Research Drudgery - Programming

When the professor who built an entire program to better suit his research needs says something "shouldn't be too difficult" to program, I can expect to spend several days on the task. It took me an hour and a half yesterday just to figure out how to make an array and a repeat command in the environment we're using (not the one he built, or I'd make him do it), and who knows how long it will take me today to figure out why the program isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing. And this was just the preliminary step to finishing the third part of the experiment; I haven't even started programming that.

I actually like programming, most of the time - it's fun to solve problems and conquer logic. It's just that this experiment has been in the programming stages for the entire semester, due to the scarcity of programming computers (a Windows-only programming environment in a Mac-only department - whose bright idea was that?). It is the hindrance to me feeling that this semester has been a productive success. I now have two days, before I take off for Thanksgiving break (we get the whole week off), to try and finish programming in hopes of getting some data before the end of the semester. Back to the sub-basement for me...

Trade-Offs on Time: Quantity vs. Flexibility

Whenever I feel overwhelmed with the amount of work I have to do, and begin to wonder why I'm in graduate school and if it's all worth it, I try to remind myself of some of the beneficial trade-offs that come with all that work.

A few weeks ago, in the throes of comps writing, I ran into an undergrad RA at Panera Bread. She was there on a date with her husband (yes, even the undergrads are getting married); I was there as an intermediate step between the public library and Borders Cafe. The undergrad, who is considering going to graduate school at some point, was put off by the seemingly never-ending stream of work we graduate students seem to do. And I can certainly understand that impression; it was a Saturday evening, and I'd done nothing that day but work, would do nothing that weekend but work. During the school year, when research requirements are met with teaching, classes, and an amazing quantity of colloquiua, I easily work 40 hours a week; some weeks, I easily top 60.

On the other hand, there is flexibility here too that often makes it seem worthwhile. Today the weather is an unseasonal 74 degrees - in the middle of November, we're talking record highs. In a "real" job, working 9-to-5, I wouldn't be set free from work until the sun was almost setting and the chill was rapidly returning. As a graduate student, I abruptly decided to take advantage of this weather in the middle of the day, embarking on a leisurely walk to the pedestrian mall downtown to shop for a birthday present. It took a bit over an hour, and it was not my lunch break. I don't know of a "real" job that would allow me to disappear for an hour in the middle of the afternoon because I felt like enjoying the unseasonal weather.

I'm not sure this freedom always makes up for the times when I work non-stop for an entire week. I've never counted the number of weekend days I work or the number of weekdays I slack off. At the moment, however, right after a brief sojourn in the sun, that freedom to decide when I work feels like it completely makes up for the excessive amounts I work.

Comps Writing is Done, Only Defense Left

Three days of non-stop comps revisions later, and I have sent the final no-more-revisions allowed version of my comps paper to my committee. The full paper (including title page and references) weighs in at 51 pages, 14,010 words; the text itself is 34 pages, 10,386 words. I never needed to worry about making the official 10,000 minimum, although I still can't believe that my advisor gave me enough comments to add 1,500 words to an already long paper.

I got a little obsessive toward the end. It turns out that 34 pages takes a long time to scan through checking for typos, and then I needlessly fretted over the formatting of my references section (like my committee cares). This is considerably more vetting than I gave to my master's thesis. It may just be a deep psychological need for stylistic perfection, since this is my one Achievement for 2008 (there might be two, if a paper in its second round of submissions gets accepted, but I'm not holding my breath).

The downside to all this is, I can't quite celebrate yet. I can't say I'm "done", because I haven't "passed". That will be determined three weeks from now, in an oral defense. Which means that as soon as my brain is recovered, I get to start putting together the presentation and re-reading critical papers for any questions my committee asks to test my fitness for Ph.D. aspirations.

And, getting the final paper in on Friday (instead of Monday) doesn't mean that I get to recover over the weekend - it means I get to do all the work I was going to do over the past three days, and didn't. But my brain feels only slightly more functional than after the marathon weekend draft-finishing session, so all that work gets to wait a few hours while I surf the net, eat, and try not to involve anything that requires conscious thought.

Not Quite "Done"

The good news is, my advisor told me it would be okay if I sent the final version of my comps paper to the committee by next Monday instead of by this Thursday. The bad news is - you guessed it - that I need an extension from Thursday to Monday to deal with all the comments and revisions. Or I might not; I sat down to work on this at 5:30 last night, after an early dinner, and got up from it at 11:30. So that took care of the one huge comment (tell the story earlier and keep referring back to it as you introduce each new section) and most of the little "cite something here", "move this point", "explain this study better" comments.

I know, I know: It's making it a better and stronger paper, it's better to do these things now instead of having them come up in the defense proper, it'll put my paper into the proper word count, etc., etc. It's not like I would have had any idea what to do with the work-free weekend I was looking at.I just am really ready for this to be done.

Then I can start working on putting together a formal presentation for the oral defense. That's going to be a fun Thanksgiving holiday.

To TA or Not to TA

The current and recent economic situation, and specifically the funding climate of the past few years, is starting to put a pinch on my advisor, and thus on her four graduate students and professional research assistant. We are the in the hellish process of attempting to renew her main grant, which has been going on for over a year now. Naturally, they decided to shift from "3 rounds of submissions, and expect to go through all 3" to "2 rounds, and you'd better hope you make it in 1" just as we got back the reviews on round 2. So I was a bit thrown off by my advisor saying it might be better for me to RA than TA next semester. How exactly does that work?

It turns out this is just my advisor's attempt to be equitable across graduate students. It's very likely that this would be the last semester she can put us all on RA-ships, so if I want to have a semester I don't teach for the remainder of my graduate career, this might be it. I explained that I would much rather have all that money set aside for summer, when TA-ships are few and not enough to keep you out of debt. Besides, the department is woefully short of TAs once again.

I'm not concerned if I'm the only of her graduate students teaching; it was a frustrating pain in the neck the first time, when the grant proposal was being thrown together at the exact same time I was throwing together a lab course, but I've since achieved some level of balance. Often I feel like I need teaching requirements, to give me something to do besides the frustrating and sometimes pointless research. Of course, all this positive feeling might not do me any good if I'm assigned to teach stats. At least next semester is relatively light in the formal requirements...

InaDWriMo

I am amused that just as InaDWriMo starts, I have run out of things to write.

The comps paper, although giving me a taste of exactly how hard it is to throw together 50,000 words (coming in at ~8,500, but definitely something like 25,500 if you count all the words that got deleted and/or rewritten), is done. The hellish tyring-to-get-something-published paper (which had a cap of 3,000 words anyway) was submitted months ago and is still under review. The related hellish trying-to-badger-collaborators-into-writing-correction paper has been languishing in my advisor's inbox for just as many months, and is unlikely to return to me before the Thanksgiving break. My honors thesis student finished her Intro/Methods draft and lab presentation in October, and doesn't need to be writing anything else right now. The only other research worth mentioning has been submitted as abstracts to a conference, but even if I hear back from them I won't be in a position to create the posters themselves until January. There is just no research to write.

What I do have, is a 7-9 page paper for my completely-unrelated minor class due sometime this weekend, and two reviews for a grant competition to read (with a one-page writeup review for each). That's it. I might be doing a great many things this November, but writing won't be one of them.

Whose Schedule Do You Cater To?

I never want to have to schedule a committee meeting again. It's been seven months, and I'd forgotten the horror and the headache. I started optimistically thinking that somewhere in a 2-week time slot a full month from now there would be a reasonable time. This was foolish.

Advisor only wants noon-4pm. Member1 shot down Wednesdays and one Monday and Tuesday, and has scattered availability everywhere else. Member2 gave me all day Thursday and one Wednesday and Friday morning. There is one tiny hour of overlap, and Member1 had specified "ONLY if that is the only possibility".

I started with Member2, because she gave me the least flexibility. She was unswayed by my pleading and had no further time to offer. Then I had to weight the options: who do I ask to bend? My advisor, the nurturing-if-currently-absentee mentor of the past three and a half years, and deserves? Or Member2, the most experienced with my topic and the one I know least and am somewhat intimidated by?

My advisor, of course. Partly because she said she could try to be available earlier, and I pointed out that I just wanted to give Member2 some alternative, but mostly because I have taxed myself far too much getting this draft ready too stress about this scheduling option, and the advisor is the less-stress option.

It Is Done

Alright, not quite "done". There is always the chance that my advisor will get back to me with comments, and there was enough new writing in a 12-hour revision session that I'll have to go back looking for typos and inexplicably nonsensical sentences. But if someone told me I had to give my comps to my committee today, I could do so without hesitation, regrets, or concerns. It is what it is, and if that's not good enough I don't even want to be here anymore.

Revisions cut out 1 page (209 words) and 9 references. If anyone on my committee is actually anal enough to complain about being 1,137 words short of the official length guidelines, I shall volunteer to do a global find and replace three letter acronyms are returned to their full, spelled-out glory. After all, I don't have to read the thing.

But the hard part isn't over yet. It's not the defending that worries me, it's the scheduling. I'm still waiting to hear back from one committee member, and I half expect her availability to be "any time before 3pm", because the intersection of availability for the first two is "3-4 pm (three days a week)". Not that I really mind having my defense constrained to one hour on the grounds of my committee's ridiculous offerings of availability, but I have nightmare visions of not defending until January, when I've forgotten everything I've struggled to put together.

If I sound somewhat incoherent, it's because my brain gelled sometime around hour 6 of revisions on Saturday, and is still in the process of resuming normal form. I'm really starting to buy that brain-as-Jello image.

No More Reading

The rough draft is complete. As of 10:48 p.m. last night, my comps paper checked in at 9,072 words and just shy of 30 complete pages. And that's without the 112-item reference section.

Now, nine separate sections of thought written over five months need to be read together, as a sanity check before seeking advisor's approval, and to figure out what on earth the conclusion is (what? was I supposed to actually remember everything I wrote over so many months and be able to tie it together?). I do not know and do not care if these efforts bring the paper to the magic 10,000 limit, or if the word count shrinks as a I strike all the wishy-washy "may", "could", and "possibly" text.

I'm not entirely sure I want to send this to my advisor. Then I might have to read and write some more. I'd rather send it to my entire committee as a fait accompli. Here it is, as good as it gets, and judge based on that. Perhaps I'll feel differently by the time I get comments back, but no guarantees.

Grad Student Budget

Surviving on a graduate student budget has mixed success. I considered being upset with myself when I saw that I'd already spent my entire October paycheck with a week left to go, and then I had Quicken pull up a report of what I spent money on. Oh yeah - a $400 plane ticket home for Christmas. It was purchased in September, but got pushed forward to the October calculations because September already had a $300 plane ticket for Thanksgiving. That ticket was purchased in August, but August already had health insurance and a plane ticket for my grandmother's memorial service.

November will have my brown belt test (hopefully). December will have my annual dental cleaning and X-rays, no doubt with a conversation with my dentist about how I came in to find cavities, but not to fix them at $250+ apiece. January is another health insurance premium (why, when it doesn't cover dentists or optometrists? Because the University requires it). February will be new glasses (1 prescription out of date) and sunglasses (2 or 3 prescriptions out of date, and functionally useless). I haven't gotten out as far as March, but I'm sure something expensive will come up - and it won't be Spring Break.

Throw in the fact that I'm currently overpaying my taxes (payroll adjustments for the August overpay are after-taxes, so I'm paying taxes on that income twice until I get my annual refund), and it's completely understandable that I'm dipping $50 into savings this month. Heck, the fact that this is the only month I've gone over, and should be the last one (as long as I keep the find-not-fix dental rule in place), means I should be congratulating myself. I haven't gone grandiose, I just don't intend to sit in my office and work on holidays, or let my health deteriorate. At least I am not in the ranks of college students applying for food stamps. I can still splurge a little on my organic Honey Crisp apples.

The Future

I didn't go to grad school so I could use the degree; I went to grad school so I could get the degree. It wasn't an attempt to lay the foundations of a career, although that was certainly a possibility; it was because it was a challenge and the topics were interesting and I had nothing else pressing to do. I refuse to be trapped by my education. If I decide I want to write children's books, become a police officer, join the peace corps, learn carpentry, start my own dojo, teach kindergarten, work for a non-profit, or run for political office, it is not a "waste" of or disservice to my education. Doing something just because it makes use of my PhD would be a waste of or disservice to my life. I can only assume that anyone who says otherwise stayed on a lifelong path set by a decision made in college and thinks everyone should suffer the same fate.

Real Life vs. Research

For the most part, my real life doesn't interfere with my research - there isn't all that much of it, really; I read, I take pictures, I workout. Recently, as my "workout" karate has progressed closer and closer to black belt (a much more achievable goal than the PhD, since I started karate and grad school at the same time), the risk of injury has increased.

First I sprained my finger. It sounds like a completely ridiculous injury, which it is, but it's been 7 weeks now and it still hasn't healed. The doctor's estimate was six to twelve...months. Fortunately, I only had one week where typing was problematic, so it's more a minor annoyance than a real hindrance to research progress.

Yesterday, I banged up my knee. Karate again - the same person's shin making unfortunate contact with a fleshy part of my anatomy, actually. The knee joint is fine, but a specific portion of my right quadricep is bruised, swollen, refusing to assist in extending my knee, and otherwise whining.

Naturally, this occurred the morning of the day I was going to spend the afternoon on campus programming, and instead wound up spending the afternoon in bed communing with an ice pack. Naturally, this occurred the day before I have three hour-long events back-to-back in completely different buildings on campus, one of which is a teaching presentation to the graduate teacher program that my faculty mentor (not the same person as my advisor) will be evaluating. The facts that I volunteered to do the talk and have it evaluated are not helping, and are in fact making it worse.

I see workouts as a vital means of combating a sedentary research lifestyle, relieving stress associated with comps and the rest of graduate school, and feeling like I do something with my life that doesn't involve staring at a computer. I'm holding on to the belief, completely unfounded (it's not my area of research), that the long-term benefits of my more active lifestyle are worth the short-term costs of injuries that impair my research progress. All the same, I think I should write off any productivity for the rest of the day following a karate workout.

Halfway

The comps wordcount passed the halfway mark at approximately 9:15 p.m. last night. This is the point where I finished refining a paragraph from disjointed notes into a coherent statement, and Word told me that my cursor came after 5,063 words. The cursor was sitting just over halfway down the 17th double-spaced page.

No, I am not going to force myself to get to 10,000 words, the lower limit of the "expected length" range we were given. I am going to make the points I need to make, citing as many of the 116 journal articles on my reading list as I can. My advisor's inevitable requests for clarification may put me into the proper range, of course, but I prefer to keep to concise statements rather than try to make an arbitrary word count.

The most frustrating thing about a theory paper is that I have no idea whether any of what I'm saying is true, or even reasonable. Have I somehow missed huge swathes of the literature, or misread critical points? I try to take comfort in more senior grad students' assurances that I won't be failed as long as I demonstrate some competence in theoretical arguments, but I can't help but cringe at the potential expectation that this be publication-worthy. I have enough confidence that it's accurate to base my dissertation work on it, but not to let anyone who actually knows this field look at it. Wasn't I supposed to be feeling like I had a good grasp on this topic by now?

Meanwhile, the current status of the paper is 5,459 pages, spread across a full 18 pages. Add all the notes I have on sections that are not ready for proper writing yet, and the word count is 7,234. It'd all be in good shape if it didn't have to make convincing sense.

Can You Really Get A's Without Trying?

On the whole, I'm pleased with the student reactions to their first grades. The class average was a C (median C+, mean C-, or something like that), which makes perfect sense to me because "C" means "average" and I don't expect great things out of the first written assignment - that's why there are three of them, to give students room to improve. I'm very conscientious about marginal and summary comments, with the summary comments being an explanation to them and reminder to myself of why they got the grade.

My greatest fear was of the two students who got F's; the one who barely put together a paper said nothing, and the one who plagiarized the entire summary from the journal article e-mailed me to say she was surprised/disappointed but had reviewed everything I highlighted and understood.

There was, of course, the anticipated line of students wanting me to answer questions after class. This was a 50-50 split. Half of them were on the issue of plagiarism; many students had what I accepted as "accidental" plagiarism that was marked and didn't affect the current grade, but would affect later grades (I declared one letter grade deduction for each plagiarised sentence). I reviewed what counted as plagiarism with each of them. The other half were the "I shouldn't have received such a bad grade". I had no problems sitting down with students to explain why their summaries, critiques, or proposed follow-up studies didn't meet the levels spelled out in the rubric they received with the assignment. I was not moved by the "I've never gotten that grade in my life" or "I get A's in my other classes without trying, how can I get a C here when I did try?" arguments.

Can you really get A's in your other classes without trying? Which classes are we talking about here? I have certain expectations of what a junior or senior taking a lab class in their major should be capable of doing. If you got a C, it's because you just barely met those expectations. People who are about to graduate from a respectable institution with a bachelor's degree should understand the difference between a prediction and a finding, not say that researchers "expected" to find something that wasn't a prediction; they should also understand what a paragraph is for and be able to use it properly. Am I the only person in this university who expects that? Are the standards for writing in our field really so low that we accept vague, unclear, uncritical analyses and give them A's because - what? because the classes are so huge in our popular major and TA's so unwilling that stamping anything with an A really makes sense?

I'm forced to wonder if students think they're paying for an education or if they're paying for a good transcript. On one hand, I feel bad because they signed up for a class with the most entertaining (if not that effective) teacher in the department, and got stuck with me in charge of a third of their grade (and lab sessions didn't start until after the drop deadline, either). On the other hand, I don't think my ideas of what these students should be capable of are unrealistic, and certainly don't intend to compromise on the grounds of some vague student-stated standards.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were some general agreement, with supporting examples, of what students are supposed to be capable of producing? If you want to earn a bachelor's degree, you must be capable of this, and it's not just me who will hold you to that standard, it's other people as well.

Naturally, this whole issue comes up two days before I lead a department workshop on grading and less than a week before I present to the general graduate teacher program on incorporating writing into non-English classes. I practice what I preach, but practice doesn't necessarily show that the preaching is correct...

The Sound of Your Advisor's Voice

Is it a good sign or a bad sign when you don't recognize the sound of your advisor's voice?

My advisor made a cameo at the (mandatory for grad students) department colloquium today, newborn in tow and toddler presumably left at the nanny. I didn't notice this before the colloquium began, possibly because she was not yet there to notice; she and her husband have a history of arriving 5-10 minutes late, but I myself was only just in time and was focusing on finding an empty seat rather than documenting attendees. So when questions began, there was a moment of puzzlement: That voice sounds familiar, but I can't quite place it. Even when I turned around, identified my advisor, and tried to make the connection, the voice sounded just a little off. It's only been six weeks or so since she last came to lab meeting, and I don't recall any such oddity when she returned from her first pregnancy. I had no problem identifying her husband's voice, which I'm much less used to, but then that voice is distinctive (read: loud).

The extremes of bad advising would seem to be when you cringe in fear at the sound of your advisor's voice, and when it is completely unfamiliar. This falls somewhere in between, on the side of unfamiliarity. Am I happily independent, or slightly neglected?

Not Plagiarism Again...

I am a very careful grader. I have only 22 students in my one lab section, not all of whom turn in every assignment, so I can afford to be generous with my time. Prior to coordinating with the other lab TA this afternoon (we give the same assignment, and will review the papers together to make sure students neither gave nor received unauthorized help from someone in the other lab), I was just going to read through the papers once, with no pen or intentions of marking anything. I just wanted to get a feel for what the students had said, and sit on that for a while before starting to mess, however slightly, with their GPAs.

My intentions were lost by the second paper. In the very first paragraph - because I foolishly thought it unnecessary to go over such things as "introductory paragraph" - was a sentence that just couldn't be right. I hadn't even read the journal article they were reviewing yet, for this first pass, and yet I knew it couldn't possibly be the students' writing. It was in the vocabulary, the use of acronyms without explaining them, and a certain sinking sensation. The student wrote three pages of "summary" that are more properly described as "blatantly plagiarised recitation of the methods and results, with a bit of introduction and conclusion added for variety".

After my fiasco with plagiarism last year, in which I decided "they're juniors and seniors, they know what plagiarism is and I can just say 'don't do it' ", I spent an entire lab session on research ethics, including a group activity on plagiarism. So far - I've only read through half the papers - it seems that the only person who didn't get the message was someone I'm pretty sure wasn't there that day. I should be encouraged by this; there's just no way to reach students who don't come to class. But all I can think of is that my careful planning changed nothing, because I'm still caught in the web of figuring out what to do.

Last year's plagiarism fiasco resulted in one student completely pissed off because she got a D (the plagiarism wasn't so extensive, and I was impressed enough with her evaluation that I gave her credit for everything but the summary) and one student who got a 0 with an option to rewrite that he didn't take. I am still sitting on the paper, decided how much credit, if any, to give. I'm inclined to do a 0 on principle. I could give some credit (like 20%) for attempting the evaluation, but I can't decide if that's based on any principles or just on not wanting another student confrontation in my office. I'm also trying to decide if perhaps I should buy a six-pack before I actually grade these things.

Mental Preparation for Teaching

Just as I consider doing a bit of my nascent mindfulness practice before going to teach, I see that PhD Comics has its own commentary on the need for mental preparation before teaching. The sad thing is, abandoning hope isn't all that far off from my goals before setting out to teach, mindfulness or no.

The aim is to be in a state where I am no longer personally attached to whether my students enjoy my class, whether they participate or fall asleep, whether I sound like a knowledgable professional or can't avoid saying "uh" and "um" every few sentences. You might say that I'm just getting rid of the stress that makes "what if I do a bad job?" a self-fulfilling prophecy; or you might say I'm abandoning all hope that the class will go well. It's all a matter of perspective.

What Am I Doing With My Weekends?

Recent posts on ScienceWomen about striving to find balance between work and the rest of life dovetail nicely with my own ponderings this past weekend, about what work I had achieved and whether it was sufficient.

My obsessive time-keeping experiment is over, so the weekends are no longer a push to get up to the theoretically correct hours of work done for the week. Instead I try to focus on accomplishments, starting each day with a short list of things to accomplish and trying to manage it despite whatever comes up during business hours. Still, there is a temptation to see weekends as "wasted" time: time that could be spent in the lab coding on computers that are suddenly free from people, or working on comps in chunks of time uninterrupted by visitors, meetings, and incoming email.

Overall, I have no hard concerns about the balance I am achieving in my life. If I am unbalanced, it's in favor of "life" not "work". This comes of having no ambition whatsoever, a "maybe I'll just join the Peace Corps" philosophy to what I'll do after graduation and what I'd do if I left the program. I have no stress over working on weekends because I know I'm spending a decent chunk of my weekdays on things unrelated to my research - either teaching, which my advisor is not going to see as particularly productive, or doing something completely unrelated to graduate school.

So I spent my weekends not working, and feeling like I should because I also spent some of the weekdays not working, which is an entirely different take on "I didn't get enough done this week!". I could just declare my "weekend" to be Thursday and Saturday - the typical days for getting no work done - but I think the five-hours-a-day, five-days-a-week schedule suits both my ability and my will for getting work done.

The only real question is whether I'm productive enough in my focused time slots. Tick tock; the semester's deadlines for data collection and comps defenses are rapidly approaching.

The Enthusiastic Teacher

A fellow TA once suggested I consider the mid-semester check-up. We've gotten this far, now what do you like about the lab, what do you want to see more of, what do you want to see less of? Although this advice is over a year old, I finally implemented it this semester. With any luck, I would get some feel for how the class was going - it's just hard to tell whether silence and the occasional sleepy student are reflections of my teaching or of the general atmosphere immediately before lunch. As an added bonus, hopefully the students would be encouraged by my show of interest in their opinions and progress.

In general the results are about what you expect from an anonymous survey. Actually, as I think about it they must have been relatively good. Everyone in attendance (18/22 students) wrote something. Almost half - 8/18, or 44% - either said nothing needed to change, or left the question blank (which I'm taking as "nothing" in another form). Four people just told me to move the class along faster, five people made specific requests on content and activities, and one person told me to be more enthusiastic.

It's the enthusiasm question that gets me. Everything else is either easy (make some group exercises, no problem) or out of my control (I've made an effort for the readings and topics to be interesting, but I can't guarantee interest for the entire class). It's the enthusiasm I don't know how to change. I received a few similar comments on last year's FCQs - one of my students had no comment other than "smile more!"

I can't say for sure I'm the most enthusiastic TA in my department, because it's huge and I don't see most of them as they teach, but I know I'm somewhere up there. I care about teaching. I asked to teach this semester; I didn't have to, I wanted to. I spend time on my lesson plans, picking topics and readings that I hope will be interesting, planning how to get them involved. If I stay in academia, it will be in a teaching-focused rather than research-focused position. So I know I'm enthusiastic. But how on earth do I convey this to my students?

It's hard to be bubbly and smiling when you're standing in front of 20 pairs of eyes that always seem more jaded or sleepy than bright, trying to figure out what to say next and how to keep their attention. I count myself lucky that I (probably) don't have stricken deer-in-the-headlights look. I'm there; I know what I'm doing is important, I have a point I want to convey, I usually have a specific moment I hope will go well, I devote all my energy to engaging the students in the discussion and making my topic real to them. I even make an effort to make sure I'm smiling. I really have no idea what to do beyond that. All the other things that come to mind that demonstrate enthusiasm, like fast talking, are not conducive to good teaching.

Perhaps this one student is the only of his or her class who thinks that an enthusiastic teacher more like the lecture professor, who jokes non-stop (at the cost of the lecture material, but that's another story). If that's the case, I probably shouldn't obsess over the comment. I've just had assorted mentors tell me about the importance of your students perceive that you actually want to be there, and I'm not sure how to do it.

Where Do Universities Keep Their Money?

The news world may just be determined to help me rethink my position on credit, bailout, etc.

The popular perception is that, with the outrageous pace of rising tuition, universities have more money than they know what to do with, and should spend more of their endowments rather than jacking up tuition beyond inflation every year. I've ignored that argument, for the most part; legislating what universities spend isn't going to take much hold when people are willing to take on such burdens of debt to attend the prestigious places regardless of how little of their endowment they spend.

But where exactly are those endowments? They are obviously not piles of cash in the basement of the administrative building; in fact, they're in a lot of places that seem to be just as affected by the current economic situation as the stock market is. I'm not sure I'm convinced that Wachovia's decision to limit withdrawals from a common college fund is going to do much more fiscally speaking than give assorted payroll & benefits services more than a headache from resource juggling, but in the long run it will be extremely interesting to see the effects on the tuition argument.