Catch up time

So we had a lovely holiday. We had three weeks off between semesters which really didn't amount to three weeks of vacation. I spent the first week off in training and the last week prepping for a new course I'm doing this semester but the holiday was still nice.

We spent five days in D.C. with my family but before we left santa had to make a visit. M got me this for Christmas.



Isn't it beautiful? It's much more beautiful in light of the fact that my Mario Batali dutch oven has a big crack in its interior enamel after less than a year of use. It's a shame since I'm always a big fan of less expensive alternatives.

Of the few photos we took during our trip, this one must be my favorite.


My mom. Santa was VERY good to her this year.

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.

Grading entertainment

I have a large number of students in my non-majors class that have been raised in a Creationist or semi-Creationist form of faith and so I make a big deal about evolution.

As a homework assignment I ask them to describe the theory of evolution by natural selection and summarize the evidence supporting it. There is more to it but that is sufficient to enjoy this little quote given as an example of evolution. Try and get past the really poor writing, this really was written by a fairly intelligent student although you wouldn't know it from this assignment. I've added the ellipses to cut out the less entertaining bits.

"...for example two big guerrillas their offsping would probably also be large... if that large of guerillas could either scare off the smaller guerillas [sic] and ensuring that their offspring would also have that advantage. Continuing in this thought experiment, those smaller species of guerillas [sic] by chance find a new environment where their smaller size might help them survive and adaptive radiation would occur and in if the population of guerillas became isolated for a long enough time sympatric (should read allopatric) speciation would occur..."

I just have this image of really fat (or buff) and really petite guerrilla fighters competing for resources, reproducing and evolving to form new species of guerrillas.

And now for something completely different.

In the spirit of Laurie's Drunken Cat Sweater Contest:


This is from I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER, and it's the best I can do given that I would not knit a sweater for my cat (or any other) ever.

why should you care about farm subsidies?

Congress has recently been involved in passing a new farm bill that largely maintained various farm subsidies in spite of violating international law. This seems all very esoteric and we can all get behind the feel good idea of supporting our domestic family farmers but there is another side to it all. You could read Omnivore's Dilemma or just check out these two food pyramids.

For those wondering, I have basically fallen off the face of the planet. I (big surprise here) have completely over committed myself at work and am spending 12-14 hours a day at school.

Have I learned my lesson? Probably not, but if I survive spring semester, I might finally get a clue.

Forget football!

Earlier today we found out that S. Africa will play England in the final game of the Rugby World Cup!!!!

To give you a sense of what this means to S. Africans, here's an ad that was sent to us by a friend in S. Africa. While it isn't really appropriate for children, I suspect children are not reading this blog and that, even if they were, they won't get it. Just to be on the safe side, you'll have to scroll down quite a ways to see it.

Just to prove my point....

I handed back the second exam of the semester to my majors introductory biology class. While some improved from the first exam, at least 50% showed no improvement. Given that their average on the first exam was below a C, it sort of put me into a bit of a depression.

Instructors go through a series of emotions when their students are not doing well. I personally tend to start asking what I could do differently do help them. Then I figure out that I have held review sessions, made suggestions on how to study and how many hours they should expect to study and realize that there isn't much more I can do. At that point most instructors then get frustrated and maybe even a little angry with their students. After we bitch and moan to our colleagues about the situation, we tend to calm down. We accept that students have the right to fail a course and try to develop a more Zen-like attitude about the entire thing (yes, I hate the whole Zen-like thing too, but the phrase works here).

So I got to class last night and explained that I had expected to see higher grades and reiterated what the students will have to do to improve their grades. Instead of the bitching and name calling that I have experienced at other institutions, I saw heads nodding. I had several students come up to me at the end of class and ask for help. I had several others come up to me just to let me know that the exam had opened their eyes and that they would be working harder in the future. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy just remembering it. Life is so much better and teaching is so much more enjoyable when you genuinely like your students.

Please note, do not interpret this to mean I did not like my students at other colleges and universities. Okay, there were some individuals I really didn't like, but they tended to be the exception to the rule.

Exclusive private colleges vs. open admission state colleges

It's interesting, now that I've had some time to observed students in both environments, to note how very different they are.

I really enjoyed teaching at the Claremont Colleges. My colleagues were interesting researchers still focused on student education. The students were bright, worldly, well prepared for college and highly motivated.

Now that I'm at a state college with a largely open admission policy (actually all Utah state schools have to have an open admission policy, we just offer our remedial, make that developmental, classes on campus whereas many send their students to local city colleges for such courses), I have to say that my students are VERY different, however not necessarily in the ways that you would expect.

Obviously my new students are much less well prepared for college and I am regularly amazed at what they think is acceptable college level work. I will get homework assignments that have been written in IM code or even worse, terrible English. I am fairly certain that I have a student or two that may qualify as illiterate but who were not caught by the tests that funnel students into the remedial classes. Despite having a very clear policy about making up exams, students will forget what they have been told (and what is written on their syllabus) and assume I will do what they want. They also fail to listen to directions in class AND fail to read the written instructions for assignments and are then surprised when I take points off of their homework.

That being said, these are some of the hardest working people I have ever met. We have a mix of traditional and non-traditional aged students and they are all likely to have families (this is a very Mormon town after all) and full time jobs in addition to attending school full time. When they don't do well on an exam, they never (okay, rarely) blame their professor but quite willingly admit that they needed to study more. They also like their professors even when they aren't doing well in a class. As a result, while I sometimes want to tear out my hair in frustration over some of the things that they do, I really find my new students to be a breath of fresh air.

Back in California, I had a few students who thought I was wonderful (because they came to me for help outside of class typically) while the rest hated my guts because it wasn't easy to earn an "A" in my class. Here, my students respect me for making them earn their grades.

Granted, I still do have whiners who will never be happy but they are largely in the minority.

The one thing I never expected though, is that school isn't necessarily a priority for many of these students. I guess I can understand when they have families to support but I am still disappointed when students miss class entirely or leave halfway through because of work. It certainly makes it harder for them to succeed, although many fail to understand that.

Even more surprising are their parents' attitudes about their education. Marius actually had a student come to him and ask to be allowed to take a make-up exam. The reason this kid needed to miss the exam was because their parents had booked a holiday and didn't want to drive through Vegas rush hour traffic. Yup, avoiding traffic came before their child's college education. To add insult to injury, the kid's mother emailed Marius to see if she couldn't convince him to change his mind. What a wonderful woman.

Pine Creek

Sadly our camera died when we did Keyhole but we did have the opportunity to finally do Pine Creek this past weekend. A friend took some pictures but unfortunately most of the shots look like these. We weren't in a cave but the slot canyon was so deep that very little light got down there at times. The best part was a 100 foot free rappel where you just lower yourself down without touching anything. Once I figured out that I couldn't die doing it, it was great fun. These photos also prove that I do go on these hikes with Marius despite all prior photographic evidence to the contrary.

Slot canyons

Two weeks ago we got permits to do both Keyhole and Pine Creek in Zion. Keyhole is a short beginner rappelling canyon and a great way to get your feet wet before Pine Creek which is a bit hairier. Although we live in the desert, flash floods were predicted for the afternoon so we had to be satisfied with just Keyhole. This is maybe only a mile or two in length but with a short but steep uphill hike in to the slot and a series of rappels to get through it took us nearly the whole morning.

Here I am on my very first canyon rappel ever. The inner tube is for a friend's eleven year old daughter who came along for the fun.

Confessions

So many of you know that I really like my food and I tend to like it to be high quality. I've been introduced as a tea snob or food snob or [insert your favorite here] snob not infrequently in spite of my protestations. So I figure it's about time to disillusion some of you with a series of confessions.

Until recently I would develop month long cravings for Cheetos. It's only gone now because I think I really overdid it right before the summer.

I still have cravings for fast food burgers with the exception of McDonald's.

I HATE truffles and stinky cheese. I have that "OMG it smells/tastes rotten and I think I'm going to gag" response to those flavors.

I am happy to drink 2-buck chuck and Trader Joe's brand teas (in tea bags even!) but I can't stand poor quality coffee and I have no idea why except that the taste of bad coffee bothers me much more.

I have frozen pizza and t.v. dinners in my freezer as I type.

One of my favorite comfort foods is grilled cheese and not no stinkin' gourmet version either. We're talking Wonder bread and processed yellow cheese here folks. Grilled cheese served with a bowl of condensed cream of tomato soup is like being five again.

Okay, this is getting old and you've probably lost all respect for me so it's time to quit while I'm behind. Hope your week has been more worth writing about than mine.

pseudoscience homework

I asked my students in my non-majors biology class to find examples of pseudoscience and explain why they are pseudoscience as a homework assignment.

This is what I got from one student, verbatim:

"Global warming"

"Recent year's people have witnessed a series of over the top pseudo-scientific methods. Few scientists would dispute the fact that climate is changing on a huge scale. There are good reasons to believe that some of the changing features are not part of a natural variation, but consequences of man made pollution. What many scientist will dispute, is whether this is a on going change. Scientist believe that one, there's an upward change in the atmosphere's mean global temperature. Two, whether the mechanism is responsible for the CO2 fossil fuel combustion. Today climatology is vulnerable to these kinds of faddist dogmas. They are pushed forward to the political and media driven agenda. Because it lacks a functional, broad, orderly and unified understanding of the nonlinear system formed by the atmosphere. The oceans, the land mass and the biosphere, provide inroads towards developing such an understanding. Starting with the sun and the solar radiation in the weather patterns over short and long term scales."

For those uncertain about this, I have no clue as to what they were trying to say here and now that I've met with them to go over it, it's clear they didn't either.

I have great new neighbors

I'm still catching up on posts.

A few weeks ago I lost sight of Sam (our cat) long enough that he left the yard. He didn't come home. That night we had a big thunder storm and I was in a complete panic.

The next morning I reported him missing to all of the local shelters and we posted signs. Our neighbors called to let us know that they had seen him in their yard but that he had left in the direction of home (they didn't know we were neighbors yet as they also just moved in). They very kindly promised to keep an eye out for him and grab him if they did see him.

It rained again that night and the water ruined the signs. We replaced them and got our neighbors hopes up that he had been found. I was spending most free moments walking around our subdivision and a few neighboring ones. I even found a lost dog in the process and met more of our neighbors as well as many of the construction workers working in the area. Everyone I met promised to keep an eye out for Sam.

So he went missing on a Monday. By Wednesday I was losing hope. We figured he must have been eaten by a coyote or something up in the tortoise reserve (not far from our house).

Amazingly enough, on Thursday evening I got a call around 9:30pm. A family that lived up the street from us had gone on a hike in the reserve and had seen Sam!

I surprised them a bit by running up the street to meet them at the gate into the reserve from our subdivision and they explained where they had seen him and that they tried to catch him but he kept running away from them. I started to climb up a cliff to where they had indicated and suddenly I was flooded in light. This lovely family and moved their car into an empty lot where they could shine their brights up on the cliff to help me.

I found him in just fifteen minutes hiding in the rocks within ten feet of a young couple (who seemed awfully relieved to discover that the person running toward them with a flashlight wasn't one of their parents). I managed to grab Sam and walk home with him. Sam, of course, was not thrilled to be leaving the reserve. Apparently it is the equivalent of Disneyland for cats. He cried and fussed the whole way home and, to this day, he still bolts for any open door in the house.

It turns out that the family who found Sam had the same thing happen with one of their cats. Their Rocky stayed in the reserve for three months! I am so glad our ordeal lasted less than a week. I don't know what I would have done had Sam walked up to our house after another three months.

So thanks to many of my neighbors, Sam is safe and sound at home and appears to be only slightly grumpy that we won't let him go back to the tortoise reserve.

What I would love to play for my classes...

I teach biology. This means that within the first day or two of any introductory class, I cover the basics of evolution. This is because the only way to understand life is through the process of evolution by natural selection. Now mainstream Mormons are all in support of evolution so I don't often have to get into debates with creationist students. However, the are fundamentalists in any movement and I've been told that there are even some Mormons who think the world and everything in it was created by a deity in seven days.

I would really love to be able to just play this clip in class and move on but, of course, it would be inappropriate I suppose. So instead, I'll subject you all to this great piece by Lewis Black. I should warn those of you who are not familiar with Lewis Black that his language makes this clip inappropriate for kids (and perhaps some adults).

Here's a direct link for folks who can't see it on this page.

Ways to put a smile on a teacher's face

In the hallway today I was approached by a young student who asked:

"Um... so like, um... are you a teacher here?"

I didn't say it was a nice or friendly smile did I?





(for the record I did manage a straight face and then went running to our department secretary's office so I could share and laugh appropriately)

Road trip!!!!

I've been a bit absent but life has been interesting.

Two weeks ago I realized that the entire week before school started was filled with meetings. So I quickly contacted folks in California and drove out there to catch-up, plan future work, return equipment and just hang out. The trip was busy but good. I got to see everyone I needed (and even some I didn't expect to see!), stocked up on all of the things that are hard to come by in Utah (wine, good olive oil, lemon tree, you get the idea) and headed back with a full car. I left in plenty of time to get back in time to get a decent night's sleep before my week of meetings the following morning.

Around Zzyyxx (if you've ever driven this stretch of the I-15, you know where I mean, for the rest of you, this is the middle of nowhere), my temperature light came on. I pulled over and waited a few minutes and it went off. I started up again. Less than twenty minutes later, it came on again. Fortunately I was approaching Primm, NV and pulled off there.

I eventually reached my long distance mechanic/honorary brother-in-law on the phone. I had a leak in my coolant system. We were hoping it was small. It wasn't.

For future reference, if your temperature light comes on but the temperature gauge hasn't budged above normal, one of two things has happened. 1. Your temperature gauge is broken. 2. You're leaking coolant. The tank that holds the coolant apparently has a sensor in it that triggers the temperature light to go on if there isn't enough liquid in the tank. To find out if it is due to a big or small leak (or a busted fan), get some bottled water and fill up the tank. Turn on the car and look underneath for any leaks. If you don't see anything obvious and the temperature light stays off, you probably have a slow leak and as long as you immediately top off the coolant tank with clean water whenever the temperature light comes on, you can probably drive to the nearest mechanic. If there is so much water leaking out that you can hear it splash over the sound of your motor, this would be a BIG-a** leak and you are screwed if you are far away from a mechanic. Oh, and if there is no leak and the water levels holds but the light stays on, you are seriously screwed because you need a new part that costs much more than a simple hose.

It was pretty dark by the time I had figured out that I was dealing with a serious leak. While Primm has no mechanic, it does have three casinos so I was able to get a room easily and relatively cheaply. I say relatively cheaply because this same car had problems in Vegas when I moved out to California and the hotel cost nearly $200/night.

The next morning I found out that I was pretty lucky. The leak was in a short molded hose that I could easily see and reach. This meant that I should be able to patch the leak with duct tape. Did I have any? Of course not. Did any shop I visited have any? Of course not. Did the neighboring outlet mall have a shop that could sell me some? (all together now) Of course not.

However, the outlet mall did have a helpful guy who sent me to the other side of the highway where the gas station convenience mart actually sold convenient things (like duct tape). They even had a heater hose emergency repair kit so I got that too since Paul told me that, if it worked, I could drive all the way home. Did it work? (one last time....) Of course not. Did I mention the big-ass leak before? Yes, well, my leak was so big that if I had cut out the damaged part, there wouldn't have been enough to stretch back together to attach to the emergency patch. So I went all McGuyver and duct taped that sucker until it was nearly doubled in diameter. Since this probably wasn't going to completely block the leak, I also picked up an extra four gallons of water and started off toward Vegas.

A friend's father and stepmother, who live in Vegas but were out of town (hi Deb!), had helped me locate a VW dealer in a town next to Vegas and presumably the closest to my location. Was it? (okay, okay, dead horse, beaten, I get it) However, I did such an impressive job with the duct tape that it held without any problem the entire 60+ miles to the dealer.

I got a case worker (I don't know what else to call them since they don't work on the cars -you all know the people I mean) who was wonderful (at Findlay VW in Henderson for anyone else prone to getting stuck near Vegas) and he even had someone bring all three cases of wine, the olive oil and the lemon tree, that would have all been ruined in the heat, into the air conditioning. After looking around for a real replacement part (it did turn out to be a molded hose part instead of a basic heater hose), they found a hose that did the job just fine and I was on my way after about five hours, just about the time my first day of meetings was coming to a close.

Let me just say that my car will never see Vegas again if I have any control over it.

Anyone in need of a large quantity of bottled water?

A break in the heat wave

It finally dropped below 100 this week. Perfect timing really, as I was in Chicago last week visiting friends and getting a little work done. They were in the middle of a major cold period with highs only in the 70s and 80s for my entire stay.

Don't tell my PhD advisor but the main reason I went was to meet this little person:



She arrived in the U.S. early this spring and while I have a ton of photos, it's not the same as being in the same room. Here she is with her Mommy at Brookfield Zoo. She doesn't look too happy here but we got dippin' dots before we left and I now have a new friend (ice cream covered hands precluded any photos).

I was only gone a week and flew back into Vegas. While I was waiting for the St. George shuttle I hit the small Borders inside and found the new Thursday Next novel nearly a full week before it's official release date. Woo-hoo! If you haven't picked up a Jasper Fforde book yet, do so.

Unpacking

Happy 4th everyone!

I've finally emptied every possible box that we could unpack (there are always a few that just need to stay packed oddly enough). Of course we moved during an unusually warm June. Normally June doesn't get much hotter than the mid 90's but for some reason we didn't even have a week of days with a high below 100. Murphy's Law and all I suppose.

To escape we went to Cedar Breaks National Monument and Bryce Canyon. We ended up camping at Bryce but Cedar Breaks is really nice right now. It's the peak of the wildflower season there (peak being relative since southern Utah is in a 13 year drought) and it doesn't get much warmer than the 80s while Bryce is a bit warmer and crowded with summer tourists. I won't have my laptop connected to the internet until Friday so you'll have to wait until then to see photos.

We don't start teaching until the end of August so in the meantime, I'm exploring our new town, cooking and knitting (again photos will have to wait) when I haven't been unpacking. Marius brought home a roast the other day so, in spite of the heat, I actually made a pot roast. You know you're in a small town when the cashier at the supermarket picks up your turnips and exclaims "Turnips!" Apparently no one buys them hear even in the winter. Odd since they taste so good in a pot roast. I guess I should be happy that the store even carries them. Fortunately I have discovered that we have the equivalent of a corporate milkman and so we are getting decent milk, juice and organic produce delivered weekly now and Jeanette discovered that there is a local cattle rancher who produces grass fed beef and delivers for free in our county so I can't say I'm hurting for good food.