A Day in the Life

Woke up, got out of bed

Ran a comb across my head...

8:40: Leave home, bike to work.

8:50: Arrive at work, stow bike in lab

8:55: Download electronically submitted papers to be graded. Determine which students haven't handed papers in yet.

9:15: Change into teaching clothes, review lecture notes.

(Continued...)

9:35-10:40: Teach class on basics of quantum computing, logic gates, supeerpositions and entanglement.

10:45: Let class go five minutes late. Run to bathroom.

10:50-11:55: Second class, review for Tuesday's exam. Answer questions about right-hand rules, magnetic fields, and Faraday's law.

12:05: Last student leaves.

12:05-12:30: Eat deeply unsatisfying lunch of salad w/o dressing (oil and vinegar being forbidden on the heartburn diet).

12:30-1:15: Colloquium by job candidate.

1:30-2:05: Meet with job candidate, give lab tour.

2:15: Sit down to grade papers, find big pile of email.

2:15-2:30: Deal with trivial email.

2:30-3:00: Deal with email from grants officer about NSF grant renewal. Spend a bunch of time attempting to extract information from FastLane.

3:00-3:15: Research student arrives, spend time discussing poster for DAMOP next week, giving instructions for lab tasks.

3:15-3:30: Discuss revised schedule for job candidate visits with chair.

3:30-4:00: Academic advisee stops by for pre-scheduling discussion for Fall term. Discuss choice of classes, current classes, future plans.

4:00: Research student returns, having discovered Problem in lab. Is sent off to calculate magnitude of Problem.

4:20-4:30: Discuss results of depressing calculation of Problem.

4:30-5:00: Clean up mess from last couple of weeks of labs.

5:00-5:30: Set up lab for Tuesday.

5:30: Belatedly remember bike ride ahead. Change clothes, retrieve bike, head home.

5:50: Arrive home, rescue dog from crate. Realize that absolutely no grading was accomplished.

Some days it's hard to remember that I have the second best job in America...

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For many people, it is the time of the year to put the bikes away. I live in Louisiana, so now is the time to get the bikes out (too hot in the summer). Learning to ride a bike is a curious thing. Most parents use training wheels to get kids started. I do not think this is the best strategy.
Minneapolis is the City of Bikes. There are more bikes here per capita than any other US city, I'm told. Many Japanese cities have more bikes per capita and even less room, so the whole bike parking issue in Japan is pretty severe.
Dan Meyer at dy/dan just posted about teacher-student analogies. His analogy is that the student is like a weight lifter and the teacher is the spotter. I like this.
My friend J sent me a link to this gyrobike (http://www.thegyrobike.com/index.php). From what I can tell, it's a flywheel that you put in the front wheel of a bike. The site claims that this will help kids learn how to ride a bike.

A Homeland Severity drone at LAX warrantlessly shaking down passengers averages $110K/year salary. Munificent federal benefits and pension. Modest criminal and/or drug rap sheet, functionally illiterate, no problem. High school GED fully qualifies you.

Sweat it out with negative cashflow in in college and graduate school, or be monkey boy with a badge and get paid $1.1 million in salary for the same 10 years. How is that for diversity? Welcome to the New World Order.

I dunno...on this so called bad day you get back home by six. I could live like that ;)

You still have job candidates interviewing on May 9???? I thought the job search season ended a month and a half ago....

-Rob

I dunno...on this so called bad day you get back home by six. I could live like that ;)

It wasn't that bad, as days go. I just thought it was a nice example of the way stupid little stuff keeps piling up to keep me from accomplishing anything.

You still have job candidates interviewing on May 9????

It's for a visiting position, and it's a long story (that I won't be telling here, because it's internal department business).

We've got another candidate today, and another one tomorrow.

Forgive me for being a bit picayune, but you've misquoted the Beatles' song "A Day in the Life." The correct lyrics are these:

Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head.

Sorry, but I've been a Beatles fan since 1964.

Forgive me for being a bit picayune, but you've misquoted the Beatles' song "A Day in the Life."

I wasn't sure about that, but I was too lazy to Google the lyrics and check it. Thanks for the correction.

That's all right. My bane is that my head is filled with the complete lyrics to almost every Beatles song - the result of a "misspent youth," I admit. When I was supposed to be studying for my chemistry final, I was listening to Sgt. Pepper. That's probably why I'm an English teacher today instead of a cancer researcher.

By Joseph Smigelski (not verified) on 11 May 2006 #permalink