Also I worked on the assignments for an workshop I am taking on online education: I'll have more to say about that anon. There may be some value in online education, but I fear that it just depersonalizes and commodifies learning even more than is already the case. I am collecting evidence, and may amuse myself by writing a critical essay on same in the next few weeks.

Mostly I must get my dissertation draft done. After 7 pm tomorrow, I will be free, and then I will have 16 days til the end of the month, which I believe is adequate to the task of completion. I will not say more about it now, but am developing a schedule. Short bursts of writing, following by weeding, housepainting, cleaning - all the contemplative activities, yeah. It's ambitious, but possible. And then - June/July/August are MINE.

Read a book for my dissertation and took notes on it. (and returned it: it was SERIOUSLY overdue.)

Met with the Dean and got my reappointment squared away for next year.

Not bad, eh? I think I am owed a few minutes of chilling with Detective Adam Dalgliesh before falling asleep. (LOVE, just LOVE, summer reading! Yeah, I have a bunch of serious things to read this summer, but I feel I am OWED some well-written fluff to begin.)

Here's the amazing thing about academe: my salary for working 8 months is amortized over 12: so I will be paid June-August for just chillin'. I have lots to do, but it will be a delight to stop and smell the lilacs. I am trying to build more dellight into my daily awareness.

Tomorrow: a nice long walk before I go to campus for the workshop on documenting myself for reappointment/tenure/promotion purposes.

If they had no seeds, I would be completely in love.

I tried a Greek garlic chicken recipe from the Globe tonight as well - less of a success, helas. Too much lemon (bitter); and the rest of the ingredients (garlic, onion, oregano, olives) didn't really add up to anything more than their individual flavors. No synergy: I hate that. Food must be more than the sum of its parts.

Still, the concept is intriguing. I'll have to work on it.

This week has been one such collection of opportunities. On Monday, I attended a more-or-less mandatory workshop on student assessment at my workplace, and then the rest of the week I've been attending our annual geography conference in Boston.

The workshop left me thinking that I don't work nearly hard enough at identifying what my students SHOULD know, and WHY, and then figuring out ways to have them show me that, and be assessed as to their success. The workshop also raised the usual questions of "what is important to know in a geographical education" and "how can we make sure students possess that knowledge." I have a feeling that such a conversation would be quite contentious in our department as well as in my home (grad school) department.

Ah, geography...the discipline with no clear sense of itself. (Like landscape architecture, which I to some extent got out of for that very reason, and urban planning, which has no clear set of ideological precepts on which to build a body of work.) Why am I attracted to disciplines with identity crises?? It is NOT a recipe for career success!!

At the conference, I've had the chance to reflect more strategically on my future plans. I am interested in the intellectual frameworks of tourism geography, but I see myself shifting more into economic geography. I am particularly interested in regional science (or what is left of it these days), particularly as it intersects with newer cultural ideas in geography.

I am also interested in sustainable development, but it's such an emerging field that it will be difficult to pin it down and get a real research focus. It's probably the most important thing I can do, though.

I am always interested in heritage and history and preservation.

If you try to look for trends in AAG program books, it's really hard to do year by year. But this year I was more struck by quirky takes on issues: everyone's looking for novelty. Is that an artifact of the conference format, or a reflection of our interdisciplinary nature? Cynically, I'd guess the former.

It has been fun, although I don't blog nearly as often as I wish. I'm (believe it or not) kinda picky about what I put out there, and a lot of personal stuff from my daily life (involving family, friends, or even colleagues) is censored in my mind before I even start to type. (Someday, when I am dead, someone will chance across my personal journals, and will publish them as an account of a woman in the late 20th century. Or, I'll be like Henry James and burn the whole lot before I go.)

Anyways, happy anniversary to me!

Temple U, in geography at least, favors the caste system. They hire tenure track people to do research and teach limited classes, and they hire contractors on fixed contracts to do the icky work of teaching undergrads, so as not to unduly burden the researchers.

I had a phone interview there last spring, and frankly I counted the minutes until I could decently end it. It was clear early on what they were interested in (warm bodies to relieve the "stars" of the drudgery of teaching) and It's another example of the hypocrisy of academe: you'll find that the tenure-track researchers there are all interested in class/race/disadvantage, yet when it comes to equity in their own department...well, it goes no further than their own self-interest.

Typical, I'm finding, of the world of academe. Full disclosure: I didn't get an offer. But frankly, I was so horrified at the setup that I would have turned it down in a heartbeat if they'd called back.

They are advertising again this year like crazy. Must be a helluva place to work....

Item One: in my own town, a report on the trial of a cop who allegedly hacked into the police computer system to get personal records (exam scores) of fellow officers. Even more disturbing, yesterday's testimony seemed to suggest that a mysterious individual in a trenchcoat, who can't be identified from the surveillance video, was also on station premises at the time of the hacking. (Defense trying to introduce "reasonable doubt" I suppose: but why are unidentifiable persons freely roaming the halls of the station???)

Item Two: two towns over, the selectmen are trying to decide the fate of an officer accused of dealing percocet. He allegedly also would trade drugs for sex: nice for his wife and kids, huh?

Item Three: two towns over in the other direction, an officer is on trial for accelerating (0-60 in something like 11 seconds, in an urbanized area) up into a parked car and killing its occupant. Defense is now alleging some sort of seizure - having given up on the equipment failure defense: "It wasn't my fault; the cruiser was defective." It surely wasn't his fiddling with the Very Large Orange Soda he had just put into the beverage holder that was the issue. (He was pissed off that it was all soda water and no syrup; I am resisting a Chief Wiggum joke here.)

Public trust indeed. Remind me not to call 911.

Oh, yeah: my MIL is on lockdown in the home due to some sort of virus, so we are perhaps totally free from a trip to the State of Insanity this weekend. I have dangled the promise of painting my SIL's living room soon though - so perhaps next weekend.

Annoyance-du-jour: students unclear on email-as-professional-communication. A sample: "Hey. did u get my last email? i was wondering if u wd give me more time on [assignment] b/c i am now just getting [insert Classroom Management System name here] to work on my computer."

Dude. That's "Professor SnoCones" to you. It is 7 weeks into the semester. I have been posting notes and announcements and lectures on the course website for 8 weeks. Where have "u" been????

I am just too old-fashioned, perhaps, in dreaming of old-skool decorum. (E.g.: there any reason nowadays why men shouldn't wear hats indoors? I am always tempted to mock the hat-frat-boys for lack of manners - but what is the reason, I wonder, for asking boys to remove their hats in the classroom? (For starters: so I will know their names; one hatted joe looks just like the next - but perhaps they like it that way? but I really know all their names and can call on them at will - even if they are slouched down as if lack of eye contact makes them invisible. (Hint from the world of optics: it does NOT.))) Not rocket science, boyz.

Related annoyance: homeworks that produce the bare minimum, in which students are not willing to expend a single second to produce a better product, when in their judgment (ha!) the slacker half-assed job adequately meets the requirements of the assignment. I'm talking about graphics here, and students who wouldn't take 30 seconds to clean up a chart or graph of extraneous information, because "it's good enough."

I exhorted them yesterday: "have some pride in your work, people!" They stared dully straight-ahead, unimpressed by the harangue.

Good advice from an unrelated meeting yesterday: make all your objectives align; be strategic in what you do (and don't do) so that you move your own goals forward. Ha ha. If academics really took that dictum seriously no one would serve on any dopey administrative committees and the whole structure of academic governance would fall apart. (But would anyone notice??)

Ah, onward! I strive for excellence in a milieu of mediocrity.

I had the presence of mind to grab important things (like my car keys and my laptop, as it turned out that classes in my building were cancelled and the building locked down) while my colleagues urged me to hurry up, and I wasn't scared until we were gathered en masse in the campus center, and then the thought occurred that a person REALLY wishing to do harm (assuming some intelligence and pre-planning skills; yeah, it's a lot to assume) would pretend to target one building, and then show up in the evacuation center.

Now I am sort of freaked out. But I am not home appreciably earlier than usual, and I have two sets of lecture notes to write, so onward I go.

"A 14-year old female dialed 911 because she was upset with her parents because they would not allow her to go out that night. An officer informed the girl of the proper use of 911."

Kids these days....

I am listening to In Cold Blood by Truman Capote these days, in the car. It was my "three-strikes and this form of entertainment is OUT": I found the Sue Grafton crime novel I'd borrowed from the library annoying beyond belief and although I sort of enjoyed Nadine Gordimer's Beethoven was 1/16 Black, I found the cadences of it a bit pretentious as well.

But Capote is just right (so the game is on) - what a gift for language he had, and how perfectly he evoked the salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners of mid-century. I am only on disk 2 of I think 13 but I am enjoying it so much that even my 1:40 hour commute last night did not annoy as it might have.

(What's up with Thursday traffic anyway? Monday through Wednesday is a dream commute. Who ARE all these people who materialize on Thursdays??)

I don't teach on Fridays, which is good, because school got cancelled mid-day today, which would have been a reprise of the Black Thursday (see??) commute-from-hell on Dec 13. Snow-schmow.

We have shoveled the driveway and walks once, but we'll be doing it in the morning, no doubt. We must return Miss Kitty to the State of Insanity. Murp!

PS: confidential to my "North Dakota" reader: I'm working on squirrel cuisine. Stay tuned...

But I sort of get out of the habit, and then I think my next entry has to be GREAT to compensate, and there's no greater inhibitor to writing than that sort of pressure, and so you get the drift.

Here's what's up: I wrote an angry post about the state of health care in this country, prompted by the fact that my bro-in-law (who has no health insurance) has now had THREE surgeries and has been in the hospital for three weeks, with months of rehab to come. Then I felt the post was just too angry and incoherent, so I got up in the middle of the night and deleted it.

I wrote a new chapter of my dissertation over the winter break, and revised a couple of other chapters, but DID NOT FINISH THE DRAFT, which is a daily disappointment and reminder of my ineptitude. And now I'm caught up in the daily grind of writing (or rewriting) lecture notes, grading, preparing slide shows, and doing all the little bits of administrative work that constitute my day job.

But we do have my sister-in-law's cat to play with so that's fun. This is the cat that used to say "murp!" She meows now, no murps anymore, alas. It was fun watching her watch the avian wildlife out the window this morning.

And the squirrel population has been "relocated" out of our house, so my sleep is more normal. And the days are getting longer, so that's a mood elevator. I must begin soon to think about my garden and how I will maximize my biomass.

1. Build in some flex into the syllabus, to account for snow days, sick days, family emergencies and the like. Then, have some free-floating lesson plans that relate to the course objectives but don't have to be in sequence, to fill in if you haven't missed any class meetings. I was sick on Monday, and I am really stressing out about catching up: my syllabus is a finely-tuned instrument and if I get behind it will cause all sorts of other problems.

2. Set up a directory system and naming conventions for documents BEFORE THE SEMESTER STARTS. I spent a bunch of time this morning looking for a document I'd renamed. It got into the wrong folder somehow.

3. Likewise, use the Save As function to make new documents AS SOON AS YOU OPEN THE ORIGINAL. Otherwise you lose old material because you mistakenly Save. It really doesn't matter a huge amount in the particular mistakes I've made in the last couple of days, but I don't have a full archive of what I did last fall anymore, which is kind of too bad.

4. Spend some time learning how to foster useful discussions in class. I spent a lot of time with this last summer, and it worked, but I've gotten out of the habit at my new job - partly because it is SO HARD to get them talking that sometimes I am just not up to the effort. College as a spectactor sport; the professor as a sort of live TV screen. Harrumph.

Spent today at a professional development seminar. Some thought-provoking stuff, some people talking to hear themselves talk. "models of advising"? wtf. The possibility of a new system with five required "encounters" between student and advisor or a hold is placed on their registration?! wtf.

Yesterday I finished my chapter and emailed it to my advisor, and by the time I got home tonight, the markup was waiting. Mostly small edits and places to expand the thinking (what, 32 isn't long ENOUGH??) so it's pretty manageable. Onward!

I've written quite a bit of my tourism chapter today. Some of it is boring, workman-like description - but some of it, I hope, is more analytical and insightful. I have done so much less than I wanted to with this winter break. Yet I have worked steadily at times, and have kept at it, even when it was tempting to go do something else.

I am not sure what sort of sustained effort at writing is really possible in completely unstructured days, anyways. I can write quite easily in short bursts, and can produce about 800 words an hour if I focus. But I can only do that for 2-3 hours a day. The rest of the day, even if I'm sitting at the computer, is "worthless." Surfing, checking the blogs, playing games. I sometimes wonder if I wouldn't be wiser to quit the office and go do something else. Yet perhaps the act of sitting here is worthwhile too - and I should recognize its worth and stop beating up on myself?

Yeah, like that'll happen. I have about a week left. I would like to finish this chapter, and at least one other.

I listened to a podcast from my undergrad college today. The topic was relevant to my teaching, at least on the face - and I was thinking it would be a nice change of medium to assign it to my World Regional Geography class. But the lecture wasn't very good - tentative, inconclusive, methodologically weak, unclear on any sort of hypothesis - and so I am not sure it's worth it. (I am always amazed at the dreck that passes for research in the academy: are my standards really so much higher than everyone else's??)

Well, supposedly my grandma-in-law has an "apple" tree with all sorts of other fruits grafted on it (yeah, Grandpa was an arborist back in the day). Is this really possible? It apparently does have different kinds of apples: she gave us some at Christmas - yellow delicious ones, Cortland-looking ones.

Usually home apples suck; no one can keep up with the pesticide applications necessary to produce bug-free apples in this climate. But hers were remarkably good. I made a crisp of them, which we plan on eating quite shortly. Yum, delicious apple crisp. mmmmmm.

THAT'S TOO CLEVER YOU'RE ONE OF THEM!

(Sorry. Some of these I do just for myself.)

In other news, we de-Christmased the house today. Sad. Usually I am thrilled to see the tree go and the obligatory Merriment of the Season end. But today I was not. The tree was beautiful and it smelled great (even today when dry as kindling for a house-fire) and I shall miss all my ornaments (having not seen them for 5 years).