Tag: annual

Faculty Activity Report Season

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment
Figure 1. Sheaf sheaf ply sheaf.

FAR season. Annual faculty activity report season. Workload percentages in each semester must add up to 100%. Except for those who agreed to overload administrative responsibilities in spring which were offset in fall. Or the reverse. You whose workloads are atypical, say so by adding parentheses to standard workload percentages. The parenthetical percentage offsets can look like this, (+20%) and then this (-20%). A workload can tip, lean, favor one semester, but then it must balance again, like a semi trailer at a weighing station. “What is the pressure in your tires? Over.” “Eighty-nine give or take, but that should be enough. Over.” “Ten-four.”

What did you even do, really? Whirload percentages are in section one. Provide context but not too much. The committee is tired and has dozens of these to read. Include supporting documentation if needed but really and truly please don’t. Rubrics are a modern extension of rubine, rubrication, the red ink used in medieval European manuscripts for emphasis. Each section of the workload agreement will be rated using a rubric. The textual part of the rubric uses language you might be familiar with from everyday life, namely, High, High Normal, Normal, Low Normal, and Low. These words are too long and so they are abbreviated to H, HN, N, LN, and L. How are you feeling today? HN. What mood is the cat in this afternoon? LN. What would you like to have for dinner tonight? N. Numbers are more authoritative. Each descriptor lines up with a range of numbers. The numbers are doing the real and keen mathematical work behind the scenes. They are engineered with greater precision than the human eye can discern, especially when drawn all the way down to the thousandths place. If you require a magnifying class, so be it. For example, a high normal day could be a day rated as 6.001 or it could be as amazing as 7.999. Decimal places in rubrics are almost like context in that they can bring us up close to the microscopic details. Like Serres writes in Branches, accounting expedites.

What do you mean you have not been keeping up with data entry in the eFAR system? You’re not in trouble trouble; you just have months of data entry to do. The eFAR system is a grand database where every faculty employee fills in blank fields, thereby creating records of the work they do. Some records are autogenerated. Teaching and course evaluations, for instance. Some records are presented as hedges, machine guesses, speculative possibilities: “Are you the author who should receive credit for any of these 49 publications whose author teams have names resembling your name?” Then from the eFAR system, output a report. You will need to make careful revisions to the vast majority of the translations from the raw database to the .doc form. Don’t whine about it. It is what we have and we are thankful. Plus you are not alone. You are among friends and colleagues who also are carrying the weight of periodic reductive reflection. Low Normal years are a part of life. Low years, too. High years. Normal years. During FAR season, surrender to the old you. Remember the best parts and know they will be translated fairly and equitably from the hundredths place into next year’s cost of living pay increase. Submit the completed FAR to Canvas. Exhale normally. Watch the snowflakes fly. Now you are dallying. Next year’s FAR cycle is already underway. You have an article to review. A pair of emails needing responses. A conference abstract to draft. Fractions of points to earn.

Farther Away Than They Seem

/ Derek Mueller

Twenty-twenty-three in a word was reparative, rested-through with healing and repair of different sorts: reconnecting with longtime friends, quieting the email inbox and impulses toward glinty but ever-toilsome careerism, and too, physically, sticking with the trouble of massage and physical therapy regimens, and making a certain amount of peace with the notably prevalent Western mythology that embodied life is possibly pain-free, when it turns out that time wags a finger and says no it’s not.

I re-read those resolutions from 2017, a good enough set for an echo:

more laughter, longer beardgrowth, occasional blog entries, regular running, new tattoo, Grand Canyon, more kimchi, early yoga and earlier meditation, watercolors, heartier alliances, coalition building, political resilience, generosity and kindness, when to habituate and when to digress and when to rest, longer olive branch, mightier dynamite, more olive branch dynamite, cayenne hot chocolate, eclectickler reading, more drawing, bigger optimism, more sunshine, and more laughter.

From “Resolving in 2017“

Running is out, but there is biking, swimming, and yoga ahead. No Grand Canyon coming up. Olive branch and dynamite were administrative tactics, and although I will have a brief interim administrative stint in 2024, all that’s needed for a few months is a steady hand and a positive outlook. I will be doing well if I continue the reading and writing and drawing rhythms that found cadence over the second half of 2023. Cayenne hot chocolate is always a sure, why-not treat, but it’s better enjoyed infrequently, every third month, let’s say.

In numbers, 2023 reduces to the following easily tabulated scores. There’s always more in that hazy margin of activities that don’t deserve to be record kept for future lookbacks in future orbits: hours around the house doing this or that, the repairs and painting in the shed, cooking, mowing, and so on.

  • Email confirmations tell me I spent 40 hours in the pool at the Christiansburg Aquatic Center in 2023.
  • Forty rides totaling 25 hours, 41 minutes on the stationary bike, according to Strava. Most of these were in the cold weather months, Jan-Feb and Nov-Dec.
  • 20 hours, 32 minutes with the healthy back set of exercises, each on its own standing as a 16-17 minute clip.
  • This averages 100 minutes each week of fitness activity, but these figures are not especially flat considering that some months saw a lot of activity, and others, less.
  • There were 29 blog entries in 2023, more than I’d posted in any other year since 2011, back when del.icio.us bookmarks were automatically setting up at EWM. I also posted a handful of entries at the RIDE Blog for ENGL6344, but I haven’t included those in this tally.
  • I drew 41 new illustrations, including the last six in the Cirque du Felinity set. ProCreate doesn’t make it especially easy to get to the time-spent ticker for each image, but these average maybe 2.5 hours each, which I would crudely extrapolate to 100 hours of drawing. But this, too, falls very unevenly across the months. Not as much drawing in the summer months, for example.

I’m tempted to extend this to workside scores for committees and teaching, mentoring and advising, review tasks, letters, and more, but I will resist that temptation, and, anyway, Faculty Activity Reports are due at the end of January, so I will have cause to look back at 2023 through the lens of productivity. There were events, like rallying for a response to the proposed landfill nearby and like listing and selling the Ypsi condo, but these, too, are difficult to quantify. Hours pile up. One other outstanding impression as we flip the calendar to ’24 is that I was in Michigan in every month except April, and that meant seven round trips by car, one half trip (returning to Va. on January 5), and one roundtrip flight for a campus visit, so 3,500 miles on the Subaru and occasional twinges of fatigue from packing and from 120 hours in the car. This is one score I’d like to be a tiny bit lower in 2024, though I do miss Ph. and Is. and T. mightily when I am not in Michigan.

That’s it; that’s the look-back roundup. May 2024 clear way, wiser and kinder as we go.