It Ends with Little Fanfare

Or at least, thus far it is ending with little fanfare. Stay tuned, because tomorrow it really ends. "It" being the last of classes. I am trying to make a lecture for tomorrow, and I have thus far been slogging for three hours, with nothing to show for it. It's supposed to be an overview, and these are the easiest lectures to make, because I'm just summarizing everything we've done. Hmph. Not so easy for me when it's organic chemistry and when I'm changing the format to lump everything under slightly different headings. I should really be working on it, but I am distracted and anxious. It's Tuesday of the week after Things Should Be Decided at the academic institution at which I applied. It's been just over a month, could we please make a decision people? My life is hanging in the balance here and I need to know if I should apply for the job at the bakery up the road.

Quite frankly, there are days that I think that kneading dough all day would be the most fantastic thing ever. No big decisions, no grant proposals, no panic. Just yummy dough.

Last week I found out that my NSERC grant was renewed, so I'm safe there. I let the people at the possible new job place know that I'd secured my funding. This may or may not make a difference. Who the hell knows. It actually should, because then I can focus on the other huge proposal that has to go in this fall for the instrumentation necessary for me to do my work (and to help out with the work of others in the department).

Really. Should I worry? I should be far more confident than I am. I already have grant money (not a lot, but enough to get started), I know how to teach well, I have been on oodles of committees, I've graduated lots of students. On paper, and when I say all this, it looks like I should be a shoe-in, right? So how come I don't feel that way?

Maybe because I interviewed like a brick. Granted, a lighter brick than usual, but still, brick. Sinking to the bottom of the river, fast.

So, in order to focus on the lecture for tomorrow (which I am clearly doing as I write the blog entry) I have decided that beer is the best aid. In the last 10 minutes, I have gulped one of these darlings, (Tankhouse Ale) and I am soon to open another. I think that will be enough, as one has to be careful to maintain the fine line between focussed and loaded. I don't have to cook supper because I went to the poultry market and picked up one of their chicken pies, which are better than any chicken pie I could make (and I make fantastic pies. That bakery idea? It's not half-baked.) and besides, cooking tonight would be a waste of an hour. Not that it matters because I can't think to save my life tonight.

In other news, I am attempting a more local diet. This means buying food as close to home as possible, within 100km if it can be done. Obviously vanilla won't be within the radius, and if you think I'm giving up vanilla you are on crack...it is the most necessary baking flavour ever extracted. Spices all around are a bit of a problem, except for those we can grow, which right now we can't especially because it's supposed to snow all weekend. Hello! Easter here! Easter Bunny would rather not hop through the snow to deliver the baskets! but whatever. I won't care, I'll be done classes and note-making. Dear Sweet Christ Upon The Cross I am so glad I will not have to do this any more.

At least, until the next time I have to do it.

I shouldn't even be thinking about hearing about the job this week anyway. Once the dept makes the decision, it has to be okay'd by the dean, and that won't happen immediately...especially if it's me and the dean says, "Why are you picking the person I didn't meet? I liked the other one better." .... and in the interest of my sanity, we will not go there.

OH! it's also the week of course evaluations, my most very favourite time. Actually, it's not so painful as first term, and we just got those evaluations a week ago. What a farce. This term we're making the students do paper evaluations rather than the online fiasco they did first term, and so the secretary types up the comments and I get them same day. So let's see, from the grab bag: "She's totally unapproachable for questions, doesn't welcome them at all." "She's so helpful and always answers every question." "Excellent prof." "I can't stand her."

The class is bonkers? No, this is typical, especially of first year. In upper-year classes I get excellent reviews because by then they realize how lucky they are to have me as their prof. That's not ego talking (see fourth paragraph. I don't suffer from egocentricity.) because it's true. Mostly, I will answer all of the questions put to me, even the stupid ones that show me you slept through the entire term. "Mostly" because there are some questions that are so insane that I get offended. Apparently when I am offended, you don't need to be told how I feel, it comes off of me in waves. Even if you are useless at reading people, even if you can't understand body language to save your life, you will understand me. Instantaneously.

So this is where I am: anxiously waiting to hear whether I am still a prof or not. Anxious about tomorrow being the last day of class, and at 5:08p.m. I still have nothing to talk about tomorrow. Thus, we shall pour another beer and see if all this shite can be brought together to a coherent whole. If not, well, what the hell. They've already evaluated me.

A Request

It's a lovely day outside, the snow is falling like it does in the movies, straight down with big fluffy flakes. This winterlude will probably not last, but when winter is pretty it's really amazing to look at. I don't have the camera power to take a good photo, unfortunately.

Yesterday I was chatting with Fab Former Student, and since he was bored at work, waiting for some results before he could go on to the next reaction, I directed him to this site. He had said several times, "You need to keep a blog," and so I figured that since I'd started I'd let him in on it. When I sent him the link, he just said, "Oh, okay, I'll go read that. But I thought it would be something funny..." not realizing the author until I pointed it out. I don't know how much he's actually read, although he was surprised that I'd gone ahead and done this. I suppose that more people would be surprised if I actually told them about it, but for now I'm not going to go out of my way to tell a lot more people.

Thing is, I don't really like the division between "real life" and "blog life"....for me, there isn't a division. My real life and the blog life coincide, and neither of them ever gets the full story, because neither of them is, well, me. Real life people that I know see a lot of my life, but of course not everything. Blogging is another way of providing information, but it doesn't provide all of the information. I do keep secrets. Everyone should.

Okay, so the request is from Fab Former Student, who wants me to write about last summer and how well we worked together: him, other student who I'll call The Redhead. (I am currently also a redhead but I'm actually a blond so, well, whatever.) The Redhead is actually a biologist/forensic science major, but the research is boring. He's worked for the biologists and always gets the bad jobs (here, you mortalize the mice! we're going for coffee!) whereas in my lab? No living things, except for the mice that are actually inhabitants of the building, and we don't kill them and harvest their organs to put into a blender to find the concentrations of whatever goes there. Yuck, I know. which is why The Redhead is much more suited to chemistry than biology.

The Redhead is also native by adoption, although quite frankly it doesn't matter how one gets to be native, but the advantage for him is that he comes with a summer scholarship...and yet still has a hard time getting hired. Why? Because people don't think to look past the fact that he's sort of ADD and he gets distracted easily and bored more easily than that, and he can be disruptive and he's sort of goofy...yeah, all those things, but he's also really smart and if he's got a project he believes in then he'll become completely obsessed with it until it's done right or until he at least gets some kind of results. You don't need to explain things to him more than once, but you do need to make sure that he takes his Ritalin, because when he doesn't, he can't work well. Whether he should ever have been prescribed Ritalin or not is another question for another day, but he was an now he's dependent on it and we nagged him a lot if he hadn't taken the pill. Sad, but quite frankly, when you need the work done and you need it done right, you need people to be focussed on what they're supposed to be doing. We can't have bouncy 20-somethings acting crazy in the lab, period. Even though much of the stuff we did wasn't particularly dangerous, there were enough chemicals in our lab to cause a lot of damage, and we're all about the safety in my lab.

So here we are: I'm getting ready to move in the middle of the summer, and I hire "my boys" and tell them, "Okay, here's the deal. The project is this....(blah blah blah) and here's exactly what I need you to do by the beginning of August. After that, we're packing and getting rid of stuff, because I'm moving."

And they were stellar. They got some gorgeous things done, things that no one else had been able to do after years in my lab. They were motivated, they were funny, we had a lot of fun. Everyone wanted to stop by our lab to chat. The music was going pretty much constantly. They composed this "Hulked-out" picture for me...we visited many a strange and wonderful website when we needed a break from doing fantastic chemistry, including Gunther and several others, although Gunther was certainly the hit of the summer (sorry, I haven't figured out how to put the umlau over the "u"). We ate lunch at the pub when the world cup was on and, as any good ADD student would do, The Redhead got totally into it, and then some.

There are a bunch of stories, and I'll write some of the best ones at some point. This is just an intro to a couple of guys who made last summer so memorable and so much fun, even in the face of building renovations, dust storms inside the lab, crazy work hours (please, please can't one of you come in at midnight to top up the liquid nitrogen? it's always me who has to do it...) and insane colleagues who actually think they are constellations...and more. I couldn't have done it without either of them and I tried to make that clear, I hope they understood.

One story: when I went back to do the last of the packing in the middle of August (I left for Southern Ontario in early July, went to a conference in Hawaii .... ahhhhh....) I took them out for dinner to a lovely Italian restaurant that serves traditionally, which means take your appetite and be prepared to sit for 3.5h. And we did that, we ate and ate and ate (antipasti, pasta, meat, salads, desserts, two bottles of wine and coffees) and drank, and had a great time as always. Two things happened during dinner: one was I received the B-B* Award for Exemplary Leadership and Teaching......it's a glass plaque that holds a small clock and the engraved silver plate that indicates the award. They each gave me a card, and both of them wrote beautiful notes about how I'd changed their lives. The award was slightly bittersweet, since I'd been overlooked for the University Teaching Award this year, and Fab had nominated me for it (after some prodding).

The other thing that happened was we decided to form a band. The only one who can sing at all or play anything resembling a musical instrument is the Fab one, but we dreamed it all up anyway. Keep in mind that I'm twice as old as these guys, and then imagine it anyway. Good times had by all, and then a very sad parting that evening.

The Summer of My Amazing Luck, truly.

(*Both their last names start with B, and they put their names on the award but I'm not putting them here.)

Another term done

It's not quite done, there's an exam to administer, but the teaching part is done. I do like teaching quite a lot, and I guess it shows because on Monday, about 100 (1/3 of my class showed up for the last 8:30 on a Monday morning class of the term) first year students stood up and applauded after I finished my course overview. I've been teaching for a while now, and that's the first time I've gotten an ovation for doing so. I'll save the pat on the back for when I need it.

Teaching well at the university level isn't a difficult thing to do, but it takes patience and organization. It takes a great deal of thought and empathy. If you walk into a room and shut yourself up for a few seconds, to take a few seconds to get the feel of the room, you'll know beforehand whether your lecture is going to fall flat or not. I had one class once where four of the eight students really disliked me, and there was nothing I could do about that. Longest thirteen weeks of my career, and teaching evaluations to prove it....lower scores than normal. This was a fourth-year course, too, so you'd think that the students wouldn't be so interested in what they felt about me as they were in getting through, getting out, getting to grad school or jobs or wherever they were going. It was personal, they didn't like me, and every misstep, every small mistake (hey, profs make mistakes! go figure!) was amplified. At the same time it didn't particularly bother me, because there's not much you can do to make people like you. I have been told that students either really, really like me, or really really dislike me. I think that's fine, I'd rather the extremes than inspire ambivalence.

As I say though, it doesn't matter one way or another whether the students like me or not. It's more important that they're getting the information they need and that they are learning something...or at least, that learning is available to them, because then they can choose to learn or not. This is the advantage of teaching adults, they have choices. I couldn't teach younger kids, I don't have the patience for that and I don't have the touchy-feely attitude about teaching. I do have a "take it or leave it" approach, and I'm not the best prof ever. Teaching science is more about talking about topics that are intangible, giving notes, giving lectures. It's not about discussions very often. It's not about "how does this make you feel?". It's about facts, and relaying facts in as interesting and captivating a manner as possible.

And sometimes, it's about spending Friday night with champagne and the laptop, making notes for Monday.