jane | September 30, 2008OK, I think I've finally figured out what my schedule looks like for Grace Hopper (with all the logistics going on, you'd think we were trying to move the pope or something) and I have some possible meet-up times. (I was going to email the interested parties, but then I realized that I don't have everyone's email, hence the blog post.) So, here they are:
Possibility #1: Wednesday night at the poster session/opening reception. I can meet after 8-ish if we do this.
Possibility #2: There seems to be a rather large break after lunch on Thursday---well, ok, there's a plenary session, but…
jane | September 24, 2008As I may have mentioned, oh, once or twice or 20 times, I'll be at the Grace Hopper Conference this year. I'm still trying to figure out my schedule and such while there, but I'd love to try and meet up with fellow bloggers and readers, if we could possibly pull such a thing off. So, if you're going and would like to try and meet up, leave a comment! If there's enough interest, I'll do another post where we can figure out times and dates and all that fun stuff.
(and please, keep the comments and thoughts coming on the previous post---great discussion there so far!)
jane | September 23, 2008This year, our department (finally! finally! after years of wheedling/wishing/hoping/pleading) is seriously discussing issues of retention, recruitment, and climate. I'll have much more to say on this later. But for now, I want to focus on an interesting side discussion that's come up:
Should computer science, as a major and a field, be an exclusive club, or be open to all comers?
There is a very real divide among my colleagues on this issue. Those who subscribe to the "exclusive club" mentality, if I understand their arguments correctly, say that computer science is Hard! and…
jane | September 16, 2008Well, so much for the year of being in balance, and so much for keeping my life in control. It's still relatively early in the school year, and I am already completely overwhelmed.
I've been up since 5am today. At one point today, I had 47 unread emails in my Inbox---and I check my email regularly. I spent maybe 10, 15 "quality" minutes with Baby Jane today, and 0 "quality" minutes with Mr. Jane.
Things were actually going along ok for a while. It's just over the past few days or week, maybe, that things have gotten out of control---like the Mack Truck of Too Much Work came barreling in…
jane | September 10, 2008I saw this meme over at Adventures in Ethics and Science: The Vegetarian's Hundred, a veggie-flavored response to the recent Omnivore's Hundred meme. I'm going to play by Janet's rules, which are:
[original] If you want to play along, here's how you do it: copy the list, including my instructions, and bold any items you have eaten and strike out any you would never eat, and then post it to your blog.
[janet's addendum] I'm going to add the following rule: italicize items you have made (or grown) yourself. (Presumably, you've eaten those as well.)
My list is below the fold.
The Vegetarian…
jane | September 8, 2008For reasons that I don't even pretend to understand, Baby Jane has entered an extreme Mommy Attachment phase. Most of the time, she's her normal, independent toddler self. The rest of the time, she apparently feels some strong need to be held by me or to attach herself to my legs or whatever other body part is available. (Or, my personal favorite, to call out for me randomly in the middle of the night. And it usually goes something like "Mooooommmmmy Moooooommmmmmmy MommyMommyMommyMommy...." Good times.) It's gotten so extreme that she actually had a major meltdown tonight when I handed…
jane | September 3, 2008In the past at around this time of year, shamelessly borrowing an idea from Laura at Geeky Mom, I've made resolutions for the new academic year. I've been trying to think about what I want my resolutions to be this year, but I've had a hard time of it.
Maybe it's the stress of the tenure year that's making it hard for me to focus (on anything, really, for that matter). Maybe it's a bit of summer angst---you know, summer is over and I had all these big plans and ideas and how many of them came to fruition? (Actually, quite a few---I'm pretty proud of what I accomplished this summer, work-…
jane | August 28, 2008...I'm playing hooky! I'm declaring not just a work-free weekend day, but a work-free, computer-free, long weekend. With nature and good friends and good food and all that fun stuff.
See you on the flip side, and hope you all have similar enjoyable holiday weekends!
jane | August 27, 2008The most popular question I've been asked lately, on campus, by colleagues: "Is this your tenure year?"
Technically and officially, no, it's not---the clock stopped for a year because of Baby Jane + my sabbatical. So I go up next year.
But in my mind, yes, this is my tenure year.
If you think about it, the year before you go up for tenure is really crunch time. Your teaching is scrutinized. You obsess about student evaluations. You work to get those last articles out for review and that grant proposal submitted, in the hopes that at least some of these will be in press/in print/funded…
jane | August 25, 2008Doesn't that sound scandalous? Sadly, it's not scandalous. But it is pretty darn cool:
I just signed up for free childcare. At a computer science conference, no less.
Yes, of course I'm talking about the Grace Hopper Conference. Continuing their fine tradition of being one of the coolest conferences ever, GHC (as of last year, I think?) now offers childcare. And it's free. Free, available, convenient childcare! Even during the banquet! (Not during the Friday night festivities, I noticed, but other than that, the hours are really good.) What a concept!
This will be my third conference…
jane | August 25, 2008
If I feel like I need to take a day or 2 off, I should just take a day or 2 off, stress-free, and not try to "work through it".
I need a couple of weeks to decompress after all of the end-of-the-year stuff before I can really get down to doing serious work. (A vacation would be a really good idea at this point.)
Having new undergrads start work in my lab during this 2-week cushion (see previous point) is not a good idea, for my mental health or for their education in the ways of undergraduate research.
Baby Jane definitely inherited her mama's love of the water. Yay!
It's a good idea to go…
jane | August 18, 2008I have had two experiences in quick succession that have made me seriously wonder what kind of reading education kids these days are getting.
(Jeez, did I just go over into old geezer territory? I think that's the first time I've used the phrase "kids these days" in a blog post. Next I'll be telling people to get off my lawn...)
(Note: for simplicity in telling the stories, I'm just going to go with "him"/"he" to avoid the whole him/her s/he awkwardness.)
In the first case, a student is helping me get materials ready for one of my classes. This involves setting up a particular piece of…
jane | August 13, 2008Typically, when I want to use a student's work that s/he handed in as an assignment for one of my classes in another context, I email the student to ask for his/her permission. For instance, sometimes I want to use a student's assignment as an example of a particularly well-done assignment, or to illustrate a particular point in lecture, or even just to provide some debugging practice to students. I tend to do this as a courtesy, for sure, but also because frankly, I have no idea what the "rules" are concerning the ownership of student assignments for a course taught by me.
I'm currently…
jane | August 11, 2008...absolutely no worse feeling in the world, than watching your child being loaded into the back of an ambulance.
Baby Jane is just fine now---it was more of a scare than anything else, nothing seriously wrong.
But I can honestly say that I've never felt as scared or as totally helpless as I did then, and I hope to never, ever, ever experience that again as long as I live.
jane | August 6, 2008It never fails. During particularly stressful times, I tend to have nightmares. (In fact, sometimes I don't even really know how stressed I am until I start having recurring nightmares.) They were especially prevalent during my third-year review year, during a hiring mess a while back, and then again this past spring, when I was struggling mightily for some unknown reason. They seem to be back, now that I'm heading into my tenure review year---I've had one almost every night this week.
Oh, joy!
Helpfully, I've discovered that my bad dreams are usually some variation of the following:
The…
jane | August 4, 2008I'm teaching an intermediate-level class in the fall that I've taught a few times before with varying levels of success. I've taught it enough times that it's time to do some tweaking, and I find that I'm faced with a very interesting dilemma. In a nutshell, the dilemma is this: which thing, or things, do I cut to make room for Potentially Very Cool But Untested Module, or should I even incorporate Untested Module in the first place?
For pseudonymity's sake, let's say the course is Ice Cream Construction. The course covers the building blocks of ice cream, the ice cream making process,…
jane | August 4, 2008So. I was gone for a bit. Yeah, the plan was to do a "best of" series of posts from the old blog in my absence: after all, this was something I could easily set up beforehand, and besides, we'd have some Internet access while gone, so I could always post from the road!
As you can see, that didn't happen.
As is typical around here, the days leading up to vacation were busy. Why do work crises always pop up the day or two before one leaves? And packing---oh, how I loathe the packing. Especially now that the airlines seem to be charging for any and all luggage, except car seats and…
jane | July 22, 2008It's been a while since I've done an official Baby Jane update. In fact, I don't think I've done a proper one since I migrated over from the old site! Time flies.
So, what is Baby Jane (now Toddler Jane, I guess) up to these days? Basically, it can be summed up in three areas: Movement, Language Acquisition, and Playtime.
Movement: Baby Jane's been walking for a while now, and has definitely perfected the art. She is a very physical kid. She walks, tries to run, twirls, dances, tiptoes, and climbs. Oh, does she climb. So far, the climbing has been mostly limited to chairs, stairs,…
jane | July 17, 2008Where is my summer?? I thought once July hit and the busyness of June subsided that I'd actually have time to, you know, maybe, relax a bit. Ha! This has been a particularly busy week. The good news is that after today, things do get easier and calmer.
(Of course, playing Guitar Hero for 3 hours last night certainly didn't help matters much either. Good for the soul, yes. Good for the work and sleep schedules, not so much.)
So what have I been up to this week that's keeping me so busy?
After a few weeks of not being able to get to the unreviewed article (ok, so maybe, just maybe, I was…
jane | July 10, 2008I've been doing some on-and-off thinking lately about teaching (summer is a great time for that, away from the pressure of the school year). One of the things I've specifically been thinking about is the idea of "transparency". I'm curious to hear what you, faithful readers, think/do in terms of transparency when you teach.
So, here's today's discussion question, for those of you who teach: How "transparent" are you in your teaching? Do you spell everything out for the students up-front, or do you save the explanations for "why did we just do this" until after the fact, allowing for…