School wrap up
May. 10th, 2006 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cornerofmadnessWell, it’s all over with, the last faculty meeting done. I can’t believe I’ve been here a full academic year already. It seemed to fly by, much more so than even the appointment in Wisconsin did. I still don’t know if I’ll be teaching in the summer (though the contract is signed). There’s only one students signed up but they take registration up to the first day of class so who knows. That’s a little frustrating.
I won’t bore you with all the tedious details of a day long meeting but here are a few highlights (well at least to me) I’m in the new system for entering grades and absences as MALE and there’s no way to fix that just yet (and thank you for making me waste 10 hours of my life training on the old version when you knew you were getting rid of it, thanks Uni).
Two professors from my department said they heard from the students how well I organized my classes with my powerpoints and that they wanted to copy my model for this. That made me feel pretty good. (Though I have to confess I took the idea from one of my profs in FL). At the department meeting I did put forth my idea for a needed special topics class that I’ll be running with in the spring time, ‘reading scientific papers.’ You might not think that needs a class but there’s a certain skill set you need to have to know how to effectively cull data from scientific papers and you’re expected to know it BEFORE you get to grad. School. In bringing this up, I found out from the Stats prof that there is no requirement for stats for the biology majors. This is bad. As he pointed out, rightly so, you can’t read those journal articles unless you know stats. I think in the fall pushing to amend this lack will be my new windmill.
One of the math professors put forth the idea of a mandatory one credit class as a senior exit capstone, mostly a literature review kind of thing on something new (i.e. not taught heavily in classes) and giving a presentation to the professors. There was a little hesitation about this then I pipe up with ‘this is nothing new. I had to do it when I was an undergrad 15 years ago.’ Again most people in math and science will either go on to grad school or teaching and they need to know how to communicate. So, they look at me and say, ‘Well Dana you’ve been through this, you get to head it up.’ I’m thinking but it was HIS idea. Truth be told, I’m not sure if I got assigned because no one else wanted to do it or if they think I’m good enough to handle it. I’m going with the latter. Though, we didn’t talk about this enough. I honestly think that it needs team taught. If we want to extend this to the chem/physics major, biology, math and computer science majors then we need a prof from all those disciplines because while I can judge a good presentation in any subject I can’t grade content in things I know nothing about it.
I won’t bore you with all the tedious details of a day long meeting but here are a few highlights (well at least to me) I’m in the new system for entering grades and absences as MALE and there’s no way to fix that just yet (and thank you for making me waste 10 hours of my life training on the old version when you knew you were getting rid of it, thanks Uni).
Two professors from my department said they heard from the students how well I organized my classes with my powerpoints and that they wanted to copy my model for this. That made me feel pretty good. (Though I have to confess I took the idea from one of my profs in FL). At the department meeting I did put forth my idea for a needed special topics class that I’ll be running with in the spring time, ‘reading scientific papers.’ You might not think that needs a class but there’s a certain skill set you need to have to know how to effectively cull data from scientific papers and you’re expected to know it BEFORE you get to grad. School. In bringing this up, I found out from the Stats prof that there is no requirement for stats for the biology majors. This is bad. As he pointed out, rightly so, you can’t read those journal articles unless you know stats. I think in the fall pushing to amend this lack will be my new windmill.
One of the math professors put forth the idea of a mandatory one credit class as a senior exit capstone, mostly a literature review kind of thing on something new (i.e. not taught heavily in classes) and giving a presentation to the professors. There was a little hesitation about this then I pipe up with ‘this is nothing new. I had to do it when I was an undergrad 15 years ago.’ Again most people in math and science will either go on to grad school or teaching and they need to know how to communicate. So, they look at me and say, ‘Well Dana you’ve been through this, you get to head it up.’ I’m thinking but it was HIS idea. Truth be told, I’m not sure if I got assigned because no one else wanted to do it or if they think I’m good enough to handle it. I’m going with the latter. Though, we didn’t talk about this enough. I honestly think that it needs team taught. If we want to extend this to the chem/physics major, biology, math and computer science majors then we need a prof from all those disciplines because while I can judge a good presentation in any subject I can’t grade content in things I know nothing about it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 03:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 08:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 06:15 pm (UTC)I think it's cool you're being put in charge of developing courses. It'll look great on a resume when you move on to a real town. :)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-10 07:01 pm (UTC)that's my thought exactly on the resume front