Scenes from dropping off a college sophomore
Observations from helping my daughter move into her student apartment: Why do people rush to buy milk and eggs before a storm that’s predicted to wipe out your power: do people in the Northeast regularly plan hurricane parties with eggnog funneling? Electronic locks on summer storage spaces (tied to student IDs) removes significant friction out […]
Department chair vs. union leadership: first impressions
I’ve been responding this summer to queries about the rough, over-a-half-year exchange of union chapter presidency with department chair role with the numbers-vs.-intensity thing: I exchanged worrying about 1600+ careers in the abstract with unpredictable “where did that come from” issues, on the one hand, with a job helping 25 colleagues’ careers, 100+ grad students, […]
Wild and woolly week
Moammar Gaddafi and Steve Jobs overthrown, earthquake on the East Coast, hurricane barreling towards Cape May, and the Rays finally beat the Tigers for the first time this year. Amazing! Early this evening, my daughter and I board a plane heading in the general direction of her college… and where Hurricane Irene is headed. The […]
The Rapture and bureaucracy
It had to happen this year, and I guess it’s inevitable I spotted this in my second week as department chair. Earlier this week I was forwarded a spreadsheet with a number of sections in the college (including in my department) where the classes database did not list classrooms or days of instruction. And then […]
Annual Kappan/Gallup poll results released
The HechingerEd Blog’s summary of the new Kappan/Gallup poll is a reasonable summary of this year’s edition of the Giant Ed Poll of Doom. Lots of complicated results, largely because education politics are complicated. Parents are far more likely to like the schools their children attend than to approve of schools nationwide. The country is split on […]