Skip to main content

Working Saturdays

My university expects faculty to work two Saturdays each academic year. In the Fall we have Family Weekend to try to help family members have a sense of what students do. The faculty side of the programming is for us to be available to meet faculty members during a fixed window. It is usually a pretty cheerful event, although afterward I have always felt the long week and crashed a bit.

In the Spring we interview scholarship candidates. The incentive is to help find the students who will be most successful here which is a win-win for everybody, but again it makes for a long week and I crash afterward.

I was very nervous with my admission interviews so I go into it knowing that it is a stressful time for the students I meet and that they will not always be at their best. I enjoy engaging them in conversation and encouraging them to display the quality of their thinking processes; the worst-case scenario is when out of nerves a student just clams up, because then there's nothing to go on.

The interviewing process is something I've done for my university in many other contexts. In my younger years I would interview job candidates at employment registries at conferences, sometimes seeing forty in two days. Now I am Faculty Ombudsperson and my intake when working with a faculty member in trouble is to get them to open up about their issue.

I am a shy person by nature but over the decades I have become comfortable with the mask I wear in such circumstances, drawing strength from the role I play.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Collective

Something good happened this week; I was informed of it yesterday when a colleague forwarded an email to me announcing it.  The announcement had to do with our university administration committing resources to something that needed doing; the fact that it had not been done had threatened the safety and work environment of dozens of my colleagues. I was clueless about it until in my job as ombudsperson I heard about it from multiple individuals. 95% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is focused on the individuals who come to me, brainstorming about their options and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. I've been around my university for over 36 years so I've picked up some knowledge of our system and as a mathematician I have a lot of training and experience in problem-solving. I'm not bad at counseling stressed individuals; professional development at ombuds meetings has helped me a lot with that. 5% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is managing upward. The...
Post a Comment
Read more