jliedl.ca

I interact with the world under two different names (my maiden/professional name and my hyphenated, married name). That makes things interesting sometimes. (And, no, don’t ask me to teach under my hyphenated name as students cannot pronounce my birth surname. Asking them to hyphenate that with another short but occasionally opaque surname would be a recipe for failure.)

I have citizenship in two countries. That’s always fun come voting and tax time. The paperwork can be staggering!

Now, on Facebook, I’m reminded of another personal liminal state: I came to high school with one peer-group but graduated a year early so I can be considered a member of class X and class X+1. Both alumni FB groups want me to sign up with them, though, and I’m consumed by the weirdness of it all.

Why is this the one dual identity that sends me over the edge?

Both of my undergraduate classes this term handed in assignments today: majors’ class comparative crime analyses and senior-seminar essay proposals. I have one GTA to whom I can hand off fifteen of the analyses for grading. That still leaves me with, what? (insert brief pause while I did some quick assessing of enrollments and what’s been submitted), seventy-eight assignments for lil’ ol’ me to mark.

Oh, boy!

At least I scared off about ten people from the majors’ class since the start of term. Otherwise the numbers would be higher.

(You know, the list of people who never would be missed?)

The people in your organization who send out announcements in a PDF or document file with the advisement “see attached” when they could save everyone a lot of annoyance by simply providing the incredibly brief bit of information they’re attempting to convey right there in the body of the email.

Extra bonus points for the people who make it even more annoying by decorating their stupid memos with clip art and uselessly fancy fontwork, just to make it load up ever more slowly.

Seriously. If it can be written in one sentence? It doesn’t need to be sent as an attached file, people!

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet? English street and place names provide endless amusement for the New York Times.

My personal favourite? Tumbledown Dick Road. Sadly, I can’t find it via Google Maps.

Today, eldest daughter said goodbye to Angel, one of her pet rats. His health was declining rapidly as a tumour pressed against his brain stem. Our vet said could possibly live for a week or two, but he would be increasingly frail and immobilized. Being unable to move or grasp his food would be a fearful hardship on the little fellow, especially with no hope of improvement. His situation didn’t seem painful, but full of frustration as he fought to move his limbs in ways they no longer would.

We let eldest make the decision about how to deal with this news and she rose to the challenge, deciding that we were only prolonging his suffering if we tried to keep him going at home any longer. With silent tears coursing down her cheeks, she cosseted and comforted him until it was time to say goodbye at the vet’s office. Angel left this world in security, comfort and love. Only after he was gone did the heaving gasps of sobs begin (and they weren’t only hers).

We’ll miss you, Angel!

The strike of TAs and contract faculty goes on unabated at York University, with the unions rejecting the administration’s offer 63-37 (according to The Toronto Star). If the strike lasts Friday, and it can’t help but do so, this will be the newest record for strike length at a university becoming infamous for its fractious labour relations.

York’s school year will probably run into June or July in a best-case scenario. York students, who’ve been out of the classroom since November 8th, will be hitting the books and writing exams right through Canada Day, unable to secure summer jobs to assist with next year’s expenses. And looking ahead wouldn’t fill anyone with hope. There have been three strikes of not-inconsiderable length in the past twelve years. The odds of another in the next few years aren’t ones that some people are willing to gamble upon.

While applications to universities across the province are up by 1.1%, The Globe and Mail says that York’s applications for 2009-10 are down by about 15%. That’s staggering, even moreso if you remember that York is normally in second place behind U of T in the number of applications province-wide. This year it’s in fourth place, behind Toronto, Ryerson (a former polytechnic that’s located in downtown Toronto and offers a range of undergraduate and graduate courses — a close-at-hand alternative for many of York’s undergraduate offerings) and Western. The article goes on to detail how York’s administration is considering cutting down the size of next year’s freshman class so that they’re not lowering standards as they pick through their slightly shrunken pool. Read more »

Tomorrow will be one of those crazy days where, in and amongst the teaching obligations, I’ve got to squeeze another couple hours for obligations relating to a non-departmental hiring. That’ll cause a cascading effect on everything else in our delicately balanced family life so that I’ll be calling a taxi to get home at the end of the day.

Fortunately, these days only happen every so often.

Battlestar Galactica’s heading into the final half-season of the show. It’s been a glorious ride since the outset in 2003 — I can’t but expect that these last episodes will fulfill the promise.

More selfishly, I’m hoping that nothing in the last run of episodes nullifies the arguments I made in my forthcoming chapter, “The Battle for History in Battlestar Galactica.”

From an email that circulated today:

This is to advise that the University Library has already expended its book budget for the year. As a result we will not be accepting new orders. The recent decline of the Canadian dollar and escalating subscription costs have also have also imperiled our budget for journals and electronic resources. We are continuing to review the situation and we may be in touch with you about the possible cancellation of some subscriptions. Please contact your subject librarian or myself if you have further questions.

Please, let them not cancel EEBO. Please, let them not cancel EEBO!

• PowerPoint is a slide show software. It is not the devil.
• Eschewing PowerPoint in favour of a chalkboard or overhead doesn’t make you a better educator. (Nor, I hasten to add, does using PowerPoint make you a better educator.)
• Sharing PowerPoint slides before class does not have to affect attendance rates. Seriously! They still come to class.
• PowerPoint is much more readable than most professor’s handwriting, mine particularly. (As long as you avoid Comic Sans.)
• You don’t waste departmental resource printing out overheads on acetate sheets that you revise and then have to reprint the next time you teach the course.
• If you teach with maps, art, photographs and statistical charts, PowerPoint can showcase these images (and serve as a jumping off point for interactive web-links).
• You can darken the screen if you want to take discussion in a different direction for a while. It’s still your classroom, even with the big, bad projector running!
• You field almost zero requests for spelling of terms which leaves more time for substantive questions.

Agree? Disagree? (And, yes, the choice to present this in point form was deliberate!)