Blogs

Today I attended my first unconference, a one-day event put on by NERCOMP on the learning management system (LMS).

I revise and extend my pre-conference complaints.

Today is the first day of my spring break. The day began at 5:45 am with a call from the local school system to tell us that there would be a 2-hour delay in school opening due to “predicted inclement weather.” I put the phone down, told my husband what was up, and tried to overcome the adrenaline that an early-morning phone call always elicits and get back to sleep—then realized that the call had come from my son’s former school system, not the one he’s in now. I was pretty fully awake by then, so I got up to check on his school—and saw the snow falling in large, lazy flakes, blanketing the cars but not, as far as I could see, the roads.

Control is important, we need to be able to balance a number of lives as grad students, maintain multiple fellowships and jobs, work on our research as well as ace our classes, and make a good impression in the department as well as the broader discipline. Our success comes from the close control over every aspect of our professional and academic lives: mapping out every minute of our week into our Google calendars, tracking assignments through various iPhone apps, using Zotero to organize every bibliographic reference, and keeping up with the professionals through every social media site we can think of. This is good, it keeps us grounded. So here's the problem: you can't control everything.

The theme for this year’s League for Innovation conference seems to be “where is everybody?” Attendance seems visibly down from last year. Last year’s conference was in San Diego. This year’s is in Philly. I’m not saying that’s the reason; I’m not saying that’s not the reason

Today is the end of the first week of teaching in the South African academic year. It’s been an experience that any academic at any university around the world would recognise: the chaos of finding timetables and new lecture venues, the inevitable problems with IT and parking spaces, the long queues at university bookshops, and in the midst of all this, a new group of anxious, happy, first year students.

Names are powerful. That’s why I understand Georgia Tech’s “X-Degree.”

Being a good girl has gotten me this far, but to go any further, I'll have to figure out how to be bad.