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MIcah
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Great style tips for those of us who can benefit from slimming tips :)
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This is awesome. Definitely want to use it as part of the healthy shopping/cooking/eating game I'm thinking about.
slept late.
feasted on gerald's pancakes and thick slab bacon.
read a trashy novel while i did my grandmother's laundry.
picked up my sister, took her (and the laundry) to my grandmother's nursing home. watched my grandmother and her aide play bingo (and win 70 cents! go grandma!). fed my grandmother hamantaschen and and juice, and tucked her in for a nap. took my sister home.
returned library books; traded in trashy novels i'd read for trashy novels i hadn't. shopped for groceries, none of which would meet with michael pollan's disapproval.
watched the usa/canada gold medal game, while eating delicious oven-fried chicken tenders.
thought a lot about the idea of a game that teaches healthy shopping/cooking/eating philosophies.
read another trashy novel while drinking a martini and listening to the brandenburg concertos.
i really love vacations.
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An awesomely cool web utility by Greg Koberger. "I made Please Call My Phone because I kept losing my phone in my room, and needed an easy way to find it. The site also has a "schedule" feature, so you could use it as an excuse to get out of a bad date or boring meeting."
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"The ordinary teaching load for the Department is three courses per semester. "
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"Normal teaching load is 2/2."
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Position descriptions indicate that teaching load in most departments is two four-credit courses per semester.
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"Faculty generally teach a mixture of undergraduate and graduate subjects, and occasional recitations. Instructors mostly teach recitations in their first year here, and a mix of recitations and undergraduate subjects thereafter. In teaching load calculations, a recitation counts as 1.5 hours, a regular subject as 3 hours, and leading a large lecture subject counts as 4.5 hours."
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Unbelievable. Homeschooling FTW.
It's the last week of winter quarter here at RIT, and we're slowly sliding towards exams and then break. I've never liked this quarter--partly because it occurs during the darkest, coldest, dreariest part of the year, and partly because of the two-week break that occurs after the third week of classes (we start in December and end in February).
This quarter I really struggled, and I know I didn't do my best teaching. It wasn't a disaster (at least I don't think so), but I didn't have the energy level and enthusiasm that I know makes a big difference in the classroom.
Last week, RIT's new president announced that we're going to begin a transition to a semester system here at RIT, and I'm pretty happy about that change. There are many things I dislike about the quarter system--the split winter quarter, obviously, but also the compressed time frame (ten weeks is simply not enough time for me to really get to know my students, nor does it give as much "soak time" for concepts as I'd like), and the extra set of course preps we have each year. We don't really ever get a break as faculty, because we spend all of exam week grading, and all of the break week prepping for the next quarter. If you get sick during the quarter, or go to a conference, you lose a significant amount of instructional time--which is bad for both instructors and students. The only significant upside to quarters is that it's seen as an opportunity to offer a wider range of courses.
While many of our faculty were enthusiastic about the idea of switching to a semester system, our students were less happy about the idea. Interestingly, however, student government ended up holding two votes. In their official vote, where they expressed the feelings of their constituents, the student representatives voted in favor of keeping quarters. When asked to vote (secretly) as to their own preferences, the same representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of semesters. The student body president hypothesized that the representatives were perhaps the best informed about the pros and cons of various calendar options, and that the more they knew the more likely they were to see the benefits of the change. (That hasn't stopped disgruntled students and alumni from forming this Facebook group and bemoaning the fact that they think the value of an RIT degree is about to evaporate...)
Some students are concerned that semesters rather than quarters will limit the range of places that they can work for co-ops. However, when you look at the actual numbers, the vast majority of our students already tend to spend more than one quarter with a single employer. So, if you're in a program that currently requires three quarters of co-op, you probably were doing one single quarter co-op and one two-quarter co-op. In the semester model, you'd do one semester at each.
From my point of view, this is an amazing opportunity for our faculty to take a hard look at where our fields are going, what we want our curriculum to contain, and what we want our students to take away from their time here--and to redesign our curriculum from the ground up to make sure that we're accomplishing what we need to do. For those students, alumni, and employers who are afraid that "increasing retention" is code for "dumbing things down," I can assure you that there's nobody at RIT who would benefit from the latter. Making programs better doesn't mean making them easier, and it's not always true that you need to suffer in order to achieve.
This change won't happen overnight--in fact, it's going to be a three-year transition, with semester-based instruction beginning in the fall of 2013. During those three years, we'll definitely be looking for input from students, faculty, staff, alumni, and employers. I hope everyone will start to see this as a real opportunity for meaningful change in our curriculum, and an end to the "silly season" of split winter quarters.
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