, but realise we don’t have evidence of their qualifications! Oh and problem solving when staff have failed to turn up to assist in assessment. Well I’ve given my ‘admission’ talk 3 times in a row to the 6th formers visiting the University who are hosting a Higher Education Open Day. I almost know it now! And I’ve one more rendition after lunch. Actually, it is quite good to be able to amend it and try it out again almost straight away, and I feel it is much slicker now, and ready for open day next month. I have had the odd moment of ‘deja vu’; did I say that just now or was it to the last group of students? Managed to grab 5 minutes to pop over to the shop to get lunch, which I am eating while checking my email and writing this. Also had my (85 year old) father phone about a family business matter. I hope I am still as switched on and aware when I’m his age. 4th and final admission talk went well, with several of the young people staying behind to ask questions; too well really because it meant I was late for my next meeting! I was supposed to be at a research meeting at 3.30, but as is so often the case the urgent (in this case exam marks) pushed out the important. We had to check the borderline candidates’ marks (for the third time) and double check a couple of MCQ answers. It is finals, so high stakes. Currently it looks like there are 15 or so who won’t be graduating this time round....but the exam board isn’t until Friday. However, we still haven’t finished the checking and I was planning to work at home tomorrow, but needs must.... So leaving the office now, only 5.30, to stop off at the supermarket on the way home. A girlie night in, I think as the husband is out to dinner. After supper we can curl up in front of the TV and watch the Apprentice! Uid 7815 June was my first day back at work after a week on leave (some of it in a very sunny Devon). The first couple of days back at work after leave are always dreadful. No-one does my work while I'm away so it piles up. As usual I felt completely overwhelmed and intimidated. I was also a bit sun burned and annoyed that a sensible person like me should allow herself to get sunburned and I was suffering with hay fever which involved constant sneezing and feeling very unwell. I spent the day in the office trying to recover my equilibrium. On the whole - not a good day.Uid 80Interesting day. Received the invitation to contribute to the review of the SCQF level descriptors. This is of considerable interest to me as I put in a tender with colleagues to do this work. Agreed amongst colleagues how to give a University response. Discovered someone had searched for me on Academia and thought it was about time I updated my profile - actually put anything in it actually. Along side this I had a very weird phone call from someone who said they were from Anglia Ruskin. They were suggesting they were secretarial and asked to check me out for a colleague who had been trying to email. Received a Linkd in request, and started to sort this out but admit to being quite perplexed by the whole face book style approach. Managed some reading around learning theory and style. Had a very constructive conversation with a colleague about the future direction of one of largest programme. Encouraged by our shared understandings. Progressed the new pathway curriculum devleopment I am undertaking for RAF staff. Finally, had a conversation with a colleague writing a discussion paper on the life/expiration of previously gained credit. I had read some research that tended to suggest that not accepting old credit was probably a political decision rather than one based on any real data. Need to look into this furhter.Uid 82Exam. Board. That's what Weds 15 June was for me. The exam board was over in record time, thanks to the skillful management of proceedings in the run-up to and during the board by the chief examiner and the admin staff. Our students had done their best, and we did our best by them. I had marked out most of the day for the boards but had some delightfully unexpected spare hours. I wrote a few emails to students who were trying to work out dissertation topics and then prepared for a meeting with a colleague from our learning and teaching support team about how to better support our first years in getting to grips with writing essays at university. A day involving students at all stages in the undergraduate lifecycle. And pleasing to know - although the students didn't until the end of the week - that the third years would have cause to celebrate their hard work. I will raise a glass to them myself tonight.Uid 95Marking and Exam. Meetings The furore of exams. is over and the mark sheets are all done, ready for the internal examiners' meeting on Friday. My main module is coursework-based so is completed before exams. It's the admin. and chasing missing work that takes the time. Does my line manager really know how long I take reading professional skills folders (PDP work plus the start of evidence and reflection for the students' professional accreditation is about seven years from now)? Like me the students hate the "reflective review" bit and level 1 students are not very good at this time of creative writing. The exception is the small number of mature students. I have also had rather higher number than usual of Level 3 projects to second mark most are in areas where I have little knowledge but the theory is that second markers are looking for overall structure and presentation, rather than technical content. We have to agree with the supervisors mark (more or less) and I always seem way off with management-based reports. I put this down to being a scientist! I also had a large discrepancy between myself, as first marker, and a second marker for a student who I had supervised: I am convinced that the second marker only marked on spelling and presentation and toally mis-understood the aims and objectives of the project. A third marker, fortunately, agreed with my marks. In another case, in total agreement with the supervisor, we have failed one student. There will be implications for his visa as he is an international student who won't be able to progress to fourth year. Then again, the examiners might over-rule our decision. While we try to follow rules and be consistent, I do sometimes wonder about decisions taken in the examiners' meeting that make life easier for the staff. Have made a decision to leave the module file, gathering of coursework samples, and the general tidying up of teaching until all the examining stuff is finished when the external visits next week. Being a Student Myself Surprisingly I have found time to pick up on work for my teaching Diploma. This had been put on hold because of the heavy marking load. Spent a couple of hours doing an on-line literature trawl for "action research", updating notes, and starting to write up my own coursework. I am a typical student with procrastinating tendencies until deadlines loom. Knowing the theory of time management and imparting this to students is one thing: parctising what I preach is another! At least the interest was sparked again so I am ready to continue the work and even set myself some intermediate deadlines. Checked a few emails: a) UCU encouraging attendance at emergency meeting re pensions. Much as I agree with their stance, I am against strikes and don't think university staff will gain anything this time round. b) Anxious students emailing about when results will be published (three weeks), references (not my tutees so why can't their tutor write one - sorry tutors now on research trips!), and some from "industrial contacts" who mean well with offers of help but can't fit in with the academic year. Reply with platitudes as it's important to keep them "on-board". c) Then I found the email about the workload data!!! Under Valued Every year my work load comes back that I only work about 70-80% of the time. This is because I don't DO research. But what about my diploma research projects which are educational research? "Research-led teaching" is a joke in this context. Anyway, this year is BAD - I am only working less than 30% of the time. Given I start at 7.30 each day and often come in one of the weekend days during the teaching period, I am devastated. Burst into tears with the lack of support from colleagues and line managers. {I later emailed to make the point that my role as induction co-ordinator, and year tutor x 2 has not been included: polite reply to say that they know this). I've work at uni. a long time, am a graduate of this institution, and quite frankly this is the final straw. We now have admin. people and managers who try to fill in paperwork for the senior team without even asking what we do, and certainly not appreciating how we spend time with students, deal with their traumas, and general make sure that the "student experience" is a good one. With all this pressure to fit in little boxes, the human side of university has gone. Maybe in 2012 when the students are paying ?9,000 the university will realise that you don't have to be a researcher to be an academic, and that teaching involves caring for the students as well as delivering lectures and amrking assessments. Home Travel home with partner whi has also had a bad day (rule is that we let off steam until we reach the house and then stop). Anyway, he is in IT and reports that "they" are re-structuring again - must be fifth time in ten years. Being Wednesday I visit elderly mother who happens to be unwell. Hide my own sadness so I can cope with hers. Partner out this evening so home to a solitary tea: thoughts racing around why I do what I do, not appreciated, housework untouched because of all that marking. Gloom lifts as dog comes over for a cuddle and polite request for a walk. Fresh air helps. Looked at "The Apprentice" and marvel at so call intelligent people getting current project so badly wrong. Tomorrow is another day. Uid 98The invitation to hearing from the Head of School prior to the Undergraduate Exam Panel was intriguing enough to get an early attendance. However, it turned out not to be a pep-talk to pass more students but just the taking of an opportunity to talk to cognate sections of the School. So to the Panel. A mechanical exercise where there's a ruling not to permit discussion of individual students. Academics must formally agree marks, even though we're the ones who submitted them electronically. Is this odd? Well it turns out there were a number of adjustments to be made to the marks at the Panel. Now I really don't understand that. So, if there is the opportunity of error, how much stranger that the stated activity can only apply to coursework marks as examination marks may only be held centrally; there's a mismatch between two regulations - not having a record of exam marks (so that they cannot be hacked into?) against taking an independent check. That a colleague was running a laptop during the Panel warned us that next year's Timetables had to be sorted. The possible free time evaporated in poring over interlinked pages of modules, rooms, students, staff. Just enought time for a quick lunch on the way to see individual PhD and MSc students about their studies. Home, for emails, ending just after half past eight, making a 12 hour day.Uid 114Today I have a 2 hour journey to get to campus (I usually work remotely). I decide to head off early and thenI'll be able to go for a run whenI arrive before a series of meetings. Alas the train system says no! Arriving at Euston head of schedule I discover there are no trains. I'm directed to walk to Kings Cross and catch a train for Bedford. When I arrive in Bedford some time later I'm told that it would have been better to direct me via Luton instead - the next connection is nearly an hour! I walk into Bedford, find the coach station, wait half an hour no realising there is a queue forming outside the bus station and then only just get on the bus before it is declared full! Eventually after the bus and a cab I arrive on campus4.5 hours after leaving home! Naturally it is my run that has to be cancelled as I'm already late for the first meeting. The afternoon meeting is with quite a large group and I have been complaining for months about how badly run these meetings are and that they always go massively over time. In response to my complaints I have been made Chair and today is the test or my ability to improve things. It starts well and we are still on time after the first hour. It's hard to get a group of academics to reconveine after teabreak and by our second tea break I have been renamed Miss Whiplash! I'm really chuffed that we are running 5mins ahead of time when I hand over to the previous Chair who has the final item which should be timed at 10 mins..... the meeting then runs over by half an hour! Oh well - it was definately an improvement and I'm pleased when several of my colleagues compliment me on how well run it was. Uid 1169:34 AM: Today is the start of my third week of sabbatical. I'm working as a software engineer with a mid-sized Mac/iOS software development company. We have just under 50 employees and about a dozen consumer/retail productivity application. I'm thoroughly enjoying the work so far. It's nice to not be so driven by deadline pressure—pressure to prepare lectures, to write assignments, to grade assignments. Because this work is in a new area for me, I have much to learn. That's been a lot of fun. Last week we went to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. It was exciting to see programming language research ideas making their way into practical libraries and APIs. I'm always intrigued by the ways in which practitioners choose to simplify and refine academic ideas. 11:30 AM: I spent the morning studying text layout documentation and formulating a bug fix. 12:30 PM: For the past hour I participated in a planning meeting on the next steps for the evolution of one of our product families. It's a complex problem to balance customer expectations, the evolution of the host platforms on which the product runs, competition, and engineering resources. 1:00 PM: One of the great perks that this company offers is three free meals a day. For breakfast, we're on our own to fix toast or cereal. Lunch is a sit down affair with the whole company. For dinner we can take food home for our families, or our families can join us hear. Communal dining really helps to strengthen bonds. It's also a huge time saver. 2:00 PM: Completed a fix to a bug in a shipping product. The fix ended up being just 25 lines of code, but required an understanding of several thousand lines. 2:45 PM: I met with our technical lead and another new engineer to review the code and discuss the overall architecture of the application. After committing my fix to our source control repository, I updated the bug in our bug database so QA knows to review the fix. 3:39 PM: After a mid-afternoon coffee, I caught up on email, read some technical specs, and started looking at the next bug on my list. 5:00 PM: I determined that one of my assigned bugs affects the user interface in two other project families. I consulted with developers on those teams about proposed changes. 5:30 PM: After dinner, I spent some time looking for code in our libraries that might already solve part of the problem on which I'm working. Reuse is a challenge when the code base becomes so large. 6:00 PM: I found the code that solves this problem in another of our products. The solution there is much more general than what is needed for the products on which I'm working. As such, I'll think about doing this code from scratch. It will still be re-used in three product families. Seems like a good stopping place for the day. 6:58 PM: The drawbridge on my route home stopped me for 10 minutes, but otherwise the commute was easy tonight. I hope to start bicycling to work but need to figure out how I'm going to shuffle clothes and computer back and forth. After I got home, I chatted with my wife over iChat. I'm in Seattle and she's in Philadelphia until December. Hopefully we'll be done with living in two locations then. It seems like we have to sacrifice choice of location to find interesting work. I know we shouldn't complain, since we both have work now. Many, many others aren't so fortunate, and the pols don't seem to care. This sabbatical came just in time. I was getting very burnt out by the pace of teaching. Although my course evaluations and conversations with our graduates told me that I was still touching students' lives, I was focusing more and more on the parts of the job that make it work. I'll be interested to see whether I'm missing teaching in the fall when my colleagues had back to the classroom. I'll also be interested to see how I feel about my industry work in 12 months. Will the novelty wear off? Or is the pace of change such that there is as much novelty in industry as in research?Uid 119The summer is still full of work. My day began with a meeting with administrators at a local high school about how they might work with us on an NSF grant that we have just received. The meeting went well, and then it was off to my office. There I responded to ever-present e-mail, and then revise a handout for an upcoming workshop that I am presenting with a colleague. One thing that I am able to do during the summer when I'm not teaching is take advantage of the pool being open for a couple of hours at noon time. At one o'clock I went over to the pool and swim a mile as I do almost every day. After my shower I headed over to our South campus for another meeting with my colleagues in Music and a teacher from another local high school. After that meeting I stayed to work with one of the Music professors and review some new tools that he had recently learned about for combining computing and music. By the time I got home and had dinner, there were 38 new e-mails that come in since I went to the pool at 1:00 PM. It took me a couple of hours to go through all those, leaving some, filing some, and writing answers to some. I did some accounting on University project as well. Finally, at 9:30 PM, I got a chance to sit and write this journal entry. It's been a busy day, but the Red Sox have beat the Tampa Bay Rays this evening, and the Bruins are leading Vancouver at the end of the second period in the 7th and deciding game of the finals of the Stanley Cup playoffs, so one cannot say it's been a bad day! :) Uid 120I'm on maternity leave! The baby isn't born yet though, so in addition to popping into town and meeting a group of women I met at my antenatal classes for lunch I have also been trying to finish writing my book. I had to raise ?3k for the production of images for the press, but have since discovered that this doesn't cover the cost of copyright permissions or scans. Since some of the picture libraries I have used charge ?100+ per image, I'm desperately trying to organise cheaper copies of all the images as quickly as possible. And I have two chapters which need some pretty hefty revisions before I resubmit the manuscript. On top of that I have a museum talk and some prizes to organise - linked to the outreach project I ran in March. My co-organiser doesn't seem to realise that I won't be able to drive 2 hours to the museum, give a talk, and drive 2 hours back, when my baby is under two weeks old. So I am trying to help get everything sorted out before I have the baby and don't leave him in the lurch too much. I should have been marking exams and essays throughout this period. Instead I have been resting, giving a paper in Aberdeen, and finishing off my research. I should go on maternity leave more often! Uid 126Wednesday 15th June A long day and very warm. I am out in schools observing students so up early for a banana smoothie (no strawberries added this morning) and serious fashion decisions to be made: trousers or dress, this cardigan or that? Just how hot will it be? I project forward to the classrooms I will sit in, perched on a tiny chair trapped in the hottest corner or by the freezing open door. A visit to a local school allows a little time for lingering over coffee and e-mails. At this time of the term, there is more emphasis than usual on student crises and colleague soothing. There is a reference to write for an administrative colleague who I will be truly sad to lose from the team. The university is making major changes to its administrative structure which I think will make life much less pleasant for our wonderful, really wonderful , admin staff, and the lives of academics even more fraught. This colleague feels the need to move to keep his sanity. I am sorry. I don’t finish the reference because I want to be sure it really reflects his many fine qualities. And it makes me sad. Staff are going to have to move rooms also and some of us will have to share. One colleague is in a flap. ‘Moving rooms will give me a nervous breakdown.’ she says, and is only half joking. I drive to a village not far from where i live and think, as I always do, about the wonder of small country primary schools. I am a bit early so sit in the car and watch families arriving with buggies, dogs, bicycles, precious boxes carefully carried containing some treasure or other and those enormous rucksacks which look as if they will topple the wearer backwards at the slightest loss of balance. I know this school fairly well and it is lovely to see al that is going on and the student welcoming me, and loving it, despite family issues she is dealing with at the same time. I observe a lesson on non-fiction with a lively well-behaved class and enjoy the way the student encourages the children to talk to each other and to use talk to develop their thinking. It is something that she experienced during her teaching placement in France and it is a pleasure to see. Afterwards we talk, and she is so thoughtful and receptive and is interested by some of the suggestions I make and sure that her class teacher will help her. When I meet the teacher, I share that view. Here is a lively, funny, intelligent woman who really engages with the lives of children and the intellectual and emotional life of learning. We talk about next steps and about the poetry competition held in the county for children which i encourage her to enter children’s writing for. The student is keen to help also. I drive up to Norwich where I am to see the second student. On the way I stop to post a book my son needs for exams he is taking. I stop off in a village and marvel at the postal service. And how nice it is to enter the wooden floored room in what looks to be an eighteenth century building that houses the Post Office. I arrive earlier than expected in Norwich and go to the supermarket to buy a sandwich and some tomatoes for a dish that I think I will cook for supper. I sit and read the paper and look at some articles I have on teaching reading. At they appointed time I drive to the large suburban primary school where there are two students. I am to see a student in a Year 2 class and they will be doing maths. Oh, it is so hot and the sun beats down. The lesson will be truncated because a postponed PE lesson will take place. The student is valiant! The lesson is about estimating and measuring using rulers and metre rules. All goes well, though I think it is stressful for the student teacher and the final part of the lesson, conducted as children change into shorts and t-shirts, is hard going. I talk with the teacher and feedback. It is all straightforward. She is tired. The day before she had taken part in a whole school travelling the world event and had spent the day making Mexican crafts: lovely, but exhausting! Back to the university and the flood of e-mails that demand immediate attention scroll down my computer screen. I talk to colleagues, make decisions, get angry at what is happening, calm down, am pleased to see a colleague early so we have time to talk about joint projects, speak to a colleague on the phone, talk to admin staff and so on and so on. I am aware that I am not speaking personally often enough to members of the team. And then, hurray, it is the writing teachers group and here is a new arrival –who is also a past student and there are about eight of us. I am thrilled that two students who are on placement have come to the group. How tired they both look. We write together and they just want to jkeep on writing. And we have a cup of tea and there are biscuits, and they talk and talk about writing and teaching writing. I mention a meeting in London about a national project and they all want to be a part of it. I am so amazed and thrilled. I am especially thrilled by one student’s enthusiasm and byt he great distance he has travelled during the year. My colleague and I talk about a paper we will be presenting at a conference in July. Again, they are interested and want to talk about it and volunteer their own experiences, keen to share how the writing group has changed them and their practice. And we have time to hear a little of what people have written and it is always so surprising and affirming and again and again, people say that they leave relaxed and happy. A student wants to tell my colleague his story and I run to get a voice recorder and they talk and talk. Later she says how moved she was by what he has to say. We are finding this work very exciting. It is quite hard to shape it sometimes; quite hard to explain how deep and serious it is. While they are talking I talk to one of the teachers about some work we would like him to do to cover study leave. He is excited and I am able to introduce him to a newly appointed colleague who will share the teaching with him. They are both excited! She has come to meet me to talk through her viva to be held at the end of the month. She has just completed a really interesting MA dissertation and we talk through some of its quirks and what she might be asked to talk about and conceptual frameworks, data analysis and methodology. It is an interesting and not straightforward piece of research. I hope that the viva goes well. Our talk drifts on to her new house and the renovations she and her husband are planning and then she leaves to talk to another colleague still here at twenty past eight and we go home. I am too tired to cook anything fancy so chop tomatoes and eat cottage cheese. I check e-mails, again. Is that wise at this hour of the night? Bath, bed, an attempt at an interesting book of longitudinal studies of young readers and sleep. Uid 127Share Project Wednesday 15th June, 2011 Marking season, silly season, season of ill-will to all men (and women)? This is the time of year when academia can really grind you down. The students finished a few weeks ago (with the associated end of year party) and then we all locked ourselves away to plough through the seemingly endless piles of scripts. Luckily for me, I’m almost done, so I got to do a few other jobs today. The first was definitely a lot of fun. I have plans for some lab work over the summer, and one of our technicians was holding a training session for a piece of equipment I’d not really used before, but would like to. I spent a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours being a student again, helped by the fact that he was a brilliant tutor, able to explain some complex concepts really effectively. Then I put my external liaison hat on, as I took a group of Year 11 and 12 students around the science building, talking them through the activities we carry out in the labs, and letting them try out some of the practical work themselves. I actually run quite a few such visits over the course of the academic year, and while the organisation and related administration can be overwhelming, actually being in the labs with the younger children is wonderful fun. While the groups can sometimes be very mixed, I do get groups where everyone is really enthusiastic and interested, and the questions can provoke really interesting discussions. I have no doubt that working with local schools and colleges is a vital part of my role within the University, and I do really believe it makes an impact on how the University is viewed by the local population, as well as boosting our recruitment. Once the school group had left, I headed back to my office to look over some corrections with a PhD student for whom I was internal examiner. I have only examined two PhDs so far, and both have resulted in a lot of work afterwards to ensure the corrections are up to standard. This thesis was actually of quite poor quality, but the performance at viva was outstanding, so I’m really hoping she will be able to bring the quality of her written work up to her intellectual level. Then it was a question of catching a few colleagues to sort out some double marking, before finally dragging myself home to sit on the sofa and mark the final two project reports. It’s been a difficult week, since we found out that there may well be some redundancies coming within our area, and it has thrown me off kilter somewhat. I keep planning ahead to next academic year, trying to decide what I’ll do over the summer months and yet at the back of my mind is this question over whether I’ll still be around to utilise all my advanced planning. There is nothing to be done about it, however; it is what it is. I realise I need to put on the blinkers, and just keep going, because if I do manage to get everything done over the summer that I want to, it will make a massive improvement to my working life from September.Uid 136Oh bliss, I am at a conference! and not only that but, having presented my paper yesterday, I can just sit back and enjoy it. I arrive early and take the opportunity of a bit of summer sunshine to walk round the lovely green field site before going in for tea. This is a Learning and Teaching Conference, and one of the great joys is the chance to catch up with colleagues from around the University and beyond who actually take seriously the commitment to scholarship in these areas. I spend the morning registration tea 'break' chatting with a friend from Psychology about the best way to approach teaching new students about learning styles and how to develop more confidence in independent learning through the transition from School to HE, and together with a colleague from my own School we work out some induction and tutorial exercises that will benefit us all. Then off to the first session of the day – two discussions about formative assessment. The first of these, an interactive session, gives some great ideas on quick and simple methods to help students identify their learning needs and evaluate whether they have met them – self-feedback, what a good idea! The second session, from a different Faculty (subject area) with a totally different style of undergraduate project work challenges me to see how some of their good ideas could be incorporated in our project support. More tea, biscuits and conversation, this time with an architect about the links between sciences and Art, ranging from the design of buildings to enhancing the public understanding of science. The next talk is interesting because during an attempt to engage academics in discussing how to engage students in learning it becomes clear that academics wish to engage students in attending, a subtly different though undoubtedly related activity! Agree some follow up activities to investigate this problem…… Last session before lunch stimulates a lot of discussion about group work and its assessment, and I realise - not for the first time, but it always seems like a fresh revelation – that there is no one right answer to questions relating to teaching, only compromises. Variation in learning styles, ideal activities, assessment preferences etc mean that we just cannot deliver the optimum educational experience for each and every one of our students. I think when students are paying ?9000/year for higher education this aspect of teaching, learning and assessment may be higher on everyone’s agenda. After lunch (and that in itself is a luxury, usually I grab a quick sandwich whilst answering e mails at my desk) I attend a couple of talks on research methodology which is applicable to teaching and learning. I chair this session, which always gets the adrenaline flowing, especially as one talk involves using interactive technology. We also have good numbers of participants as heavy rain during the lunch break has turned our lovely green field site into a mud bath and some participants have taken the opportunity to stay close to the lunch room rather than wade half way across the campus! One talk is fascinating but not something I can see me using, the other is very similar to my own activities and we have a good debate at the end incorporating viewpoints from several disciplines. And lo, the rain has stopped and the sun shines on us as we leave the conference for another year. As always I feel incredibly buoyed up by these two days, fired with enthusiasm for improving teaching and learning experiences for students and ideas for new, and some collaborative, pedagogic research. This is what being an academic is about - reflection, cross fertilisation of ideas..... On the way home on the train I note down ideas and plans. When I get home I even switch on my computer. Bad idea! Over two days at the conference so much correspondence has come in that my e mail box is full and I can’t send any messages to all those potential collaborators until I delete a considerable number of files…….Now where did I leave my time-turner???????* *Time turner – a magical device referred to in the Harry Potter novels and films which enables the wearer to use time twice and thus cram twice as much activity into a given timespan as normal! Uid 138What a varied day! With exam boards over, my diary is now my own: what bliss to have a bit of freedom back. I love the academic annual cycle of activity – especially at this time of year! Started the day meeting with two very keen summer research students – third year students going into Senior Honours next year. I am always amazed at how much research can get done with the help of a 10-week summer scholarship: the students may need a bit of training in research methods, but if I meet with them daily, I can usually ensure that they remain focussed and that we make substantial progress. The ?2500 that the department gives me for a summer scholarship provides much more research value for money than the countless hours I spend writing unsuccessful research grants. This year, I have three such students funded from various sources, as well as a very good Masters student project running over the summer. I have told that that while I am away in July, they have to ‘supervise’ each other, meeting briefly daily, and sending me a short report on progress – written by a different member of the group every day. Their projects are different, but related enough that they will be able to talk to each other about them. I am interested to see if this peer-supervision works. Today was our annual Honorary degree ceremony – I don’t go often, but I do like to attend if I have a free spot in my diary: it’s interesting to find out about selected famous people (mainly people I have never heard of, to be honest!), and hear their stories – which are usually very inspiring. I could take part in the academic procession, but don’t: I just sneak in at the back. Today we had a Very Reverend, and Baroness, an Emeritus Professor, a Professor Sir, a Professor, and an Rt Hon The Lord. Lots of pomp, singing choir, and yet another opportunity for our vice-chancellor to tell us how extraordinarily well the university is doing (the professor doth protest too much, me thinks). Arrived late at a workshop on Assessment for PGT Masters students, and had to leave early (figuring it was better to arrive late and leave early than not be there at all). The university push for ‘internationalisation’ (for which, read ‘One year PGT programmes for overseas students who will bring in lots of dosh’) has meant that lots of schools have proposed new PGT programmes – I believe the total number of PGT programmes we offer has approximately doubled in the last year - the online system for submitting PGT proposals broke down in January because it could not cope with the number of new submissions. I hope that we all know what we are doing – and that we have not forgotten the importance of the student experience. I led a review meeting for our level 1 courses next in my busy day – it went fine: we had a good team of lecturers on these courses this year. I was head of level 1 this year – for the first and thankfully the last time! I have managed to persuade our Head of School that I would be better placed as Director of the PGT programmes – taking over from a professor who is due to retire next year and who has held on, and held on, and held on, to this portfolio for years – while I have not-very-secretly coveted it. Fortunately our new Head of School has agreed that I can take over that role. Hurrah – I am looking forward to working at a broader, more strategic level, rather than worrying about the finer matters of relative assessment weightings for level 1 courses – we do get ourselves into such a mix over small decisions, and tend to forget the big picture sometimes. The final task of the day was difficult meeting with a second-year PhD student who has not been permitted to progress to the third year of his PhD, and has been given the option of submitting for an MPhil instead. I am his second supervisor, and was instrumental in this decision after I quizzed him in his progression viva. He was not really reconciled to the fact that he will not be able to progress to a PhD, and was under the impression that if he worked very hard this coming year, we might change our mind. He gave me lots of reasons for having performed poorly in the viva: I gave him details of who he should contact in the Graduate School if he wishes to appeal. I took notes on the meeting, and gave him some advice on some literature that he might pursue. He told me that he had been under the impression that the point of a viva was for him to get feedback on his work from us, rather than for him to justify what he has done – and that this was the reason why he did not answer many of our questions. I find this all rather confusing, and have a lot of sympathy with the student – who is a really nice guy. But a student who cannot tell me, at the end of second year, whose work in the literature has most influenced his own research, is really not on track for submitting a reasonable PhD within a year. He is too obsessed with programming a system that embodies little real Computing Science innovation. And then a swim at the end of the day – ah! Uid 13915th June 9am research meeting – went well… but then I end up with quite a bit of work to do. Afterwards the RES form got modified as required and printed off to be filled in, but I couldn’t find Jon so left it with Mary to give to him later. Job done, as far as I was concerned. Tested out a couple of Wordles and the first one looked really good, but they don’t seem to be able to be copied, so the only way round that seems to be to print them and then scan the print afterwards. I think there’s some way of doing it by doing a screen dump but I haven’t found it yet. Almost sorted out the marks for the Technical Conference, but there are some students who haven’t done their reflective reports, so for the moment they don’t have any marks for that bit. They’ll get marks later when they get the work in, I hope. But then there’s the wobbly we get thrown. An OIA case lands back on us and it looks as if we have to do a re-mark, even if it will make no difference. So we sort out the numbers, or just about. They need a bit of confirmation. There always seem to be a lot of jobs on at the same time, don’t there? I’m not sure I’m good enough at multiplexing… I need to get out the unit titles for one of our graduates who’s applying for professional membership. But I haven’t managed to find the course scheme document. I get an email from the Quality unit saying they’ve managed to dig out the document, so I could come across to them and get a copy done. Robin said that if I’m going over to the Quality unit could I get a pint of milk on the way back. I get over there: I can do the copy, but the document isn’t supposed to leave the office. That’s OK. On the way back stop off and see Ruth and Tom who are trying to sort out how to talk to a group of staff from the Arts faculty on feedback. So I interrupt them, but Tom offers a cup of tea anyway. On the way back I remember to get the milk and pop into Tescos where I bump into Jeya who offers to buy the milk for me. Odd, as she doesn’t drink milk. She thinks it odd that I’m buying milk at twenty to five. Yes, but I stopped off for the tea so it took me longer than I was expecting. Uid 140Exams are over until August. As year tutor I have to write to all the second year Pharmacy students. I am trying to get the hang of mail merging. I also need to set coursework for the referrals. Looking forward to time off. If that sounds like prison, it feels it.Uid 141Today was a pretty normal day for me at the moment. I don't have a module to teach but nonetheless there is plenty to do. So usual day of getting my daughter to school. She was really good. Then it's back home to wait for the electrician to come. Our house seems to be having a run of things going wrong. This is just a fan in the shower but it needs doing. My wife is at home but then if she is looking after the baby then it's hard for her to be sorting out the electrician. As it happened, the electrician was brilliantly prompt. Didn't stop long though as he didn't have the part he thought he would need. Hey ho. I did some email while he was doing stuff. So then I did some reading. I've got a PhD thesis to read. I am not examining but have picked up some co-supervision with the head of dept. The student is excellent. The problem with excellent students is that they produce large quantities of sophisticated work. So ploughing through a thesis is no small task. I've had it a couple of weeks already but I am seeing him on Friday so I needed to crack on. So I finished chapter 4 which mostly went over my head. Then I went in to work. At work, quite a lot of email. We need a "new module" to allow us to transfer students who are failing on the MSc to a Diploma. Admin seem to think the module doesn't exist but I know it does - I wrote it! So that needed sorting. Then I was sorting out other PhD students, either arranging to meet or reading abstracts. Nice stuff but it all takes time. Getting close to lunch time so I thought I would try to do something for myself so I looked up funding opportunities for a proposal that I am hoping to write with a colleague. He's now at another uni but we'd met the day before to talk research. It was wonderful! So many ideas. Really uplifting - I miss that with my current colleagues. Not sure why it doesn't happen. I think because we don't make time for it to happen. Anyway, we have an idea for a proposal so we were wondering who might have the money to fund it. The short answer is the usual suspects. If we're lucky. Bit depressing but still - you have to try. So then lunch so I took some reading to the cafe. I don't usually do that but I don't get reading done if I eat my lunch in my office. Also I can treat myself to a pizza so that's my reward. The reading was another chapter of the PhD thesis - I skipped one which I have read many times already and went straight for the final chapter which was relatively short. Not so good as the others. I think he's failed to big up his work enough. I also read something one of my MSc project students had produced. She's just starting and this is the first bit of writing. Good start. Not perfect but any writing is good writing in my book. Then the departmental seminar. I made a special effort for this one as it was being given by a new member of staff. Missed my daughter's sports afternoon for it. And it was quite good but quantum computation is a bit beyond me. Still, at least I went. Afterwards, I worked on a paper that I have been knocking around with someone I don't know well. She's a usability consultant who comes to teach on our course. When I met her earlier in the year, she seeded an idea which over the last couple of months has turned into a more substantial argument. So she and I are trying to write a paper now. Which is great. Unfortunately, I started in LaTeX and she doesn't do LaTeX so I spent a while converting to Word and tidying up some things as I went along. Very satisfying. Then home. Spot of tea with the family. Walked the dog with my daughter. Made the dinner while my wife fed the baby and my daughter had her supper. Got daughter to bed and read some emails. Ate dinner. Spot of telly - well can't miss the Apprentice :) And then some more emails mostly doing some work on admissions for the MSc course and looking at a PhD applicant. Then bed. Oof!Uid 142Oohh... might even remember to do this today :) So far, have managed to reinstall the basic OS on an old Netbook - preparatory to installing UberStudent - which is meant to be a linux distro for Students - so has lots of studenty things included (such as Zotero for the referencing & YouTube for the relaxing) Uid 149It’s Wednesday. Undergraduate teaching is finished and so is most of the marking. The first task of the day is to meet a PhD student along with my fellow supervisor. The situation is one which is quite common in our institution – the student is also a colleague. The people recruited to teach the large number of practitioner oriented programmes often have practitioner backgrounds themselves and struggle to do PhDs at the same time as coping with quite intensive teaching loads. Sometimes this places a good deal of stress on them. They’re often the more experienced and motivated people in their departments and have to take a lead role whenever there’s a revalidation, a visit from a professional or statutory body, a renewal of the contract for non-HECE funded teaching an d are also sometimes at the mercy of cutbacks in the public service. In this case however it seems that my colleague is making some good progress. She collected her data a while ago and has redrafted her introduction to take account of the emerging themes and ideas from her participants. Sadly she’s retiring soon. After that, it is time to try to book some catering for a small conference the following Monday. I try the number provided by the university a few times but just get a recorded message. I try another number and speak to a person who helpfully directs me to the number with the recorded message. I start to compose an email to the university’s caterers but have to interrupt this to go to an exam board meeting for the Masters students. This is a pleasure as we have a very affable external examiner who has come over from the North of Ireland and is always entertaining. Sadly it is his last year of office. The marks are more or less agreed and we have some useful discussion as to how the Masters students doing biomedical sciences can be motivated to undertake the coursework on our research methods modules as several of them haven’t and those that have have only performed at a very poor standard. It’s probably not the background in the life sciences that's causuing the problem. We’ve got medical doctors on the course and they’ve done really well. After some discussion we decide we can’t really solve it in this meeting and need to consult with the people who teach the biomedical scientists or the molly bollies (molecular biologists) as the external examiner calls them. I feel sad that I won’t see him again. Then it’s back off to the office and further attempts to secure a buffet for our meeting on Monday. The caterers may not answer the phone but they do respond to email. Bingo. Buffet booked. It’s complicated by the fact that the refreshments are funded by an external body rather than a budget within the university itself though. These things are so complex that I’d often rather stump up myself for a few sandwiches, biscuits and tea & coffee. But I try to go through the motions. The money’s available, we just have to figure out some way of getting it spent. Then it’s time to consult with a colleague about a research proposal she’s working on. We have some discussion about the different ways in which one can appeal to people making decisions over funding and how to pitch the idea more effectively. Whilst occasionally I have been lucky with this kind of thing in the past, I’m still fencing in the dark myself, but we end up with some ideas of the kind which I have seen work successfully in previous applications. With that finished I pop into town to pick up some rabbit food and some of that stuff you squeeze onto the backs of cats’ necks to stop them getting fleas. I’m uncertain as to its effectiveness but at least it cuts down the extent to which we get bitten in the early part of the summer. Once home I get on with some other work – some pdfs of papers to find for a colleague with whom I’m revising a draft of an article on language in health care, and a paper on life narratives as a resource to understand the historical sociology of Wales. Both of these are on the cusp of being accepted at different journals and just need a bit of tinkering to address the referees’ comments. I do as much as I can and then email the results of the evening’s labours back to my colleagues to do their bit. Over the course of the evening the email inbox fills slowly with messages from colleagues who are also burning the midnight oil. The university is trying to get ready for the REF early this time around, rather than the last RAE’s last minute effort. So I shall be writing the bit entitled ‘environment’ in our particular submission, it seems. I also go hunting on my hard drives for files for another colleague whose laptop I recently backed up and restored. A few of his precious documents don’t seem to have copied back over onto his freshly reformatted hard drive. Fortunately I still have them. Time for bed, and it’s not even 1.00.Uid 155I feel oddly bereft – no marking, nor any projects that need any immediate work or planning. It was the exam board yesterday, and the deadline for most of my projects was on Monday, so I have nothing immediate to do. Instead of fire fighting I can identify what I would like to do and in what order. Feels slightly strange …. We had a lunch time meeting about business development. In my subject area this is rather alien, and selling the idea to colleagues that they will need to do work (on top of everything else) that will income generate is going to be tough. That is a fight for a few months away, though. I also saw a few students who had popped in to say thank you because they were pleased with the grades that they had received; there were quite a few tears of joy. It is this that makes the job so worthwhile. Many of my students started their degree hoping they would pass, and so for them receiving high 2.1s or first class honours is such an achievement. This is why I get so frustrated that we rank so lowly on the ‘value added’ scales in league tables. If the statisticians from The Times and The Guardian met our students they would soon realise how transformative the degree is for so many of them, in all elements of their life. In the evening I realised that I now had the time (at last!) to find and book a holiday. Eventually I found somewhere that has the right balance of sun, beach, peace, culture and access to city life (we are not fussy or anything!), and so we have that to look forward too. Will write a new to do list on Monday – will enjoy a few days quite before I have a look at all those things that I have been ignoring for the last few months …. Uid 157It was definitely a day of two halves today. My university was running a Higher Education event for local secondary schools to send their 6th formers to attend. The idea being to show off what HE has to offer and to give the students an opportunity to hear about some of the specific subject areas. Over a 2.5 hour period I gave the same 15 minute presentation on 'Why study biology?' multiple times. The challenge was how to fit into 15 minutes the answers to that question whilst also emphasising the courses our department offers! Whichever emphasis I put on the talk (ecology, molecular biology, biochemistry, biomedicine or a broad biological sciences approach) the student feedback was that they wanted something else, even including somethin on chemistry or geography! The afternoon was spent attending exam board meetings. The UG students have just completed all of their examinations and now the boards have to sit and look at the marks and make decisions about progression and classification for example. I am new to this process and so it was definitely a steep learning curve for me. Also squeezed into the day was some last minute marking and some planning for next year. And of course answering a number of e-mails from colleagues and students. So the day started with speaking to prospective students and finished with discussing final year students about to graduate. Well actually it finished with a well cooked dinner, a beer and no exam script marking!Uid 168June 15th The start of the working day was slightly put back after discovering calculator and ruler of son taking Chemistry GCSE had been left in the kitchen prompting unscheduled trip to School (ironic note: turned out these were his “spares” – write out 100 times “I must not be a helicopter parent”). Most of the day was spent delivering a CPD course for secondary school teachers. A small, but very switched on, crowd. I ran the session with two colleagues. The content was a mixture of subject-specific content at the points where cutting edge breakthroughs have made it into the curriculum for A level, and some practical ideas for tackling some of the more controversial elements in a classroom setting. I really enjoyed the day, and the delegates seemed to do so as well - the feedback for the day was great, with the only moans being about difficulties parking. Once back home, the arrival of a VISA bill was a partial resolution of the great “have we got Olympic tickets?” mystery. It turns out we do. We’ll need to wait another week for exact confirmation, but there are only 2 ways to reach the stated amount taken – one family trip to the football and either one or other of two preliminary hockey rounds we bid for. Didn’t expect to get opening or closing ceremonies, but disappointed not to get anything in the athletics arena. Wed night is also "Apprentice" night. Lord Sugar definitely fired the wrong man tonight – Jim should have gone. As with all "reality TV", I know the programme is edited to give you a selected spin but I think there's a lot you can learn about employability from the Apprentice. I already use one clip from last year's series in my first year lectures. Uid 171I started my 'work' day by being a subject in a neuroscience study. I'd signed up for it some time ago, figuring (a) I can hardly ask people to take part in my research if I don't also offer my time for studies, (b) I teach some things that rely on MRI evidence, so it would be good to have first-hand experience of being in a scanner, (c) I want a picture of my brain! It was an interesting experience, but since I was not allowed to drink coffee beforehand, I left my keys at home. At least, that's my excuse. Not sure if the post-scan headache is from wearing headphones that scrunched my ears for an hour, from lying still for an hour, or from the lack of early-morning caffeine, but the headache has coloured the rest of the day. Sneaked essay-marking into all bits of waiting before/between/after the things I had to do for the study (I'm about 9 essays behind where I meant to be at this point), then had a phone meeting with my resaearch collaborator at another university, settling a disagreement about which statistical test to favour in our study and setting out the next steps of our work. In my field, one submits abstracts rather than papers for conferences, so now we're in the position of having 2 weeks to the conference, and only part of the data coded. Oh dear. The upshot of this is that I have to have all the rest of the data coded (and the database in shape for someone else to work on) before tomorrow. So much for getting on top of the essay-marking. Between that and our School Meeting I had an hour to fit in preparation for a training day tomorrow and Friday's away day for the teaching staff on the degrees I convene--which mostly involved finding all the relevant papers to go with the agenda and printing/copying. Oh, and eating cake for lunch because everything else at the tea bar looked disgusting. The School Meeting agenda was crammed with motions that have nothing to do with our school--e.g. condemning treatment of student protesters elsewhere (didn't we do this last year?) and the New College of Humanities. I nearly sent late apologies to the meeting about five times. Instead, I went, took my laptop and coded some data on the side, and tried to point out some ways in which the NCH motion could bite us back. Maybe it's my American upbringing, but while I think NCH is a stupid idea and think the University of London is foolish to engage with it in any way, I also think 'why should we worry about it?' I've been here 11 years, and there is little in the UK (or English--Scotland may be different) system that I think is superior to the US system. The English system involves so much more bureaucracy, so many fewer contact hours with students, so little actual training at postgraduate level... A parent of a daughter who'd been accepted to English and US universities recently asked me which I'd choose, and I could only say "That's difficult for me to answer as a representative of my university". I mean, I couldn't spin it positively for the UK. I just couldn't. My colleagues point to the UK system of low fees as equitable--but participation in HE is much higher in the US, and the student bodies of Harvard and Yale are far more diverse than those of Oxford and Cambridge. So, I'm losing patience with my colleagues on this matter. They like things the way they were because that's the way they were. And they're all for minimising student contact in the name of 'research time'. I'm not impressed. After collecting my daughter and the family time before her bedtime, I'm back to work. Coding till my brain bleeds. Might need another MRI. Or to go to sleep before I actually finish it. Boo for me. Uid 172A very long day as a participant in an exam board. Poorly prepared for and poorly run. Much more briefing needed for the chair and officers. Long and very busy train trip home during which I typed up my report. Arrived home 9pm. Felt and probably looked like a zombie.Uid 179Marking season - will it ever end? It feels like I've been marking for ever. First research proposals and dissertations, then more research proposals, then yet more research proposals (need to finish them by noon tomorrow), then one final lot of project reports. I think I should be done over the weekend, thank goodness. Last week I felt I was getting exhausted: fell off my bike up on the Common and bruised my ribs. Not a good sign. But then slipped in the shower one morning and fell backwards rather awkwardly and hurt my shoulder. Definitely not a good sign. Anyway, I took the Saturday off to take the eldest boy to climbing. So what have I been doing today? Marking ... this morning. Then on the train to the University to meet a research student for a first tutorial. Later went to a thought-provoking lecture by a visiting speaker on how young people construct their adolescence. Back again and more marking - apart from taking the younger boy to the bath at nine o'clock. No story tonight: well, it was going to be Dinosaur Pox (one of my favourites), but we chatted instead. Off to bed now, 12.30 am. Uid 182Today is a relentless day of meetings for reviewing courses, policy documents, setting the assessment schedule for the next academic year etc. I've tried to complete as many student placement reports as I could in the 5 or 10 minute gaps in between but I got distracted having to reorganise my shelves since I couldn't find a folder. However, so far today, this practical task has given me the most satisfactior and feeling of closure as at least I can see that it was accomplished! I spent approx an hour over the day in various phone calls arranging guest speakers for summer and September sessions. It's 5'o clock now and I want to get as many ssays as possible marked before I head to a society meeting in the city centre.Uid 184Summer time is recharge and retrench time. After nine months of No Free Time, my three months of summer are a time to: * Take some time off * Get home projects done * Get ready for fall I won't bore you with details about my home remodeling. Instead, I'll brief you on what I'm doing to get ready for next semester. As the de facto system administrator for our Linux systems, I'm migrating our physical servers to a virtual environment. Our IT department does there own VM stuff, but I wanted to learn about it, too, so with their help I procured a couple of cast-off servers and installed Ubuntu Linux-KVM on it. Since then, I've been having a blast! All this fun will result in something to show my students come September.A few of my more enthusiastic students want to work on some side projects over the summer, so I have been scheming up some things for them to do such as re-write some Java graphics libraries we use and work on some web-based teaching tools that I've been trying to bring to fruition for a couple of years. I've discovered YouTube. Not as a watcher--been doing that for years. No, as a producer. Inspired by Salman Khan's TED talk, I'm recording a bunch of short problem-solving videos for my some of my courses. Already I've received positive feedback from all over the world. I want to "flip" at least one course this coming semester. I also got an offer to help completely upgrade the PCs and server in an office. I spent a good part of the day playing with Windows Server 2008, ordering network gear, and planning out the upgrade process. Maybe I'll even get paid. At the very least it's a chance to do something different.Uid 186Ah. Holiday. Madeira. No I'm not yet over 65. but it is nice. Work? They can just get on with it!Uid 1877:20 AM - Woke up. I'm working at a Boy Scout summer camp as the business manager this summer. While I've been in camp for most days during the previous three weeks getting ready for the summer, this week is the first we have had campers in camp. Today one set of campers leaves this morning and a new set come in this afternoon. As a result of a very busy and full schedule for camp, I have had very little time to devote to non-camp activities. Therefore, my independant learning (online) students have received significantly slower response times from me than I like to provide. In total for the day, I may have devoted 15 minutes to them. 5:00 AM Off to bed for a few more hours.Uid 1896.40am left home 7.50am arrived at a school where our students are having a placement...did some work on laptop in car 8.30am entered school and spoke with staff and students prior to lesson observation and feedback etc 10.30am left first school to travel to next school 10.45am arrived at second school...as above 12.30pm left school for university 1.00pm arrived at university and attended open meeting 2.15pm staff meeting in our faculty 3.45pm attended to emails and voicemails 4.30pm meeting with students who are concerned about their studies 5.30pm continued to clear emails 6.30pm left for homeUid 191The 15th this month was just after the marking deadline for my second semester module, so I felt like I was on vacation. In the morning worked on a Java program that I'm hoping to use in our 'bootcamp' at start of year with total beginner programmers. I have taken what is essentially a LOGO program and the idea is that the students will learn about loops - and if statements although that is harder - in that context, and then we will look at Java proper. The idea originally was to make it as control structured as possible, but as soon as you introduce the idea of subprogram you get into a bind. Either you put everything into the main, but then subprograms become static methods .... a dangerous direction. Or you have to get into instance variables, and constructors etc. I don't know if this will help. This year we had dreadful results in the 2nd programming module, and as the teacher of the first I felt responsible. I think I was really low energy. But anyway, I am reinvigorated AND I am having fun with the program - makes me remember why I went into computing in the first place :) At coffee, read an interesting article in the New Yorker about 'why go to college'. One of the things it says is that there were two old reasons for college (college is for sorting out who is the smartest; or college is for educating everyone to make a more democratic society of people who appreciate ideas more). Now we have students going to college for whom neither of those apply i.e. they just drifted there with no real motivation, so what does that mean? I'm not stating the argument well, but it certainly fitted some of our students, and some of their behaviours. For instance, first theory students will work hard in order to get ahead, second theory because they are intrinsically interested. We have had (for the last few years particularly) students who just seem to want to do no work. I was talking to the person who teaches the group project module and he says that at one time students underreported their hours so as not to get in trouble, now they overreport them. Ah well - I refuse to be depressed - my LOGO program will solve all problems, and yes I know that this is the triumph of enthusasm over experience! Actually a lot of teaching is that, now I think of it. Anyway, then took the afternoon off and went to the market in XXXXX. Had tea and cake with friends, came home, watched the last but 2 episodes of Northern Exposure on dvd. This has been my trashy entertainment option for the last year and now I only have 1 episode left! I know, I am a sad old hippy, but I enjoyed my day. Uid 200I have a lot going on right now that is keeping me quite busy, but not much of it is academic. I am leaving my current position at University X and will be starting at University Y in the fall. So, I am at X today to try to finish cleaning out my office. That is not an easy task. I am down to some of the big and heavy stuff as well as all of my back issues of the SIGCSE Bulletin and Communications of the ACM and other miscellaneous publications I have collected over the years. I am trying to assess just how important the paper copies are to me now. I truly like reading papers on paper. I have never been able to read as effectively on the computer screen. However, paper copies of proceedings and the like are not searchable (easily) and they are extremely heavy (when you pile them up). So, it will be a tough decision, but one I have to make today, because it is the few decisions left I need to make for the things in my office. I met my husband for a quick lunch. It was nice to see another human being during the day. Campus (of X) is a ghost town in the summer and I can go an entire day without seeing another human being from my department, which after days and days of the same, gets to be boring. I have heard that campus Y is not like this. Dealing with the move has been interesting. There is a physical move and a technological one. Email, files, etc. all have be thought about and maneuvered in such a way that I have access to what I want and don't lose anything. It has its own form of logistics. In the afternoon, I sorted through all my paper conference proceedings and magazines. I went to dinner with some of my former students and TAs who wanted to take me out to celebrate the fact that I am moving to a new job. It is always nice when someone is happy for you. Uid 204A bit of excitement today - my campus of my university was closed because of the expectation that it would flood. It's rather low-lying, there's been a lot of rain over the last week, and torrential rain was forecast for today. I normally go to the main campus on Wednesdays, so I wouldn't have been affected; but my students were to have sat an exam today, so I'd arranged to stay at my home campus. Therefore I ended up working from home. This isn't a great deal different from working at work; it's just like Saturdays and Sundays, when I take a little time out for shopping, housework, etc, but spend the rest of the day at my desk. (In the event, the campus didn't flood, but I suppose they were wise to be prepared.) Started on my email at 7.45, and spent an hour there. One recurring issue was the uni's handling of the campus closure. They had notified students whose exams were affected that they could do a replacement exam in the middle of July. For all you northerners, that's in our short winter break, but even so, many students have already booked holidays in that time. I assured them that the uni would receive many complaints and would soon be trying an alternative solution. Sure enough, it wasn't long before the uni told them instead that they can do the exam on Friday! Much needless alarm could have been avoided with a little more thought. A couple of hours reconsidering the evidence in a student plagiarism case. The two students involved insisted that their work was neither plagiarised from a common source nor written in collusion, so I spent more time than it's worth re-reading all of their work, and concluding that they're lying. The case will proceed on that basis. After the luxury of a long lunch break I was brought back to work by a phone call from my Head of School. A student is concerned that the reason for her poor marks in a particular course is either that she's female or that she's Muslim, and the lecturer is therefore discriminating against her. The lecturer's away at a conference, but the course and all the material are mine, so I know it all well. I downloaded the student's three assessment items from the submission site and marked them all. I was delighted: my marks were exactly the same as the lecturer's, except that he'd converted the actual marks to weighted marks and rounded them up. I saw this as vindication of the finely detailed marking schemes I tend to produce when working with multiple markers. Another concern from the student will also have to be taken seriously: she says that she's received no feedback on the assessment items, and that the lecturer has told students not to contact him outside class and not to email him because he's too busy to respond. This is not the way we do teaching at my university, and if it's true, we'll need to start working out how to address it. The rest of my working day was spent solving a hardware problem (I ended up replacing my USB hub) and working on a teaching-related paper for an education conference. All in all, an incredibly light day's work - just under 8 hours! Uid 207Exam board day. I woke feeling apprehensive. Have never quite managed to stop feeling apprehensive on exam board days – always feel that the external examiners ‘will find me out’ and declare that DR XXXX clearly didn’t prepare the exam question correctly, or clearly made a bad job of the marking on module XXXX. I can easily be as apprehensive as the students. This year only one personal tutee with a viva – but that is at 8.30 so need to get in to be reassuring if needed and stay out of the way if not. Before leaving do an hour of paperwork as executor of a family estate. The experience of recent bereavement has many aspects to cope with – but it certainly does come with a lot of paperwork. In office for 8 am – student puts head round the door to say that they are going to sit quietly for 30 mins before the viva. Was very upset yesterday on hearing about it but now looks very composed and professional. Wish them good luck and leave them in peace. A good student but very hard to know what a viva tests for and how consistent he process is. I want the student to do well and have this chance of a better degree classification but do feel a little as though I am being examined myself. All over by 9am student relieved but not overly optimistic, and it does not sounds as though they gave a 100% first class performance. Reassure with tea and biscuits and then they go of to travel to a job interview tomorrow. Hope one of these interviews ahs a positive outcome. 9.30-11.00am try to prepare for a piece of outreach I’m doing next week. Very little information from the school about numbers/level of interest or background of the students. Hope my ‘catch it all’ preparation will suffice. Technicians are away/busy next week so have to ask them to get the entire kit ready this week. 11am – very early lunch. Colleague in another dept. rings to say that they have just left their exam board and have a break for coffee and a sandwich (timing fits well with the 6 am b’fast this morning!). WE go to the only decent coffee shop n campus and talk families. I have for several years had to commute several hundreds of miles a week to care for an elderly parent with dementia – the process is just starting for this colleague and their parent but with a commute/flight of several thousands of miles. When term ends in 2 days they will fly out the next day to try and settle a house sale to pay for the 24/7 care soon to be needed. We talk about how the geographical and social mobility we prize so highly has a price to pay when it comes to issues like this, I suggest some strategies that I had adopted that helped me go through a period of being extremely time poor. You are always either leaving or returning in this game. I take the spare keys to their house and promise to drop by a couple of times a week. Noon – back to preparing outreach events – with various interruptions by students trying to get clues about their marks before the official feedback dates after the boards. Get quite cross with the students who for 3 years has come in every single time to say that they really really really have to go home early because of a final crisis. Try to find reference details for an inherited student who hopes to go to the LSE for a masters next year – I have only met him twice but know that a less than total endorsement won’t get him this place. Try to get as much information over the phone from my colleague/their long term personal tutor who has been off ill for the last 6 months. 2pm – Exam board meeting – and not my student didn’t move up a degree classification – and not our students in general didn’t do that well. 3.30pm – decide that going into just the last 30 mins of the senate meeting would be silly. Try to finish writing all the references and student recommendation needed before they head off on their summer break. Head to local supermarket to spend a coup of hundred quid on bubbles and nibbles for our finalists celebration tomorrow, having initiated this a few years ago I don’t seem to be able to shake off the job of procuring the supplies – but one of the times I really don’t resent the time put in. An important occasion to mark. 7pm – Colleague who’s partner is at an external dinner drops round and we get takeaway and open a bottle of wine. They will emigrate in November but are feeling very shaky about the decision. We talk about options and how many things this will change for them – good and bad. They just need a sounding board. 10 pm – Bed /sleep/exhausted. Uid 213This should be the beginning of my research time, technically, but grades went out this week so I have lots of student emails and frantic requests for phone calls. Students who don't understand how they could have failed, a student who apparently spent an entire semester in my class looking at texts and reading other students' writing and yet left with the misapprehension that prose should be centered on the page. How has she gotten to her twenties believing that? Has she ever read *anything* where prose is centered? This is, of course, not the reason she failed the coursework - that came from the writing. I also have a third year student who has had a truly terrible year, and so she's been given deferrals. She's worked out exactly what mark she needs from my module to get a 2.1 overall. So in our tutorial, she kept saying 'will this get me a 68?' Asking if work is a 2.1 overall might be possible, but it is extremely tricky to say yes or no to a very specific mark. It makes me extremely uncomfortable. My other task right now is planning induction for next year. The OVC decided at the last minute that all new first years should have a lecture by a distinguished professor, which sounds fantastic, I very much approve. However, the decision came down *after* all the plans and room bookings had been made, and we had to scramble to vacate the auditorium and shift our own plans around. We run a book programme in Induction - we ask all students to read a book over the summer. We then have the author in to give a talk, sign books and talk to the students in small, break-out groups. We're repeating the same book as last year - And This Is True by Emily Mackie. Only problem, her schedule clashed with our induction week, but with some negotiation with room bookings, I've managed to get her in in week 1, and we'll invite the whole school. Apparently this fits in with School policy of continuing Induction into the academic year, but partly it's because a. I don't want to find another book this late, and b. I really like Emily Mackie as a speaker and as a guest - she's lovely. And the students responded really well to her last year. Otherwise, I'm trying to edit my new novel, and I continue to send my first novel out to agents and competitions. I'm trying to squeeze every drop of time I can to do my own research and write. I also answered queries from international exchange students - part of my job is to approve their programmes of study. My favourite question of the day: Is the module Romantic Poetry about poetry in the Romantic era? These tricky titles, I just don't know.Uid 214This is the last week of term before the summer 'break' (aka 'period between teaching in which I try to do everything I don't have time for when I'm teaching'). As a consequence, today was a blizzard of meetings designed to wrap things up on the student assessment side. Undergrad examiners meetings in particular took up the majority of the day, alongside more specific meetings about the various things that need sorting for our ongoing taught and research postgraduates. So a lot of admin but all to a good cause - ensuring consistency and quality of grading for those graduating this summer, and ensuring that those who continue on into the next academic year are well-looked-after in the meantime. In the remaining spare moments of the day I worked on first edits of the draft a book (and was pleasantly surprised by what I've written, meaning that the end of July deadline is a genuine possibility), and even had time to stroll along to the campus bookshop in my lunch hour to buy a map of the area I'm going on holiday to in August. The day ended with a trip to the pub with the two PhD students I am supervising, to catch up with their latest news and their work plans over the summer. Total time at 'work' = 8am to 9pm, but well worth it.Uid 217A fairly full day to report. It began with the usual fifty-minute public transport experience. At 10 we had a lengthy preliminary exam board (the full board with externals present is in a week-and-a-half's time), where we had a rather awkward discussion of our differences of opinion about the effect of experiments with participation marks in our modules this year (some people want the marks to be actual - that is, tangibly to raise or lower the marks for the written work - and some want them to be heuristic - that is, to function as a means of ensuring that the students turn up and do presentations etc but only tangibly to affect the final mark if a give student has wilfully failed to show up or present: you'll be able to tell my preference from the thoroughly biased sentence you've just read). That took two hours, partly because the chair is either thorough or ponderous, depending on your viewpoint. A quick sandwich. Then I joined the head of dept and a group of colleagues for a pre-meeting about the five-yearly programme review and then we went on to the meeting proper, where we were questioned by a ten-strong panel for three hours (with no break) about the programmes we offer, our responses to issues with our NSS scores, and so forth. A few years ago I was on the School of Humanities Teaching Committee, and so have been on the other side of the table for these events. They serve a very useful purpose, requiring each department (rotated over a five-year period) to reflect on their provision and to discuss ways to develop and improve the BA and MA degrees offered; they also less helpfully provide something of a bureaucrats' charter, so (for instance) we had a teenager from E-learning helpfully telling us how exciting it would be for us to video our lectures and put them on Moodle so that our students could revisit them (or, of course, though this didn't seem to have occurred to the teenager, skip the actual lecture and just watch us on a screen). It started rather badly, the review, with the Dean firing questions at us about statistics that only he had access to (a pointless activity, obviously), but once he had gone off to some other meeting we were able to have a proper conversation with the actual review panel. A decent number of useful things were discussed and we came out feeling reasonably cheered. I was relieved, because I'd written the 'self-evaluation document' and had then (see earlier entry) had a row with my head of dept about her overwriting of my draft - so I was relieved the panel commended the document and also that they seemed to think well enough of my analysis of some statistics about age and ethnicity and the timely completion of degrees: I'm not a numbers person and I have no training in analysis of statistics, but the issues raised were genuinely interesting and I enjoyed trying to make sense of what the percentages were telling us about the varieties of our students' experience of doing a degree. By this time it was 5.30 and I went, as arranged, with the head of dept for a quick drink with a visiting professor from Australia and then dashed off to hear a talk at a nearby theatre, ending up going for dinner with the theatre's head of digital media, its archivist, and my research associate for the Australian project (see earlier entries) to discuss possible collaborations (e.g. a documentary). A fairly full day, all round. Tube ride home; to bed, tired but pleased enough. Uid 219When I was at school in the 1980s, I thought the feminists that preceded us had done a good job of preparing the workplace for the modern age. How wrong I was. I've been spending the week collecting example of sex discrimination experienced by countless female colleagues, as a dossier is being collated for official channels. It appears our university is stuck in the 1970s when it comes to equality, despite its protestations and a superficial appearance of equal treatment on paper. The record seems to be held by one suprememly talented and widely respected woman stuck in the same position for ten years, despite three worthwhile applications for promotion. She is given masses of teaching and all the dull, tedious administration to do, while her male colleagues get the plum research-related tasks that move them on rapidly towards ever greater heights of loot and autonomy. It has got so obvious, even the most entrenched men in the department are now sympathetic to her plight. Hopefully the university will now see the error of its ways and address the situation of such colleagues in a meaninfgul manner before we have to occupy the central administration building and burn our bras (again). I do despair sometimes at all this, however.Uid 221Taking a week's leave this week, so on holiday in Somerset.Uid 224I'm at a conference on beautiful Jeju Island, in South Korea. The setting is idyllic and relaxing and the talks and conversations are stimulating, which is a nice change after a rather frantic 9 months of natural disasters at home. I spend the morning browsing talks and touching up my slides for my talk. The talk is in the afternoon, and is actually a 2-hour workshop. The attendees are really interested in the material, we have a long discussion that extends past the allocated time, and I come away with some great ideas for developing the material further. Perfect. The conference finishes around 5pm, and the evening is spent going for a pleasant walk on the ocean front, and enjoying some Korean "folk" food and drink. Who wouldn't want to be an academic on a day like this?Uid 226This was a travel day for me. I attended a workshop on the west coast on Monday and Tuesday. Returning home to the east coast took all day. (Really all day - 8:00 AM Pacific to 8:30 PM Eastern.) Although I took work on the plane, I read a novel instead.Uid 231I have been on Long Service Leave since February. This was enforced for everyone who had over six months accrued leave. At first I was upset that I had to take it and then I realised it was the perfect opportunity to get stuck into my research. Hence, I have been working my butt off on my leave apart from five days last week when I escaped to a tropical island for some R and R. Have come back to Australia to cold (15 degrees) and wet weather that is so depressing that I am forced to spend all day on the computer rather than breaking it up with a bit of reading on the terrace in the sunshine. I am also President of the local branch of the Academic Union, a job that is normally enjoyable but in the absence of our organiser who is on sick leave, we have to share her work with cases etc. All of this is just background to having spent today inside on the computer or telphone for 12 hours so that my body is aching and I am fed up with academic life! The day started with a call from a distressed academic while I was still in bed. The remainder of the day consisted of telephone calls about union cases, correcting a dissertation, searching for literature for three papers that have very close deadlines, arranging research meetings, going through budgets for research projects and answering emails that go back to just before I went on holidays. I would like a little variation in my life. I almost miss teaching in the sense that at least it is envigorating compared to the druge and loneliness of research - what am I saying, most of the time I am so happy to be free of all the admin and pressure of teaching, but perhaps on cold wet days a spot of human contact wouldn't go astray. (Live alone by the way, so no family to interupt work and the fridge is empty so living on black coffee and packets of noodles). So that's how I spent the 15 June, 2011. It's 9pm and I'm still in my pyjamas! At such times, and at the recent age of 58, I think it's time I got a life!Uid 234My day starts just before 8. I am hoping the majority of the day will be research, and I actually manage to get all the jobs done on my "To-do list" by 5. The first hour is spent working through emails. I had a problem a couple of weeks ago when I file that was originally an email attachment didn't save properly. That time I lost 4 hours work. Today, I wrote a job reference for someone, but when I tried to send it as an attachment, again it wasn't saved. I logged a call with IT Helpdesk, but they can't explain it. I suspect they blame me, but are too polite to say so! Still it's 15 minutes wasted writing the reference & 15 minutes wasted logging the problem. I then invested 3.5 hours in research work, & this goes fairly smoothly, no hiccups or major interruptions. Ideally I only want 3 emergent research themes, at present I have 9 {& I suspect one of those should be subdivided}. It's always the case that you start off fearing that you won't have enough data and in the end you have too much! Within the college there is a research seminar, I went along because I was interested in their methodology. Whilst it was interesting they didn't once mention methodological issues; it was about security, surveillance, autonomy and care of the elderly. Which in an anecdotal way I am interested in but has very little to do with my teaching or research. I bumped into my line manager on the way back in, and we drifted into a discussion about a colleague. It is a colleague that I have mentioned before - she has "recurrent depressive disorder". The majority of her teaching load goes to me when she is off sick. She is going downhill again and this raises very difficult tensions between wanting to be a good friend, wanting to be supportive, wanting to act in an inclusive manner but simultaneously not wanting to do the teaching load of 1.75 people on a regular basis. Within a small department we have four people claiming a full time salary whilst rarely coming into work and carrying a reduced workload. Tensions and disgruntlement are rising. I manage to invest another hour into research work & complete my to-do list for the day, before finding 30 minutes to write an entry for the Share project. Uid 237Diary entry 10 Wednesday 15th June Context: This Wednesday falls on the last week of term, which is tutorial week (exam boards were end of last week, and all years now have their results). I informed my tutees that I would be around Monday and Tuesday for tutorials. Only 5 out of 20 odd turned up. Content: I was in my office all day, half expecting tutees to turn up saying 'sorry I didn't get back to you, can I have a tutorial now' but none actually came. I started the day by sending emails to do with tutee requests from the previous day (checking re-sit work, changing an instrumental teacher, and so on). I then spent some time tidying my office (can't walk across the floor for paperwork) and clearing the back log of emails. Basically, doing anything but the research article I am supposed to be writing at the moment... I went out for lunch, which I managed to make last nearly two hours (impressive procrastination), and then returned to my office at which point I had a tutorial with one of my Masters students. Always a pleasure, as she is enthusiastic and brings good ideas to meetings. I was at work for another hour or so before I went training in the evening. So it wasn't a productive day in terms of my own work, but it was the sort of day which balances out all of those stressful days in term time when you are so busy that you don't know how you're going to get through the day! More on research article tomorrow... Uid 239A strange day. I was clearly too calm before the storm. Who'd have anticipated that what I took to be fairly routine meeting would be rocked with a proposal to cut yet more course and more staff and be brought up to account for the recruitment difficulties which I was handling perfectly well. One thing I'm usually good at is anticipating but I didn't see those coming. So on one goes with the brave face, to deal with the relatively petty squabbles (important for those feeling them at the time, I know) knowing what might loom ahead. Anyhow 'we all have choices' as they say.I'm so not looking forward to what they might be. Uid 241Since I don't have any papers to grade until August, I have been surfing the Web. Some of my surfing has a practical purpose: the Web site and some of the 2010-2011 pilot sites for the course. Looking at that material has rekindled some of my excitement for the field, showing the passion, beauty, joy, and awe of computing popularized by Dan Garcia at SIGCSE. The students have done some cool things with a rudimentary knowledge of Processing. I need to check that out.Uid 256Diary June 15th Today is my 54th wedding anniversary. So it’s kind of special. We’ve done well to last this long. Rose about 06.30, too early to waken my wife with breakfast. Logged on to the pile of emails still waiting me from 4 days south to visit with my grand-daughter at Oxford, while she is still resident in College. Urgent message outstanding since late Monday from a man who wants constructive comments on a grant application which has to be in today. It’s basically sound, but could be made much better with a few additions which strengthen rather than weaken. I tried to outline these, and got them off within the 45 minutes. But I suspect he may have sent it off already. Was it worth my effort? Then a message from Taiwan about a possible paper by my partner and me, to be presented by her alone, in Florence. The abstract really needs radical surgery, but the problem is how to tell her that without hurting CHC feelings. Also the abstract has to be in by the 18th, and time difference with Taiwan always slows us down. I sent an immediate reply, promising a redraft by tonight. Next from the principal author a revision of the paper for Active Learning. Quick skim; it needs thinking about and going back to the detailed editor’s comments. I sent a message to say just that, promising to get round to it this evening when my wife is at a Kirk Session meeting. But only now realising that it’s “The Apprentice” tonight – my one TV indulgence. Will I have to miss it? (45 mins) 08.15: Stopped to get toast, marmalade and coffee for us both. Took it upstairs. Re-read the Florence abstract while eating and drinking. (Call it 15 mins). Back downstairs by 08.45. 08.45: Working on redraft of Florence abstract. Must at the same time be considering: ?What the paper itself will/can look like, so it’s not just a matter of an abstract, but rather working backwards from an as yet unavailable paper which is being abstracted; ?What I can rely upon my Taiwanese partner to contribute ?What I can persuade her not to contribute as more personal plagiarism from previous papers; ?What our real message is, and how to convey that to the selectors effectively and attractively. Keeping an eye on e-mails as I go along. In comes one which deals with a difficult case of a work-based learner who has failed, will be very upset, and who has been messed about by the system, the module director, and (to some extent) by me. Quick holding message; another task for this evening. Best get shaved, showered and ready to go. 09.30 (45 mins). Making progress meantime on abstract. 10.15: Ready to leave. Drive into country, walk round a loch (in a smirr of rain), lunch at country park restaurant (very pleasant), back home via a garden centre which used to be splendid but is now run-down and not looked after. Sad. Maybe that’s a bit like me, run down and not looked after. 16.15: Home in time to miss an e-mail asking me to phone a former colleague before 16.00 about a matter he has to discuss at Holyrood with a Minister, and on which he wishes my opinion. Apologised for being too late, and told him I was sure he was right in any case (whatever it is). Quickly cleared much of the trivia from my emails; my way of cheering myself up that the bundle is not too enormous. Some time on the diary to date. 30 mins for all of that. Then back to the abstract, 60 mins. Time for evening meal, almost. 17.45: Evening meal, then discovered when going to wash up dishes that the gas boiler once again has failed us, only 30 hours since last repaired, and seems dangerous. Ouch! Spent a while phoning them asking about our rights in this protracted saga, and writing a letter. Didn’t really get back to the abstract until 20.15, by which time my wife was away at a Kirk Session meeting. Tidied up abstract and sent it off by 20.45. 30 mins. 20.45: Still to deal with the case of the failed student. Dug out all the documentation, and worked out what to say and to whom, and how. Took me until 21.25. Now move on to a curious review case of a paper which has come back again for comment, for reasons which are not apparent. The other reviewers seem supportive, and I quite liked the paper and found it useful, though I felt it a little boring. Ended at about 22.15. A mixed day, mainly centred on formulating/improving grant and paper proposals, and on a difficult student case. Not much anniversary celebration. Uid 257Up before 7am, to leave time to walk in to the campus and get there in time for the start of the Sciences Faculty Committee meeting. This consists of a few senior officers of the Faculty and mainly representatives from central offices of the institution, of which I am one, who can report on developments relevant to the Faculty, so I find it more useful to get familiar with latter bunch rather than to serve primarily as liaison with the Faculty. I am able to report on our new PGDip/MA and the imminent MyFolio rollout (the learning technologists’ new online collaboration and PDP tool). I have to miss one of our own Graduate Studies Committee meetings on at the same time (0930-1100, shame ;-) - they are becoming very perfunctory. I get back to the office (pop out a bit later and get slice of pizza to bring back for lunch), catch up with email and telephone queries, planning wrt resources, much of this to do with our teaching programme next year. I prepare for our practice oriented seminar series (Academic Practice Forum) event tomorrow, when we are launching a university wide network for research degree supervisors. I draft a response, under the auspices of the Society for Research into Higher Education Postgraduate Issues Network, to the HEFCE consultation on the funding of research degree programmes. I agree to review a paper for a journal, have correspondence about inviting a speaker to our new research centre, jointly under the auspices of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, for which I get in touch with one of my group’s links at the other university next door. He is not playing in the evening event, which is the annual cricket match between the staff teams of our universities, hosted by them this year. It is just a 20/20 and our team amassed 178 for 2 wickets then to dismiss them for just 38 - just a bit one-sided! I kept wicket and stumped out their last batsman. I stay a bit for a drink (partly to dull the pain of the bruise on my thigh, having been hit by the ball hit at me when I was the bowling umpire, fast such that I could not get out of the way!) with our skipper and most of their team in the clubhouse (not their institution’s own - they hired the pitch) get a lift back into town and have a swift one in my local, where I can make notes from the 2010 Good Beer Guide about pubs in the Snowdonia area, since I and my dad will be venturing out for some hill-walking next month. I am still up until after midnight but don’t get around to looking closely at the external examining documents which arrived for me in advance of the exam board on Friday.Uid 258It's the time of year when academics jump onto trains and planes and into cars and head off to far-flung parts of the world/UK to fulfil external examiner duties. A friend of mine is currently carrying out EE duties in SE Asia. Unfortunately, my life is not so glamorous. I make the four-hour journey to a university north east England with Cross Country Trains who, to my delight, have complimentary WiFi in every compartment. Both WiFi and train are rather slow and as a result I nearly miss a mid-journey connection, which means no time to grab a coffee. I work on the train - responding to emails and writing a presentation for a forthcoming conference. Gone are the days when I could relax with a book or a newspaper; the pressures are now too great and the need to perform and be seen to perform are too pressing. Once at my external examinership I'm put in a room with another EE where we review mountains of scripts of varying standards. It's always comforting to know that students at other institutions are neither better nor worse than your own, and the unspoken benefit of being an EE is that you can often 'borrow' good assessment ideas from other universities for your own use. It's a lovely day, I'm tired, and there is a fantastic view from the room I'm in, which means that my mind often wanders. At 6pm I get a lift back to my hotel (cigarette burns in the net curtains and peeling wallpaper but lovely staff). Quick change, more emails, chat with husband and daughter on the phone and I'm, er, out on the town with the programme team - another unspoken benefit of external examining. A Thai meal and a couple of beers follow - being a working mummy with a toddler, I don't get too many nights out, so I make the most of this. This isn't the greatest preparation for the Programme Board meeting the next day, but before going to bed I set my alarm for 6:30 so that I can go for a run before the meeting (which I do actually manage to do).Uid 260A real working day! I get in to the university at 7:15am and peruse my emails. I collect my mail and find more scripts for me to look at as external examiner. These include a dissertation from a northern university where there is suspected (but unproven) plagiarism - one internal examiner wished to give it 35% and another 56%. I am cast in the role of Solomon. The case is complex because the student has mysteriously used a number of sources not available to Turnitin but which are also not available in that university's library. There is certainly some unattributed copying, often as footnotes, where the source appears in the student's bibliography but not as a footnote citation. The student certainly knows how to cite when he/she chooses to do so - indeed many citations comply with the complex requirements of the Harvard Bluebook. All of this leaves a very strong suspicion of plagiarism but no sufficient smoking gun to warrant a referral for cheating. I make my judgment and give it 40%, explaining my decision as taking account of the fact that plagiarism cannot be proven but marking it down heavily as being excessively derivative. I meet with a postgrad student at 8:15am. She is working with me on the expert system I am building. I brief her on what is required next and fix to meet her at weekly intervals over the summer. I have volunteered to cover for a colleague as relief invigilator in three exam rooms from 10am. I check with the invigilators as to when they would like to be relieved but find that there has been an admin snafu and that each room has two invigilators for an average of just six students per room in open book exams! All cheerfully wave me away - this is good as I got kudos from my colleague for covering her duty (plus bottle of wine) but find the task a sinecure. I return to my room and spend two hours looking at exam scripts as external examiner. I'm happy with the marking and approve all marks awarded. I receive an email from Exsys offering me an education licence for their expert system builder application (Corvid) at a price of $5,999. They include a link to a 30 day demo version and to their instructional tutorials. I download the application and start the tutorials. It's lip-smackingly good and is a vast improvement on the old expert systemn shell that I am currently using. All I need do is make a case to our Dean - and I check to find that we do still have money left in the pot. In the mid-afternoon an international postgrad student from India comes to see me. I know what has prompted this visit and my heart sinks. I have given her 0% for an essay and I have to tell her that she is lucky just to have been given 0% and referred in the subject rather than referred to the cheating committee. She is a picture of abject misery. Her essay was little more than a cut and paste from Wikipedia. I explain to her why this is not acceptable. As I probe further why she did this, I learn that she has apparently never written an essay before. Her entire educational experience has been tests and exams. This has been a problem this year. Our Head of School has been almost on permanent tour recruiting to our Masters programs - but the result has been that we have acquired some very weak students. I felt that many students on this year's cohort had poorly developed English language skills - both oral and written. These students seemed mostly from Asia. Their limited language ability made them very reluctant to engage in seminar discussion in class - it was difficult to gauge whether they had read suggested materials for discussion or not - or whether they had attempted to read them but the materials were simply beyond their ability to comprehend because of language problems. My view was that we may need to to make strenuous representations to the University that there cannot be a university-wide minimum TOEFL/IELTS score - that some courses simply require a better grasp of spoken and written English than others do and that law has a high literacy requirement. I have noticed that some other faculties have a number of Chinese students. I see these students in the cafeteria where they converse among themselves in Chinese. When they approach the counter for service they rarely seem able to say anything at all in English - they just point at things. I can't begin to imagine how a student who cannot ask for a coffee can possibly understand a lecture on a degree course. We do not seem to have allowed for the fact that some students that we are recruiting to the course simply have no idea what is required of them when writing an academic essay. We have to accept that some students come from countries where there is a very unsophisticated higher education system that relies heavily upon rote learning either of a text or of lecturer's notes. Exam success depends solely upon an ability to recall and reproduce the approved words. How are we going to respond to these students? How do we cope with postgraduate students who have never written an essay before? I return to my flat to continue working on an academic paper. On my phone is a text from Dr Bluestocking who is in Paris to present a paper. I call her and find that Dr B is not amused - the airport shuttle that took her from Charles de Gaulle airport to her hotel went to virtually every other hotel in Paris first and took 2 hours to deliver her. Then she found that she could not logon to the hotel's internet connection as she got the message "Windows is not configured for this network". She implores me to contact the university's ICT team for help and support. I pledge to do so. I have supper, open the wine and watch on video on demand the BBC programme "Poor Kids". I take my hat off to the programme researchers who managed to find four such wonderfully articulate young advocates against the obscenity of child poverty. If ever there was a need for clear justification for widening access to higher education, these children made that case. Uid 264I completely forgot to journal on Wednesday so now I'll try to remember what happened based on my log file and the sent box of my mailer. My official position is 80% of full-time. Each week I try to pick a day that I call my "day off" and on that day I only do a bit of email or do a bit of work as an opportunity presents itself. For example, even though it is my day off, I might work on my laptop for the 45 minutes that I'm waiting for my son at his violin lesson. I can't ever let an opportunity like that go by. This week my kids both had dentist appointments and one had a doctor's appointment and we had a whole slew of other errands that were spread across Wed - Fri. So I decided to not declare an official day off but divide it over the 3 days. Wednesday had the least work and the most off. I started off at the dentist for 7:30 am and had kids back to school and me at my home office desk by 9. Of course I worked (prepping for a later meeting) for a good 30 minutes in the dentist's waiting room. Once home, I spent the next 2 hours reading email and responding. Most of it was either about the UCOSP program (a distributed undergraduate project course that I help run) or about our upcoming CS4HS program. From 11-12:30, I chaired a phone conference call for the outreach committee of the Canadian Association of Computer Science. I remember when I used to be so nervous before those meetings. Now I'm just frustrated at how the other committee members don't reply to requests for meetings, don't really want to do anything and mostly want to talk. I've already given notice that I'm resigning from chairing. It has been almost 4 years and it makes sense to move on and give someone else the reigns. My previous chair was very keen that I do this but the guard has changed and while my new chair is supportive, I don't feel the same need to carry on. Time for something new. After the meeting, I did some more family errands (doctor, shopping trip, ...) and finally got back to work after 4. Spent another hour sending email messages -- again mostly about outreach or recruiting. Looking back, I don't think I did a single stitch of actual computer science work or even thought about the process of actually teaching computer science. All of the 15th was strategizing about outreach or administration of programs. I don't mind this kind of work once in a while but what I usually like about my job is that I get a nice mix of organizing things and also thinking about technical content. When I'm teaching a course much of the work is administration but not all. For example, yesterday (not the 15th), I spent a few hours writing code and working out a lab for students to do that exercised the concepts I wanted them to learn. I think I'd go crazy if all my days were like the 15th this month and I didn't have the chance to think about CS content at all.Uid 266Woke up on my brother's sitting room floor, somewhere south of Stoke (the northerner's equivalent of "somewhere north of Watford"). Made myself decent, rolled up sleeping bag, had a shower, decontaminated my mouth and emerged for some breakfast with brother's family. Amazed at calmness and ease with which his children seemed to be ready for school by 8.15, then played quietly and cooperatively without recourse to any electronics. Compared with my headless chicken approach to getting children ready for school. Drove off at 8.30, and headed to Cambridge, to externally examine a PhD. Driving into Cambridge, you could be coming into any large town in the unglaciated part of the country. Even when you go past the Cavendish Lab and the Institute for Astronomy, they could be just big out of town industrial parks. But once you turn down Queens Road and head along the Backs, the splendour of Kings et al. means you can't really be anywhere else, and you can't help but be impressed and a little intimidated. Then you turn down Fen Causeway and, in the middle of the city, you come across this gorgeously unmanicured wetland, Coe Fen, replete with a herd of cows mooching about and languidly avoiding the cyclists weaving between them. What a place! I didn't go to Cambridge, but I grew up in the Fens, used to come here on days out and for Christmas shopping, and my great uncle, great grandfater and great great grandfather went here, so I feel both at home and like an outsider. I like this tension. Park, and walk up to Christ's College where the viva is to be. Swithered over what to wear, but figuring that they like to dress up at Oxbridge, and since I'm the examiner that over-dressing is probably better than under-dressing, I'm in full suit (my old wedding suit, the only I've got) and tie (first time I've worn a tie for over a year, and that was for a funeral), and feel a bit jealous of the kids in shorts wondering around in the sunshine. I'm met in the Porter's Lodge by the internal examiner, and the candidate, a nice German guy in his early 30s, shows up a moment later, so we all troop off to the internal's college room, which is the full works - oak panels, fireplace, big windows and all that. Pass a very pleasant two and a half hours discussing the candidates thesis, managing (I think) to tread a line between pedantry, hand-wringing humility and Oxbridge-sycophancy, unnecessary smart-arsery and all other traps that lie in wait for the unwary examiner. All ends happily and we send him off a few minor corrections short of a PhD. At which the internal invites me to have lunch in the college, so we repair to the hall (is that what they call it?) where I fill my calorific boots with as much dignity as I can muster. Then for coffe in the Fellows Common Room, where I am introduced to the present Master (who is reading the Guardian) beneath a picture of the guy who was master in the 1680s (who isn't). For a terminally self-doubting prole from a northern 60s university, it's all a bit head-spinning. To top off all this kind hospitality, I am shown the Darwin garden and sculpture, there because Darwin was an undergrad at Christs. Wonder back down the road to my car, noting how southern and London-esque Cambridge feels. Bump into a guy who was a PhD student in our department about 5 years ago for a moment (he was in a hurry). As I leave, I think about how, actually, I felt I held my own there and, for all the historical impressiveness of the place, I reckon I'm very much on their level. Also a sense of how the value of higher education and academic research, which I so often doubt and question, is so utterly demonstrable and taken for granted in a place like Cambridge. So I leave buoyed up, both about my own personal worth and that of the whole endeavour of universties. A long drive home remains. Can find little worth listening to on the radio - an unimaginative interviewer on 5 live, brainless rubbish on Radio 2, impenetrable plinking and plonking on Radio 3, tedious waffle on Radio 4, nauseating saccharine dumbing down on Classic FM, and airhead candy floss on all the local stations. Stop at a service station near Brum, and who should walk across the car park and get into the car next to mine but Roger Black, Olympic 400m silver medallist, still scrubbing up nicely in his mid 40s. Home by 7, get back into family life. Bed at 10.30 and quickly to sleep. A good day.Uid 267Not a typical wednesday really as I woke up in Montreal having arrived the evening before on an Air Canada flight to attend the 13th annual Space Between Conference (i.e. literature 1914-1945) at McGill University. I did wake up about 4.30am of course but because I had kept awake during the flight the previous night was suffiociently tired enough to get back to sleep and in the end managed to doze to about 9.00. There was no worry because the conference didn't actually start until Thursday lunchtime. I could go through giving a scheduled breakdown but basically I had a lovely day wandering around Montreal, especially around the old town and the old port and watching the St Lawrence flow past. With everyone speaking french and the temperature in the early 30s, it felt very mediterranean. Got back to air-conditioned room about 5.00pm for facebook chat with family (before they went to bed), then did some work on my paper (due to be presented on Saturday) because - here is the teaching-related bit - the week before had been taken up with courses and exam boards. Then went out for a meal later and then came back, read a bit and went to bed. A good day!Uid 274Filling outforms for my annual appraisal causes me to focus on how the job has changed for the worse in subtle and not to subtle ways - and has led me to wonder why I would want to stay in this post. An email from a colleague about a vacancy at their university is so tempting - but I have a university student daughter living at home and can't relocate. Lots of tensions between wanting to escape and being a good parent, and between her experience as a student and mine as a lecturer. Looking forward to my kayaking course tomorrow - when I get to leave all this hassle behind and focus on not capsizing - not so different after all!Uid 276We had our Subject Assessment Panels today with our external examiners. It’s a right old hassle compiling all the paperwork for the module box (I’m on very friendly terms with the photocopier) but thankfully the Panels went well. The externals made some really great comments (we should post them on our website for publicity) and it’s good to hear that they think we have got good practice for the sector. The externals do a really good job but it’s not something I’ve ever wanted to undertake myself – it’s onerous enough carrying out internal moderation, never mind actively seeking more from another institution! Still, I guess it helps you to calibrate your academic life and to find out that the grass is not always greener elsewhere…Uid 2828:00 am Got up, dressed and ate some yoghurt. Today is the first Wednesday of this semester when I was not teaching an all day session on campus. Nice to be home sleeping in. Getting up at 6:00am to teach from 8:00 to 5:00 three days a week can be so tiring. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to teach this long at a time. Made a list of places to go and things to do. First to the chiropractor at 10:00am, then to the jeweler to have a gift appraised to add to my insurance policy, then to get the windshield chip fixed on the car. Once the car was done, returned to the jeweler for the appraisal documents to take to the insurance company. Daughter came over for a visit, and then the husband came home (summer hours means he comes in at 4pm). Ran to the dry cleaners to pick up clothes. In between, ate a light lunch. Answered work emails. One dealt with a student admitted to my online class late as a favor to an instructor on campus and the girl started her communication with me by asking me if I would like to make my due dates more consistent, implying they weren't already. Couldn't respond right away, too angry. Needless to say, she missed the quiz due date and ended up complaining to the registrar expecting a full refund of tuition and to drop my class. Strangely, she was allowed to do this with no communication with me by the provost. I will be talking to someone next week when I return to the office. I honestly think this class was more than she thought it would be so she decided to complain in order to get her funds back. I am glad she is gone but would rather she had communicated with me directly instead of complaining about me. Cowardly. The most disappointing thing was not getting to work on my research. This is what happens with too much frequency when I work from home. No one thinks anything about asking me to do things for them, not to mention the things I think of doing.Uid 289Funny kind of day. Term is coming to an end. I spent most of the last 3 weeks marking. I got that finished on Friday. Monday I was away external examining and so yesterday I spent the whole day clearing through my emails and reacting to them. I have several commitments – some related to marks and the end of term and some not. Spent some time resurrecting an on-line project marksheet from 2006 – for a colleague who is writing a reference for the former student in question. Then I read and reacted to more emails. This is not a happy department. Redundancies have just been announced, in administration and IT Support. I am having a technical problem with my laptop, but when I take it to Support (twice) there is no one there. I presume they are meeting to discuss the situation. Lunch at the keyboard. One of the jobs I did yesterday was to fix the date for a PhD viva, so today with some time to spare, I start reading the thesis. Seminar in the afternoon. It’s an inaugural for a (relatively) new lecturer, so I want to support him. He has a difficult job pitching quantum mechanics at a mixed audience, but succeeds pretty well. Back to the office and some more admin tasks to sort out – most connected with project marking. Then some time to read more of the thesis. Home earlier than usual. Enough for today. Uid 291An early rise for me, 07:20. Look at the over-night e-mail which was not very much. Read the on-line paper -- why do be continue to call it a paper when it is clearly electronic? Take my wife tea at 08:30. The post brings a newsletter from CAFAS but I decide I do not have time today to read it as I need to develop the Open Day demonstration, which is what I do all the ret of the morning. The demo is of 2D audio in ambisonics, controlled by a wiimote (at last a controller one can afford). Today's work is to look at drum loops, which is outside by normal area. Cycle in to the department at noon. Talk to my colleague about a possible research proposal. Neither of us has much belief in it being funded, but sometimes one has to tick the "tried" box. I should add quickly that the proposal is excellent, cutting edge, going places unknown, and we are the world leaders in the area. It is just that the lottery never seems to come our way. To a UCU committee meeting. Confidential material, but pensions, government policy, white paper, and university management all feature. I forgot to take any lunch, and as our department is so far away from the main campus I make do with a cup of coffee. The first part of the afternoon was spent on more for the Open Day demo, followed by the regular meeting with a research student and staff. A wide ranging discussion on HPC which is always fun, even if I am a little behind the others. The 4pm meeting was delayed as the co-supervisor was busy with another graduate student, but we managed it at 5pm. An hour with the Iraqi is always hard; English is not really good enough, but at least there is now a genuine idea that could lead to a PhD. We have to explain the necessity of recording experiments even if we do not expect speedups. Rather a hard hour but afterwards we thought that progress had been made. We move the audio kit into the lab for tomorrow morning's demonstrations, and set up stands and cables, locking away the expensive bits. Cycle home -- it started top rain as I left and by the time I got home I was soaked to the skin. A complete change of clothes was necessary. A simple supper of pasta and a little more work on the demo completed a bitty day.Uid 29615th June. Travelled to a conference today, so up at 4am (only a little earlier than on a usual work day) Drove to the station and then caught the train to London, then underground to Kings Cross where I met a colleague and we travelled north. A couple of hours later we reached our destination. On the journey we did discuss student research proposals for an MSc...and the time did go by quite quickly. Walked through the town and booked into the hotel, had coffee and ambled down to the conference centre and a 1pm start. The first day of the three day conference was very stimulating and enlightning; didn't finish until 6pm and then needed to tackle a few e-mails with feednback to students. A very nice meal in an Italian resuarant and a walk through a very interesting town in the evening sunshine. Really tired with the travelling but had a very good day.Uid 301An all day meeting to discuss the development of a distance learning program. This is a new venture for the university and we're feeling our way through it. About 1/3 of the meeting is essential information which I can't afford to miss. The rest is dross that adds nothing. Unfortunately I have to attend it all, as the good bits are randomly interpersed amongst the rest and can't be easily separated out. When people take a day of your life, I wish they would value it more by keeping the the schedule and concentrating on value added activities. The result is that I have to squeeze all the other daily tasks around the edges of the day (e-mail, student supervisory meetings, issue resolution with admin, etc.) . This means a 7am start and finally leaving the building at 8pm. Of course I still have an hour or so of e-mails when I get home too... Before bed I take time to read through the latest educational news, but decide that it's all too depressing and call it a night - after all, I have an early start tomorrow to catch up with some of the research I didn't do today.Uid 303Woke at 6am to walk the dog. A worry walk. Counting all the tasks that need to be managed before everyone goes on leave. 1500 coursework assessments, exam boards, external examiners. 5 showcase exhibitions, L&T reports, 10 references, 3 research reports, 5 new Programmes to push through final stages of validation, module improvement plans, coordinating 40 module reports, 40 module spec updates, and new module guides to be published for next year in time for the franchise Programmes. Preparation for the fourth QA audit inside 12 months. Timetabling and first week plans to revise. Clearing rota to organise. New meetings every week for the planned school merger. I'm just a field leader, at our University you're not even given the dignity of being a head of department. I'm being advised to apply for associate Dean. I'd have to get the application in before Friday this week. I'm taking 10 days leave frpm Monday, as most of the summer has been filled with research objecties and merger plans. I think I'm headed for a breakdown. His has been the worst year in HE I can remember in my 15 years. I'm tired and scared that I'll forget to complete a task that'll cost me my job when the redundancies come. They give the tasks to those who work. Those that don't get left alone, nothin seems to affect them.Uid 31015.6.11 This is a frantic time of year, so an early start. Mostly we are past the undergraduate rush now, although there are still some around on placement and preparing projects. Things don’t seem to slow down. 7.30 Greet cleaners and turn on computer. While waiting for the increasingly slow warm up and all the many firewalls to establish themselves, sort out paperwork for a meeting this afternoon and walk the length of the building to my mail box, only to discover it is empty. Spend the next 50 minutes online, organising various journeys and accommodation and trying to find passport number and expiry date to check into one flight. We are supposed to go through the University travel system, but this is so very cumbersome that it is worth doing it yourself in the interests of getting the right budget billed, the right tickets bought and not least maintaining mental health. 8.20 Phone call out of the blue from Saudi Arabia, a prospective student for a masters course who seems to have found my number at random. 10 minutes and some confusion later, he is clear about the application process… I hope. 8.30-9.00. Write reports on the progress of three PhD students (all very good) and send off for the next stage in the process, where they are interviewed to see if we supervisors are doing the job. 9.00-9.40 A variety of PhD and MSc supervision queries dealt with by email. There is one Honours student still needing a reply, but as she is on holiday this week, that can wait. 9.40-10.00. Suddenly realise I am hungry. Another long trip this time to the canteen, via passing over some final course work for second marking. 10.00-12.00 Poster preparation. This is for a local conference and it is a joint effort with a colleague whose first presentation this is. She has produced the content, I just provide the width/ appearance. 12.00 The computer crashed and took another 10 minutes to get going again. 12.10-2.00 Poster continued 2.00 Realised that the meeting had been postponed. 2 hours cleared! Poster continued 3.45 After several email conversations with the colleague concerned, had a break and looked out of the window. Pouring down, and there is a huge pile of washing out on the line at home. B*****r! 3.45-4.45 PhD supervision. This is with one of the students whose report went off this morning. She is deep into statistical analysis which is way beyond my, so thank goodness for supervisory teams. 4.45 The final draft of the poster sent out for colleague’s approval, corrections and general admiration. Well maybe. 4.50-5.00 packed bags and lap top for London and beyond. Remembered to book a taxi for 5 am tomorrow. Ugh. Then a long and glorious dive across the moors, with views for miles in all directions, in order to visit family before the next trip. Uid 314up 8am attempt and fail to get daughter out of bed in time for school - leave to spouse to mix bribery and threats 9-10am run 10-11 am mow lawns, breakfast, get to work 11-12 attend seminar. fall asleep. 12-1 talk to colleague; lunch 1-2 stare vacantly into space 2-3 work on CV for grant 3-4 talk to PhD student & ex-postdoc supervising about submission to doctoral symposium at a conference in the US 4-430 work on grant 4.30-5pm collect daughter 5-6.30pm help daughter rock-climb 6.30-8.30pm dinner 8.30-9pm wrangle daughter to bed 9-10pm watch backbenchers on soon to be shut-down by the tories public service TV channel 10-11pm watch 'Sherlock' saved on freeviewUid 315Lectures have finished, and now the great pile of marking that has built up must be tackled. I have several Masters theses that need to be assessed, and that should be top priority. However, on days like this, when I don't have any crucial meetings (other than one teaching & learning committee meeting, because administration marches on) and the winter weather outside is quite agreeable, it's difficult not to go on random flights of fancy on the internet, looking for what could be the next interesting research project. Great thing about this job - sure there are days when the third extension to the deadline must finally be met - but there are also days when I can do whatever, wherever, and be paid a pretty decent salary for it too. Good day, all up. Uid 325Went into work in the morning, having checked and dealt with my email before leaving to avoid morning rush hour. Did some admin etc, met with one of my students, attended a seminar, had lunch. Went home early and spend the rest of the day and night marking all the essays for my postgraduate course. I am very impressed with our final year (Honours/400 level) students essays. Only a few years ago, most CS grads couldn't put two English words together unless they were "if then" or "do while". Now with our Uni having a push to increase our graduates communication skills across the board, our CS/Engineering grads seem to be learning to write better and better every year. Nowhere close to the Arts students, but a far cry from the extremes of "This paper show us how implementations of pattern in wrong contest can cause your design to suffer badly as one should only use the appropriate tool for the trade as required" or similar pearls of wisdom. :-)Uid 333Spent the first four hours of the morning (8-12) dealing with email relating to my two administrative chairs (I'm chairing exams and undergraduate studies). Lots of email, one phone call, and the editing of lots of documents, notably the 101-page handbook for those entering year 2 next year. My predecessor had revised the grade descriptors--already legion because different ones seem to be needed for different types of assessment--so that they are more bullet point-like and less like running prose. Having just marked lots of scripts with the old descriptors, I find the old ones more than adequate and can't see the rationale for the change. I considered just overruling the change and sticking with the status quo ante, but then decided that implementation of things already passed by the committee before my tenure as chair should be carried out. However, I 've put it on the agenda as an item to be discussed. Is it just the case that when administrative tasks fall to academics who stay in each chair for 2-3 years, history will show a see-sawing of ideas back and forth with change the only constant? Some departments have chosen to forego an academic post so that they can pay the same to a high-level administrator who takes on director of Undergraduate studies and graduate studies. This seems sensible to me and would lead to greater continuity and a strategic plan for change. In my dept, however, we can't afford to lose a lecturer and can barely afford the lecturers we do have. Assembled a lunch of smoked chicken with grated raw celeriac and apple plus walnuts and herbs. Cut a slice of rye bread and ate lunch checking my twitter feed. Having ascertained that HEI matters at large were going from bad to worse, I got back to my administrative tasks. The need to finish proofreading the handbook (whose arrival on my desk today--with an 'asap' turnaround time--could not have been anticipated) meant that I sent my apologies to a lunch meeting of a committee that discusses student progress. Instead, I sent my updates on students by email, which seems anyway more efficient. This meeting (which happens twice a term), gathers tutors in different subjects at a single college and we go through the entire list of students (c.200) by subject. No one else's comments are relevant to anyone else, so it seems a rather ritualistic event. I was not sorry to have to send my apologies and might do so regularly in future. At 2pm I phoned an emeritus professor to agree marks on scripts. He is still teaching and assessing in the department and would like never to have retired in the first place. If he hadn't retired, however, I wouldn't have the job I now have, so my feelings on this are rather mixed. As a feminist who's divorced at least one academic husband for being a workaholic, I think that external prompts to STOP WORKING are few enough in academia as it is, leading to a culture of workaholism and self-definition only through work. This culture is detrimental to relations with family, children, and friends, and creates emotionally deprived individuals. Removing the retirement age will be, in my view, a human disaster. Between 3 and 5pm I finally saw some students: my current second year tutees. This was the third meeting of term to discuss final year options. In between meetings I'd sent them away to gather information, talk to other colleagues about dissertation ideas, and generally flesh out their vague plans for the final year. After the last student had left, I wrote and submitted my online reports on their progress: all had managed to develop good dissertation ideas, engage a suitable supervisor, and all but one had put in a title and bibliography to the central departmental committee that needs (for a reason beyond me) to approve such things. At 5.30 I met up with several colleagues in a wonderful local real ale pub. One of my colleagues had organised this event by email--our once-a-term departmental pub trip. About 7 of 14 came along--not a bad turn-out. (As all too often in this post, though, I was the only woman at the table.) The beer was good and I we got into earnest conversation about syllabus reform. Given that scheduled meetings are so full of rubber-stamping and have agendas that are far too long, the pub seems the only real forum for a wide-ranging, free, and frank discussion. In this it's far better than the departmental away day, at which battle lines are drawn up in advance and at which nothing is every decided. I'm hopeful that I persuaded at least two colleagues that a certain paper has to be removed from being compulsory for student progress. Although whether they'll still be persuaded when they are not the right side of two pints remains to be seen... Home again in time for dinner. Read Schiller until bed.Uid 343I’m currently at an international mathematics conference on the Ile de Porquerolles, a small Mediterranean island just off the south coast of France. It is an intensive meeting with a very full programme of talks. The conference is at a holiday centre and the centre ‘cinema’ is in use as our lecture theatre. We were told before the meeting that the only possibility for presentations is to use the data projector. This has annoyed many participants who have never done such lectures before, being used to overhead projector presentations or simply blackboard and chalk. In this subject there is much to be said for such ‘old fashioned’ approaches: it enables mathematics to be done in real time, rather than mindlessly flashing up one line after another. A strong feeling is building up during the conference that many presentations are rather clinical, with the data projector slides marginalising the personality and charisma of the speaker. This morning the four speakers approach their presentations in different ways; whether their adopted styles were intentional or not I am not sure. The first, a German, can hardly be seen as he stands in the shadows at the side of the theatre, reeling off a list of his own results, with the suggestion that nothing else in the subject is of any significance. Next is a rather apologetic Frenchman who stands on the stage, partially illuminated by the projector, as he talks through an endless sequence of scanned pages of almost illegible handwriting. After the coffee break, a speaker from a British university gives an entertaining account whilst pacing energetically back and forth across the front of the room – he must have walked at least a mile during his lecture. The final speaker, from Denmark, stands on the stage in front of the screen, waving a laser pointer at arms length in true Harry Potter fashion. The afternoon is the free afternoon of the conference. A walk round the island is on the programme, but only three people including myself turn up, perhaps because with a temperature of 30 degrees most prefer the beach or sea. The island scenery is spectacular, with steep cliffs and azure blue sea, as well as palm trees and rather splendid tree heather which covers much of the island. My two companions soon wilt, and I am left to finish the route by myself and climb to the highest point on the island, at all of 460 feet above sea level. When I return there is the poster session, with posters presented by about a dozen research students. These are extremely professional, both for content and presentation. Their large glossy colour-printed sheets far outclass the half dozen typed A4 sheets stuck onto a bit of card – my generation’s idea of a poster. In the evening we have the conference dinner. The French staff do us proud with about 7 courses and even more different wines. As the senior member at the conference, I give a short speech of thanks to the organisers, not least for having selected such an idyllic location. I always find these conference dinners a bit of a strain – with over 90% of the participants male (which is typical for mathematics meetings) the atmosphere becomes rather artificial, and certain sections of the company lack self-restraint when it comes to refilling glasses. After the dinner a few of us wander down to the shore and watch the moon above the island horizon as it passes through the final stages of eclipse. Uid 348I am away doing external examining so a later start than usual and the luxury of being driven around! But then back to the relentless pile of essays to be checked. After the marking onslaught of the last few weeks, looking at 60 more is almost more than I can bear... But made a good start yesterday and it's always fascinating to look at other providers' and meet colleagues. Good discussions with my fellow examiner as well. We work on these all morning and then there's exam board. Now back onthe train catching up on emails and writing my report. Just three days out of the office and, despite regular checks on emails on my phone, it's amazing how they build up.Uid 352Arrival in office around 8:45. Students are already in the corridor to get various responses: what can I do to improve my computer project and get a better mark? when is the new video software arriving so that I can get on with my project? In between time marking the late assignments that come dribbling in and trying to organise Masters thesis defenses and advise students on their writing in progress (sending documents back and forth via internet) I am also seeing students that come by to solve these same problems : how to finish this year (thesis writing, exams to retake or reports to rewrite), what to do next year, etc. etc. Some time is also spend on our project to re-equip an old language lab and turn it in to a computer / IWB classroom for training teachers in technology use. The funds have not arrived and if the purchase order is not processed soon, the room will not be ready for september. Of course the rescheduling of room users and planning for the use of the room is already well under way!Uid 354The quarter is finally over! I submitted my grades by the 5 PM deadline on Monday, and yesterday I finally had a full day to dedicate to my research yesterday. Without the hovering thoughts about my course preparation or grading that I needed to do. Today is my second full day in which I am free to focus on research. It feels great, except that I am floundering in my research. I feel like a butterfly, finding so many interesting ideas to pursue. Each conversation with a different person raises another interesting avenue of possible research connected to the things that I care about. I spent the last nine months, my first year back as an academic after 19 years in industry, exploring what types of research topics would fit in this context, with these potential collaborators. I got some good clarity about a month ago, when I realized that there are two types of perspectives that I am continually bringing to every research question that approaches me. At least this is consistent. Now it is time for me to sit on one plant (one research project), lay some eggs (testable hypotheses) and tend them into mature and respectful research projects and papers. My difficulties deciding which one to choose. This is what I have been struggling with today. My intuition says that there is a rich area to unfold in this one place, yet it is a place that has almost nothing published in it. And I'm having difficult time seeing how to take my ideas beyond the thought piece in into actionable projects. I also find that I have some interesting ideas, that other people also agree are interesting, but I am having a more difficult time identifying what problems I am trying to solve. I want to solve problems, not just do something cool. This morning my wife and I, and our two dogs, went for a walk in the neighborhood and I talked about some of these quandaries. To survive in the system, I have to find something that I can publish on. Perhaps, I wondered out loud, I should go back to the work that I had done eight years ago. It is in the place that has lots of venues, lots of people publishing in it, and is a place where I could make small steps. I could also connect it to the teaching that I am doing. At 2 PM, I called my former advisor back in the 80s. He and I still get together occasionally, and he helped me get my current position. I had sent him a "Help!" e-mail yesterday, and we had arranged to talk this afternoon. It helped to some degree. Perhaps. I'm still confused. Time to get back to making my research concrete. Took a break. Organized my e-mail inbox a bit. Tied off a few loose ends about some coursework I am associated with this summer. I have been reading a book called "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins. It is a fascinating book describing a theory of how the brain works that differs from anything I've read before. It seems so simple in concept. It fits with the other things I know about how the brain works. I am only halfway through, and am looking forward to seeing what he says about how to emulate such a system and software systems. There is so much to do this summer in order to prepare for next year, and to get my research path moving that it is hard to take a break and relax. This really is one of those jobs that consumes all your spare time. All that you let it into. Uid 362Phew!!! Marking is finished. My PgCAP portfolio has been submitted - life seems more manageable even if it's still busy. So, two meetings today - a divisional meeting this morning (the last one of the academic year), a quick sandwich and coffee and then the pre-exam board. It's good to see how some students have progressed and I'm looking forward to the exam board next week to see the final degree classifications for the third years students that I teach. But it's good to know that I can go home tonight and have a glass of wine, safe in the knowledge that there is nothing more to mark!Uid 370Today was a bit different to other 15ths because I'm currently overseas on a trip. My partner is visiting a university to do some research and I decided to go too. At this time of year I generally sit in my office all day staring at a computer screen, there's no reason why I can't do that from the other side of the world! My goals for June are to finish my dissertation for part of a masters degree in education so I worked on that for a little while today. I also worked on a couple of flyers for recruitment activities. Basically being away from the normal distractions of the office lets me catch up with the small tasks that never become both important and urgent but fall intot he category of 'would be nice to do at some point'. Would I be doing these things if I were back at my office, not really. I'd probably be dealing with a looming open day (first for new fee regime recruitment) and probably dealing with an endless stream of relatively unimportant complaints from people who should probably know better. I am glad to be away from it all. I responded to a few urgent emails and spent some time looking through grade sheets to determine which students should win prizes. I was quite glad to see that 4 students came in with very high module averages and therefor the 2 prizes is just going to have to become 4 this year. Also, the students are from a variety of backgrounds and personal circumstances which shows that in some ways our widening participation and support mechanisms are providing for a high achieving diverse student body. Regardless of whether I am here or there, the day was relatively short - I'd probably go home early in my office and I was back at our accommodation by 4pm. I spent the first few hours of the day shopping for food at a local market (big sporting fixture on in the evening, so not much chance of getting into local pub for dinner). That's the best bit about June - more flexibility and less stress, more time to think and work on projects that have been neglected.Uid 37515.06.11 I don’t want to keep going off on a ‘Woe is Me’ theme, but I’m really struggling to keep it all together. I emailed my Line Manager and said ‘I am extremely stressed and exhausted’. My Line Manager replied without mentioning what I’d said at all. I thought it was a clear plea for help. Apparently not. I have interminable meetings, some in my own institution, others elsewhere, where I’m an External. I want to be getting on with my own writing and research but can’t yet. My Line Manager’s unofficial policy of punitive teaching allocation means that I’ve got a module in October which I have never taught before, in addition to other teaching. Despite having a book contract with a top academic publisher I am not being given the time and space to write. Too much subjective power lies in the hands of my Line Manager who seems to want to punish me in any way possible – but always in a ‘just this side of what’s not actually proper conduct’ so that they cannot be caught out. I don’t know how long I can hold it all together. And, if I do, I just don’t know how the book’s going to get done by the deadline (this is, I can tell, going to be a recurring theme in my Share Project entries). Being an academic is all-consuming. There is no place where the job ends and I begin. I am so tired and low and have nowhere to turn. Other colleagues – one in particular – self-medicate by drinking expensive Scotch by the bottle. That’s not a route that appeals to me – and that colleague, anyway is ‘in’ with the Line Manager – they’re long-time buddies. All I can do is keep working so that eventually some space will appear so that I can get back to the book. I love my students and love my research but I hate my Manager’s bullying tactics.Uid 379I did not go to work. My grandfather died about a week ago and we all went to Jerusalem to his grave. So, I took the day off, cancelled a very important meeting and missed an important vote (for the head of school). At noon, back at home I crushed on the sofa tried to get some sleep, but two students called. One needed an immediate advice on her work, one asked to schedule a meeting. I then worked on my emails: reading students' drafts and guiding them how to improve. So I guess I did work eventually.Uid 383I am an examiner for the Chartered Institute of Marketing and today there was a meeting down in Cookham. As I was unable to go down the night before due to family commitments, I left home at 4.15am to catch the 5.05am train to London from Manchester. This allowed plenty of time for getting there, even if there were delays. Have I set a record for being the earliest time to respond to student emails? I sent one at 5.03am whilst waiting for the train to depart - it was an applicant to my pg course from Canada who wanted to come and visit me and discuss the course for 2012 entry. I wasn't the only one working on the train at such an early time either! After dealing with some emails I read through the very long case study and exam questions and prepared for the meeting. I had managed to get a cheap first class ticket down, so at least I got breakfast (even though it was at 5.45am!) and at least I had a decent seat and table to work from (I do miss first class travel and good quality hotels that I had in industry). After finishing my preparation for the exam meeting and having breakfast I read through some of the marketing industry magazines. I read three magazines every week and use these in my lectures, tutorials and they also help with ideas for assignments/exam questions and case studies. Unfortunately there was a signal failure at Watford and after sitting on the line for some considerable time, we went back to Milton Keynes where we were told to get off the train. By now it was after 8.30am and I should have been in London at 7.30am. After some time, there was limited access to Euston, with hundreds of people trying to get on a train at 9.15am. By this time it was just too late for my meeting which was only 10am - 12. By the time I had got across London to Paddington and then out the meeting would probably be over. At 10am I got on a train back to Manchester and went home feeling very tired. I had every intention of working, but fell asleep in the conservatory after dealing with a few emails. This was the first time I had attempted to go to the CIM via train (I normally drive), but I thought it would mean more time for working, less stress travelling, and better for the environment! ................
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