Tag: evaluation

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.

Goose Meat For Tenderness

/ Derek Mueller

Food Writing preparations for Thursday’s class session sidewinded unexpectedly to Agriculture Canada’s 1970 (revised) volume, Methods for Sensory Evaluation of Food. The small internet-archived book has just 64 pages, and most of them provide models for Likert ratings and corresponding statistical lookups so as to go easy on calculator-keying. Especially telling about the book’s time and place are selection of foods features in the examples: peaches, “fish-potato flakes processed under two different sets of conditions” (16), and, here, “three samples of goose meat” (30).

I don’t think I want to go the meandering long-haul distance on this one; it’s too tangential to our focus on whether and to what extent, if so, food evaluation is plausibly indexical, relatable from one person to the next, communicable, and so on.

Without venturing too far into the numbers, I want to pose as a methodical backdrop categories of appearance/aesthetics, aroma/scent, taste, texture and consistency, temperature, and overall flavor, which I understand to be a more integrated and holistic sensory impression, whereupon each becomes inflected with the other (much of which I have adapted from sites like this). From this context, we have a system of a certain sort, and yet, this is meant to provide an antecedent for the more active and applied part of the class, which will include sampling an apple, mandarin orange, or banana, listening again to “Are You Really Appreciating the Apple? from Savor, and “Eating an Orange” from A Pebble for Your Pocket, and then, through writing and conversation, engaging reflectively on the relationship between experiential knowledges and the techniques, associated with mindfulness, in this case, for granting greater (or is it simpler, if intensified) saturation to the sensorium, while eating. I know, I know, 99 word sentence. Blog forgive me. I am mulling over the contrastive frames for experiential transposition, and that sets up promisingly in this first model, assigning ratings to discrete qualities, as compared to the mindfulness meditation that invites spacetime flux, the cosmos in a bite of tender goose meat, or GMO fruit, as the case may be.