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What’s with all these teaching musings, you ask? The university requires annual peer review of teaching for assistant professors, so yesterday I did a review for one of my junior colleagues. I went to one of his lectures (he knew I was coming), took notes, and I will write up a report for his tenure file. When I…
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I don’t think I have always thought this, but I suppose I do now: you can in fact be a good researcher and be an atrocious teacher. And I don’t mean being bad because you don’t prepare or otherwise blow off your duties. You can put in the work, you can care, and you can still…
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I have been going to the same grocery store for the past several years. Their bread is second to none in in a 5+ mile radius. I usually go shopping on Sundays and see the same salespeople every week. I pretty much know most of their names and chat briefly when I run into them. The…
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Clocks go back 1 hour tomorrow, supposedly we can all get 1 more hour of sleep. Yeah, right; tell that to my kids. Clocks, schmocks. I will be blogging daily in November, as I did the last two years, starting new stuff November 2nd, after a grant deadline. A repost tomorrow. The latest repost brought thoughts on work…
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I am very grouchy. Instead of wasting the time I don’t have on a new post, here’s a reasonably close approximation of my thoughts, a repost of this piece. ———————- When you blog for a while, sooner or later you start revisiting the topics you discussed before. Some of them you visit multiple times. A few,…
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Readers who are chemists or in related fields: I have a question where I appear to disagree with Eldest’s chemistry honors teacher. It’s about the (ground state) electronic configurations of atoms. It’s not a problem as to which orbitals get filled first; it’s slightly more subtle. Namely, once you start filling a degenerate set of orbitals (the set…
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Breaking news: Detaching from work helps one re-energize for work. Who knew? I always thought that I needed more time to veg out. It turns out I detach from work best when I am very busy all weekend, but with non-work stuff. This weekend I spent five hours timing at a swim meet, we had friends over…
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Yesterday I received requests to review not one but two papers co-authored by the same person; the papers are from different journals and on different topics, but that makes 3 papers from the same guy within a month. Obviously, I am on his preferred reviewer list, which is fine. He works in my field and I am happy to review.…
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Usually you hear “People, not projects” in discussions on how grant dollars should be distributed. Yesterday I came to think how the syntagma holds for collaborations. I have long-term collaborators with whom I really enjoy working. Our collaborations may not be continuous, but they are frequent as we often apply or funds together. I like how they think, how they work…
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