Missing the signs

I've probably been approached by the third time this past week by a student who apparently was not aware of the new set of requirements we had made for working on a final project.

Since the teaching staff had decided on the new set of requirements before the last school term, we had to make the students aware of this. So I hung several posters around the building before the registration period then to announce the new requirements. One particular requirement I was anxious for the students to know was that they needed to present a proposal before this school term registration period before they can be allowed to enroll in the final project course.

To my satisfaction, students who planned to work on their final project for the coming academic year read my announcements and were able to meet up with their supervisors to work on a proposal. This is why we had that one day of proposal presentations last week.

Unfortunately, there were a handful of students who probably don't make it a habit to read the announcements posted on our bulletin boards. And these were the ones who approached me days after we were done with the proposal presentations. By that time it was of course too late. We had made it very clear that they had to present a proposal by last Tuesday.

It mystifies me how they could have missed any of the announcements I posted. I had one on my door, another at the bulletin board where we always post announcements about final projects, another on the corkboard outside our main entrance and a few more on each of the corkboards just outside out lecture halls.

For me not reading those posters was completely inexcusable. After all, the rest of their classmates didn't miss seeing those posters. So why did they?

Replaced by machines?

The Computer History Calendar gadget on my iGoogle page featured the following quote today:

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
-- Sydney J. Harris, American journalist.

When I read that, the following thought came to me: Perhaps another real danger is that men will leave the thinking to computers.

It has long been the lament of high school and grade school teachers that the arithmetic skills of their pupils have declined since the invention of portable electronic calculators.

I for one believe that I myself have also fallen victim to the advancement of technology. I remember well when I had to use typewriters to type out my reports in high school as well as in college. Back then one had to be careful when typing, to strike the keys in the correct order and to watch out when you're about to reach the end of the line. Nowadays, word-processing software take care of justification and automatically insert a carriage return. Incorrectly typed words are corrected on the fly as well. For instance, I often mistype "the" as "teh". Unfortunately, that bad habit will probably go uncorrected because I will continue to type "teh" but the software will always replace that with "the".

With that I certainly hope my mental faculties won't be (at least further) diminished by the convenience of computers and smart software.

This blog's readability

Hey! You need to be doing postgrad work to understand this blog. Ha ha ha.

Yesterday I was checking a blog where one of the posts showed off the blog's readability. I decided to try it out just for fun for both my blogs. As I already said, this one received a College reading level rating. Curiously, it rated the reading level of my Federer blog as "Genius". I think though that its rather appropriate: you need to be a genius to read about a genius.

I really wonder what criteria it uses to rate a blog or profile's reading level as I've noticed that it gave rather well-written blogs I read a "High School" or "Grade School" reading level. The website does claim that the tool works for most websites.

Still, I'm curious.

Old homes via mail

One of the blogs I subscribe to via Google Reader is Interesting Thing of the Day. Given my love for trivia, I find the varied topics discussed there, well, interesting.

Recently, the topic was on the mail-order homes offered by Sears during the early part of the 20th century. (Goodness, saying that makes it seem so long ago.) While it was entertaining to read about the logistics entailed by mail-ordering a home during those times, I was more curious about the house designs then.

So I visited the archived Modern Homes Sears website hoping to see floor plans of the Modern Homes that were offered and was amused but not surprised to note some common features of the houses back then:

• As expected, the kitchen layout didn't indicate the presence of a refrigerator until the later models. Pantries appeared to be the standard instead in the early models.
• Some models didn't have a living room per se but rather a parlor (is this a Britishism for living room?).
  
• Cooking ranges appeared to be rather large. I think they were still using wood stoves as today's gas stoves were most probably unknown at that time and electricity was a luxury? (Sorry, I'm not an expert in this area.) The description of one house (The Wabash, Model Nos. 248) in fact explains that "Under the work table [in the kitchen] is a fuel box which can be filled once a week. The ashes drop from the stove through an iron pipe to the concrete ash bin beneath the floor."
• Long continuous kitchen counters didn't seem to be the norm either. There would be a sink with just enough counter space for dishes, a work table, the aforementioned range and a cupboard or two.
• Bathrooms were optional particularly in the smallest houses. The main page explains that "An outhouse could be purchased separately...". If ever a bathroom was present some floor plans, particularly that of the early models in the 1900's to 1920's, seem to indicate the old free-standing footed bathtubs rather than the fitted ones in use today and apparently introduced in the 1930's. Even then, each house was generally equipped with just one full bath. There was no such thing as a separate bath for the master bedroom which in itself was nonexistent as most rooms were simply labeled as bedrooms or chambers.
• There seemed to be greater variety in the architectural styles in the later models: a few houses featuring what I think is the Tudor style started to be introduced.
  

What I also found intriguing was a sentence in one of the descriptions that implied the imposed gender roles that was typical of that era:

From the screened porch you can enter direct to the combination dining room and living room without disturbing the women in the kitchen.

That statement seems to not only assume that women were relegated to the home and kitchen but also that it was a man who, being responsible for providing a roof over his family, was the one going through the sales catalog and likely the one as well to make the decision regarding the choice of a home.

Altogether, browsing through those floor plans provided me with a rare glimpse of the lifestyle a hundred years ago.

Trying to please everybody

I've already mentioned that one of my responsibilities at work was setting teaching assignments for our department for each school term.

This involves first of all deciding how many of each type of class (lecture or laboratory) each faculty member will be handling. This is a tough thing to do given the we are short of staff compared to the courses that we have to offer each school term. Most of the time, I have to make the painful choice as to who would have to handle more than the required normal teaching load.

The next thing I do is decide which courses will be handled by whom. In doing so, I naturally have to consider each faculty member's teaching preferences and, to a certain extent, qualifications to handle a course. As always, there are the very popular courses, which are those that most would prefer to teach, and then there are unpopular ones which are the courses nearly nobody wants to teach. (I happen to be handling a pair of courses that nobody else wants to teach and this is the main reason why I've been stuck with these two courses for nearly ten years now.) Most of the time, I get to assign to each faculty member the courses they would like to handle. But since somebody has to teach the unpopular courses and there are not enough sections for the popular courses for all those who want to teach them, I have to make another set of painful decisions regarding who would be forced to teach the unpopular courses and who cannot teach the popular ones.

Then the last thing I do when making these teaching assignments is assign specific lecture and laboratory sections to each faculty member so that the class schedules are not in conflict each other. While this is complicated as well and takes a few hours to do manually, this is not as big a hurdle as the one regarding teaching preferences.

Once all is done--and it sometimes takes me one or two days depending on how I get interrupted at work in the office--I finally release the teaching assignments to the rest of the teaching staff in the department.

And that is exactly what I did yesterday. I mailed everybody a copy of the teaching assignment and waited in my office for the first bomb to drop. And sure enough they started coming.

From those who were forced to teach the unpopular courses I got the expected howls of protest. But what can I do? I simply tell them to find somebody to swap courses/sections with if they really don't like what's given to them. There are those who also let me know that they don't like their schedules because they would like to have so-and-so day of the week free. So I tell them the same thing I tell the latter group: find somebody to swap sections with. Others are more resigned and accept what is given to them. But generally to those who are unhappy with their teaching assignments I just have to step back and wash my hands of the matter because I've done what I can do.

Besides, I've tried handing over the responsibility to others but they've all refused. They all understand that it is after all a very tough job trying to please everybody.

A very brief meeting

Yesterday I received a note saying that I had to attend a meeting this morning to present one of our curricular revisions to a the committee who is in-charge of evaluating such things before it is passed on to other committees higher up in the administrative hierarchy of the university.

As the meeting was set at 9am, I once again showed up at work earlier than usual to attend to other matters before I left. Then after posting a note on my door on my whereabouts and letting our department secretary know that I wouldn't be around for the next hour or so, I set off walking at around 8:50am to the venue which was at a building about a couple of minutes away.

Upon arriving there, I was shown to the conference room. To my surprise and slight irritation, I found the place empty: I was the very first to arrive there. Knowing that I would be wanted back at my office to sign papers as usual, I hoped that the members of the committee would arrive soon so that we could get the meeting over and done with. After all, we only had three short curricular proposals to discuss.

[This so-called Filipino time where Filipinos generally arrive very late for meetings or gatherings is one of my pet peeves. I recall being asked to be piano accompanist to a group for a particular event. I would always show up a good ten minutes before scheduled rehearsals to set up my keyboard and other paraphernalia. But the the group's members would always arrive half an hour late. I was so irritated with having to waste so much time waiting that I refused to play for the group for subsequent events.]

After waiting for about 5 minutes, somebody finally did come. We had to wait for a few more minutes before the committee chair arrived. And then it took another ten minutes for two more committee members to arrive. Still, the meeting couldn't start yet because a quorum of five was needed.

Finally when it was apparent that nobody else would be arriving--it was a few minutes past 9:30am!--the committee chair decided to start. So we went through the usual procedure of taking up curricular proposals: I as resource person would present each proposed revision and the committee members would make comments. As expected, we were done in a mere ten minutes--which is a laugh, because it took more than twice that time to wait for everybody to come.

Anyway, we all made our quick goodbyes--the committee chair was just as anxious as I was to get back to his office to attend to registration matters--then I started my walk back to my office building. I had gone less than ten meters when I heard somebody calling to me. It was one of the staff at the office where we had the meeting: I still had to sign the attendance sheet and would I mind waiting for the snacks to arrive? It turns out that the office staff had ordered some sandwiches and drinks but our meeting was over so quickly that the snacks had not yet arrived by that time!

In the end, when the snacks did arrive a good twenty minutes later we all just grabbed a sandwich each and left the drinks to the office staff. (By the way, I had the sandwich for lunch.)

Stood up and harrassed

Yep. I got stood up today but it wasn't such a big deal. After all, it was just a "date" with a colleague to discuss a proposal to institute a new course. Haha.

This happens to be the third time our meeting had to be postponed. We had agreed to meet two Fridays ago but I fell ill in the morning and had to go home before lunchtime. Before I left though, we reset the meeting to the next Wednesday, 31 October. But when I dropped by his office on Tuesday to confirm that meeting, he said he couldn't be around because he was driving his mother to a province far up north to see her dying father. So we decided to have our meeting today and as it turns out, he apparently forgot about it.

I had reported to work early today in order to get some things done before our meeting which I believed would start around 10am since my colleague usually shows up at work around that time. But as the hours rolled by and my colleague remained absent, I decided that he had forgotten all about our meeting (my cellphone battery was dead so I couldn't contact him either) and turned my attention to other pressing matters I had on my to-do list. So it wasn't so bad that I got stood up.

Besides, I had important letters to write for various purposes to administration officials in relation to the coming registration period. I was also busy with setting teaching assignments for our teaching staff for the coming semester--which is one of the toughest tasks I've ever handled as we are don't have enough faculty members to handle all the courses we need to offer each school term.

In fact, I nearly didn't get those done as I was always being interrupted by a constant stream of students coming in to my office to see me for all sorts of reasons. A small percentage of these were students who were dismissed due to failing grades and needed my recommendation to back up their appeal for readmission. These cases take a lot of my time as I have to review their supporting documents and talk to each student before deciding whether I should recommend approval or disapproval of his/her readmission. Some of the students were those whose final projects I was supervising as well and it took some time as well to read drafts of their final papers before I could approve of them. Most of the students though who came simply needed my signature for all sorts of forms they had to accomplish for the coming registration period. While it doesn't take too much time for me to ask a few questions before affixing my signature on the forms, these brief interruptions can still be annoying as they usually break my train of thought when I'm especially working on something difficult--like making teaching assignments!

Sigh. Such is my life in between school terms.