Time Scales, on Campus and in the Blogosphere

My major "service" activity at work is involvement with the Minerva program, which attempts to blur the line between academic and residential life. I enjoy this because it gives me the opportunity to work closely with students outside a narrow academic context, and I've been very impressed with the creativity and responsibility of the students involved.

Part of the program is also to get faculty involved, and this runs into more problems. The biggest of which is probably a mismatch between the time scales on which students and faculty operate. If you try to get faculty to do something in the house, they often say "Oh, I just did that a little while ago..." where "a little while ago" means "three years ago."

For a faculty member who plans to be around for decades, that's a little while, but for students, three years is a lifetime. A faculty member could give exactly the same presentation every other year, and they would find it boring, but the chances of any given student seeing the presentation twice would be quite small, and the fourth time around would most likely be just as well received as the first.

The same sort of thing happens in blogdom, only faster.

My first reaction to Chris Mooney's post on finding common cause with the religious was something like "Oh, God, this again." It was an effort just to tag it for the daily links dump. There's nothing wrong with the piece, and I basically agree with Chris, but I'm just tired of the topic.

Thinking about it, though, it's been months since the last time I took an active part in one of those discussions. Maybe more like a year-- I don't really know. I just know that I feel like I've said my piece on this a dozen times, and that there's no upside to having the conversation again.

In my mind, it's something that I did just a little while ago. In blog years, though, it was eons ago. There's enough reader turnover in the blogosphere that the majority of people reading this probably aren't as sick of this as I still am. And that's not counting the people who have a bottomless enthusiasm for yelling about the subject.

I have colleagues in other departments who happily teach exactly the same introductory class year after year. They've found what works, and they're perfectly happy to repeat that as many times as needed. I just don't have the temperment for that-- I'm teaching introductory mechanics for the first time in a couple of years, and out of a completely new book, and there are still aspects of it that bore me.

I view those colleagues with the same mix of admiration and bewilderment that I do somebody like Orac, who somehow manages to blog at length about essentially the same idiocy over, and over again. The specific individuals involved change, but the scams are just variations on a theme, and I've heard the theme too many times. I'm glad somebody out there has the energy and enthusiasm for it, because I could never do that.