Teaching Rewards

There are many annoying things that come with being a teacher. This is a profession that transforms you, and not always in a good way. A teacher is often a person who grasps at any opportunity to offer a lecture.

"Do we have any bread left, honey?" a teacher's partner asks her.

She clears her throat and launches into a lecture on the meaning of bread, its history, and ideological ramifications of its consumption. In the meanwhile, the hapless partner munches on the bread and wonders how he got himself into a  relationship that is an eternal classroom.

At a party, a well-meaning host often has to approach a teacher and tell her, "Sweetie, we are not in the classroom. It's OK not to answer every single question people ask of others."

My mother who was a teacher of mathematics in our country became very used to students greeting her entrance into the classroom by standing up (which is traditional in our culture.) The students don't sit down until the teacher tells them they may do so. One day, after teaching 10 classes in a row (which was a regular practice in the Soviet Union), she walked into a crowded subway car. there were no empty seats, so many passengers were standing. When she saw all those people standing when she walked in, my mother thought she was in yet another classroom.

"Good evening. Please be seated," she announced in a loud teacherly voice. The passengers regaled her with bewildered stares.

However, being a teacher has its rewards. I just received an email from a former student who thanked me for everything I taught her and shared how she is using the activities I presented in class with her students. And they love it. 

When a student feels like getting in touch to thank you long after the course ended, you get the highest teaching reward imaginable. No award for excellence in teaching could beat this great feeling.

Entitlement and Parents

I read the following comment at College Misery today that made my hair stand on end:

I recently learned my parents gave my younger brother $40, 000 so that he could buy part of a regional airport. These are the same parents who paid $50,000 less for my college education than they did for his, and who told me two years ago that there was no way I could live with them or borrow money from them since they didn't have any.

Some people's sense of entitlement is really scary. They forget that the moment when they reach the age of 18 their parents don't owe them anything any more. If your parents are willing to support you financially after that, that's great. They are not, however, obligated to do so in any way. They have the right to dispose of their money, the money that they made for themselves, in any way they wish, and nobody, in my opinion, has the right to dispute their choice and feel resentful about it.

If I were to discover tomorrow that my parents gave $40,000 to my younger sister so that she could buy an airport or anything else, I would be very happy on two accounts. First, that my sister had the money. And second, that my parents were in good financial shape that allowed them to make this kind of gifts to whomever they chose. As I was growing up, I was always told by my parents, "The only money that is truly yours is the money you made." This was a very valuable lesson as it taught me never to desire or begrudge anybody else's money.

Many people tend to see their parents as property that belongs to them and that has no life, will or desires of its own. Parents are people, too. They are responsible for their children's well-being until the children reach the age of majority. After that, they have no financial obligations to their children. 

The Insanity Is Contagious

Do you remember the bill in South Dakota that proposed to legalize murders of abortion providers? The idea caught on, and now Iowa and Nebraska are considering similar legislation. The people who are pushing for these bills are the same people who call themselves pro-life. These are also the same people who screech about how much they hate governmental intrusion into citizens' lives while advocating governmental intrusion into women's bodies in the most egregious way possible.

Just to think that a bunch of sexually repressed maniacs who hate any reminder that others do enjoy actual sex lives would make such a public spectacle of three states. 

Who's next, I wonder?

MEUS AMORES

QUERO AGRADECER DE CORAÇÃO A SUA PRESENÇA. MUITO OBRIGADA. ANDO SEM TEMPO DE VIR NO BLOG. MAS ASSIM QUE PUDER VOU AGRADECER PESSOALMENTE EM CADA BLOG. ESTOU MUITO FELIZ COM A SUA PRESENÇA. FICO MEU ABRAÇO SUPER CARINHOSO A TODOS.

DEIXO ESTA PEUQENA MENSAGEM PARA A TODOS.
DE TUDO O QUE FIZEMOS BA VIDA FICAM APENAS ALGUMAS LIÇÕES:

A CERTEZA DE QUE ESTAMOS TODOS EM PROCESSO DE APRENDIZAGEM... A CONVIÇÃO DE QUE PRECISAMOS UNS DOS OUTROS... A CERTEZA DE QUE NÃO PODEMOS DETER O PASSO... A CONFIANÇA NO PODER DE RENOVAÇÃO DO SER HUMANO... DEVEMOS APROVEITAR AS ADVERSIDADES PARA CULTIVAR VIRTUDES. FAZER DOS TROPEÇOS UM PASSO DE DANÇA. DO MEDO UM DESAFIO DOS OPOSITORES, AMIGOS E RETIRAR, DE TODOAS AS CIRCUNSTÂNCIAS, LIÇÕES PARA SER FELIZ.

ESTA FLOR É PARA VOCÊ..

AGRADEÇO A SUA COMPANHIA!!!

Blog Coletivo-Uma Interação de Amigos-

MEUS MIMOS/SEUS PRESENTES- VOU TE ESPERAR POR LÁ.

Poetas-Um Voo Livre-

Sinal de Liberdade-uma expressão de sentimento-

Research Is Unforgiving

There are many wonderful things about the academic career. A great amount of free time, a high social position, a respectable salary, good benefits, the opportunity to spend one's life reading, thinking, and writing, getting paid for expressing one's opinions and growing intellectually, the chance of helping young people to develop their love for learning - all these things make our job one of the best career choices possible. There is, however, one big obstacle a beginning academic needs to overcome, which consists of actually finding a tenure-track position.

There are many positions where one can end up after getting a PhD. One can become a Visiting Professor, an adjunct, a lecturer, an instructor, or get that horrible curse of scholars in the Humanities, a post-doc. It is only a tenure-line position, however, that opens the door to the wonderful things I have listed above. All other positions only lead to crazy teaching loads, no support for research, ridiculously low salaries, and no power of decision-making at one's institution.

Tenure-line positions are very hard to get nowadays. In the first year I was looking for a job, over 400 people competed for one tenure-track job in my field at a college that nobody will ever consider first-tier. The second year I looked for a job, things got worse. Many people fail to find tenure-line positions for a few years after they get their PhDs. Often, they discover that these several years that have elapsed since they graduated and that they spent as adjuncts, post-docs or instructors make them nearly unhireable for any tenure-track positions. As an example, see this story from College Misery.

It might seem very unfair that employers would reject people who have graduated a while ago in favor of "freshly minted PhDs." This policy does, however, have a very practical justification. Research is a very unforgiving endeavor. It is similar to a jealous, high-maintenance lover who cannot be abandoned even for a short time, let alone for years. A while ago, I listened to a scholarly presentation by an academic who hadn't done any research for a few years for a variety of personal reasons. As a result, he was completely clueless about some important new developments that had been done in his field. His presentation sounded like a valiant attack on windmills that weren't really there any longer.

Unfortunately, the teaching loads of adjuncts and instructors are huge, while the pay is extremely low. As a result, they have to teach part-time at a variety of places just to make ends meet. Who has time and energy to think of research under those conditions? Prospective employers understand that and are unwilling to give tenure-track positions to people who have been in such jobs for a while. After I got the PhD, I knew that I had to do everything I could - and more - to get a tenure-line job. Or I would be out of academia for good. This is an extremely stressful situation to be in, but that's how things are.

What Everybody Needs to Know About Bandwidth

Mike, who is an expert on everything that has to do with connection technologies (pardon my clumsy expression but I'm a little tired this week), writes the following on his blog:

People in general just don’t really understand how fantastically, insanely cheap bandwidth is these days. It’s so cheap imagine that if you went to the grocery store and your monthly food bill was a fraction of a penny. . . Yes, there does need to be equipment in place to support all the traffic. But I can buy and roll out enough equipment to provision a small country – say, 10 million people — with 100Mbs synchronous connections for not more than 100 million dollars. (Yep, really.)

I had absolutely no idea about this because this is not what we keep hearing about the pressing need to kill unlimited usage plans.

In case you didn't know, AT&T recently cancelled its unlimited data usage plan for cell phone users and made all of its plans usage based.

Inconsiderate Coworkers

Some people have no idea how to be civil to their coworkers. They believe themselves to be the center of the universe and don't seem to realize that other people exist. We complain about our students having no manners, but how can these kids be expected to behave courteously when they see esteemed older professors being extremely inconsiderate towards others.

Today, I'm showing a movie in two of my classes. In order to ensure that the audio-visual equipment works well, I stayed until after classes ended yesterday and did a trial run of the DVD. I hate making students waste valuable class time while I fumble with the equipment. So I made sure that everything worked perfectly and left. Today, I come to class and discover that:

a) the person who taught before me didn't log off. Which meant that I had to reboot the computer. This operation takes at least 5 minutes since the computer is not extremely new.

b) the audio-visual equipment was disconnected. There is no legitimate reason why one would need to unplug the sound system and the DVD player that were turned off and weren't bothering anybody. But this is what the inconsiderate colleague did. So I had to crawl around on the floor for ten minutes, messing up my clothes, and letting the students experience the richness of my swearing vocabulary in Spanish while I connected everything back.

The next time I'm showing this movie today is 2 pm. I'm quite resigned to yet another inconsiderate person messing up the equipment yet again.