Tag: season

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.

Soccer Media Guide

/ Derek Mueller

The 2010 Park University Men’s Soccer media guide is available, and it’s worth a look–impressively produced. I say this not only because Ph. is in there (p. 11), but also because I used to do the work of creating materials like this (and in many ways not quite like this, not this good anyway) at PU. Without going into too much reminiscence about how shoestrung and cobbled together pieces like this once were, let me just say it has come a long way, indeed.


The guide answers every important question about the Pirates this year, except this one: Is August 12 too soon to book a trip to Orange Beach, Ala., for the NAIA National Tournament in late November?

Trophy Ceremony

/ Derek Mueller / 1 Comment

College basketball is at long last over for the season. And that can only mean one or more things: we have an official and undisputed winner in the Brick-à-Brack (ID#21100) NCAA tournament pool: Julie Meloni. Given that this is Julie’s second EWM Tournament Pick ‘Em win in, what?, two or three years, we can either 1) urge her to write a ProfHacker entry on the blood, sweat, and tears it took to out-predict the rest of us or 2) conclude that something statistically suspicious is afoot and impose a three-year Pick ‘Em probationary period for this possible (some would say “probable”) violation. Okay, so maybe No. 2 is too scornfully anti-congratulatory. Whatever the case, this second championship elevates Julie into Krzyzewskian ranks. Congrats, Julie!

No, I really mean it. I do. Like everyone else you defeated, I’m sincerely “happy” for you.

I don’t have much else to say about this NCAA Tournament (read CGB’s entry on why college basketball in general comes away a winner after a tournament like this). By the end, I was rooting enthusiastically for Butler. Like this, “Go Bulldogs! Woof! Woof! Woof!” Not really. I mean, I *was* rooting for Butler, but without barking. To be honest, though, I misjudged Duke and Butler as upset specials. Neither of them had even a slim chance in my vision of how things would play out. I had Butler losing to UTEP (first round) and Duke losing to Louisville (second round). Be forewarned: Next season I will keep these hallucinations and blindnesses in mind.