Bardiac

 Like many other campuses, NWU has moved to a system of centralized advising, with students having faculty advisors assigned rather late in ...

 Let's imagine, for a moment, I've received a letter of complaint from some students about a colleague.  The students meet with me, ...

 As chair, I'm responsible for doing my own classroom visits (aka observations) of tenure track and newer adjunct instructors.  Because ...

 As instructors, we all have little stuff that needs to get done.   We have monthly time sheets, which basically ask, did you take sick leav...

 This past week, our former chair, several high level administrators, and I had a meeting to review the department review that was done in 2...

 I can't get the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" out of my head... “Forward, the Light Brigade!” Was there a man di...

 The weirdest thing about being chair so far is that people seem to think I know stuff.  Not special, secret information, but stuff no one w...

I got this idea from Dame Eleanor, here, where she looked back over her decades . Six decades ago, my parents brought me home from the hos...

To continue my story about the not real reed prep person:  they started on Monday. And because they'd come from a sister school's ...

Imagine, a fable: Underwater Basketweaving hired a new non-teaching person recently to do reed and materials work and preparation.  Ther...

You know the saying, probably, when you're just trying everything you can think of to see if something, anything, works: Throwing spaghe...

So much depends, sometimes. When I first came to NWU, the Underwater Basketweaving department had a administrative assistant who was less ...

I've been spending an inordinate amount of time filling in forms lately.  Each form has it's own acronym, which is what everyone cal...

Mine has taken a hit with the new chair stuff.  Working on it. Early last week, I got a desperate email from a transfer student's core...

Right now, this chair thing feels like juggling, only there's sharp knives mixed in with porcelain cups and rubber balls of varying size...

In the past, I've heard department chairs lament that once they became chair, people (specifically, the people in their departments) cha...

There's much uncertainty these days!  The other day, I was in a meeting with chairs and the Dean, and several deanlings, all on line. ...

Like a lot of people, I'm in a couple of facebook groups, including several aimed at academics.  There are a couple feminist groups, and...

Early last week, I had my car (a 2003) in for servicing.  It was due for 60K mile servicing, which I'd missed early on, and left to 100K...

I've been the new chair since Tuesday, and I'm learning about all the things I need to start actually learning. On Monday, I had a...