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A student has been scoring in the 60s and 70s in a class where the average score on the tests is in the mid-70s. He’s not failing, but he won’t be getting a great grade, either. He doesn’t come to class or office hours. He submits homework only intermittently. He tells me that he’s too busy…
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Creating PPT presentations is on my mind. (I don’t use PPTs in class, so this is not about lectures with PPTs.) Recently, I have witnessed a midcareer/senior academic who should be at the top of their game (mid-to-late 50s, lots of accolades on the CV) deliver an abysmally bad talk during a seminar in the context…
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Often, as I read the external letters of evaluation written by experts in support of the tenure cases of stellar junior faculty, I wish these young professors knew how highly the senior colleagues thought of their work. Some of these letters are full of genuine praise and admiration. If you are an academic, it’s likely that you sometimes —…
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If you want me to do something for you and I say I will, I will ask you to give me a deadline. Once I have the deadline, I will do my best (and will usually succeed) to deliver what I promised by said deadline. BY SAID DEADLINE. This means not much before the deadline.…
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Here are some things that came up over the past few weeks as I thought about the teaching performance of that junior colleague of mine. Here is a hodge-podge of things that I think work for me, or in general. I am assuming here a semester system, and a typical 3-credit course equivalent to 150 min…
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I cannot wait for this semester to end; it’s mostly because a couple of major service obligations will end with it, so I will no longer have to deal with some very difficult people. There are people who, once they’ve grabbed onto some power, develop — or perhaps just give themselves the permission to manifest?…
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I volunteer to help in Smurf’s Kindergarten classroom for about 45 min per week, on most weeks. Usually, I walk around and help the kids as they try to trace their letters or read their little books. Sometimes I read a more complicated text to a small group of 3-4 kids. Today one kid came up to me as…
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I think my paper might be held prisoner, but I don’t know why or when its sentence will end. We have this result that’s pretty cute, but our first choice journal returned it without review as not hot enough. So I thought a bit about where to send it, and since it was written as a…
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Over the past few months, I have made some notable mistakes in how I spend my time and energy. *** I participated in a funding-agency panel, led by a program manager who’s not funding me. At the same time, I had a bunch of proposals to mail-in review for a program manager at another agency, who is actually funding…
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The (faux) field of credit dynamics studies the motion of intellectual attribution in scientific collaborations. The first and second laws of credit dynamics are: 1) A vast majority of readers mentally attribute each research paper to just one of the authors in the author list. 2) The attribution of a scientific paper always flows toward the most…
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