Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Writing

I had a student come up to me and we ended up chatting about writing assignments. He was doing the same what I heard enough in college "when am I going to use this skill in the real world?"

All the time.

I can now confidently say 90% of my job is creative writing/editing to some degree of creativity (minimum is grant reports, maximum creativity is for expense reports ;)
But nearly all is creative stuff. This is why I have been mildly jealous of those in science who could write well. Not just sufficient but with clarity and, my favorite, brevity.

At this stage I would be happy to write okay and fast. Faster at any rate.
I want those grant proposals written, the homework and exams, oh and finish that paper, and edit that student's paper.

It never ends though. Keep truckin.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Insomnia

It seems do be a particular academic thing to have insomnia. Big brain will not shut off. And it sort of meshes with the "I-am-so-busy-I-cannot-afford-sleep" toxic attitude.

Last night was insomnia once again for me. Not so much brain cannot stop thinking insomnia ("the hamsterwheel") or anxiety dream insomnia. I just woke up at 2:30 with All Systems Red Alert. Could be an anxiety dream but it did not feel like it. Some noise must have flipped a primordeal switch reading "All AWAKE NOW".
Well I got my class for this adternoon mostly prepped.

Brain:"we should have insomnia more often!"

"shut up brain"

Monday, October 16, 2017

How cool was the worst kept secret in astronomy?

Today was the big day for LIGO amd just about every other observatory (see what I did there? LIGO is "just another observatory" now). This has been rumored on astro social media for some time now. With Hubble observing logs public and an overenthusiastic tweet to boot. Yet it made a big splash anyway. Coordinated press events, a monday news cycle almost to themselves (president is golfing). All very well done. The graphics are amazing and I can start using this whole thing for my astro 101 class. Great!

Can I cop to being a little jealous? Such an inspiring global effort. Would have loved to have been a part of it. Barring that, I'll be cheering this magnificent achievement on.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

The 100% myth

One thing that is now a nodding-in-agreement topic in academia is how overworked we are. Not that it has led to meaningful evaluations of people's efforts in any way but one can get a nod of symphathy out of most people when complaining about the workload.

Something that is not so often considered is how we arrive at said workload. It happens when we (or those doing the planning for us, but let's be honest here it is us) plan for anything. Subconsciously or not, the assumed our performance is 100%. On a flat, even surface with factory settings. But we rarely function at 100%. Your car engine certainly doesn't. No one else does all the time.

R told me to aim for 70%, and expect 50% from time to time. That does make planning anything much more realistic. And my own evaluation of my performance teaching etc.

I blame all those idealized models for our poor planning model. Assume spherical professor in a vacuum with no friction from paperwork.