I am just amazed (and alarmed) about the performance of students on my essay questions. I asked a very simple essay question for one of the courses I teach in. In fact I felt rather bad about the question afterwards because it was such an easy question - I thought most of the students would have it right. Boy was I surprised when I got the answers and found that over half of the class had failed my question. I actually had told them the answer in question in a way when I was going through my lecture.

Two different lectures today. Really does me in. But it is the end of the semester. Now all I have to do is write a test question and grade answers for this question and another one I wrote for a different class. But it does mark the end of the semester for us so now I hope the committee work does not start getting piled up on me again.

Am in full teaching mode this week. One thing I cannot get over is how many students choose not to attend class. They do get the notes either through the class pool (of mixed quality) and from the handouts we post on Blackboard. They also study on their own. It is just something that we did not do when I was in college and graduate school.

Yesterday afternoon spent an hour working with one of the undergrad students I advise on choosing which medical school acceptance to take. A nice problem for him. Both choices would be fine. Also talked to the materials transfer people about our ability to be compensated for the materials we supply to other investigators. This is a rather complicated issue. The bottom line is one is to supply other investigators which various raw materials (clones, cell lines, etc) on request. The problem in general is that there is a cost involved in making the material. Generally this is done as a courtesy. However, in our case we are an established core set up by a grant from the NIH. We are required by the terms of our grant to be compensated for the supplies and time of a technician. The materials transfer people actually understood exactly what we wanted to do and told us exactly how it could be done quite easily.

Just heard that one of the people who is a part of the research group I am involved in will be leaving. His move is an upward move but it creates a real hole in our program and in the Department he comes from. He is a clinician/scientist and it is hard to find these people - there is so much emphasis on clinical income in the clinical departments that there is a negative incentive to establish a research program. It is a real shame. We are an academic institution and I have this notion that we should not make financial considerations our driving force. This may be naive.

One of the problems with being used to working in the lab is when you cannot (because of teaching, money issues, meetings) it is hard to judge your day. I actually finished the tasks I had in mind for the day and am kind of thinking what should I do for the next hour. I hate wasting the time but I am tired having read for most of the day, had one meeting, went to an equipment show. I would feel terribly guilty if I went home early so I will do some general stuff for a while to avoid getting down on myself.

Today students presented in the class I taught in last week. Tried to emphasize thinking - going for the concept of what is the question and how they tried to answer it rather than bog down in details. They semi got the concept although I think the larger question of what was the point of the papers was poorly presented.

This weekend was our faculty retreat. We have these about every 3 years. It is a time to discuss the major issues facing the department (budget, teaching, space) and how we should deal with them. As usual several members hijack the discussion and push their agenda. I just find that frustrating.

Today was one of those meetings where you do not think this is necessary but it is mandated by the federal government so you do it. I am in charge of the committee and try to make the meetings move along - if we have to be there I will make it as meaningful as I can. The problem is I am old enough to remember the time when the federal government did not regulate these matters. The vast majority of people of course did things in a moral manner but just enough bad things happened that we now have all kinds of regulations. Some of these are necessitated because the type of reasearch we a capable of doing puts things in a very different realm.

Today I was looking over the schedule for the rest of the term for the course I run and noticed that a couple of times seemed odd. Looking up the official calendar I found that somehow I had put the wrong times down for 3 lectures! Two of them are not a big deal but 1 error is really glaring. I am at a loss to explain how I made such a stupid mistake. It really pisses me off and I know the students will complain about it.

Sat on a students thesis proposal committee. This is when the student presents the work they plan to carry out for their PhD degree. As usual it is interesting to see what the student just does not know. We pointed out how important it was to know the basics of your project. I was supposed to be on another one tomorrow but the student on Friday contacted me and asked if they could first get the proposal to me on Monday leaving only 2 days to read it (since they tend to be 10 single spaced pages this is not possible with the other things I have to do). I told them it was not all right and unless they could get the proposal to me on Saturday they would have to postpone the meeting. They did not meet my Saturday deadline. Since the student set up the date they knew well in advance when the proposal had to be finished. It is important that students understand there are deadlines - we have them for grants, getting papers in, teaching.

Really got into it with another faculty member at a committee meeting today. They were going on and on about how the administration was spending our money and how we as faculty were weak since our sister institutions have blocked a specific program. I defended our faculty by pointing out her facts were wrong. This led to their assertion that my facts were wrong since they heard them at a meeting the other day. I am not sure what facts they heard but the University official web site supports my version as well as a newspaper report. The other issue was how the administration spends money. Before we start banging our chests that they are expanding we should see facts that indeed they are taking more money rather than rebudgeting what they have. They indeed may have too large a budget but my bet is they will show that their budget is actually smaller than in years past in which case we would look like fools.

I need to learn how not to get so worked up by what goes on at meetings. The one today was an important meeting but a lot of the time was spent with two members arguing over an issue that happened over a year ago. The unfortunate aspect was one member just could not understand how they could be wrong - they were asking for a payment in one form which simply cannot be done but could have been done in another way. They just refuse to believe that they cannot receive the payment in the way they want. Another issue was the look and feel of the web pages. They wanted to have all the faculty have a uniform format. When I brought up that this had lasted only a short while in an earlier incarnation of the Departmental web page they started talking about how primitive it had been (somewhat true since it was created long ago in a more primitive time). I did not bring up the fact that they were the ones to first move away from the agreed upon format.

Yesterday I had a 1.5 h lecture for a class. One of the big issues to me is the benefits/problems of team taught courses. In this particular course almost every lecture is given by a different faculty member. This course is among a number at the extreme end of the team taught course. The advantage is that each lecture is taught by someone who has more knowledge than when the same person has to cover a range of topics. The problem for the student is each lecturer has a different lecture style, a different emphasis, and different ideas of what types of information a student should learn. Not easy for the student.

Small victories. Figured out my computer problem.

Major defeats. Found out the grant I am part of was cut 17%. This is something probably not known outside academic circles. You get a grant from the NIH balancing the amount of work with the budget figuring on the number of people you are going to have to pay for then the agency cuts your budget (like I said 17%) and expect you to do the same work. With my very small budget this is a real problem. I have certain fixed costs - salaries or more truthfully the one salary on this grant. With the cut the vast majority of the budget is going to be devoted to that. How about supplies? Forget travel.

The student I was to talk to on Friday was late. Every time we have an appointment he is late and I have made it quite clear how pissed I get waiting. What I have taken to doing is leaving my office and not returning for a while - making him wait. I am constantly telling him I have other things to do than wait in my office for him to show up. Maybe because I am so compulsive about being on time I find people making me wait very distasteful. I also wonder if it is a power play - showing they are more important that me. A major pet peeve of mine.