how am I going to be a professor?
So, despite the promise that I am going to be writing more often, I seem to have missed almost a week of blogging! Yikes!
Part of it has been because its been a busy week. I was wrapping up a number of things at school because I had to pack for my trip home to Calgary this week. I won't even be going back right away, due to a conference in Toronto this weekend -- and a portion of my "fact finding" mission.
My students had their papers due the day before I left for Calgary. I gave them two options to hand in their papers. Either they could hand them into the office, or they could come by and hand them in straight to me, as I was going to hold office hours that same day. Surprisingly, a number of them came by my office, instead of handing them in to the poli sci office. It was nice to have a real conversation with some of them about their summers and future academic plans. In fact, I think I like some of these undergrads more than I do other graduate students, in the sense that they really come from diverse backgrounds, and they all have different interests and different degrees even, so they approach the material and the class and their ambitions differently than the students (grads) that I am used to hanging out with. Masters students (and my extension, PhD students) are self-selected. They are students that were always good at school, teachers pets (ie: they had a prof tell them they would be good at graduate school) and have similar ambitions. I think that's why I found it particularly interesting to chat with some of my students the other day.
The second interesting part of the conversation was that a number of the students in the class came by to tell me that they (in retrospect, of course) really enjoyed the class. One fellow said, "Anita, you know I really hated that class during the semester, but now that I am done the exam and the final paper, its really started to make sense. I mean, really really making sense now." --- bless their hearts, I was so happy to hear that! I thought that whole "teaching" experiment had been flushed down the tubes, because I can't lie, it was a very frustrating semester.
I remember in particular, my supervisor, Frank, asked my how I am enjoying the class, and I told him that "I think I might hate it." He was sort of taken aback by it, but I had to be honest with him. Research inquiry - or political epistemologies - is a mandatory class for students, so they hate it, and so does the prof.
Anyways, it was good that I had such a positive experience going into the marking, because the further I get into it, the more I hate marking. I always have actually, its one of those things about the job that I absolutely detest! The same redundant comments - need to edit, improper citations, run a spell check, arguments don't make sense etc - are so painful, because inevitably, you still need to work through the paper to assign them a mark. Sometimes, like today, at the end of a marathon 8 hour marking session, I wonder if the marking is that bad that I might not want to become a prof at the end of the day. Government and research institutes don't have marking afterall - I can do the research and forget about the exams and papers.
Yikes!
Part of it has been because its been a busy week. I was wrapping up a number of things at school because I had to pack for my trip home to Calgary this week. I won't even be going back right away, due to a conference in Toronto this weekend -- and a portion of my "fact finding" mission.
My students had their papers due the day before I left for Calgary. I gave them two options to hand in their papers. Either they could hand them into the office, or they could come by and hand them in straight to me, as I was going to hold office hours that same day. Surprisingly, a number of them came by my office, instead of handing them in to the poli sci office. It was nice to have a real conversation with some of them about their summers and future academic plans. In fact, I think I like some of these undergrads more than I do other graduate students, in the sense that they really come from diverse backgrounds, and they all have different interests and different degrees even, so they approach the material and the class and their ambitions differently than the students (grads) that I am used to hanging out with. Masters students (and my extension, PhD students) are self-selected. They are students that were always good at school, teachers pets (ie: they had a prof tell them they would be good at graduate school) and have similar ambitions. I think that's why I found it particularly interesting to chat with some of my students the other day.
The second interesting part of the conversation was that a number of the students in the class came by to tell me that they (in retrospect, of course) really enjoyed the class. One fellow said, "Anita, you know I really hated that class during the semester, but now that I am done the exam and the final paper, its really started to make sense. I mean, really really making sense now." --- bless their hearts, I was so happy to hear that! I thought that whole "teaching" experiment had been flushed down the tubes, because I can't lie, it was a very frustrating semester.
I remember in particular, my supervisor, Frank, asked my how I am enjoying the class, and I told him that "I think I might hate it." He was sort of taken aback by it, but I had to be honest with him. Research inquiry - or political epistemologies - is a mandatory class for students, so they hate it, and so does the prof.
Anyways, it was good that I had such a positive experience going into the marking, because the further I get into it, the more I hate marking. I always have actually, its one of those things about the job that I absolutely detest! The same redundant comments - need to edit, improper citations, run a spell check, arguments don't make sense etc - are so painful, because inevitably, you still need to work through the paper to assign them a mark. Sometimes, like today, at the end of a marathon 8 hour marking session, I wonder if the marking is that bad that I might not want to become a prof at the end of the day. Government and research institutes don't have marking afterall - I can do the research and forget about the exams and papers.
Yikes!