- You could have stayed in bed all day and gotten more accomplished than you actually did.
- You are a computer scientist---someone who works with computers for a living---and can't figure out how to program a seemingly simple thing on your computer.
- You have an encounter that makes you (a) seriously question your department's dedication to properly mentoring you and (b) seriously question whether you have a snowball's chance in hell of getting tenure at your institution.
- You have an infuriating encounter with a student that makes you question whether the encounter would have gone much differently, and whether the student would have treated you much differently (more respectfully), if you were male. (You suspect the answer is yes.)
- Your favorite coffee shop is out of cupcakes.
- You are supposed to meet friends for coffee, but your signals get crossed and you don't end up meeting after all.
What made the day slightly bearable:
- Deciding to give up on work and just go ahead and rearrange my office this afternoon. It didn't completely take my mind off of the crappy stuff, but at least it calmed me down a bit.
- Deciding to stay at the coffee shop and get some reading done. I got some good ideas for new assignments in one of my classes as a result, and some ideas of how to present some upcoming topics.
- A good workout.
- Hanging out with Baby Jane and Mr. Jane after work, and watching Baby Jane *almost* take a step. (!!!)
I sincerely hope tomorrow is a better day.
Education & Careers
Comments
Tell me about the I.T. skills fading. I haven't done any flash development in long time. And now I find ActionScript has been upgraded to 2.0. Just trying to implement a menu bar is driving me nuts.
Posted by: Tony P | March 26, 2008 1:10 AM
umm... tony? It's been at 3.0 for about a 6 months now...
Posted by: peter | March 26, 2008 1:56 AM
I also hope tomorrow is better for you. I'm so sorry to hear the departmental angst continues, but am pleased you found ways to cope. Oh, and (!!!), indeed, for Baby Jane!
Posted by: Katie | March 26, 2008 2:10 AM
Sorry to hear about your shitty yesterday.
Can you provide details of these situations?
Posted by: PhysioProf | March 26, 2008 3:12 PM
Sorry for the bummer day... but I'm glad Baby Jane is making up for it!
Posted by: ScienceMama | March 26, 2008 4:01 PM
physioprof, the two are actually related. I'll try to be brief, but the gist of what happened is that I had an assignment that did not go well---there were some issues that I didn't anticipate, and the students ended up doing way more work than I intended, for a negligible payoff. Big, big oops. I did a lot of damage control, I took responsibility, we had a most excellent class discussion about it, I got really excellent suggestions from the students about changes I could make to the assignment next time, I made sure that they knoew I was listening to them and *hearing* them and that I would take their feedback very seriously, they seemed to get that---everything was hunky-dory. Except apparently there is a (vocal) minority of students who just cannot let go of the fact that I made a mistake, even well after the fact. One mistake. One of these students confronted me in a, shall we say, not very nice way. I handled it as best I could. Now, in a normal department, I would have headed straight to the nearest senior faculty/mentor's office and said "here's what happened, here's what I did, now what did I do right and what could I improve next time?" Except that past experience with my "mentors" has shown me that the best I will get is "well, you didn't handle that very well" or "gee, I don't know", full stop, and that I will somehow get dinged for this later because I didn't know how to handle the situation. I don't know, I just feel like I have to figure all this out on my own, which, fine, but if I ask *directly* for help and if it's clear that I'm making the effort to help myself before I ask for help, well, then I don't understand why I'm not getting the help/mentoring I need. It's frustrating, because this kind of thing (not getting mentoring from my department) plays out over and over again, and I don't know how I can possibly be more explicit about what I need.
Hmm, I guess that wasn't very brief, was it?
Posted by: Jane | March 26, 2008 9:21 PM
Hope tomorrow goes better.
Posted by: ScienceWoman | March 26, 2008 10:46 PM