Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Ok, Cranky Professor ... I'm blogging. Well, since last I blogged, I typically missed the deadline to try to write for the
Chronicle of Higher Education"first person" series for money. But that's because I was getting a Full-time Faculty Position!! Woohoo! But seriously folks ... it's a one year visiting position. Maybe two. No more than that, because then I get dangerously close to mandatory tenure-track. So what have I been doing? New faculty stuff.

Gotta say, this may be the best thing to happen -- I get to do all the new faculty stuff, but in a weird, still not really faculty kind of way. So I went to a New Faculty workshop, where we listened to a bunch of really awful people who talked in Edu-jargon (ugh!) and one guy tried to convince us that good teachers and good researchers were in some way mutually exclusive -- and that we Community College professors were in some what morally superior ... The breakaway sessions were pretty good, though, once we got past talk about assessment and outcomes. The crap we don't learn about in grad school ...

CHeck back later for the motivational speaker who drove many of us to question our self-worth and sent us into a lithium-needing downward spiral!