Professionally Lonely
Jan. 10th, 2008 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebToday at work I finished a boring thing, then another boring thing, then I sent out all the e-mails about confusing issues in the second boring thing. I made photocopies. And I went to two meetings.
One meeting was about a change that's happening, and during it I figured out a strategy for trying to do what I thought sounded impossible at first. (Feel free to skip the following two paragraphs if that sentence didn't make you want to hear more.)
We have new university-wide requirements, but only some colleges are adopting these for the next catalog, and the rest are waiting until the next catalog. I wanted to code the new rules for everyone, but how can I do that when it's really only for some people? Today I learned which colleges are waiting. So I can copy the current university-level rules to the college level for all those colleges so they can keep using them.
Our system looks at the most specific rule at any specific number, so if there is a university-level rule #230 and a college-level rule #230 and a department-level rule #230 for a degree program, then the audit will use the department-level rule. The audit for a different department but the same school would use the school-level rule. So I can hide the new university-level rules using rule numbers already in use by all the colleges that are waiting. I'm not sure it's possible to find enough college-level rules to hide under, but it might be. If not, I can ask one or two of them to create exclusion rules that won't do anything and thus won't appear on audits at rule numbers in use by all the other colleges that are also waiting.
At the other meeting the speaker was an educational anthropologist. Someone asked him for ideas on how to get students to use some of the services we have that can help them. He recommended finding out why they were resisting using the services and start there. For example, if they have been taught that this kind of program labels you as inferior, you can explain how lots of people use the program, many people who are not using the program are using the skills taught in the program because they already know them and that being in the program will not appear on their record, so no one even has to know. Some may have learned to do all their work by themselves because whenever they tried to study in groups before, it never worked. You can tell them that this is how you play the game in college, and that it's too hard for one person to figure out everything by themselves.
That reminded me that the reason I didn't participate in programs (even the few I knew about like office hours and tutoring) was that it felt like cheating.
I now basically get it about networking and learning more efficiently and mentoring. But I feel very alone when it comes to knowing people who have any interest in creating educational materials. Most of my friends are computer people because people with nice brains like I like tend to gravitate toward that kind of work.
Then someone asked about how to get college students thinking about graduate school. They need to be doing things like to get to know faculty members so they can have people to write them letters of reference. You can't just go to someone who gave you a good grade.
And there's where I apparently have an advantage over regular people. Teachers come to me sometimes. My first grade teacher begged my parents not to move until after the standardized tests so I could make her look better. I once had a professor come to me and try to talk me into changing majors to his major on the basis of my tests in a very large class. When that didn't work, he volunteered to write a letter for me if I ever decided to attend graduate school in his field. Which I did, and so he did.
So instead of moping about feeling professionally lonely, I should take the clues I have about the field I want to enter and start doing stuff. There's a homeschooling journal that comes out every two months with a different topic--I should try to find them again and try to think of something good to submit to them. There are online databases of educational units--I should try to see if I can create some and submit them. If I do good enough work, and it's the kind of work I like doing, the right people just might come to me.
I need to look through all my notes and papers that give me a clue and brainstorm lots of ideas like that and then refer to that list on a regular basis so that I can always be working on something.
Which has been my plan for a while, and so I shouldn't be writing about how I'm planning to do stuff, but since I haven't actually done anything today, what else can I say?
One meeting was about a change that's happening, and during it I figured out a strategy for trying to do what I thought sounded impossible at first. (Feel free to skip the following two paragraphs if that sentence didn't make you want to hear more.)
We have new university-wide requirements, but only some colleges are adopting these for the next catalog, and the rest are waiting until the next catalog. I wanted to code the new rules for everyone, but how can I do that when it's really only for some people? Today I learned which colleges are waiting. So I can copy the current university-level rules to the college level for all those colleges so they can keep using them.
Our system looks at the most specific rule at any specific number, so if there is a university-level rule #230 and a college-level rule #230 and a department-level rule #230 for a degree program, then the audit will use the department-level rule. The audit for a different department but the same school would use the school-level rule. So I can hide the new university-level rules using rule numbers already in use by all the colleges that are waiting. I'm not sure it's possible to find enough college-level rules to hide under, but it might be. If not, I can ask one or two of them to create exclusion rules that won't do anything and thus won't appear on audits at rule numbers in use by all the other colleges that are also waiting.
At the other meeting the speaker was an educational anthropologist. Someone asked him for ideas on how to get students to use some of the services we have that can help them. He recommended finding out why they were resisting using the services and start there. For example, if they have been taught that this kind of program labels you as inferior, you can explain how lots of people use the program, many people who are not using the program are using the skills taught in the program because they already know them and that being in the program will not appear on their record, so no one even has to know. Some may have learned to do all their work by themselves because whenever they tried to study in groups before, it never worked. You can tell them that this is how you play the game in college, and that it's too hard for one person to figure out everything by themselves.
That reminded me that the reason I didn't participate in programs (even the few I knew about like office hours and tutoring) was that it felt like cheating.
I now basically get it about networking and learning more efficiently and mentoring. But I feel very alone when it comes to knowing people who have any interest in creating educational materials. Most of my friends are computer people because people with nice brains like I like tend to gravitate toward that kind of work.
Then someone asked about how to get college students thinking about graduate school. They need to be doing things like to get to know faculty members so they can have people to write them letters of reference. You can't just go to someone who gave you a good grade.
And there's where I apparently have an advantage over regular people. Teachers come to me sometimes. My first grade teacher begged my parents not to move until after the standardized tests so I could make her look better. I once had a professor come to me and try to talk me into changing majors to his major on the basis of my tests in a very large class. When that didn't work, he volunteered to write a letter for me if I ever decided to attend graduate school in his field. Which I did, and so he did.
So instead of moping about feeling professionally lonely, I should take the clues I have about the field I want to enter and start doing stuff. There's a homeschooling journal that comes out every two months with a different topic--I should try to find them again and try to think of something good to submit to them. There are online databases of educational units--I should try to see if I can create some and submit them. If I do good enough work, and it's the kind of work I like doing, the right people just might come to me.
I need to look through all my notes and papers that give me a clue and brainstorm lots of ideas like that and then refer to that list on a regular basis so that I can always be working on something.
Which has been my plan for a while, and so I shouldn't be writing about how I'm planning to do stuff, but since I haven't actually done anything today, what else can I say?
no subject
on 2008-01-12 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-01-12 04:17 am (UTC)It turns out there's only one rule number that all the reluctant colleges are using, and I need many more than that. So we're going to have to go with the fake rule strategy, and those will be easy to find and remove when we copy those rules over to the following catalog.