Job Search Saga: Interview Preparation

The months-long wait was over, and I had finally received an invitation to interview. The interview request itself surpassed my expectations, because it didn't start out slowly with the phone or Skype interview, instead jumping straight to the "we will pay for you to fly out here and visit us" interview. The only catch was that they wanted me out there soon; the invitation arrived on a Friday, with suggested interview dates ranging from the coming Wednesday to the following Tuesday, just a week and a half later. That did not leave much time to prepare.

The first step of preparation was remembering what I had applied for. I deliberately kept myself removed from all my applications, letting myself learn about the colleges in depth for the day or so it took to decide to apply and customize my cover letter, and then forgetting about anything to do with the college so I would not be overly disappointed if I were not selected for a given job. So the name of the college and chair were vaguely familiar, but I did not remember the job description or anything I wrote in my application.

My excitement about the interview increased, impossible as that would seem, when I pulled up the cover letter I had written. I had applied to 18 jobs, and done my best to customize 18 cover letters, but sometimes the position announcement or the school website just doesn't present anything exciting to write about. This college had been one of the exciting ones. Oh, I was probably more enthusiastic about my applications at the time, as it was within the first half-dozen letters I wrote, but the school had contributed as well. I was excited about the January term, a not uncommon feature of liberal arts colleges, the prospect of teaching freshmen seminars, and a few unique features of the college curriculum, and I waxed enthusiastic about them in my letter.

The fun part of my preparation was doing my best to visit every page on the college website, to review all those features that had excited me and to become an expert on the college curriculum and advertising materials. I found myself wishing that I had known about liberal arts colleges, and this one in particular, when I was applying to colleges myself, which has to be a good sign in becoming a professor.

The second step of preparation was creating a job talk. I had known that I was likely to need a job talk, but been too discouraged about my chances of getting an interview to make an effort, especially as I applied to jobs in two sub-fiields, and would likely have had to adapt the talk anyway. I hadn't expected to be given only a week to prepare, and count myself as incredibly lucky that my advisor and lab were incredibly supportive. We called together a special lab meeting just so I could practice my job talk and get their advice.

The most important piece of advice was something I had heard before, but which was useful to hear again: Liberal arts colleges favor teaching, and job talks often do double-duty of showcasing both your research qualifications and your teaching ability. My job talk was all about trying to present my research in a way that would be accessible to undergraduates, and in a way that would be interesting despite being in a formal presentation - which I do my best to avoid during teaching. This included ditching all that statistics, and most of the caveats of what nitpicky questions get raised about my interpretations of my data. It also included making as many connections to other subfields in my area as possible when discussing future directions, to suggest to the faculty present that we could build some nice connections and collaborations as well. It was a tall order to accomplish in just one week.

The third and final step of preparation was general interview preparation. I knew the kinds of questions that might be asked in a regular job interview, but what would be asked of a faculty candidate? I had received the schedule of interviews, which included 45 minutes with the Provost and 30 minutes with the Faculty Interview Committee; what should I ask these administrative people or other faculty members? That topic deserves a post of its own.

To Cancel Class, Or Not To Cancel Class

It may be one of the most hotly contested issues of classroom teaching, for all I know: Does the ill professor cancel class, risking the ire of students and the headache of getting the course back on track, or does the ill professor attend, and risk spreading infection among the students?

I'm sure some professors out there would be horrified to learn that I trekked to campus last Thursday, with a definite fever and slight congestion, and held class as usual. In the panic over swine flu, I might be seen as one of those reckless people who doesn't get vaccinated and doesn't enter deep isolation at the first symptom of illness. The decision was based on three things: I was pretty sure I'd caught whatever it was from my students in my first place (2 out of 7 have been out sick in the past few weeks), I could minimize any more contamination by keeping my distance and using hand sanitizer, and we'd missed a class just two weeks before due to a blizzard. Put together, the cost of canceling another class seemed greater than any risk of sharing the fever.

I should consider myself lucky that I have only one class, two days a week, to cause concern; I do not have a full course load, and an illness can't leave me behind in three or four different classes. On the other hand, as an adjunct, I don't have a network of fellow professors I can ask to sub for any of my classes. With any luck, the next time I get sick I will have multiple classes to keep track of - and then I can sit and work through these decisions all over again.

I'm An Adjunct: Progress Report

I haven't written much about the actual work behind my teaching a graduate seminar as an adjunct at a nearby (defined as "within two hours by public transportation") university. On the bright side, this means I haven't felt the need to anonymously vent about the course or my students.

I have seven students. One is non-traditional, taking a course just to keep her hand in the "professional development" of her field. One speaks English as a second language. Those are my greatest challenges, which is to say that the course is going wonderfully, better than I could have expected, at least from my perspective.

The seminar is two hours, two days a week. When designing my syllabus, I phrased each day's topic as a question. The first hour is led by one of the students, who provides a summary of the day's readings and leads discussion on each article and how they might fit together to answer the day's question. The second hour of class is me getting up and attempting to answer that question myself, and then providing background on the readings for the next class. This leaves me with only one hour of material to prepare each class, and more importantly, only one hour of talking.

Amazingly enough, the class has never got out more than 15 minutes early. Somehow, with only the vaguest idea of what I was doing, I put together a reading list that lets students keep each other occupied for an hour (with occasional input from me, of course). Even more amazingly, I have mastered that Professor skill, which is To Profess. I have heard this from various workshop speakers throughout the years, a comment to the tune of "I'm a professor, so I will just stand up here and speak at you for an hour if you don't stop me with questions". It turns out that I can do this, even on topics not directly related to my research. Every morning on that two-hour commute I refresh myself on the readings and put together some notes, and every afternoon I manage to talk for an hour on what the students should have got out of those readings. Some days I have no idea where this information comes from; it's just there. Surely that's a hallmark of a professor?

I could be wrong in thinking that my students are getting what they need/want out of the class, or otherwise finding it useful. There's enough "lecture" that they should not feel my complain from my own graduate seminars, which was that there was a lot of discussion and not much teaching going on. I haven't been able to bring myself to conduct a more formal survey of student opinion, partly because the course is only for 10 weeks, but mostly because of that blurry graduate student as teacher / graduate student and students line, which I'm wary of crossing. I managed to grade their first papers without problems, feeling myself fully in the role of Expert, or rather More Expert, but my inoculations against undergraduate student opinion have not transferred to graduate students.

We're on the downhill slope now, past the halfway mark for the course, and I'm almost sad. Actually I'm mostly sad, because I love teaching and probably won't do any more for the rest of the year; but only allowing myself to be almost sad, because I do need that time freed up to finish my dissertation, so I can teach more classes next year.

Prioritize The Dissertation, Failing To

I mentioned to one of the other graduate students in my lab that I had achieved my goal of applying to 10 jobs this semester, and he was suitably impressed. Not at the number - like me, he has no idea how many job applications would be reasonable - but at the fact that I was applying for jobs and finishing my dissertation at the same time. He didn't think he could do it.

I'm not really doing it. Applying for jobs, yes; making progress on my dissertation, not so much. It's not the job applications that have delayed my dissertation progress, so much, although checking the various job posting sites has become my new means of "productive" procrastination. Teaching, and mentoring my undergraduate students, and just dealing with the daily influx of emails and small requests, are taking up all my time. Even telling myself that I would dedicate one day a week to working on the dissertation has not motivated me enough; there are always things with nearer deadlines, or straightforward end-of-week burnout.

In my defense, I have written drafts of the first four chapters - my introduction, and the first three experiments. I have also been kept busy with the design and data collection of my fourth experiment, so it's not as though I've done nothing. I've just done very, very little since the semester began. I had planned to have my introduction ready for my advisor's approval by the end of the semester; that's not likely to happen.

The good news is that our department colloquium lacked a speaker last week, so it became a q&a on dissertation requirements. The one member of my committee who was present advanced his opinions on length of the dissertation, explicitly stating a preference for an introduction appropriate for a journal article, and definitely not in the style of our huge comprehensive exam. I am relieved that my procrastination does not come at as huge a cost as I thought (I'm only 20 pages behind, not 50). I might even be motivated enough to turn to that introduction and start revising. Or I might be one of those people who only gets to writing within a month of the due date. At least my job applications get out several months in advance.

Adjunct ID

I didn't need to pick up an adjuct ID card. I blend in on almost any college campus. I spend only eight hours a week there, all of which is spent in my office or my classroom. I don't even have to cross campus to get to my office; my building is on the edge, and I get there by walking down a street with campus on one side and a residential neighborhood on the other. I certainly hadn't missed the card in the first three weeks of class, so there really was no reason to detour to the ID office on Thursday.

Except: I really, really wanted one. For two reasons, two little words: Adjunct Professor. There are days I can't quite believe I'm really a professor, hired to a position in my chosen profession. I'm not going to be taking the ID out of my wallet and admiring it - I'm not quite that crazy - but I will be saving it, the tiny, official memento of my first "real" job.

First Day of Class

Today I am a professor. Or I should be. Let's run through the becoming-a-professor checklist and see how I'm doing.

*Get hired. Well, the unofficial hiring process has been completed - I was offered the job, I gave some poor admin assistant a bit of a headache trying to arrange my class time, and the department chair confirmed as of yesterday that I am teaching the class (specifically, that the students are excited, but I'm taking that with a grain of salt). The official hiring process, on the other hand, has barely begun, thanks to a months-long delay in gathering my information for a background check (the fact that my eventual login had the wrong domain suggests the underlying cause).

*Familiarize myself with the department. Not so much, no. To date, my only trip to this department was my hiring interview, in which I learned the location of the building, water fountain, and chair's office. I think I know where the main office is, because there are only a few reasons for secretary's window in a campus building lobby. I do not know where my classroom is, I don't know where my office is, I don't even know how many floors the building has. I know adjunct professors are academic temps and don't qualify for benefits, but I was kind of hoping for some form of orientation. Hopefully the main office admin people will be forthcoming with information like how to get my syllabus photocopied.

*Review my class roster. Nope. Due to the above hiring delay, I do not have a login for any of the campus websites that might let me access my roster; but that's okay, because due to the above disorientation, I don't even know what the websites are. As of a few weeks ago, when a student asked for permission to enroll, I had six students enrolled, with another two possibles. Once again, I'm relying on the main office to help me out.

*Get campus ID. Nope. Again, this can be blamed on the slow hiring process. Fortunately, I'll blend right in to a college campus, with my trusty red-and-black swiss army backpack advertising my student status, so I'm not too worried about being stopped by campus security and asked for proof I belong.

*Prepare my class syllabus. At last, something I can check off. My syllabus is 7 pages long, with one page of course information and six pages of readings. I read or skimmed every reading, about 850 pages of scholarly work, and several dozen additional articles that were discarded as not fitting my grand plan for each class. I know when papers will be due, and even have a list of potential topics. Only one day, our final discussion, may need a little something extra, if I judge that additional readings are needed to get my students discussing for the entire two hours.

*Prepare lesson plan for the first day of class. Check. There is of course the obvious: Introducing myself to the class, having the students introduce themselves to me and each other, and reviewing the syllabus, These are all necessary, but I don't like limiting the first day of class to such administrative tasks. The first day of class sets the tone. In undergraduate courses, this means they need to break out their notebooks and preferably their minds at some point. In a graduate seminar, this means discussion of some sort. My advisor, experienced in the ways of graduate seminars, provided the topic: A discussion of discussions. Everyone knows what makes a good discussion and what makes a bad discussion, but it's helpful to spell it out that first day and come up with class tactics for halting bad discussions.

*Dress like a professor. Or perhaps not like a professor. Most professors are distinguishable from students only by age - it was in a seminar much like the one I'm teaching that I first realized that my professor and I wore the same sneakers. I am not distinguishable from my students by age, and will have to rely on wardrobe. A suit or even dress pants seems overkill, as these are typically reserved for job interviews, but jeans are certainly out. I rely on the button-down shirt and black slacks to convey the right impression.

And then it's just a matter of killing time until class starts. Preferably by, say, getting hired, finding my office, and all those minor details.

One Last Vacation Before the Storm

Next week the teaching begins, and my schedule will lose a great deal of its flexibility. The day-to-day "wake when I want, work at whatever time of day seems best" flexibility will remain, but the broader flexibility of escaping for long weekends as needed will be gone. I'll be teaching a Tuesday/Thursday class, and suddenly a short weekend is the best I can do. Cancelling class is acceptable for the conference I will be attending, but not, say, to visit family or just get away from grad school.

So Labor Day weekend became my last escape, five days to relax and recharge before the semester begins in earnest. It was a truly American vacation, consisting of sleeping until noon, staying up late watching movies with my sister and brother-in-law, and fitting in some quality bonding time with my two-month-old nephew (whose idea of bonding is finding new and interesting places to spit up on me, then smiling as evolutionary survival mechanisms kick in).

Now, of course, the post-vacation stress begins to kick in as I attempt to finalize 8 weeks of readings in just seven days, on top of all my usual dissertation and mentoring work. The replenished energy stores should last just long enough - and then I'll actually be teaching. If only they weren't graduate students, and I could convince them to call me "Prof" on a regular basis.

One Enthusiastic Student

I have not received the official hiring paperwork for my adjunct professor job, or heard much from the department chair, or finalized the syllabus, but at least one of my students is excited about the course. Just as I was realizing that the course would start in three weeks, and perhaps I should get back to work on my preparations, I received an email, and a chance to make someone's day.

Someone who was not required to was interested in taking my seminar. She was a non-traditional student, not enrolled in the department but in a related real-world business field, thought this seminar would be an extra piece of professional development. How could I possibly pass up the chance to have a student who volunteered for the class?

Of course, this request also highlighted all the things I do not know about my new job. I do not know how to check the enrollment, to find out how many students I already have. I do not know how large the room for the class is, and how many students it can fit; in fact, I don't know whether we have a classroom assigned at all. I certainly don't know the procedures for providing official instructor approval for a student to enroll. I don't even know which of the two department staff members who have emailed me should be asked about these things.

The enrollment request spurs answers to some of these questions. I have 5 students enrolled, of 7 who expressed interest in my course; my non-traditional volunteer will make 6 or 8, helping to fill a classroom designed for 11. The staff will produce a form for special enrollment. And presumably, someone somewhere is making sure I am officially hired, and will tell me if I need to acquire a faculty ID card. Otherwise, I might just show up the first day of my class with some syllabi, and just get on with teaching.

No-Sweat FCQs

I have only had 3 semesters of FCQs, but the experiences of reading that first set and reading the most recent set seem light-years apart.

With my first FCQs, I avoided opening the envelopes for months, opened it to mediocre scores and one very negative comment, and required a considerable amount of moral support and encouragement to teach again. I still have that negative comment memorized word for word.

With my most recent FCQs, I couldn't bring myself to be worried. I had a moment, toward the end of the semester, thinking that if the FCQs were worse than the last semester, after the training I've had and the work I've put in, I would be incredibly depressed. I haven't thought about it since, and when I learned that FCQs had been returned, I went out of my way to pick them up. I took a careless glance at the scores immediately, in the minute before a meeting.

The scores did not disappoint. It was extremely gratifying to see a row of 5-point-somethings on a 6-point scale. TA's interest and knowledge: 5.9. Instructor overall: 5.7. Use median instead of mean, and both were 6.0.

My teaching portfolio now shows a lovely increase in FCQs, a learning curve that seems (to me) perfectly reasonable in showing that I have improved my teaching skills as part of my graduate training. With any luck, prospective employers will be impressed. And if all else fails, at least I can look forward to teaching the class again in the Spring.

A New Job, and Funding Complications

My advisor has a knack for turning a small triumph into a small headache. It is no doubt a knack shared by advisors everywhere, resulting from the different interests of grad students and faculty.

The triumph: I was offered the adjunct professor position at a nearby university, teaching an introductory graduate seminar. It's my first real job, outside of grad school, and I will be a "professor", for two months at least. Receiving the news was a much-needed motivational boost for my upcoming job search.

The headache: My advisor's reaction was, first "hooray!" (the text of her email responding to the news) and then, within hours, "so, how much do I have to pay you next semester?". It's hard not to interpret this as "how little can I get away with paying you next semester", and that the small salary that comes with the position is to make life easier for her grant, not for me. Unfortunately, I'm having a little trouble convincing her that my tuition waiver is linked to my employment here, not at a university in another city, and the potential loss of the tuition waive to "equalize" my pay with other grad students is setting off a mild panic.

I would like enjoy the thrill and challenge of designing my first real course, and anticipating going to a nearby university and teaching a new group of students. For now, though, thinking about the course is tinged with worry about administrative headaches that should never have existed. Just another reason to be taking off on a week-long vacation to visit family next week.

An In-Person Interview

Time to brush off those long-forgotten interview skills, last used some four (four!) years ago during the grad school application process. Friday afternoon I have an in-person interview at the University of Major City, my final chance to convince someone that I can teach a graduate proseminar while ABD.

I am more excited than nervous. It really helps that there's no pressure: I don't need the job, it would just be a very cool opportunity. And, since I am ABD, I can always shrug off rejection on the grounds that I just don't have that final qualification - although I'm not entirely sure how an extra six months of working on my dissertation is supposed to improve my teaching. So it's really just an excuse to practice my interview skills, and take breaks from research in the next few days to brainstorm ideas for a seminar in my field. What topics should be covered? How should different theoretical perspectives be covered? (My advisor taught the course 12 years ago, and it was entirely theoretically oriented. I don't think I can do that - and finishing the dissertation certainly wouldn't help. But how close can I get?) What topic would I choose for a final paper?

The problem with the interview is that it's going to jolt me out of my careful focus on my dissertation and start me thinking about after the dissertation. I can't even begin looking for jobs yet - they aren't being posted, everyone's still trying to fill the last-minute positions for this fall - and I'm going to start daydreaming about when I have a real job. It might help me get through the next few weeks of intense data collection; it might not.

There Is No "A" in Effort

The one thing I dislike about teaching is dealing with the students who think their grades are lower than they deserve. And it's always a matter of "deserve". So far I've only had one student who came out with a full sense of entitlement, "I don't get D's", but I've had every reason to want to track down whomever coined the phrase "A for effort" and give them a stern talking-to.

I made the mistake of returning final papers on the last day of class, not at the final exam. I wanted to remove a bit of uncertainty from their lives, and let them determine just how much studying they would need to do to get the grade they wanted. Unfortunately, this also gave them time to complain to me about their grades. One student emailed me, explaining that "I do not believe the grade I got in lab reflects how much effort I put into the labs". Another student asked to meet with me because she had some questions about grading, spent 15 minutes listening to me explain her grade, and then asked "But what about all the effort I put into this?". It's all I can do not to bang my head on my desk.

I can see where students' expected relationship between efforts and grades comes from. I don't even entirely blame some cultural movement that's deluding students into believe that working hard is all that matters. Generally speaking, when you put more effort into something, you get a better product, so effort and grades are usually correlated. However. Better does not necessarily mean A-quality. It doesn't matter if a student put 10 hours into a paper; if that paper doesn't meet the standards I laid out for an A, then it doesn't get an A. If it doesn't meet the basic requirements I put into the assignment, it doesn't even get a C.

Dealing with students in these situations is challenging. It requires a great deal of self-control. I do not respond to emails by saying that the grade doesn't reflect your effort because you turned in your final paper late and got hit with that late penalty, that I've already made two exceptions for you and won't make a third, and that I don't care whether you can get an A in the class. I do respond to questions about effort with "I don't care how much effort you put into it", just because the question frustrates me. I carefully explain that grades are based on the assignment that is turned in, and start explaining, again, how that grade was determined.

This has to be the best argument against assigning papers. Even when you think the reading and the grading are fun, the subjective nature of grading invites students to convince you to change the grade.

Acceptable and Unacceptable Excuses

Acceptable reason for emailing an hour before a paper is due and asking for an extension: My roommate OD'd last night, I was the one who found him and called the paramedics, he almost died, he only regained consciousness an hour ago, I have police paperwork to verify. I could have done without some of the graphic details, but I don't expect someone who's just been through an experience like that to have a fully functioning courtesy filter.

Unacceptable reason for asking for an extension to an extension: I have another paper due on the extension deadline and I don't want to have to ask for an extension on that paper too. This is crossing the line between an understandable request due to circumstances beyond your control to the undergradese "please rearrange your life to suit mine".

I'm sorely tempted to institute a "turn in what you've got on the deadline or turn in nothing at all" policy when I actually have control of the class you teach. If I'm going to feel like the bad guy (for not being completely flexible), I might as well be one.

End-of-Semester Personal Tragedies

I of all people know the worst things in your life happen without regard to convenience, or to college schedules. It was during the last week of classes one semester that I received a call from my father telling me that my mother had had a heart attack and was in a coma. I was fortunate in that I was a graduate student, and only had to survive telling my advisor and one other professor. My undergraduate students have to deal with four or five different teachers, hoping that all of them will be reasonable.

Several of my students are having difficult times this semester. I have managed to avoid a deluge of dead grandmothers (or -fathers). I have a student whose son has been diagnosed with a neurological disorder; a student suddenly going in for back surgery; and a student whose great-grandmother had a stroke. All have provided or offered to provide documentation. I certainly have no personal interest in forcing them to do school work during their respective difficulties, or in reading papers written with whatever parts of their brain they can spare. It's frustrating for them, and frustrating for me.

Still, part of me looks at these emails and thinks come on. If you've known since Thursday, why are you writing me the day the paper is due to tell me? Just how close is your relationship with your great-grandmother, anyway, and at what degree of consanguinity do we declare that an excuse is no longer valid? Where is the line between being a mentor and agreeable teacher, and being a pushover?

My First Conference - Teaching Institute

My First Conference is over, after four hectic days of commuting, socializing, eating out - and, of course, attending symposia and a little networking. This week we'll step through some of the highlights of the conference, starting with the pre-conference Teaching Institute.

The teaching institute was first of all interesting from both the teaching and research perspective. The first plenary talk was on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning ("SOTL"), and can be summed as follows: 1) At best, results on teaching methods from a lab setting can only create a hypothesis for classroom teaching, not a definitive guide for practice; 2) Pedagogy research needs to take into account the individual differences of teachers and students, because claims about the evil/effectiveness of PowerPoint and other teaching tools depend entirely on the teacher's teaching style.

The second plenary talk focused on the outcomes of our teaching, pointing out that one of the reasons that public policy makers are so resistant to listening to scientific study (such as in NPR's report about banning phthalates in toys despite scientific evidence that they aren't harmful) is that we aren't teaching science that well. We need to not just teach the facts we learn from science, but how we know, how what we know changes with new evidence, and what we do not know yet. Another talk on this topic pointed out that we often teach using nothing but confirmatory evidence, which is completely contrary to scientific thinking.

Beyond giving me some cachet in my claims to be a dedicated teacher, and ideas for future teaching, it was an excellent introduction to the conference. A tiny fraction of conference attendees were there - only about 170, according to the organizer - and I was able to ease into the crowds, get practice on a poster session, and chat with people. And, the people I spoke with were ridiculously nice and helpful. The round-table leader I ate lunch with started offering suggestions on how I could present myself when applying for jobs, and one poster presenter was willing to talk about teaching at liberal arts colleges and was just incredibly enthusiastic in wishing me well on my upcoming job search and dissertation. Those informal experiences alone would have been worth the extra registration fee.

Seeing Myself Teach

My university offers a teaching certificate - possibly to make you look good on the job market, possibly so you feel that all that effort you put into your teaching was worthwhile - which requires two videotape consultations. A lead TA, trained in the consultation process, comes to your class and videotapes you; then, within 24 hours, you watch a small chunk of the videotape and come up with a teaching "issue" that you can work on. Seeing yourself displayed on the TV, in the unflattering amateur camerawork, is a universally horrifying experience. Choosing to have the tape recorded to DVD for posterity is optional.

After my first videotaping, I didn't even considering getting the DVD. Why in the world would I want a record of that? It was my first semester teaching (my third as a TA, but the first two had involved nothing more intense than answering emails and proctoring exams), I had no idea what I was doing, and at the time half of my life was dedicated to finishing my master's thesis. The consultation was very constructive, but the class itself had not been pretty.

My second videotaping came almost two years later, with two more semesters' experience in teaching that particular lab. The consultation was still constructive - there's always something to work on - but I was more horrified by the sound of my voice (I hate the way it sounds recorded) than by my teaching. And if I succeed in my career plans, and become a full-time teaching professor, then someday I might want a record of what I was like "at the beginning". Not the absolute beginning - I will never regret not getting that first DVD - but with a minimum of experience and the carefree life of a graduate student.

Not that I have any intention of watching the DVD now. It'll be bad enough reading the student FCQs without throwing my own harsh opinion into the mix.

Turning It In Late

Even as a former undergrad myself, I am baffled by the approach some students take to their assignments, and whether they should be turned in on time.

I returned from teaching my lab this afternoon to find that a lab assignment had miraculously appeared on my desk. This assignment had been given back to the students today, and my first thought was that I'd somehow left one on my desk. Then I noticed it wasn't graded, and my office mate confirmed that someone had dropped it off while I was teaching. A week late, without any comment.

What baffles me is not that the student decided to turn it in without even a note, or even that she thought she could turn it in after the graded assignments had been passed back and still get credit. No, what really annoys me is that this student was in today's lab. She didn't even try to talk to me, or ask me if she could turn it in now. She just went down to my office and dropped it off without a word.

I have no idea why this would appear to be a good strategy. If I'm going to refuse to accept it in person, I'm not going to go ahead and read it if it just appears on my desk. I'm not a scary person to talk to; in fact, my "no late assignments" policy has caved several times into "as long as I have it first thing tomorrow morning". (This is the result of a slippery slope: Students have to keep track of three pieces of paper to turn in for each assignment, they keep forgetting one, and if I'm going to let them turn in one piece a day late I might as well let them turn in the entire thing a day late).

Asking permission wouldn't have changed the outcome in this case; I'm not going to accept an assignment turned in after the first lab got their grades back; there's too much potential for cheating. But at least I wouldn't be sitting here in stunned amazement and the audacity and/or idiocy of my student.

How's My Teaching? FCQs

Today my FCQ scores arrived in my department mailbox. Almost exactly one year ago, after a semester teaching the same lab, I looked at the large envelopes with some mixture of anticipation and dread, and chose to stick them on my office bookshelf to go unexamined for some four months. This time, I rushed to my office to open the envelope.

It's not that I expected vast improvements in my scores, although I could certainly hope for them on the grounds that I had been more experienced, and had spent more time designing each section. It's more that the entire teaching experience had been more positive this time around. I was the senior TA, helping out a new grad student who hadn't even taught before; comps had its downsides, but my overall stress levels were definitely far less without a grant proposal to help with and a Master's thesis to complete; and teaching was something I knew I wanted to do, instead of something I should be trying. It would have been terrible to find that my FCQs were the same, of course (they weren't likely to get worse - that would require active dislike on the part of the students), but I'm feeling very optimistic about teaching this class for a third time, and would remain hopeful.

Fortunately, the scores are all a great deal better. Still near or slightly below department average, but a full point better on the six-point scale. My "instructor overall" rating has improved from 3.4 to 4.5. The score itself might not be much to brag about, but the improvement is. I could obsess over sampling size (only 13 of 22 students returned FCQs, and I only had one section instead of two), or I could focus on research showing that the best predictor of FCQ scores is whether your students like you as a person and would be willing to go on a long car drive with you. I don't really care either way. This has been the best possible start to my day.

Why Research Professors Need to be Able to Teach

I have reached the point as a teacher that it is sometimes painful to be a student. Not because of any requirements of the class, but because some of the professors assigned to teach graduate courses are so clearly the stereotypical brilliant scientist who can't present to save a life.

One of the professors co-teaching my only class this semester clearly falls into this category. After slowly and awkwardly dispensing with the typical course announcements, he began his lecture with a long, sometimes convoluted story about the importance of Galileo's discovery of moons orbiting Jupiter. Registration to this course may be offered through five different departments, but not one of them has anything to do with astronomy. It wasn't until we moved on to the history of understanding the function of the heart (and in case you hadn't guessed, none of the departments has any interest in anatomy, either) that he finally managed a clear statement of the point, which is that humans use metaphors to understand complex ideas. At this point, about half my attention was devoted to wondering at what point in the lecture his apparent need to cling to the whiteboard shelf for support would result in the destruction of the dry-erase artwork behind him.

What seems so terrible about this is that it isn't just teaching. In fact, most of my teaching skills have been built by my advisor's insistence on decent presentations of our research in our lab meetings, defenses, and annual department presentations. Make sure they know the point you're going to make. Repeat the point so often even those dozing in the back of the room might pick it up. Explain how every piece of data you're throwing on the screen supports that point, and explain it explicitly. Professors at an R-I like my school are research scientists first, teachers only to keep the graduate students occupied, but by dint of research presentations you'd think they could pull together a decent lecture on automatic.

In this case, I distinctly remember being impressed by this professor's research presentation a year ago. In retrospect, however, I was no doubt impressed by the research despite the presentation, not because of it. This professor has a "cool" or "sexy" research topic, and he had cool toys with him to show off as demonstrations of that research. He can impress people with his research just by the nature of his research; he doesn't have to "sell" the importance or convince people that it's interesting. While he has obviously chosen a great field to be involved in, it has done him absolutely no good in terms of his presenting skills. Sooner or later, he's going to need to sell his research, and he won't be able to. It's not just for the students' sake that research professors should still be decent teachers, it's for the professors' sake as well.

Meanwhile, I will attempt not to wince in sympathy or zone out staring at birds outside the window while he lectures.

(And he never quite leaned back far enough to smudge the dry-erase artwork. It was actually quite fancy doodling, so I doubt it will have been erased in the past 48 hours. If it's still there, I might have to start taking mental bets on how long it lasts).

Yet Another First Day of Class

The final revisions (corrections of typos, revisions to awkward sentences, a handful of additional sentences explaining things in more detail) to my journal article have been sent. Seeing the official status of "Accept Pending Minor Revisions" did not make this any less of a stressful process; I'm still waiting for the editor to change her mind.

As of the first day of classes, I seem to be in pretty good shape for the coming semester. I have all the areas of research covered: old data to present (two different pieces of my master's thesis, at a conference in April), relatively new data to ponder (one set of data for me, one set for my honors student), impending data (an experiment that will begin in two weeks), and, assuming my advisor finds the comps revisions satisfactory, new studies to design for a dissertation proposal.

I could do with less of this work being focused on March and April, but obviously there has to be some trade-off to the semester system. I get an easy three weeks in December/January, to make up for the stress that comes with the end of the school year. It seems a fair trade now - we'll just have to see whether it still seems fair in April.