the universe really just likes to mess with your mind sometimes

I was at a holiday party just before Christmas where a number of colleagues were guests and I met several faculty I had yet to meet. I'm having a lovely conversation with a grumpy old English professor (not really grumpy but I'm pretty sure he'd be pleased if people viewed him that way) about my sweater (the silk garden tie-dye number for those who have seen it) and trading pedigrees as academics are wont to do when he looks at me and asks "Do you want to go on the trip?"

I of course stared at him blankly in reaction to this complete non-sequitur and then proceeded to give many looks suggesting that he should continue since I hadn't the foggiest clue on what he was talking about (I'm sure the lacking a clue bit dominated most of the looks). Well it turns out that this guy has a grant from NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) to take faculty from our little college on trips. They go once a year and each trip starts out with a seminar series at Cambridge (including as many Nobel prize winners as they can dig up apparently -Hawkings has participated) and then traveling with the seminar speakers to two other locations. This year the trip will include Vienna so that we can go to the opera and ballet and then Prague just because it sounded like it would be fun (his words). Apparently nearly everyone else in the room at the time knew about it since they were primarily in the humanities (and have right of first refusal for these trips), but every year they grab a few folks from other disciplines to round out the group. The guy in charge loves nothing better than to find unsuspecting new faculty who seem like they might be fun and to invite them to come along. That would appear to be me this year.

The grant pays for everything during the two weeks except for souvenirs and he just followed up his invite with an unofficial, once-all-of-the-humanities-folks- are-signed-up-and-it-isn't-unseemly-to-invite-the-outsiders-I'll-get-the-formal-invite, written invitation to go on the trip.

Holy shit! Karma just can't possibly explain this one...

the end of the semester

Phew. It's nearly over.

I have a couple of marathon days of grading and then I'm done. I know students think that studying sucks, well grading sucks eggs big time.

Not only is it the least enjoyable part of teaching but it can be downright painful when a student you like does poorly.

There are always bright spots in a black humor sort of fashion. I am still amused by the fact that a student showed up to take my exam that I didn't know. Now, I sometimes mix up the names of a couple of my students but I know them all by the end of the semester. This kid had literally skipped all but the first couple of weeks of class including the three semester exams and all of the weekly quizzes and homework assignments. He could have qualified for a WF which is an automatic withdrawal (but failing) for which students who disappear before a certain date qualify but he disqualified himself by showing up for the final. I haven't graded it but it would be really sad if he does well on it and fails anyway.

That's not what was funny about the interaction though (perhaps obvious given that it is rather sad). What's funny is that he walks in and says that he is there to take the final. I ask him for which class. He gives me the call number for my class (at intro. and non-majors levels we have up to eight lecture sections for a given call number) so I ask him who his professor is. He tells me that it's me and so I ask if he's been in my class during the semester. He tells me that he's been in and out (yeah, right). Ultimately I have to ask his name. Amazingly enough I remember his name from the list of students who vanished so I gave him an exam. This is probably a situation where you had to be there but seriously, it was the most surreal exchange I've had in a while with a student.

Can you imagine the balls this kid has? He hasn't shown up for months and then pops in to take the final. Apparently this happens regularly here and so all of the faculty had a good laugh over how far I took my questions. Apparently they are all in the habit of handing out exams to anyone who walks in for finals and then they check to make sure the name isn't that of a student that they know.

my week

I've had one of the more interesting weeks of my life.

Many of you know I was offered a position at Dixie State College of Utah (name will be changing in the next few years for those confused by the Dixie bit, we'll be the Univ. of Utah, St. George). What some of you don't know is that while they tried to offer me a tenure track position without interviewing me, they found out that it was sorta against all of the rules. So instead I've been working on a one year contract with the promise that they would do a formal search. First the search was supposed to happen within weeks of my moving out to Utah but that didn't happen. Then it was supposed to happen in early fall and they even did an entirely new search for that one. Of course, faculty being who they are, the process of going through the applications took months longer than they had planned and so I finally got to interview for my job this past Thursday.

Maybe I'm letting my ego get carried away but I wasn't too worried about being offered the job based on the fact that they had already tried to give it to me (and everyone was being excessively supportive and encouraging about my chances of getting it with the formal review process). What I was REALLY nervous about was making all of these lovely supportive folks who had been reassuring me that they wanted to keep me around, regret it. I really am a fairly decent teacher most of the time (and a really excellent one sometimes) and I wanted my talk to reflect that. So I put a ton of pressure on myself to try and do a really nice and polished talk as part of the interview to the point that I was making tiny little changes the morning of my interview as I was practicing.

Here is where everything goes south of course. I normally allow my students access to my lecture slides before class so that they can print them out and bring them to class if they have a hard time concentrating while taking notes, so I printed out the final version of my talk to hand out to the audience. What I didn't do was save that final version to my thumbdrive. Yup, that's right. I opened up my talk and hit the second slide only to find that the heading wasn't quite right.

There wasn't anything incorrect in the talk, it's just that the final version was a little bit smoother and less prone to repeating information than the slides I was projecting. Oh yeah, and the slides I had up didn't match the handouts of course. The talk went fine aside from the minor differences (literally just a title on one or two slides and a rearrangement of topics for another two slides) and the fact that I went a bit over the alloted time. Everyone was very complimentary about it but I spent the entire afternoon kicking myself over the mistake with the files.

I was so ticked off with myself that my stomach even hurt. I got home that night and realized I hadn't eaten all day but couldn't eat anything even though I heated up some soup. So I went to bed in the hopes that it would all get better with a little sleep. I woke up at 2am with a raging fever and it turns out that my stomach pains were because I went and caught a stomach flu that Marius had had earlier in the week. It's the sort of flu where you feel intermittently fine and crappy but you feel like you need to die if you eat anything. As a weight-loss diet it's highly effective; I've lost five pounds in 36 hours. For everything else (like being alive) it sucks.

Of course last night an interested third party got the low down on the job and called to find out if I had gotten the call yet and I could really only muster an "oh good" upon hearing the good news. I'm sure it was highly gratifying for her, poor woman.