Add This to Your Plate

 I got a couple of emails yesterday, one from HR, and one from the Dean, which I actually read.  The upshot is that all of the chairs and other campus "leaders" are supposed to participate in a number of leadership courses, each lasting from three to nine hours, it looks like.

I'd like to bitch and moan about the added work, which is, at minimum, four three hour classes, so 12 hours, but two nine hour classes are also strongly recommended.

It's not like we have to do them all today or anything, they're spread over the year.  But the ones for this spring (four of them, I think) are mostly scheduled for when I have class to teach.  That pushes me into summer to take most of them.  

I dutifully signed up.  I don't want to get a reputation as a whiner, but still I'm irritated.  

Some of the classes look super helpful, and I wish I'd been able to do them this past summer: there's one on campus specific budgeting, and campus specific roles for chairs, and another on hiring practices that's campus specific.  

Others seem, well, potentially irritating.  Or not.  They seem to be really into the "seven habits" thing.  I don't really know.  According to Dr. Google, the seven habits are:

• Habit 1: Be Proactive® ...
• Habit 2: Begin With the End in Mind® ...
• Habit 3: Put First Things First® ...
• Habit 4: Think Win-Win® ...
• Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood® ...
• Habit 6: Synergize® ...
• Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw®

I'm not sure I need 9 hours to learn about these.  I mean, duh.  And I'm unconvinced by the trademarks.  Seriously, "be proactive" is trademarked?  Didn't Ben Franklin have something to say like that?

I may need an attitude adjustment.  I need to try to make it useful, at any rate, because I'm supposed to do it.  But it does feel a bit cultish, doesn't it?

I can't help thinking how much more useful such things would be to colleagues at the beginnings of their careers rather than nearing the end.

I didn't sign up for the week long workshop in the middle of summer.  I'm hoping to actually get to have more of a summer this year.  I'm paid to work 60% during the summer, supposedly, and I mostly worked a lot more than that last summer.  (A lot of that was learning curve.)

Finally, I sometimes get the sense that people whose main jobs have to do with having meetings tend to think that the point of work is to schedule meetings, and everyone can schedule meetings at their convenience.  And, of course, that's not the way it works for most faculty and instructors on a college campus.

In better news, the department schedules committee did great work yesterday, and things are coming together for spring of 2022!