UniSpeak Lossy

The new building

2008-01-31T18:11:00.000Z

Some of my academic colleagues have moved into a new building. It is all new and shiny. Well it will be once the cleaners have thoroughly vacuumed and mopped it. The building is accessed by means of swipe cards, and gets locked with a key lock at 6pm.

WTF?

Now I can see the merits of having a system where you need to use your key card to get out as well as in, it makes it harder for the local chancers to nick all your equipment. And apparently all the doors (should) open if there is a fire alarm. But.... locking lecturers in the building when they are working late? WTF?

The caretaker (let's call him Fred) was left to stand by the door as Mike the administrator left the building just after 6, and as he went, Mike assured Fred that that was the last of the staff left in the building. Oh yes all the administrative staff had left... but not several academics. Fortunately for some of them, Fred wasn't convinced, and he stuck to his post, and sure enough, several more academics needed to leave the building subsequently, including me as I'd just popped over there for a look at the new lecture theatre. Poor Fred had to then put up with me ranting at him that 6 o' clock was very early for many hard-working academics to be leaving the building and Mike had had no business saying that (especially as there were obviously lights still on in various offices).

Even then, there were a few staff who remained in the building long after Fred had gone. They then had couldn't get out, because the building was locked and they couldn't phone the security staff because, as it was a new building, the paper phone lists hadn't been distributed yet, and the online phone lists are useless. I am told they had to resort to rather extreme measures to get out, involving a door that isn't really meant for human use...

We are told they are going to fix the swipe cards so that people can get out of the building after hours.

Web server troubles

2008-01-29T15:56:00.000Z

We have been having a lot of web server troubles recently (sigh). Recently, this has just gotten completely ridiculous.

Two Fridays ago, in the morning, our departmental web server went down. This is an important web server, containing a lot of documents that students need to access for their courses. And yes, web servers do go down sometimes, that's not the issue. Finally we got an email from tech support late on Friday afternoon - the web server had been hacked, they were cleaning it up, and hoped to have it back up and running, with its data, by Tuesday.

Tuesday came and went. So did Wednesday. Thursday and Friday, likewise. Only when it got to yesterday did we find in our inboxes any kind of communication on the subject. And the web server is back up. In theory. It looks ok, though time will tell.

Now I'm not an expert in helping fallen web servers back on their feet, and to me it seems that having a major web server, on which many people depend, out of action for more than a week is longer than it should have been out of action. But to not even let people know what's happening for 8 days? What is with that?! They even said explicitly at the end of their original email that they would keep us posted about how things were going, before going silent for more than a week!!

And of course you can't complain to tech support about the level of service. If you made it into their bad books there are a 1001 little ways they could subtly annoy you by messing with your computer settings if they wanted to. Or they could just ignore your polite requests for tech support.

Oh wait. They already do.

Choice student phrases

2008-01-24T13:35:00.000Z

Some things students said (ok I might have paraphrased a bit) and the responses I would like to have made:

"I didn't realise the deadline was in November, I thought it was December.": Yeah, like you've only been told about it 6 months ago and the information has been available to you all through that time if you'd just bothered to look.
"I didn't realise the deadline was in November, I thought it was September.": Ok so this student isn't going to be that devastated.
"I got divorced and got awarded custody of my 3-year old and I'm adapting to being a single parent and finding it very difficult to get work done.": Awwww, ok, we'll let you have that one.
"It's 5000 words!": No, more like 500. Stop exaggerating the requirements. The martyr act does not play well in this office.
"I have exams on 18th - 21st June.": And that prevents you from submitting on May 18th just how?
"Can I have my coursework back?": Err no. You plagiarised, remember? I caught you and it was identical to that of that other student who admitted giving you a copy of it. So no, you can't have YOUR coursework back, what are you thinking?!
"I got up late.": At least it's an honest excuse.
"Oh am I meant to do a project?": Yes you are meant to do a project. Those four separate emails you got telling you that you had to do a project? Guess what? YOU HAVE TO DO A PROJECT!
"But the web server was down!": And the web server had nothing to do with you handing in your work on time so stop pretending that that is some kind of excuse!
"Please can you email me my grade because I won't be back until next week?": No, I do not have time to be your personal emailing service. Just curb your curiosity and pick up your coursework from the allotted place like you were told, when you do get back.
"Please can you email me the lecture notes?": Are you SERIOUSLY telling me you can't be bothered to pick up the lecture notes from the website? You really can't cope if they aren't personally delivered to your inbox? Sense of entitlement, thou art personified.

Forms forms forms

2008-01-21T16:37:00.000Z

What's with all these forms they keep sending round? Health and safety forms, forms from HR about working from home (how safe a work environment is YOUR armchair?!), other administrative forms. Pages and pages of 'em!

If they meant something, fine, but they don't. For most of the academics they're sending the forms to, this is just ridiculous. What do the forms accomplish? Nothing for us academics! It just wastes hours of time filling them in - it's not just the form filling in, but also we're supposed to read the vast quantities of accompanying notes to explain the forms.

And to what purpose? Nothing! We are supposed to apply for the right to mark our exam scripts at home in a comfy chair rather than hunched over a desk in our tiny offices. If we want to work at home for a day, using our own personal computers, and get a lot more done because we don't have students banging on our door every other minute then we are supposed to apply for the privilege?

Maybe applying for homeworking makes more sense for certain categories of workers, but do these administrators actually consider that academics work at universities and academics typically have pretty flexible working patterns anyway? Sometimes we work in a library, sometimes in our offices, sometimes in a coffee shop, sometimes at home.

These forms are just a ridiculous waste of our time. Our time is very precious; we don't have nearly enough of it just to get the basics like lectures prepared and research done, and you send us stupid forms to fill out?

And just why are the forms needed, anyhow?

Could it be because the University wants not to be sued because if we sign the form then it's an implicit admission of OUR responsibility. Oh no it's not the university's job for us to have a safe work environment, it's OUR responsibility.

Or could it be that they want to avoid being sued because if someone turns around and sues them because they tripped over a daisy while walking over the grass to the library building and they HAVEN'T filled in the forms, well it's their fault for not filling in the forms and looking at the regulations of their responsibilities! Oh yes, it's their fault for not having filled in the form.

Or could it be that it's makework? The administrators are bored and need to do stuff to justify their position, so they make up forms and send them round to everyone.

Could it be that they are being pressed to do it because of their bosses pressing them, as a result of pressure applied top-down from government legislation?

Alternatively, could it be that these form-sending administrators are control freaks who like making the academics jump to it and toe their line?

Of course, we academics are going to ignore the forms. This course of action is not irresponsible, quite the opposite in fact. It is not in our interest to fill out these forms, nor is it in the university's interest, because we'd be spending hours filling out forms rather than do much more beneficial work for the university.

But from the administrators' point of view, we are naughty little academics who won't fill in their forms like they've been told to. And thus widens the gulf even more between administrators at the centre of the university and the academics on the outside. From their perspective, we are naughty academics for not filling in the paperwork, not doing as we are told, and not caring about health and safety issues of comfy armchairs! From our perspective, they are control freaks who want to add to our workload, waste our time, and to add insult to injury,

....actually that describes it very well, they insult us by getting control freaky on the safety of our own armchairs and if we do get injured, it's OUR FAULT.

Yes, if we get injured in an armchair from being attacked by a marauding red pen whilst marking exam scripts, it's our fault! Yes! Not the university's fault! Not the University's business, my armchair! So stop deluging me in forms, university!

Advice and the notice students take of it

2008-01-14T18:12:00.000Z

So a student emailed me for advice about the options he's planning to take for his degree and his final year project. I like that the student emailed. It's not just that I find asynchronous communication more convenient (phone calls or knocks on the door are inevitably unexpected and disrupt the thought processes), but email also offers a record of what has been said.

A record is very useful: the student can then refer back to it at a later date. But it also covers your rear end. When some of the little darlings make poor choices and mess up their studies and come and complain that they didn't know about such-and-such, then you can point to your emails and explain that they were warned about it on May 29th (or whenever). It is a wonderful defence mechanism that stops them right in their complaining tracks. Emails can have problems, however, often with the tone of voice that you write and how this gets perceived by the student. Sometimes you can't win, there's no middle ground between what a student doesn't notice and what a student gets offended at.

Anyway, back to this student who emailed for advice concerning the options he was choosing...

I responded to the student's email with various sorts of advice, explaining that he needed to take certain courses, sort out his project, and he can't possibly do all those options he chose at once, he needs to balance out his studies a bit more over the whole year.

The student replied with a second plan that did not address the first point (thus not meeting the degree requirements), proposed to ignore the project entirely, and suggested the complete opposite of a proper balance of options.

So I replied again. I emphasised that he hadn't chosen options to meet the degree requirements, he can't possibly study all those options at once, and he still needed to get his project sorted out.

He seemed to have taken in the first and third points, and then switched to complaining about how come he wasn't told about sorting out his project earlier? So I pointed out all the emails (about four of them) he'd ignored that were telling him about sorting out projects over the previous few months.

His final email on the subject consisted of telling me that he had just realised that he can't do the paperwork online, he needs a paper form. Yes, and if he had been paying attention, he would have seen that I warned him about that in the first of these emails!

*sigh*

We must protect the Sellotape from December

2007-12-06T19:30:00.000Z

Why can't we have access to stationery?

Yes, I'm serious. Why can't I have access to the stationery cupboard? Why can't any of the lecturers, from the junior to the professors, have access to the stationery cupboard?

More to the point, why do all the admin staff get to have access to stationery, but we lecturers do not?

This is how the system works:
Say you want a ...paperclip. You would have to get a stationery form, fill it in, and put the form in the appropriate administrator's pigeonhole. (Good luck figuring that one out since she left some months ago.) Then you wait until the administrator has some time to go and get you your stationery. And no the administrator doesn't like it if you want it at a snap of your fingers, they naturally want to do it at their convenience not yours.

Alternatively you could go to the nearest colleague's office and ask them whether they have a paper clip.

So therefore don't ever require any stationery out of hours, because you won't get it.

When I arrived here, I couldn't believe that such a stupid system existed. I asked the head honcho administrator why. I got told officiously that when it had been a help yourself system, rolls of sellotape tended to go missing around December time (at this point the administrator glanced meaningfully in my direction), and also we tended to run out of stocks because people would take stationery and not notify the admin staff.

This just sends me ballistic. So we swapped a system where SOMETIMES the stationery you wanted wasn't instantly available, for a system where the stationery you wanted was NEVER instantly available?! Unbelievable! And why are administrators entrusted with the oh so precious sellotape? Surely the cost of the sellotape is much less than the cost of the administrators' time in fulfilling stationery requests?!

And... it's got worse. It used to take about two days to get stationery. Now, if you're lucky, it takes a week.

As a consequence, I think our stationery bills have probably gone up. Now everyone has little caches of stationery in their desk drawers. Lots of unused stationery around the building, lots of old envelopes with gum going unsticky.... the easiest solution is often to buy your own.

And people wonder why a divide develops between the administrators and the academics! Obviously the administrators don't trust us as far as they can throw a paperclip. How much do the academics trust the administrators? Who knows? We can't demonstrate because we haven't any paperclips to throw....

Students! Demands!

2007-11-20T17:10:00.000Z

Again, he did it again!

This student, whom I have encountered twice before showing disrespect for my time, turned up again, knocking on my door. He happened to catch me at a bad time when I had a lot of urgent work I had to do and no I couldn't spare 5 mins or 30 mins or however long it was going to take to help him, RIGHT THEN.

That's not what I said to him though, I was very polite. I reminded him of the notice on my door that not only explains when my office hours are (he did not turn up during office hours) but also explains that at other times students need to make an appointment because I can't guarantee to be available. I explain that I was busy at that time and he needed to make an appointment.

He did not accept this. He didn't take on board what I'd said about being busy and not having the time right then at all, and continued to ask (nay, demand) that he get to speak to me right then. I replied again saying that I'm sorry, I'm busy, and he was still demanding my time as if he thought that just because I was in my office, that means he got to choose how I spent the next few minutes.

After repeating myself twice, I snapped at him: "I said, I'm busy!" and immediately shut the door. He immediately starts banging on the door and shouting. I don't know what he did after that, because I put my headphones on along with some loud music, and got on with my work.

Later on I sent him an email explaining carefully that he needed to show more respect for others' time. Just because he might have something important to deal with at a particular time doesn't mean that other people don't have anything important to do at that same time. Let's hope he learns the lesson that you can't force other people to give you what you want, when you want, just by disrespecting their time.

Murphy's law as it applies to lecturing

2007-11-05T21:59:00.000Z

When you're a lecturer, your organising skills really have to be good. It only takes one little mistake in what you've arranged for your course, and BAM! it ends up causing a lot of inconvenience to students. 99% ok is not enough, when Murphy's Law sees to it that the other 1% matters a great deal.

Earlier on in the Autumn, I was trying to nail down the last bit of the timetable for this class I'm teaching, but will it get nailed down? No. The administrator who does the timetabling is supposed to sort it out. Didn't happen. The wrong thing got booked. Probably not his fault, he probably just assumed it would be like last year. Anyway I knew what I needed for the class, he didn't, so it fell on me to sort out what he hadn't.

I thought I'd got everything booked. I thought was ok, but then I learnt from colleagues that the lab I'd got booked has computers that take ages (20 mins) to boot up and load the system the students will need to use. No I don't know why it takes 20 minutes either, but I know better than to go round to our local tech support staff and tell them how to do their job; I value the use of my eardrums.

Anyway most of the computer labs don't have that problem, so it should have been a simple matter of changing a room booking. Another of the administrators offered to sort me out a room booking. Very nice of her, but unfortunately none of the suitable labs are available at that time. Again, she didn't know what I needed, so it fell back to me again. Sigh.

So I had a poke around in the room timetabling system, searching for inspiration for what to do to fix the problem. I then found something worse, namely that some of the students taking my class can't, because it clashes with one of their other classes! One of the other administrators (a super-efficient new one) had booked loads of sessions for the students without checking that it clashed with my class. She didn't check because she didn't have the details of my class; although the second administrator had the details, the third administrator couldn't have realised that there was even the potential for a clash because the second administrator hadn't let her have a copy of what timetabling had been arranged for the classes! Argh! So I went and left the second and third administrators to communicate with each other and find me a new class time.

Did it work?

Not exactly.

On the plus side, I did manage to dodge the slow booting computers. However, I still had to sort all the timetabling out myself.

And then, in the third week of classes, I found out that the second administrator had never entered the booking onto the system, despite me asking her to do so explicitly, and I'd been double-booked! Fortunately the other seminar-leader was most gracious and offered on the spot to relocate his smaller group elsewhere.

Nothing ruins your credibility faster than someone else making that kind of administrative error on your behalf. Having to run around like a headless chicken to sort it out on the day just makes you look an unprofessional ill-prepared chump who doesn't know a posterior from an ulna.

The Rare Case of the Interesting Committee Meeting

2007-10-26T12:50:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, I went to a university committee meeting that was actually enjoyable. I am well and truly hornswoggled.

The thing is, university committee meetings are usually either very dull tedious affairs that go on for hours, or very interesting because there is a lively argument going on between some or all of the participants. Either way, you get sent a ton of paperwork beforehand, and whether or not you get the bunfight depends on whether someone spotted the bombshell thrown in on page 122 of the seventeenth document of the paperwork and tosses the relevant grenade into the middle of the meeting.

This meeting was different! There was no paperwork beforehand, only an agenda. The meeting had a focus on interesting topics, and people could swap tips as well as express views that could be taken up by higher-up management committees within the University. There was actually a genuine sense of "This is interesting; I would like to know more." on many of the topics discussed. This could have been because it was off-the-record, and the discourse even included various blue words tossed around carefully to amusing effect.

Student's Demands

2007-10-23T15:52:00.000+01:00

He did it again!

There's a huge self-centredness about this student that really doesn't consider things from the other person's point of view. When he came to see me to discuss his schedule, he asked "Can I just use your phone to phone up the doctor's surgery?". Excuse me? You think it's perfectly reasonable to use my office as a source for free phone calls and I'm just supposed to waste my time waiting for you for however long they put you on hold for? I just don't understand the sense of entitlement that some students (thankfully not all students) feel. How can they be so rude?

Anyway, I was polite. I answered "No, let's concentrate on this. There's a public phone in the building across the street you can use later." In hindsight, another answer could have been "I know lecturers' offices are small, but does this look like a 'phone box to you?".

Still, he did at least express himself as being very grateful for all the advice I was giving him (he needed an hour and a half's worth), which I suppose was at least something.

Student Demands

2007-10-21T15:16:00.000+01:00

On Thursday afternoon, a couple of hours before my advertised office hours, an email from a student arrived. He wanted to see me desperately urgently to get some forms signed. Some of the forms probably are urgent. It's so urgent that he said he URGENTLY needs to speak to me first thing on Monday morning. This isn't phrased in the kind of way that merely wonders whether I might be available on Monday morning, oh no, this is phrased with the kind of words that indicates he damn well expects me to be there on Monday morning for him at his convenience. Maybe he's not expecting that I jump to his every click of the fingers, but certainly the thought that I might not be available on Monday morning has not entered his head.

I checked his timetable. Sure enough, there were classes scheduled on Friday. I guess he wasn't planning to attend his Friday classes, otherwise why wouldn't he have asked me for an appointment just before or after his class?

So let me get this straight: he thinks this request is not urgent enough that he put aside whatever he's busy doing on Thursday afternoon during my office hours and whilst he bunks off from Friday classes, but it IS urgent enough that I have to drop whatever important thing I might be doing on Monday morning and see him FIRST THING.

I wonder if it ever occurs to him what a huge disrespect he's showing to a lecturer's time, when he behaves like that, creating the impression that he thinks his time is so much more valuable than mine?

Some students are respectful of a lecturer's time and don't assume we're available any time they want us to be, but others are exactly like this one. They want us available whenever it's convenient to them. They knock on our doors whenever they happen to be passing by, despite clearly advertised office hours and instructions to arrange an appointment at other times, and despite the largest most prominent "DO NOT DISTURB" notices. Then, when they are told that the lecturer isn't available, they proceed to whine and protest and demand time right then and there irrespective of who or what else they might be interrupting and how big or small their interruption is. I am not a milksop by any stretch of the imagination, and yet I find that in person, many students will continue their protesting and demands until you forcibly eject them. Their "It's only a quick query" inevitably turns out to be much longer to answer.

And there's never a "sorry for disturbing you". Don't tell me it's my fault for letting myself be disturbed in the first place. If I have a meeting in my office, a student knocking on the door can hear voices, and won't go away, they'll knock and knock and the meeting is already disturbed. I have to answer the door in order to tell them to go away (which I do so very politely), and it is then when they start in with the protesting that "It's only a quick query", and they don't accept it when you tell them that you are busy and in a meeting and cannot talk to them now, and to come back in your office hours or email for an appointment. No, they want to see you NOW and now they can actually see your face at the door, they are even more determined, They carry on until either you shout at them (which I try not to do) or you shut the door carefully and firmly in their face.

It's very exasperating. I don't know what causes the lack of respect at all. I checked my backside, and there's definitely no label on it saying "Kick me".

First Week Roulette Again

2007-10-12T13:16:00.000+01:00

This time, first week roulette was a bit more diffuse, spreading from the first week into the second too. And once more the guarantee was true:

"...it's not going to be any of the things that happened to you before and that you carefully dodged this time. Oh no. It'll be a new one."

It wasn't too bad overall, but a collection of little problems added up. It was difficult enough trying to get appropriate rooms booked at a suitable time (that's a whole other post in itself), but then our local administrator had gone and printed the wrong information in the handbook as to which lecture theatre and laboratories are being used (not her fault, it was a consequence of the room booking delay).

So, to counteract, I ensured the students were emailed the right locations, I went around placing notices on the doors of the wrong rooms to redirect students to the right rooms, and then..... I still got some students turning up late and complaining at me (I hate it when people complain at me for things which aren't my fault), because they either hadn't read their email or hadn't got access to their student account yet (so couldn't read their email). And then in the second session, I didn't bother putting redirection notices up, but some students turned up late or missed the session and were cross, because they'd been ill at the first session and were too disorganised (or dozy?) to take notice of the email telling them of the room change.

Grrr. It's irritating when all you're trying to do is to teach students well, and yet little incorrect administrative details end up making you run around in circles doing extra stuff you shouldn't have to do, and some students end up missing out on some of the teaching.

Expenses Claims

2007-10-07T20:03:00.000+01:00

Why does everything have to be so bureaucratic and petty and time-wasting? Case in point: expense claims! Here's how my latest claim went:

I submit the expenses claim to the finance person, same way as I have always submitted my expenses (make photocopies of receipts, fill in details on the form, attach carefully-numbered originals of receipts).: Two days later, it arrives back in my pigeonhole, complete with a little post-it note telling me that it's not been coded and authorised and I didn't fill in a travel authorisation form.
Travel authorisation form? Huh? One quick computer search of my archived emails later, I find that travel authorisation forms were announced to us academics as a bureaucratic hurdle for us to jump over seven months ago. However the expenditure in question occurred eight months ago. I email the finance person, pointing out that I couldn't possibly have filled in a travel authorisation form before travelling, when such forms didn't exist at the time of incurring the expenses. As far as the coding and authorisation goes, I say that I have no idea what to do about this, the previous finance person (now retired) took care of it.: Finance person emails me back, telling me I still need to do the coding and authorisation.
I say again that I don't know about the coding and authorisation, so I will have to be informed.: Finance person tells me that I need to get it authorised by my head of department.
I ask whether the head of department will know the code.: Yes.
I put the form in my head of department's pigeonhole with a little postit note on it asking for a signature and the finance code.: I get the form back, signed, with another little postit note disclaiming any knowledge of the code, but pointing out that the previous finance person knew it.
I pass the form back to the finance person, with authorisation signature but no code. I explain that I don't know the code, my head of department doesn't know the code, the previous finance person knew the code but is gone now and said finance person is our best source of information for finding out the code.: Finance person finally accepts defeat (and the form), but resorts to much tut tutting that the form was not submitted by the payroll deadline this morning so it'll have to go in next month.
I. Don't. Care.

Today's Sneaky Tip for Academics

2007-09-29T21:25:00.000+01:00

Say you've got a colleague who is organising the paper reviewing for an upcoming conference, and sends you one or more papers to review. By all means, do the reviewing as early as you can, it leaves more time to reflect and to do a good job on the review.

But, don't send the reviews just after you've done them to get them off your to-do list. Leave it until the last minute. After you've finished the reviews, set yourself an electronic reminder to yourself to send them to your colleague just before the deadline.

Why, I hear you ask? If you send it early, then your colleague may be delighted to hear that you have no reviews left to do, and will instantly send you those one or two papers he has left that he couldn't find reviewers for, with a plaintive plea for help.

Don't make work for yourself by looking too efficient.

Happy Fun Reviewing

2007-06-28T16:24:00.000+01:00

Great. Just great. Out of all the papers I had to review for an upcoming conference, guess which two reviews the programme committee asked me to comment on and defend further?

Correct, none of the four I refereed myself. I was asked to defend the two I sent out to subreferees. In other words, I didn't save myself any effort by farming some out to someone else. To boot, one of them had a very complicated proof in it that I got asked to check, to make sure that the conjecture really was true.

Yuck.

There's only one thing worse than struggling to prove your own conjecture true, that you just KNOW is true but the proof is escaping you, and that's struggling to prove someone else's conjecture true (even with their hints).

Yes you do have to do the prerequisite...

2007-03-16T14:32:00.000Z

What is it about students wanting to take a course for which not only don't they have the prerequisite, they don't even have the prerequisite to the prerequisite?

Student T tried to enrol late on a particular advanced programming course (late enrolling students can be refused entry). Noticing that not only has he not passed the prerequisite programming course, he hasn't even passed the prerequisite for the prerequisite, I refused him entry. Next thing I know, he's made the same request again, this time accompanied by a wheedling email saying he does have a bit of programming experience and won't let me down. He says he'd talked to his adviser of studies, and his adviser was ok with it.

Hmm, what do I smell? The smell of unentitlement, betrayed by the "But my adviser said it would be ok...." prefix. I check T's record again. His record reveals that not only is there no evidence that he can program, but there is definite evidence to suggest he can't program, because he took the easiest programming course twice and failed it both times!

As for the adviser, no he had not ok-ed it and was perfectly happy that I refuse the student entry on a course for which he had not got the prerequisites. Why do students try and play us off against each other? Do they think we don't talk to each other?

Another student N, had tried the advanced programming course before, when he'd attempted to plagiarise his way through it, and then failed. Surprise. He tried to enrol again for the course, but this time he tried to enrol late. So I check his record and find out he hasn't got the prerequisite programming course, nor the prerequisite of the prerequisite (in other words he hasn't passed either of the two easier programming courses he needs in order to do the advanced course). So I reject the request, politely and carefully outlining why he isn't being enrolled, and suggesting he go and enrol for a basic programming module instead.

A few days later, along comes N with a form for me to sign to enrol him on the advanced programming course. He looked utterly astonished when I refused to sign it.

Sexual Harrassment Suit, Anybody?

2007-01-12T17:46:00.000Z

One of our administrators is given to writing notes on the door explaining where she is when she's not in her office and when she'll be back. She even has a little laminated card for this purpose.

Yesterday she wrote

"I'm going to be tied up between 3 and 4"

and it was all I could do not to add a comment like

"Can I watch?"

Clearly I have not got enough stress in my life as I want to get myself tied up in a sexual harrassment suit too.

Oh now I'm doing it too. Damn.

Beware of the Giant Moles

2007-01-11T14:09:00.000Z

Oh this is great. Just great.

Some idiot has been putting piles of earth all over one corner of the university grounds. If it didn't look neatly patted into place by some form of machinery, you would swear that giant moles had been at work. Not only have they damaged a sports area by putting giant molehills all over the grass, one of the piles is huge and is right in front of one of the university entrances, thus blocking it. Whose brilliant idea was THAT?

Nobody even told us about this. One day, you can get to work via a nice bit of tarmac. The next day, the entrance is blocked and you have to make a detour over some grass that is getting decidedly muddy and slippery what with everyone trapising over it. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

Ok, this entrance is one of the more obscure entrances tucked away near the sports pitches, but still...what does the university think it's playing at? Obviously not sport, since the sports pitches are now sporting giant molehills.

My current theories:

The onsite workmen and their mechanical diggers have been scattering earth wherever they felt like it, and they couldn't recognise a sports pitch even if their diggers ran over the goalposts.
The university told the workmen to block the entrance, and didn't tell anyone beforehand because it knew that the people who use that entrance would be cross. It did this to prevent local youths with their motorbikes from coming onto University grounds, going REV REVVVVVVVVVVVV in the middle of the evening, and no doubt causing all kinds of disruption to any football games in progress.
The university told the workmen to block the entrance, to encourage the local youths with their motorbikes to come through the gap in the hedge and use the soil pile as a handy ramp to test their off-road skills on.

I don't know what I'm more cross at. That they blocked the entrance, or that they didn't think it appropriate to inform anyone.

Overheard in the computer lab

2006-10-13T19:13:00.000+01:00

I was tappity tap tapping away in one of the computer labs, when a colleague came in to take the next class, with several students in tow.

Colleague:: (in raised voice)
"There is now a practical class going on this lab. Everyone log off please, to let this load of oiks in to log on."

(turning to students trailing in behind)
"Load of oiks: has everyone got a practical sheet?"

Academically Blonde

2006-09-27T16:08:00.000+01:00

Overheard in a queue:

"My daughter Caroline's just started at University this week.": "How'd she get on?"
"Well she registered, and then that only took five minutes so she was sitting around twiddling her thumbs for most of the rest of the week. She says she's a bit worried about the other kids on her course.": "Hmmm?"
"She says they're all blondes. I said to her `But Caroline, you're blonde!' "

Exam Papers as Entertainment

2006-08-15T14:14:00.000+01:00

As a university lecturer, I have to say that marking exam scripts isn't exactly a barrel of laughs. It's tedious, with the occasional flash of entertainment. Sometimes I get an answer that is so bad I have to laugh, and occasionally I get strange little messages written on the scripts like "Please don't fail me".

But one script I marked recently was genuinely amusing. The candidate had given some data to illustrate the answer to a question, and the data consisted of some names - not just any names, but the names of the main characters of a well-known X-rated film! I just want to know: did that candidate think that I would recognise the names???

Stickers

2006-07-11T19:34:00.000+01:00

I am sitting here at my desk looking at a little sticker, preparing myself mentally to remove it.

I am haunted by thoughts of purchasing gifts from high street shops and trying to get the little price sticker off, when the little price sticker has no intention of being removed. Scraping with stubby fingernails is only partially successful: the sticker yields, but either it is glued so firmly onto the surface beneath that only the top layer of the sticker comes off, leaving a fine layer of paper still firmly attached, or the sticker manages to remove part of the surface it is glued onto.

Neither option is good for the sticker I am currently looking at. This sticker has been carefully placed onto an exam paper by the staff who deal with examinations. Usually there is no sticker, there is simply attached to the paper the id of the student whose exam paper this is, partially concealed so as to assist marking anonymously. But this time the staff have slipped up, and forgot to make sure the student's id is firmly attached to the paper. Luckily this is a student who needed special facilities to take the exam, and when his word-processed answers spilled from the printer, the computer had attached a header bearing his student id. Diligent staff then slapped a sticker over it to conceal his identity.

I have to remove the sticker, it's the only way to know who wrote those answers.

But what if by removing the sticker I obliterate the number? How would I ever know whose script this is?

(oh the suspense)

(over a little sticker)

All that worry for nothing. It peeled off flawlessly. I apologise, exam administrators, that I was so cynical in my estimate of your sticker quality.

Self-Destruct Button

2006-03-15T22:12:00.000Z

One of the bad aspects about my job is seeing students push the self-destruct button. Most of them have some sense, especially when you discuss with them the likely effects of the choices that they make, but some of them are just unbelievably irrational.

A small minority just refuse to take a realistic view of their studies, and view their choices entirely in terms of the most optimistic outcome that could possibly occur. When you point out to them that their study skills have not led to good results so far and taking on even more options this term is likely to result in exams being failed and them having to leave the University, so many just say things like "Oh I didn't work hard before, I'll work harder now" (exactly what they said last time) and other things that are entirely unsupported by the available evidence about their abilities.

I guess that they must be thinking something like "Oh my parents will be really mad if I fail the year, the only way I can avoid big trouble is by making these choices", but they don't see that they are increasing the chances that they will make an even bigger mess-up to a near certainty.

I had to put my foot down the other day. I had to say to a student that I could not ethically support his choices by signing the forms that would likely lead to the destruction of his university career. I hate doing that kind of thing, I believe in letting people make their own choices, and if they are going to choose stupid choices then so be it, but they should be very well-informed before making that choice. I have no wish to try and impose anything on a student, the whole point of my role is to show the students options for how they can achieve what they want to achieve without self-destructing in the process. But when you see one so clearly hell-bent on destroying his degree with irrationality and arrogance, how can I stand by when he did indeed want the degree?

I did point out that he could still make the choices he wanted to by getting someone else to sign the forms, but I hope the fact I couldn't ethically bring myself to sign them made him realise just how much I believed his preferred choices were likely to doom his short university career.

Guilty Conscience?

2006-03-10T20:55:00.000Z

One of my colleagues send a stern email out to students on his course, reminding them about plagiarism and how they should always do their own work and not use work by other people, and any sources they do use should always be acknowledged in the documentation.

He got an emailed reply back:

Is this because of me?

He sent this reply back to the student:

Why? What have you done?

He hasn't heard from the student since...

Lecturers' Strike

2006-03-07T14:50:00.000Z

I am in two minds about this strike. It is true that in real terms, lecturers' workloads have massively increased (I am informed that the number of students per staff member has more than doubled), and their pay has gone down over the past couple of decades or so, both in real terms and compared to pay for other highly-trained professionals. However, the unions are concentrating on the increase in pay, not the massive workloads.

I do firmly believe that

£36K as a average wage (though surely the median wage is nearer to £30K ?!) is not an ungenerous wage compared to the average full-time salary of UK workers in general. In all but the most expensive areas, it is enough to get a mortgage with, and still have enough to pay the bills each month.
Compared to other professionals, the academic salaries are very poor.

Academics are the professionals who are supposed to be the permanent research wing of the country's finest brains (as opposed to industry research which can fluctuate in size), and who are charged with educating young minds to high standards. How can the country possibly consider those people not valuable? Does it not want to have young people educated properly? Does it want to stagnate technologically? Is it not interested in new developments (e.g. protecting the human race from global warming/bird flu/cancer)? Why fund the expansion of higher education with ever increasing numbers of young people to teach, if you don't want them to be taught by the best minds in the country? Do they want academics to leave academia for industry, or abroad?

I fear that this will all become a lot more obvious in a few years time, when graduates saddled with large debts will only go into academia (more low-paid training, lower salaries in the end) if they really can't bear the thought of doing anything else. We are already seeing very low numbers of British students in doctoral studies (in many fields they are vastly outnumbered by overseas students), and within a few years British academics will be even rarer. UCEA is misguided when it says "whilst there are a small number of subject areas where recruitment can be difficult, universities do not face widespread problems in attracting and retaining academic staff, so pay cannot be that uncompetitive" - this problem will increase in the future.

Anyway that's why I'm in favour of higher pay in theory. In principle.

In practice, I have enough money to live on. I don't need more. What I need is my workload reduced. Expectations and pressures need to be lower. And the problem is, if the unions win higher pay, that is only going to reduce the capacity of universities to cut workloads. They may reduce staff; they certainly won't increase numbers. All of which means my workload will go up. How am I supposed to cope? I really don't know. And I'm one of the lucky ones.

Our Email System is Thrashing

2006-02-19T23:00:00.000Z

I am getting increasingly worried about the volume of emails that circulate amongst academics.

I'm not talking about the "Oh this is so funny you must see this!" emails, nor the "Do not open any email entitled Virus Warning" virus warnings (hoax or otherwise). I'm not talking about spam emails (we have filters that work, pretty much). I'm not talking about the "important message from the vice-Chancellor's office: the VC has a dental appointment on Friday morning and will not be available then", nor am I talking about the emails where the sender should have replied to an individual rather than the whole list. I am not talking about multiple forwards of the same email, nor am I talking about being randomly cc:ed into someone else's conversation.

I'm not talking about messages that shouldn't have been sent in the first place. I'm talking about legitimate messages concerning academic affairs. There's just so damn many of them.

There's too much to deal with. We can't cope. Too many messages arrive per day, and as we can't deal with them all as they come in, we end up putting messages aside to come back to later. The percentage of messages that are getting lost in people's inboxes is rising. Academics are resorting to extreme measures to deal with email. One colleague came back from a conference to find 600+ messages in his inbox, and promptly deleted the entire inbox, saying "If it's important, they'll email me back". Some colleagues resort to hibernation, with auto-reply messages conveying that they won't be able to respond to email for a while. Others adopt the strategy of never replying to email, requiring you to repeatedly try phoning them in the hope of contacting them.

This is all increasing the amount of communication we have to deal with. My colleague who deleted his entire inbox not only meant that people had to contact him again, but they also had to realise that their message didn't get through in the first place (no he didn't tell them). Messages buried or delayed in inboxes just means we have to try harder to contact everyone. Because we have so much email, we're having to resort to extra means to try and deal with that email.

Computing academics have a term for this kind of behaviour: thrashing. From the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC):

thrashing ==>

thrash
To move wildly or violently, without accomplishing anything useful. Paging or swapping systems that are overloaded waste most of their time moving data into and out of core (rather than performing useful computation) and are therefore said to thrash.

This perfectly describes what's going on. We're wasting more and more time trying to move our communications into other people's core focus, rather than doing something useful. The scary thing is, that on a computer, when thrashing occurs, the performance of the system plummets. I can see this happening to email too. The trouble is we can't just go and get a higher-performance brain.

The Sound of Death

2006-02-01T22:39:00.000Z

One of my colleagues owns a mobile phone. If the battery of her mobile phone starts to die, then it makes a beep, and after a while it gives another sort of a beep, every so often. The problem is, this sort of beep is the exact same sort of beep that gets made by a computer whose hard disk is about to die a heat death.

So she's sitting in her office, and hears this beep. She goes into panic mode, searching frantically for a DVD or CD on which to make some backups, can't find one, tries the tech support staff, can't find one of them around, hears another beep, gets even more frantic, rushes off to try and find ... only to hear another of these beeps, coming from her handbag. At which point she realises it's her mobile phone....

Appearances can be deceiving

2006-01-20T20:01:00.000Z

The student sat in the back row. He didn't seem to be paying much attention to the lecture. His arms were folded, his legs splayed out, and he looked like he was catching up with some sleep.

The lecturer posed a problem involving some tricky mental arithmetic. The student didn't stir.

The lecturer asked the students for their attempts at solving the problem. Some of them had got part of the way there, but they hadn't managed it fully. A hand gradually raised in the back row.

"Yes?" The student in the back row gave the correct answer, still slumped in his chair.

Moral of the story: just because they look like they are asleep doesn't mean they aren't paying attention!

Feedback Loops and Incentives

2006-01-11T14:27:00.000Z

Confessions of a Community College Dean has it absolutely right about things all being set up wrong, in this post about the lack of positive incentives.

I think of it as being a feedback loop that is set up the wrong way, to encourage negative behaviour instead of positive behaviour. The most general example of this in academia is probably that to do things properly, it takes more time (for negligible extra benefit), and that can really encourage lots of academics to cut corners they shouldn't be cutting, when workloads are high.

Some more examples:

One week during a lecture course, you think of something fantastic you can provide as extra for your students' benefit. In subsequent weeks, they all want it again...
If you are helpful towards students towards whom you have pastoral duties, advising them helpfully over their degree programme, you are rewarded with more students coming to you asking for help, and when you say "But why don't you ask your own adviser?", they say "My adviser isn't very helpful and I heard you were helpful".
The more helpful and timely you are at replying to students' emails, the more you end up having to deal with.
You have more-than-average numbers of office hours, well-advertised. You then get even more students knocking at your door, turning up at any time they feel like in the hope you'll solve their problems.
The lecturers who hide too much doing work at home, or who delete the contents of their stuffed inboxes have their lack of communicativeness rewarded with a lack of communication bombardment, unlike the rest of us, who get simultaneously rewarded with the need for more time spent trying to communicate with uncommunicative colleagues on essential issues.
If you turn up to departmental meetings (unlike some of your colleagues), then you get lumbered with more work to do. It's amazing that anyone attends meetings at all.
(This may vary from dept to dept, it's conceivable that somewhere out there there's a department that specialises in landing work on the non-attenders.)
If you go to the trouble to detect plagiarism in assignments, it takes a lot of time to deal with the results of your findings, and not only that, but the overall results for that lecture course are going to be worse than if you did no detection at all, thus making you look bad. Plus if your detection rate is good, then it's going to raise eyebrows as to why all these students are plagiarising in YOUR course. *Sigh*.
In mid-winter, if you're working late in the office, there's probably some light seeping underneath your door. Guess who is going to get a knock on the door when someone needs some random assistance? Not the lecturer who went home at 4pm.
If you didn't chase up AWOL students supposed to be doing projects, you'd have fewer hours taken up by student supervisions.
When all the lecturers are encouraged to suggest proposals for student project work, the lecturers who do what is asked are "rewarded" by having more students to supervise, which is more work to do that is generally not compensated for.

The last of these does have a small amount of positive feedback though, in that if you suggest some interesting proposals in a timely fashion, then you are a) more likely to get good students to supervise, and b) you get to supervise work on topics which are more likely to be interesting to you because you came up with them in the first place.

This isn't to say that there aren't any feedback loops with the incentives set up correctly, it's just that in academia there seem to be an awful lot of situations where poor effort gets rewarded.

Door Programming

2006-01-10T14:19:00.000Z

This morning was a hoot. Or a major annoyance. Depending on your point of view.

About half of our office doors didn't work, resulting in lots of bemused lecturers trotting around the corridors looking very puzzled that their electronic keys no longer opened their office doors.

Cue a constant stream of lecturers rushing along with their keys to a certain programmer's lair, several buildings away, where said programmer was reputed to be the One Who Programs Doors, and capable of fixing the situation. It transpired that a few years ago the programmer had been programming the doors and needed to think of an expiry date for the keys. So he picked a date nice and far into the future where he thought he wouldn't have to worry about it. It was today's date that he picked. And did he warn us about this in advance? Did he even record this date for future reference? Did he cocoa. He just left us all to waste lots of time this morning and get annoyed.

Cost of the programmer's laziness: about seven manhours altogether.

Still, it got us all talking to each other for once. The only other thing that comes close is the arrival of cakes in the coffee room.

Accidental Hiatus

2006-01-09T14:02:00.000Z

Autumn 2005 wasn't quite as busy, teaching-wise, as that of 2004, but in being determined to not work every weekend this time, a lot of things piled up, with not much time for blogging, and the piles on my desk now represent about 6 week's worth of work that I should have done by now, mostly worthy but time-consuming tasks. If I have any readers left (if I ever had any to start with in the first place), I apologise to you, and I shall resolve to do better this year.

Things I have learnt today:

The underside of the back of my desk is surprisingly clean.
The underside of the radiator is filthy.
My skull is fractionally less wide than the back panel of the desk is off the ground.
The cable from the monitor to the computer is about two inches too short to put the monitor at a comfortable distance for your eyes when the computer is placed just out of range of kicking distance.
Those little screws which secure cables plugged into the back of the computer are irritatingly small and fiddly to operate at a distance with one hand outstretched.
The plug for the CD player doesn't seem to be plugged into any of the power points on the extension cables, and thus has either an amazingly long lead, or works on magic.
It is amazing how much miscellaneous office detritus you can pack into the space underneath the inaccessible corner of the desk.
It's amazing how much you can procrastinate with office tidying when there are articles and analysis to be written.

How not to demonstrate your teaching skills

2005-11-11T20:14:00.000Z

When university lectureships are advertised, typically the short-listed applicants will have to give a mini lecture to demonstrate their supposed teaching skills. This lecture is typically attended by some members of the department curious to see who the candidates are and what their teaching skills are like.

Today we had some rather interesting teaching mini-lectures from job applicants. In fact it gave me several ideas about what to do and what not to do at a academic job interview. Here are my recommendations:

Try and be interesting.: Specifically, try and be more interesting than the view out of the window.
Don't overdo it.: That is, don't bring in your fluffy toy and use lots of animations and pretty pictures and sounds and whizzy effects just to explain some minor point about entity relationship diagrams. Just because someone told you that you should liven up your lecturing style doesn't mean that we can't recognise unnecessary pizzazz when we see it.
Don't use random visual aids.: If you're creative and use something that is applicable to the topic, then that's fine, but don't just use visual (and other) aids just for the sake of it. It smacks of trying too hard, and worse, shows that you don't know how to choose your visual aids appropriately.
Show some enthusiasm!: Students like a lecturer who is passionate about their subject. A bit of enthusiasm for explaining the topic you're talking about is always good; try and remember to breathe and keep the pitch at a normal level for a speaking voice, though.
Have decent content in your lecture slides.: We like to think our students are going to learn something from their lecture notes. Content-free slides do not reassure us.
Answer questions straightforwardly.: Don't dodge the question. If you don't know, say you don't know. That may not make you look very knowledgeable, but that's better than us thinking you're going to feed wrong information to students.
Get your facts right.: When you're preparing lecture slides beforehand, there's really no excuse for factual errors on them!
Don't make spelling errors either.: Ok so not everyone can spell brilliantly, but would it really have killed you to use the spell-checker in Powerpoint? Do you think we like the idea that you are going to encourage students to spell even worse than they already do?
Mind what you choose for examples.: Don't choose some kind of sensitive topic. Going on about BMI and the ideal weight range when you have several fat students in the lecture room isn't exactly going to make them happy, and they won't concentrate on the computing topic you're trying to teach them either.

University shower facilities

2005-11-09T18:18:00.000Z

The university provides showers. There are two showers nearby to the building where I work, one in the gents loos, and one in the ladies.

Today I went over to this other building for a shower. Unusually, the widget on the shower cubicle was showing red. But there were no shower noises coming from the shower. I couldn't see through the opaque door, so I called out

"Anyone in there?" A few seconds went by. Then came a reply of: "Yes"
"Are you just starting your shower or finishing?": "Starting"
"Ok, thanks" So to bide my time, I went over to the mirror and got all narcissistic with it.

After a few moments, one male student exits the shower cubicle, followed a few moments later by a female student!! I think I know what the student was doing in the changing rooms belonging to the other gender (they were impressively quiet, though). They didn't look dishevelled but they did look rather shame-faced and they scuttled off rather quickly. Aw poor students, just their luck to get up to some intra-lesson fun and then have a lecturer appear for a shower!

Black Holes

2005-11-07T20:48:00.000Z

Black holes have been frequent this week. What I mean by a black hole is a situation where I send some information to someone that requires a response, and for all the response I get I might as well have sent the information to a black hole. This, as you might imagine, is really irritating.

I am trying to have some sympathy. I imagine we all get deluged with a large amount of information, and it's easy to let some emails go unanswered that you meant to reply to, and too tempting to let the odd task go undone that you should do. But so many people seem to be taking the line "I'll only do it if I get pushed for it", and some are not even up to that level of service.

But it is getting more frequent, and when it's some support service that I am asking for and need, what I am supposed to do? Nag people? Play the heavy? Wait patiently? For how long?

Currently I am waiting for:

Tech support to deliver the disks they promised (10 weeks and counting, 2 reminders sent)
Urgent room booking issue (7 days)
Tech support to do a small software set up task (9 days, 1 reminder)

Not a flicker of reponse from any of 'em. I wouldn't mind if they said they were terribly busy and estimated when they would be able to get to doing it, but just no response at all? That really shortens my fuse. To add to that, it's not even stuff I want done for myself, it's all stuff concerning the organisation of courses I'm running, and I'm not doing it for my benefit, I'm putting myself out to make sure that the courses are properly run for the students, and I can't even get the support I want? It's not like I've personally given them loads of tasks to do. We are talking one only per person.

Grrr.

Autumn Gold

2005-10-21T18:26:00.000+01:00

Today was lovely, a really positive day. It was quiet, and I got the chance to hear two different interesting research talks, participate in a research discussion, and do a little writing of my own. For once I could forget about teaching, and luxuriate in learning about some interesting things that people have been researching.

In between the talks, I got to walk in the fresh air, and watch the wind swirl around some leaves, all lit up golden and green by the rays of sunshine that peeped from behind the clouds.

Evidence concerning intelligent design

2005-10-19T14:51:00.000+01:00

Obviously, biology isn't my field. Being a computing lecturer, I probably know a little more about evolution than the average person, just because I'm from a scientific background and I like to peruse information about science in general, but I really don't know the details of the finer points of the arguments that evolutionists use to explain where we come from .

What I do know is that it makes me steaming mad to hear about all these school boards in the US who want to have intelligent design taught as a respectable alternative theory. There is no evidence for intelligent design. Everything I teach in my classroom, I can back up. Anytime I make an assertion, I can back it up with evidence. Any time that a student has a doubt about why something is like it is, either it's a typo in one of my slides - "Thanks very much for pointing that out, nice to know someone is awake :-) " - or I can either back it up right there with evidence from my own memory, or I can dig it up from other sources after classes.

How dare they try and teach something to children which doesn't have evidence to support it. Teach the controversy? Sure, take it to the religious studies classroom. The only theory that their "evidence" supports is the one that says that supporters of intelligent design aren't intelligent enough to understand the details of how evolution can result in the existence of complex creatures which look like they have been designed.

Also, being a computer scientist, one other point that bugs me is their logic. They aren't using it. They don't have evidence, all they seem to have is questions concerning things that evolution hasn't explained. That by itself is not evidence. You can't just deduce "there are questions still unanswered therefore this theory is all wrong". That's like someone pointing to the whole big "NP = P?" question and saying "Therefore complexity theory is wrong". It's not wrong, it's just got open research questions. Having open research questions is NORMAL for perfectly respectable theories.

So I was very amused to read this debate on Intelligent Design from The Abstract Factory, from a fellow computer scientist, exposing the flaws in their logic. Brilliant!

University Resource Usage Patterns

2005-10-02T19:22:00.000+01:00

Here's a pattern:

A university removes (or decreases access to) a teaching resource that many staff use on their lecture courses.

Staff are cross about this because they still have the same goals for their courses as before but instead have to make do with less help available centrally from the University.

So staff resort to alternatives, and as the University isn't supplying the resources it used to, these require using extra resources, which have to come from the relevant department. This extra resource includes staff time, because most of the alternative resources take additional time to install and possibly to run.

University is happy it saved money. Departments are either cross because more money had to be spent, or not cross because they don't notice that the cost has manifested itself in the time spent by individual academic teaching staff. Staff are cross.

Wait, there's more.

The resource that got removed has a particularly obvious alternative resource. Lots of staff suddenly start using this alternative when the original resource got removed. The University has supplied no support for this alternative: no equipment, no guidelines, no help. Staff complain about the lack of support.

University complain that staff aren't using the alternative resource properly (gee I wonder why, with no support?) and moves to ban use of the alternative resource.

Much consternation and shouting ensue all over the university.

This results in (pick one):

University grudgingly provides limited support for alternative resource.
University reinstates original resource, but in much smaller quantities.
University bans alternative resource, and the above pattern repeats.

Meetings Schmeetings

2005-09-30T16:24:00.000+01:00

I hate meetings. I gather that this opinion amongst academics isn't exactly unique. However, at least my expectations for all meetings are at rock bottom so I can only be pleasantly surprised if a meeting actually exceeds expectations.

Yesterday's meeting had its plus and minus points. One minus point was that one of the topics of conversation was completely unintelligible to me. They were speaking English alright, and they weren't using any big words or technobabble or jargon or multiple acronyms that would have obfuscated the conversation. No, the problem was that I mentally failed to register the first sentence of this conversation, which was unfortunately the sole provider of clues as to the topic of conversation. I sat and listened, and could not make head or tail of what they were talking about. They were talking entirely in generalities, and it was very irritating! (We computing types don't like vagueness.)

It got so surreal, they managed to carry this vague conversation on for so long, I started recording some of the actual phrases used:

: "taking that message and trying to do something with it"
"make sure that we meet their requirements"
"alert to it all and aware of its importance"

It carried on for so long that I got nervous, in case the chap who started the conversation was going to ask "So what do you think on this issue, Lossy?". Fortunately he didn't and my ignorance was preserved.

One of the plus points of the meeting was that I didn't leave the meeting with too many issues I had to take action on, only a couple of emails to send. In conversation with a friend who works in industry, I was astonished to learn that in the modern programming industry, meetings are not for acquiring greater workloads. Meetings in industry are for turning up to, and assigning work to be done to people who aren't there.

What a splendid idea! At academic meetings, there are often people absent (with the infinitely re-usable excuse "I've got teaching then"), and people only really attend them out of a sense of duty (because otherwise nothing would get agreed upon) or because they've got some issue they want to push. You can't assign much in the way of work to people not at the meeting because you generally don't know what they've got in the way of workload committments, and so you can only really assign things in absentia if you know full well that specific task is the job of the absent person and no other. Thus it is the people who selflessly attend the meetings who come away with various tasks to do.

It's a wonder we have so many meetings...

Blood Pressure Rising

2005-09-27T12:17:00.000+01:00

Edited extract from an email sent to one of my students:

"If you've misplaced your copy of the handbook for students then I suggest that you look at the following web page
http://compdept.uni.uk/handbook.htm
(username: astudent password: pass123 )"

I included the password for the web page, because even though all students have been emailed the password already, that email was rather a while ago. Students are apt to forget that they've been sent a password, or they haven't yet developed the ability to save old emails and search them. What did I get back in response from the student? The following:

"...i tried to use the link you supplied but i cannot access this without a password"

*(&@$%£"!!!!

Resit Results

2005-09-13T18:58:00.000+01:00

Resit exams were pretty dire this year.

One student thought that a "if" statement was an example of a static data structure. This is like someone thinking that making a decision is an example of a storage space (say, a bookshelf).

The same student also thought that a "while" statement was an example of a dynamic data structure. This is like thinking doing something repeatedly is an example of an flexible storage space (like an extendible bookcase).

Another student, when asked to "draw a graph" of some adjacency lists, instead wrote out an adjacency matrix. Yes, "draw" did indeed instruct the student to draw a picture. What did I get? I got a table of zeroes and ones (which is what an adjacency matrix looks like).

These are very basic concepts that they got wrong. It is not surprising that nobody passed the resit exams. In other words, we got it right the first time.

Systems Programmers

2005-09-01T15:44:00.000+01:00

Let's have a change from ranting about problem students and instead rant about people who program the central university computer systems. Every university has such programmers: they do a very vital job maintaining various computer systems that allow students and staff to access university information, like timetables, course information, exam results, that sort of thing. The computer systems typically allow access via web pages, or from using software that everyone has access to.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who program these systems who do a very good job, and most of the work they do is unsung, because the rest of us in the university only notice when the systems go wrong. But sometimes, it can be very frustrating trying to communicate with some of the systems programmers and you feel like you are banging your head against a brick wall, because they just fob you off with excuses or give nonsensical replies to your queries and suggestions.

This is particularly frustrating on the occasions when you, as a computing lecturer, do know what you are talking about: often you are treated as if you are not a computer specialist and know no more than the average office worker. Don't get me wrong - I realise that they know about the internal workings of their systems and I don't, and in some areas of computing they probably do have a lot more practical knowledge than I do. I don't have this lofty ivory tower opinion of "I'm right and they are wrong", but I do get frustrated when their responses are unreasonable.

One sort of unreasonability I find is a view that is too programmer-centric and not enough user-centred. Time and time I see this in my students, too. When practising their programming skills they are much more concerned as programmers with what's easy to program, and when producing some software, they will value the easy-to-program route over the better-for-the-user route, even when a primary focus of the software is supposed to be that it's easy to use.

Yesterday I indulged in a mutual rant with a colleague about how unreasonable some of the systems programmers at our university can be. My current biggest pet hate is about how they structure the information in such a way that it takes much longer to get to it than it should. They have put all the information that I don't want to get to in an fast-to-access place, and all the information that I use 80% of time in a slow-to-access place. With all the accesses I make, this soon adds up.

I'm sure I'm not the only one, I found out my colleague yesterday thinks exactly the same thing, and I'll bet most of my colleagues find the same thing. Not only that, it's very easy to program a solution. You'd think it would be a clear-cut case, because the solution is easy to implement, quick to implement, and fixing this can improve access times without disadvantaging anything else. But have they done it since I asked them about it a year ago? Have they cocoa.

See, they have let-outs. The university computer system programmer's standard excuses:

"That's just your opinion."
No matter how much objectivity and fact there might be in my comment/request, they try and paint it as my subjective opinion. They try to imply that just because it might make my life easier it wouldn't necessarily make it any easier for anyone else in the university. Thus they dodge the issue, because I'm only one person pointing out the problem, rather than coming to them with a lengthy petition signed in blood by all the lecturers I can find.
"It's too difficult/time-consuming to implement"
Another standard let-out is that it's too difficult to implement, with the implication being because I don't understand their programs, then I don't know how difficult it is to implement, so therefore I'm in no position to say otherwise. It is true that I don't know the inner workings of their programming, but it's still irritating, particularly when I give them a concrete suggestion of an easy way to implement it, and they don't address my suggestion, either by saying why that's not possible or by explaining why it's more difficult than it sounds.
"It's not possible because of ..."
Standard fatuous reason, usually bringing in some other factor, some reason which you can't prove false. Typically with a reason like this you later discover that their reason can't possibly be right because they did something later on which contradicted it.
"We have too much else to do."
Again, I'm in no position to know whether this is true or not. However I believe them. They probably do have a lot to do on their plate. Which is why I try and provide constructive helpful suggestions which could help speed things up.
"We'll put it on the list of things to do."
The ultimate condemnation. That's like the in-tray which doubles as a rubbish bin, yes? When a year has gone by and still nothing's been done, somehow I don't believe you put it on a list of things to alter like you said you'd do.

Why do I somehow believe that they just think I'm a troublesome ignorant user who would just make their life easier if I never made suggestions to them? (And no, I do not bombard them with suggestions, we are talking about maybe two issues per year here.) Why can't there be a culture of welcoming constructive polite suggestions as ways to improve even better their systems?

Wish me luck when I try again to see whether they will do something about this issue of access speed...

It's HOW many weeks until the students are back?!

2005-08-31T18:35:00.000+01:00

Where did the summer go?

Meanwhile in preparation for the Autumn teaching, one of our tech support staff has installed a new version of the software students use for learning programming. We staff who are involved with using it in our teaching are now under strict instructions to try and break it. These instructions will self-destruct into the opposite form as soon as the students get back.

Flapping in the wind

2005-08-08T13:28:00.000+01:00

*$&^*~#*(!!!

I have just conducted a whole hour-long supervision with my shirt incorrectly buttoned, leaving a gaping hole near my navel. I'm sure the student didn't fail to notice this.

Oh well, lecturers aren't meant to have any dress sense, and I'm sure my students already think I'm somewhat eccentric.

Fringe Benefits

2005-08-04T11:27:00.000+01:00

As a lecturer, I often have a supervision role towards students, who can include, for example, undergraduates working towards their final year project, or MSc students working on their dissertations, or graduate students working for research degrees. Usually afterwards they come and say thank you very much for your assistance, and then go off into the rest of their lives, contacting you only if they want a reference. Occasionally, they bring a little goodbye present to say thank you.

In the past, I have received a variety of gifts, including several ornaments, a picture frame and a bottle of wine. Today, a new one: cake. Very practical. Smells yummy, too. If you'll excuse me, I think I'm overdue some elevenses...

My Friend is a Saint

2005-08-01T10:55:00.000+01:00

Several of my friends are lecturers. One of them has a lot more patience than I have with the type of student who thinks that the University owes them everything to do with their studies with no responsibility on their part. Fortunately this type of student is rare.

Anyway there was this student, who made an appointment with my lecturer friend. He failed to turn up (he overslept), thus wasting my friend's time.

So he made another appointment with my friend. Once again, he overslept and failed to turn up.

So he made a third appointment. He missed this one as well. This time it wasn't his fault, the bus was late, but my friend's time was wasted all the same.

So he emailed yet again, trying to set up a meeting for the fourth time. My friend didn't respond immediately. After a week, he emailed again to say that my friend was being rude by not replying.

I fear he has much to learn about politeness...

The heat goes down and up

2005-07-14T17:03:00.000+01:00

Things are looking up!

A colleague who was one of the brickbat throwers apologised, and it's looking like they have found someone else to take over the admin role I don't want any more.

After the apology, we managed to brush it under the carpet as some miscommunication occurring along with both of us having been stressed at the time, and we're now on good terms again. Great! He's a good chap, and I did not want to be on bad terms with him.

As for the admin role, I'm not sure who is taking it over yet, but I do hope he or she doesn't turn out to be a muggins. That is, I hope the role turns out to be one better suited to the new person than I was. I think I did pretty well in several aspects of the role, but it was really putting a huge amount of stress on me, and having a negative effect on my health. Hopefully the stressors for me won't be stressors for the new person, and I've got good records to hand over, so the transition will hopefully be painless.

Ooooo, boy, it's so nice to be working and not feeling mega-stressed. Now we just have to get someone to order some cooler weather...

Proper Referencing

2005-07-13T18:47:00.000+01:00

I heard about one student who, well, he didn't exactly plagiarise. He did know that he had to put quotation marks around material he'd copied from other people's work, and he did know that he had to use references in his essay properly...

...but one of the sources he referenced was an essay from one of those essay mills, those places that churn out papers for students to use for cheating purposes!

Someone needs to do some work on getting this student to understand the "authoritative sources" aspect of referencing other people's work.

Handwriting Recognition Stinks

2005-07-12T16:22:00.000+01:00

The other day some of us were trying out a gadget with some handwriting recognition built into it. It did very well with words and phrases like "hello world", recognising them with 100% accuracy.

Some bright spark had the idea of trying it out with some mathematics. Nothing complicated, just

x² + 2x = 3

Its attempt at recognition, I kid you not, was this:

stink--]

Red Letter Day II

2005-07-07T23:29:00.000+01:00

I got some nice mail this morning, one email telling me that my paper has been accepted (yesssss!!) and an envelope containing a current copy of a journal in which another paper of mine has been published (ooooo pretty in print).

A bit of nice mail makes a change, I'll say! Of course it didn't stop it coming in amongst a whole pile of the usual suspects, including

forms you have to fill in, urgently of course
entreaties from the head of department asking you to turn up at the next open day / comment on some d(r)aft strategy paper / dig out some information that should have been written months ago (delete as applicable)
a textbook from a book publisher, who is hoping that you will comment on it and find it suitable for your next course, even though the book covers a topic you don't teach and they send round spies every few months or so to find out what topics you do teach
a plea to review a paper "It's right up your street, you'd be really interested in it", which turns out to be 40 pages long and full of dense terminology and you've only got a couple of weeks to review it in
an invite to be on the programme committee of a conference (they won't tell you how many papers that means to review until you say yes)

More brickbats

2005-07-05T11:40:00.000+01:00

More brickbats raining down on my head.
*ouch* *ouch* *OUCH*.

Once again, they are due to this administrative role.

You don't get any credit for performing the role well, but I certainly don't expect any: in academia you have to get your own job satisfaction by you yourself noting positive things along the way, like the pass rate of the students in your class, or a piece of really good work from a student, or even simply a lack of complaints (no news is really good news around here). Nobody is going to come along and pat you on the head for good work, just like you don't generally compliment your colleagues, because most of the time you don't really know what they are up to. They teach their classes, you teach yours.

But put a foot wrong, and all hell breaks loose. Never mind that very nearly 100% of the time I do a superb job, including being polite and helpful to students and staff, even though I've been under a great deal of stress that makes it very difficult for me to keep being polite and helpful, oh no, never mind that, one time you're accidentally rude when you don't mean to be and BAM that's the time you get noticed and colleagues give you a bollocking.

So once again, I'm stressed, and I can't even deliver a few sharp words in the directions where the major cock-ups have come from because it would get them mad at me and be completely counter-productive. I'm really fed up of taking the rap for situations where the extent of my blame in the situation boils down to me not being clairvoyant, and I'm still waiting for an apology from the person who engineered the latest cock-up. Also the few occasions when the mistake has been mine, not someone else's, I find very upsetting and stressful too. Yes, I'm something of a perfectionist.

Something interesting: I have actually had some positive comments about how well I've been doing this role (which I certainly didn't expect), three of 'em, and as far as I can recall, each of the positive comments came from women in the department. All the bollockings, four of 'em, have come from men. HmmmMMMM.

The Joys of Administrative Roles

2005-06-17T13:18:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time, a few months ago, I got landed with an administrative role. This is not news, all academics get landed with significant administrative roles (the sort of administrative role that needs academic input, and thus has to be done by an academic) sooner or later. Dodging with creative excuses will only get you so far in avoiding such jobs, and the best you can hope for is to dodge some of the more vile admin jobs, and get landed with something that is a little more tolerable. Not that I'm any good at thinking of creative excuses, the best I can manage is "Ah but I'd be really really bad at it!".

The major admin role I managed to acquire (after dodging the first two that came sniffing around) never looked like the rosiest job around, but I wasn't really prepared for the aspect of the job that is this: lots of responsibility but insufficient resources and power to meet that responsibility. The result? Lots of cockups that aren't my fault (honest).

A few weeks ago: collective cockups served on a platter by several other members of the department, despite maximal organisational efforts on my behalf to prevent such things. Result? The deputy dean of the faculty rings me up to give me a bollocking, I shout back (not a smart move), and then I disconnect my phone for the next 24 hours whilst I calm down. Meanwhile, I can't in turn give relevant members of the department a bollocking because they are my colleagues, I have to work with them, and fuming overly much in their direction is not only going to get me a frosty work atmosphere, but is also going to mean they land me in it even worse the next time. So they get off scot-free.

Latest hair-tearing episode: an administrator makes a mistake on a spreadsheet, the data of which I rely on. Now I don't blame the administrator for making the mistake, mistakes can happen to anyone. But then it takes me an hour to clear up the mess. And it has to be me, because only my signature on the umpteen forms will do. So one little mistake on the administrator's part, and once again the perpetrator gets off scot-free, and it's me who has to pay for it. Grrr.

Waaaaah, I don't like this admin role. I want to give it back.

I have tried.

The head of department sent out feelers to six people who might be suitable alternatives for the role, the result of which was for six people to go very quiet and keep their heads down for the next two months. Oh great, just great. How many years before a greater muggins than moi comes along?

The Wheel of Academia

2005-06-08T18:11:00.000+01:00

Sometimes working in academia feels like being on a wheel.

When the work is coming in fast and furious, it feels like a hamster wheel, when you work harder and harder and you're running frantically and getting absolutely nowhere, because the work (particularly little administrative tasks) is piling into your in-tray considerably faster than you can get through it. And the wheel keeps spinning and spinning...

Other days, it can be like it was yesterday, where the wheel is a like a horizontal fairground ride, and you're clinging onto the rim of the wheel tightly trying not to fall off. The work whizzes by at a frantic pace and you're going from meeting to meeting without pause for thinking or even breathing and you're actually getting somewhere; the wheel is going round and round and you're getting through more and more work, and you're almost dizzy with the pace of it. Then at the end of the day it spins you off, and you're flying through the air, your head still spinning with the last item of the day, that one that needs to be dealt with first thing the next morning.

I had been anticipating a crash to earth today, but all seems to have gone vewy vewy quiet...

What to do with a sleeping student?

2005-06-04T22:18:00.000+01:00

I love the recent article in the Education section of the Guardian about how to deal with a sleeping student:

Some students are having to work all hours to pay their way through university, which leaves them permanently exhausted. You need to be careful how you raise this, though. The handbook of university pastoral care gives no definitive guidelines on best practice here, but one thing some academics have tried is to shout out "Burger and fries" mid-lecture. If your student has got another job, he will wake with a guilty start.

I say leave the poor student alone. At least he turned up to the lecture!

Are you being serious?

2005-06-01T15:29:00.000+01:00

Sorry, life keeps getting in the way of blogging.
Must do better.

Maybe a recent tutorial tale will amuse...

I was trying to help students follow the procedure for insertion in tree structures that use a balancing mechanism. At one point in the insertion, you need to figure out whether you need to do a rotation on the tree or not (a rotation being a restructuring manoeuvre on the tree that rebalances it), and if so, what kind. To figure it out, you have to look at a certain bit of the tree, and see whether it is in a straight line, or whether there is a bend in it. So I was happily describing these two options as "straight" or "kinky". I wasn't putting any sexual innuendo in there at all, nothing at all inappropriate was said, I was simply using the terms straightforwardly and in their non-innuendo sense to describe the two cases for rotations.

The reactions of the students were funny. One or two of them I could see were reacting slightly to the words, and it's as if their thoughts were saying

"Straight or kinky? Does the tutor realise the usual context of those words? Sniggger.... oh actually the tutor is not laughing, the tutor is taking this all really seriously, oh ok, we can be adults too, we'll concentrate on the trees"

Watching them try to smother their giggles and act all responsible was funny (and also good, it's good that they did concentrate on the material). I played it entirely straight-faced and didn't let my own laughter (at their reaction) surface. To add to the merriment, one of the students whose first language is not English asked me what the word meant, and I explained about "kinky" meaning "bent".

With any luck, they might remember insertions better that way!

They get you coming and going

2005-05-10T17:21:00.000+01:00

Not good at your teaching?
You had better improve! This University prides itself on the quality of its teaching!

Good at your teaching?
You had better improve your research! You are obviously dedicating too much effort to teaching and don't realise how important research is.

Had adequate time to do research this year?
Your research had better be good! This University prides itself on the quality of its ~~RAE results~~ research.

Had inadequate time to do research this year and not done much research?
That's no excuse! You had better improve! Publications for the next RAE should have been submitted by now and we may have to omit you from the RAE submission.

Had inadequate time to do research this year and still somehow managed to produce decent research through working long evenings and weekends?
That's great, with results like that you obviously don't need to be allocated any more time to do research in.

Today's essay: discuss the meaning of the word "no".

2005-04-27T18:12:00.000+01:00

*knock* *knock*
Despite having an imminent lecture to prepare for, I answered the door because I thought it might have been someone who was going to bring something I needed for the lecture and I thought there might be some kind of last-minute communication needed. But no, it's a student, specifically it's Persistent Diligent Student (PDS), who wants to see me NOW. Never mind that I've already answered email from PDS earlier that day asking for when I'd be free for an appointment, no that's not enough, my door has to be knocked on instead of checking whether there are any replies to the email.

I'm sorry, I'm not available right now.: I have some questions -
I have already answered your email telling you when I would be available. I am not available right now.: - but I have some -
I SAID, I'm not available right now. I have a lecture right away, I've got to get changed, I do NOT have time to see you right now.: Just five minutes?
I said NO!: But
No! *slam*

I give the lecture. I return to my office in order to prepare for another lecture that will follow shortly. Happy Smiley Student is there lurking outside my door:

Ah! Lossy! The very person. You'll help me, won't you?: I'm sorry, I'm not available right now.
Can you just -
No.: Please
No, I'm sorry, I can't right now. I'm busy.: Please
No.: just
No. No.: look at
No. No No No.: this
No. No No No No NO! *slam*

ssssssssSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
(auricular steam, you understand)

Student foibles

2005-04-26T17:44:00.000+01:00

In a few weeks, some of our students will undergo the final exams of their degree. Judging from these observations, maybe some of them are just a teensy bit stressed out?

One student made an appointment for 12.30pm, proceeded to knock on my door at 12.15pm, and on getting no reply at 12.15pm, did not try again at 12.30pm (when I was in, as arranged), but sent me an email at 12.45pm, and later tried knocking again at 1pm. What the...?
Another student, whom I was supervising for his final year project, got into a mad panic before his project report was due. He started giving me more and more progress reports which increased in frequency until I got six of them in one day, each report delivered in person to my office. And his visits weren't of the sort where he needed any kind of problem solving or advice, they didn't need any supervisor input, they were simply reporting on where he'd got to in his project work. It was a good job he didn't return for a seventh visit - my fuse had fully shortened to zero length and I don't think he'd have enjoyed being chased down the corridor by a roaring supervisor wielding a rolled-up newspaper. Though the rest of the department might have quite enjoyed it...
And then there was the student who handed in their final year project, which had been beautifully bound.
Upside-down.
And no, he didn't notice before handing it in.

A Word about assignment submissions

2005-04-19T15:28:00.000+01:00

Most students carefully submitted their program code for a recent assignment by carefully following the instructions I gave them: they renamed their (plain text) program files using their surnames + student identities before submitting them. The idea of this is so that I don't end up with a huge folder containing files all labelled with a variation of "Assignment 2".

One student, however, had to be different. Rather than submit the file in its natural plain text beauty that compilers find so easy to read, he/she (*) had carefully converted it to the Microsoft Word document format!

Did this student think he/she was being helpful? That it was somehow easier for me to print out this way? Since said student was also obliged to submit a paper copy, this presumably wasn't the intention.

Did it occur to the student that I might want to compile the code? And thus, actually run the program? Actually, I don't, I want to submit it to some plagiarism detection software, but from the students' point of view, running the program would be a perfectly reasonable thing that a marker might want to do with the assignment code...

One would think that if the student had actually written the code him/herself and compiled & run it on a computer to test it (as opposed to, say, trying a spot of plagiarism), then it would be obvious to the student that it is impossible for the compiler to take Word documents as input.

The mind boggles. What was wrong with the lazy option of sending the code as plain text?!

(*) Yes, I don't know whether this student is a man or a woman. Considering the class size is small and I know the names of those who attend, this isn't a good sign.

How to tell if a lecturer is seriously stressed from overwork

2005-04-15T15:59:00.000+01:00

Some recognition tips for you. The seriously stressed academic:

...may be found hurrying past any students lurking in the university corridors, lest they try and develop the theme of "Hello" into a fully-fledged query.
...finds lectures and seminars are a delightful relaxing time of the day, a welcome break from the continuous downpour of small urgent administrative tasks.
...is less annoyed by the refusal of the computer to start up Powerpoint (after all, what's one more thing going wrong amongst so many?)
...is majorly annoyed, way out of all proportion, by the nearby car park filling up by 9:01am, necessitating a WHOLE TWO MINUTES EXTRA to walk from the further away car park.
...considers root canal treatment at the dentist to be a relatively pleasant way to spend an hour at the height of exam marking season.
...receives some emails from his or her spouse, in an attempt on the spouse's part to get some kind of contact,... any kind.
...will froth and explode into orbit at the suggestion that university lecturers don't work very hard really, because they have really long "holidays" in between terms.

Administrators vs Academics (Round 1)

2005-04-14T17:22:00.000+01:00

I heard a good one today, from a lecturer friend at another university.

Apparently the examinations office was getting officious, as officers are wont to do, imposing the same fixed length of time for every single undergraduate exam.

Several of the academics didn't like this. It wasn't that they minded there being an upper limit on how long an exam could be, after all students might get two exams in a day, and this can be very tiring, particularly for some students with specific disabilities that need to be addressed when providing appropriate exam conditions (SENDA obligations and all that).

No, the problem was that some of the academics wanted to have shorter exams (the exams were used in conjunction with other forms of assessment, so it was suitable that they were shorter).
"Can't." said the examinations office.
"Please?" said the academics.
"No." said the examinations office.

Now the academics didn't want to mark more questions than they had to, nor did they want to impose more examination time than was necessary on the students, when a shorter time was perfectly appropriate and sensible. So, the academics simply set their exams as they would want them, that is, with questions taking time one hour less than the standard exam duration imposed by the examinations office, but the exam was still invigilated for the standard imposed duration.

The result? Lots of students leaving the exam early. The examinations office was collectively furious! "Very disruptive, all these students leaving early!!", they said.

Well, *duh*.

De-stressing an Academic

2005-04-13T20:11:00.000+01:00

Lossy's top ten ways for the modern academic to de-stress:

10. Go to bed early and forget about it all for a few hours.

9. Get a foot massage (requires a willing volunteer, but hopefully this shouldn't be too difficult to request from the nearest spouse if you're seen to be stressed and you offer to wash your feet beforehand).

8. Get some nookie, preferably using a selfish position where your spouse has to do all the work :-)

7. Get far far away from everywhere, and wear yourself out walking. (Also see 9.)

6. Move some really heavy things. Not heavy enough to do yourself an injury, you understand, but heavy enough to make you concentrate on what you're lifting.

5. Destroy some vegetation that has no business remaining intact. This is especially fun if it involves:

Uprooting trees or shrubs armed only with a spade and your bare hands
Chainsaw and a very large tree
Big bowsaw with really REALLY big teeth, and a trunk to take out your frustration on
Industrial-sized shredder (the noisier and messier the better)

4. Make a huge mess and laugh yourself silly at all the mess you've caused (works better if it doesn't take too long to clear up).

3. Make a LOT of noise. (Also see 6.) This works even better if it's not likely to land you with a ASBO.

2. Smack the living daylights out of a small rubber object (preferably with minimal risk of it doing any harm to anyone else). Works even better if you win the game.

1. Float on your back in warm Meditarranean waters off a quiet beach.

I got to do four of those over and around Easter. Such a pity the effect lasts such a short time once back in the office...

Mine's bigger than yours, and I wish it wasn't

2005-04-12T21:03:00.000+01:00

I got back from my Easter holiday to find 452 emails sitting in my inbox awaiting my attention.

And no, they were not mostly spam, only about 60 were spam. And they weren't just for information, either, most of them required some kind of a response, preferably speedy.

Sigh.

Student Jizz(*)

2005-03-18T14:54:00.000Z

Students are not knocking on my office door quite so much nowadays. (Good.) I must have frightened them off. (Not so good.)

Next up: how to muffle the lesser-spotted student who thinks we're all psychic?

Student: Do you know when, um, is it Edgar Wilson would be available?

Lecturer:Firstly, it's Edgar Williams, not Wilson. Secondly, do you think I have his diary emblazoned on my memory? How should I know what his schedule is like and when he'd be available?!

(Lecturer stomps off making neck-wringing gestures out of sight of student, much to amusement of fellow lecturer who overheard the exchange.)

(*)

Yes Virginia, lectures are there for a purpose...

2005-03-08T18:37:00.000Z

One student has spent several weeks deliberately missing the lectures and going only to the computer lab sessions (the lab session was immediately after lectures and I refuse to believe the alarm clock kept failing several weeks in a row, so it must have been deliberate). Once at the practical sessions, this student has been repeatedly asking us practical tutors to explain concepts which were explained at length in the lecture. Replies have been initially along the lines of "Well, if you'd been to the lecture, you'd have had that explained to you in detail", followed by internal deliberation about how much time to devote (or not) to answering the student's question further, given how many other students who did go to the lecture also have queries in the computer lab session. Is it reasonable that a student deliberately pass up the opportunity to hear an explanation of a concept, only to demand extra time afterwards for a repeat opportunity, at the expense of other students? I think not.

Anyway, said student has started going to lectures. At last. A small victory. As for the 25% of students who are not turning up for either lectures or lab sessions(*), though....

(*) Before you wonder, no they are not vile/boring/unhelpful lectures or lab sessions; students who have been to them rate them highly.

The Answer Game

2005-03-07T17:44:00.000Z

One of my students learning programming is very persistent at asking questions. This is developing into a well-honed game where the student tries to get me to answer the question, and I try to get the student to go and look in the place where the answer to that specific question exists, rather than telling the student the answer. The student wants the answer; I want the student to get used to looking information up in suitable (easily-accessible) places. Besides which, a verbal delivery of these sorts of answers is going to be a lot less successful when precise syntax is involved, so I'm not being mean to the student by directing him to the answer, I'm actually being maximally helpful.

Today's game, when starting a practical session, took just three rounds:

Student:: "How can I convert an integer to a string?"
Lecturer:: "There's an exercise in this practical worksheet which addresses precisely that."
(five minutes later) Student:: "How can I convert an integer to a string?"
Lecturer:: "See Exercise 4."
Student:: "But- "
Lecturer (pointing directly to the precise paragraph in Exercise 4 that tells how to convert an integer to a string):: "Read!!!"

Student smiles and starts to read. Acknowledgement of defeat; game over.

Iron J

2005-03-03T13:05:00.000Z

One of the students in my practical class last week had on an unironed shirt. Nothing so unusual about that of course, even I sometimes have an unironed shirt on, when my pile of no-need-to-iron shirts runs out. No, the thing that was puzzling was that it was a really really unironed shirt. The creases were amazing, all radiating out from the centre neck area at the back of the shirt. So - was it meant to be like that?

This week, he was back, with the same creased shirt (or an identical copy). I take it that it is meant to be creased. I am obviously far out of touch with current fashion and thus suitably qualified in this respect as an academic.

The Hamster Wheel of Academic Life

2005-02-22T16:19:00.000Z

(Warning: huge steaming vent ahead.)

I must be on a giant hamster wheel. There are so many things to do; so many that are important, not ignorable, and not postponable. Past experience suggests that the best strategy to get into a position such that you can actually see over the top of the pile of important tasks is to get on with it! (Ok, ok, blogging is not getting on with it, I take your point.) But I'm running and running round this wretched wheel, and it just gets faster and faster. Tasks just keep on appearing and appearing, faster than I can get through them.

Of course, some of this is counter-productive. The faster you get those emails dealt with, the faster the replies come back. Witness the "five o' clock flurry" that can happen when several lecturers are simultaneously trying to clear out their inboxes before going home and a spectacular ricochet effect occurs. (Actually 6 or 7 o' clock is more like it, but 5 alliterates alluringly.)

Another irony: I'm one of those people for whom living in a whirl of tasks is necessary, and if I don't have enough plates to spin, I'll throw some up there just for fun. But there's a fine line between "busy and beautifully motivated" and "Stop the hamster wheel! I want to get off!". I didn't choose the tasks on my pile! When you have such a non-morning person as myself resort to getting up at 6am just try and make a bigger dent in the pile of tasks, then you know it's getting ridiculous. And why is it getting ridiculous? Because this time, I'm determined to try and have what's known as a "social life". Three evenings off per week, I'm attempting! (More fool me, I know.) Work-life balance? Fttttttttttt! Don't talk to me about balance! Go read up on AVL trees for me, then we'll talk about balance...

Things students do that baffle me

2005-02-18T16:02:00.000Z

These include:

Failing to turn up to schedule teaching sessions, then wondering why they did badly on the exam.
Copying all of their assignment code from another student, get caught, get assigned a zero mark for the work, ....and then whining about how the mark was unfair? WTF?
Failing to comprehend the word "no". For some reason they treat the response "No, I'm sorry." as "Try harder! You might get what you want if you push!".Were they not taught manners as children?
Confessing to collusion, voluntarily, to my face. (I was too surprised to react.)
Being clairvoyant, hunting me down when I am far from my office and should be safe from the constant student queries, and ask for me by name by knocking on the door of the colleague in whose room I have taken refuge. WTF? How do they find me? And furthermore, why isn't it obvious that I'm busy in a meeting with my colleague and thus not available for student queries?
Complaining that the exam is unfair because it had some questions on it from the last third of course. (If you want to ignore the last third of the course it's your problem, mate, not mine.)

This post is dedicated to the many students at this university who turn up, do their own work, and have been known to display an understanding of the concept of manners. Gee, it's been a frustrating short-fuse week.

Test Bingo

2005-02-15T15:02:00.000Z

This post from Tall, Dark and Mysterious about how to make maths test marking more bearable is hilarious. That list far outstrips what we get with computing-flavoured marking. Some of them, though, look a bit familiar:

Test grade in single digits: Yes, alas. Computing students are up for this too.
Sentence in word problem solution that doesn't even make sense syntactically.: When they have to write, our computing students seem to manage a high proportion of sentences that don't make sense. Usually in an effort to be fair and nice to students for whom English is not their first language, we try and see whether we can extract any meaning from it anyway.
Bubbly girlish handwriting pleading "Please be nice!": Check! I seem to average about one "Please pass me" per batch of scripts.
Space below question contains nothing but a massive question mark.: ...or is blank entirely.

I could add:

Student writes program code that is complete nonsense, not even close to compiling.
As part of the answer, student writes out the entire question again, as if somehow the markers didn't have copies of the question paper to hand.
Student is asked to define two terms with opposite meanings, and gets them the wrong way round.
Student is asked to define two terms with opposite meanings, gets the answer lecture-notes-perfect, and then when asked to give an illustration of each, gets them the wrong way round.

The further we can manage to go in the direction of automated marking by computer, without the marking quality suffering, the happier I will be.

I do know better, honest.

2005-02-10T17:45:00.000Z

I knew I shouldn't have done it. I knew I should have tested the computer lab worksheet on the machines in the computer labs, rather than just testing on my own machine.

Result? Half an hour's worth of firefighting in the lab session today, caused by:

1 missing file containing library code that needed to be tracked down and imported specially
1 library procedure that had gone missing entirely (fortunately there was a convenient substitute to hand)
1 typo in the sample code that I gave to students, so that it wouldn't compile

I do know better, really. With a completely new worksheet, I know to

do the worksheet myself before I set it,
do the worksheet again myself from scratch on my machine,
publicise the final draft of the worksheet in advance to any of my colleagues who are going to have to read it anyway (so their preparation might as well be combined with telling me about worksheet typos before the lab session, rather than afterwards), and
take the worksheet down to the lab (ideally some days later) and test it there all over again.

This method is pretty good at ensuring that typos are down to a minimum, there are no major surprises waiting for you in the labs that could have been predicted in advance, and any remaining errors are usually some combination of {small, ignorable, fixable, only affecting a few students}.

For this worksheet, it took way longer to develop than I thought it would, I ran out of time and so couldn't do parts c) and d), and I paid the price. Oh well. It was still mostly a good worksheet, the students seemed to get a lot out of it, and it was time well invested, given that this worksheet can be used in subsequent years.

The 12 Days of an Academic's Week

2005-02-08T14:10:00.000Z

On the Monday of this week, my office hours brought me:

12 email queries,
11 students knocking,
10 can't write programs,
9 think their grade's low,
8 forms to fill in,
7 slips need signing,
6 boring phone calls,
5 minutes break.
4 need advice,
3 take it,
2 are upset,
and 1 thinks he knows it all.

Oops I was too helpful

2005-02-06T13:20:00.000Z

I like to try and be helpful to students, where possible.

As part of the administrative details one always has to go through at the beginning of a course, I thought I'd be helpful to the students and remind them where they had to go and which time for their computer lab sessions. Just being helpful, yes?

They liked that alright. What I hadn't realised in advance is that by putting under their noses when all the practical sessions were, not only did they get reminded of what time they were supposed to attend, but they also got to see where other sessions were happening at times that they preferred!

The result? All the students down for the lab session at the most unpopular time showed up at a more popular session, and poor old Gerard, the teaching assistant for the unpopular session, showed up after carefully preparing for the lab, only to find.... no students whatsoever. Ooops!

Still, I should look on the bright side. The teaching assistants for the popular sessions found computer labs full to bursting of students keen to do their lab work. That's a marked improvement on what we usually see in the first week of a course!

They have Indonesian maps on the internet, you know

2005-02-04T16:15:00.001Z

Some day I'll get round to blogging about some of the excuses we hear from students. In the meantime, as you might expect, the recent tsunami in Asia has added a whole new extra flavour to the tales we are hearing from some of our international students.

"My house was flooded."

"My laptop was ruined and I lost all my data. I was very lucky to escape with my life."

"50 of my relatives died."

Back here at this UK university, I've been trying to make arrangements for students, so that those who are suffering problems as a result of the tsunami don't have to have their degree courses disrupted any more than they have been already.

One Indonesian student, however, won't be benefitting from any such arrangements. He told a terrible tale of woe about how his house had been flooded and he had had to go back there to help his relatives. And where do he and his poor relatives live? In some place that I've never heard of. But our secretary has, she grew up in Indonesia. Apparently this place is on the other side of the island, far away from any tsunami effects...

You want to apologise for WHAT?

2005-02-03T14:40:00.000Z

Sometimes I really struggle to maintain a polite helpful facade for students, against a strong urge to let my mouth fall open in sheer disbelief.

Case in point: today this student comes up to me and says that she owes me an apology. "What for?" say I, wondering whether she's about to apologise for taking up a lot of my time consulting me last year, maybe? Or maybe she's realised that her accusation that I set an unfair exam - the exam had some questions on the last third of the course, which she hadn't revised, and she thought that was unfair - was unjustified.

No, neither of these. She wanted to apologise for thinking that I was a harsh marker. No apology necessary, actually, I prefer to think of myself as "fair but firm", but that probably translates to "harsh" in student-speak, so I'm happy to be thought a harsh marker, but why in the world did she now think that I wasn't?

It turns out that this is because she managed to scrape a pass in last year's course, and she thought that she didn't deserve this, so she deduced that I must have gone easy on her, I must have raised her mark a bit.

Raised her mark a bit?!?!!!!!!! What, she thinks I slipped her a few marks on the side? While half of my mind was busy being hornswoggled and very offended at the accusation, the other half managed to operate the old jaw-and-tongue mechanism, to very firmly tell the student that every single mark of that was hers.

I don't know why I'm so surprised, though. Students frequently take the view that they deserve more marks that they actually got and the lecturer was being too harsh, why not have the contrary situation too?

Top ten ways to make an academic happy

2005-01-28T11:48:00.000Z

10. Free Danish pastries available in the staff kitchen at 11 o' clock!

9. A student says something really complimentary about your teaching on their course evaluation form.

8. You get that research grant you applied for. (Modest joy, because administrative hassles lie ahead...)

7. That student who caused you endless administrative hassles has just completed a degree and left the University.

6. You manage find a car parking space in the nearer of the car parks to the department building, when you arrive at work well after 9am.

5. Your paper gets accepted to a prestigious journal, with only minor corrections required.

4. Your research student passes the PhD viva with flying colours.

3. Your application for a sabbatical is successful.

2. Undergraduate teaching finishes for the summer.

1. The sword of the internal teaching quality audit passes overhead, choosing to impale some other department in the university instead.

Quality Schmality

2005-01-27T17:09:00.000Z

Here I am procrastinating. I should be getting on with writing a "Quality Strategy". I hate writing these sorts of documents. I suppose the idea is initially to plan, planning that the department will do all sorts of great things of great quality, and then those plans are put into practice over the next couple of years. This might sound all well and good, but from my perspective it is complete nonsense. Why? You can't often plan what you want in advance. You end up putting something down on paper that looks good, and this seems to be for two purposes:

Firstly, beforehand, the university high-ups can look at the strategy and think how wonderful it is that the department is going to do all these quality things. Secondly, after the department fails to do these things, it's a stick to beat the department with and give them less money next time, because they failed to meet their quality objectives.

This failure is because the writer of the strategy isn't clairvoyant, and everyone else in the department has different ideas about what things of quality should be done. So they get on and do their quality things, usually very well, and usually very cheaply too, because you didn't mention their plans in the quality strategy so they didn't get any funding for it.

The result? Department does things of quality, and gets penalised for it. Like I said, I hate writing quality strategies.

Verbal explanations when caught plagiarising

2005-01-20T13:20:00.000Z

Universities up and down the country seem to be plagued with plagiarism, right across the spectrum of degree subjects. In fairness to students who do work hard on their programming assignments and well deserve their marks, I take various anti-plagiarism measures against those who cheat, both preventative and punitive. Not that it ever stops them, but still. When similarities are detected and plagiarists caught, there are several standard responses that crop up again and again. Here are some of the most common that I've seen:

But I didn't copy!

"Yes, he helped me...but I didn't copy!"
"Yes, I looked at his code.... but I didn't copy!"
"Yes, he did explain bits to me... but I didn't copy!"
"Yes, I borrowed his code... but I didn't copy!"

[This seems to be a particularly rampant excuse when the program code is identical, character-for-character. It is very bizarre hearing students say several things that indicate that they are guilty of plagiarism, whilst also denying it at the same time. Apparently just because they are learning programming doesn't mean that they can do logic.]

Blaming

Blaming everyone that the student can think of. Blaming the lecturer in charge of the course, blaming the tutors, blaming the lack of other help (even if help was in plentiful supply and well-advertised). Also can come with extra topping: accusing the lecturer who discovered the plagiarism of creating a bad atmosphere on the course by discovering evidence of plagiarism.

[Oh yes, blaming the lecturer for discovering plagiarism is really going to help.]

The black-is-white approach

Deny deny deny, even in the face of irrefutable evidence. Student claims that yes this was his program, and yes it produced those outputs. This is even though the program doesn't even compile and therefore can't run and produce any outputs whatsoever.

Naive innocence

"Yes, I gave her a copy of my code.... but I never dreamed that she'd copy it."

[Yes, you said that last time we caught you for collusion. Do you think we were born yesterday?]

Stream of random excuses

Student goes off into excuses about how he was moving house and he has dyslexia and he's been really stressed and he had flu and then he broke his arm and he doesn't understand English very well and didn't realise when the deadline was and he is really desperate and please please don't penalise him.

The best one.

"Yes, I did it. It was wrong. I shouldn't have done it.I'm really sorry."

The only attempt at explanation I like. At least the student has the decency to minimise the hassle involved.

The students return...

2005-01-18T17:11:00.000Z

Once more, it is time for first week roulette. I'll let you know how it goes. Meanwhile, for your entertainment, I give you a first week roulette result from some time ago...

The University has quite a nifty system for registering students on the computer, to give them their new usernames and passwords. Students sit at the computer, type in some special guest username at the login screen, it then grills them with a few questions to see who they are, and then it tells them their name and password. Quite a handy system, when it works, much better than distributing little slips of paper to individual students, and much better than relying on students to have obtained their own login ID before their first programming practical lab.

So there I was, starting the practical session, with students all tappity tap tapping away, trying to get their brand new usernames. The registration system wouldn't let them on. What the F***?

It turned out that someone had turned the system off. Why? You might well ask. Someone decided to impose 9am-5pm hours on the system, and my practical class was in the evening. I ended up having to go and drag some poor IT support staff member who was working late in his office along to the computer lab, and he ended up sorting them out manually.

It baffles me. A University that regularly puts on a whole raft of courses in the evening, and someone just decided, at a stroke, to make it impossible for programming students to have their first class. Furthermore, the IT support staff had already been reprimanded a few days earlier for the very same thing! They had the registration system turned off at the weekend, when some other class was starting!

And don't even get me started about the difficulties of trying to get IT support in the evenings. How a University can not only insist that courses be taught in the evening but also insist that IT support will not be provided in the evening for said courses, well words fail me.

Writing papers with other authors

2005-01-17T10:22:00.000Z

January seems to be the season for research paper deadlines in the field of computing, for some reason. This January I have some papers with colleagues to write, in contrast with the single-author papers I sometimes produce. Collaborating with colleagues to write papers has certain advantages.

My writing skill for creating formal papers for journals or conferences is such that when writing on my own, I need at least ten iterations of "revise phrasing; wait at least two days before revisiting this section of writing" to transform my initial gibberish into something approaching polished explanation in English. As such, collaborating with colleagues makes writing much easier and less time-consuming. Instead of having to wait a while so that I can see my own writing with fresh eyes, my colleagues can much more easily see where my writing needs improvement, and I can provide fresh eyes for my colleagues' writing. I think overall the quality of the submitted paper is much improved.

Then again, maybe I just like the idea that when the paper-in-preparation trundles back and forth between the various collaborators, there are occasions when it is blessedly absent from my in-tray :-)

Peace!

2005-01-11T15:43:00.000Z

But not for long. Still, it is nice to have a few quiet moments before the students get back, and with the admin piles sunk to levels that you can almost manage to peer over.

Can I fit in a quick bit of time for some research? Yes! That's assuming I can manage to remember what it was I was doing before the last relentless procession of teaching work happened, before the next one arrives.

Perspectives (No. 1)

2004-12-21T15:27:00.000Z

Sometimes it's exasperating when students have a particular way of thinking about something, which results in issues for me to deal with, repeatedly. I don't blame them for thinking in that way, after all it probably seems quite natural from a student's perspective, but repeatedly having to deal with their misconceptions is tiring. After all, I was once a student, so I can (I think) imagine what it's like from their perspective, as well as being able to see it from my current lecturer's perspective. However, they can't see it from mine, they have no idea what it is like to be a lecturer, so the onus is on me, not them, to resolve the issue. For example:

Student thinks:: I'd like a better idea of how much I have to write for this report I have to hand in for the course that this lecturer teaches on.
Student says (to lecturer):: How many pages should I write for the report?
Lecturer hears:: I'd like to know precisely how many pages you want for the report, and then I'll slavishly aim for that number. If my writing comes out under that many pages, then I'll stretch the report with a lot of waffle, and if over, then I'll cut lots of important bits.
Lecturer says:: It's difficult to give an exact number of pages. Some good reports will be short, some good reports will come out longer. Try to write as much as what you have to say takes up. Be concise, rather than padding it out with waffle or miniscule details, and don't leave out important parts of your writing. Use the marking scheme as a guide.

That gives another example above, too. The student knows full well which report for which course is being asked about, but merely refers to "the report", either assuming that the lecturer will know precisely which one is being referred to, or not even bothering to make that assumption because it's so obvious to the student concerned. The lecturer, on the other hand, may not know which course the student is referring to, because the lecturer may be teaching on several courses during the teaching session, one or more of which might require report writing, and if the classes are big, the lecturer may not be instantly able to recognise the student and which course the student is studying.

Oh no! That's too harsh!

2004-12-20T18:09:00.000Z

Lecturer:: Just to check, this was your program that you submitted, yes?
Student:: Yes.
Lecturer:: And you ran the tests with this program?
Student:: Yes.
Lecturer:: Now, this program doesn't compile. You ran the tests with your program even though it doesn't compile?
Student:: Well I ran it on someone else's machine.
Lecturer:: I'm not interested in what machine you ran it on, I'm interested in which program you ran. How can you have run your program at all if it doesn't compile?
Student:: I ran a different program.
Lecturer:: You weren't meant to be testing some other program, you were meant to be testing this one. That's what you submitted for your assignment work.
Student burbles some complete nonsense.
Lecturer:: Well I'm going to give you a penalty. Zero marks for this assignment.
Lecturer:: Oh no, that's too much, that's too harsh.

Student seems to fail to grasp that, with a non-working program, test results which don't match, nothing else of value in the submission, even without the penalty, the mark would have been zero anyway. Not only is the penalty not harsh, being no penalty at all, it's an extremely generous, considering it's against University rules to hand in false test results!

Conversation with a student

2004-12-14T17:02:00.000Z

Student:

So how come I didn't get good marks for my programming assignment? The program works, and a third of the marks are for the implementation alone!

Lecturer:

One of the problems is your testing of the program.

Student:

But I tested it! I ran the program with several large files!

Lecturer:

Testing isn't simply running the program with some input files. You have to actually check whether the program produces the results you expect it to, in all kinds of situations.

Student looks unconvinced.

Lecturer:

Look, suppose you were taking a flight in an aeroplane, and the software that was flying the aircraft had only been tested by running it a few times and seeing that the program didn't crash. Suppose no-one had actually checked to see whether the program was doing what it was supposed to. Would you be happy to fly in that plane?

Student:

Er, no.

Lecturer:

Of course. You'd want to know they'd tested it thoroughly, wouldn't you? You would want to know that they'd tested it in all kinds of different situations and checked to make very sure that it was flying the plane how it was supposed to do, yes?

Student:

Yes.

Lecturer:

Ok! So you have to bear in mind that same sort of idea when testing your own programs.

Student wears thoughtful expression and stops complaining about the assignment grade.

Corridor Conversation

2004-12-08T20:00:00.000Z

Scene: the corridor, just beyond an open door to the office of one of my colleagues.

Student:: You know this assignment? Do we have to do anything for it?
Lecturer:: Er, yes.... did you come to the talk I gave?
Student:: Er, no, what talk was that?
Lecturer: The one I sent you an email about.
(faint snorting sounds heard emanating from the direction of the open door)
Lecturer:: Well it wasn't a good idea to miss the talk because I talked about exactly what you had to do, in detail. Did you look at the website instead? Where I'd put slides of the talk?
Student:: Er, no. I remember.... we had mumps that week!
Lecturer:: Oh that's a new one, I haven't heard that excuse so far this week.
(louder snorting sounds)
Student:: It's true!
Lecturer:: Never said it wasn't. Now, here, let's just move down this corridor a bit away from the noise, and get you started off in the right direction. The first thing is go to the website and look at the slides....

Things that students manage to do that irritate me (No. 3)

2004-12-03T18:41:00.000Z

Email me, 30 minutes before a big deadline, detailing every kind of excuse they can think of, to try and not get penalised when they hand their work in late. Further ask that I hang around for several hours on a Friday evening, or come in specially over the weekend, so that they can find me to hand in their work, if they turn up, of course.

That's not really the irritating bit of it. The excuses and demands are so ludicrous that they are laughable. The real irritation is their attitude towards being responsible and handing things on time leaves a lot to be desired, and as a consequence they think absolutely nothing of causing people extra hassle, and making requests that staff bow to their oh-so-important demands.

Mate, if it was that important to you, that you asked me to give up several hours of my free time for you, then it was important enough for you to hand in your work on time in the first place. Responsibility. Respect. Two words you'd do well to ponder on.

So Tired

2004-12-02T17:22:00.000Z

In an earlier post on long hours, I mentioned that I was going to keep track of my hours. So far, the average amount of time I've spent working per week just exceeds 60 hours. That doesn't count time internet browsing whilst munching a sandwich, or time spent blogging, only time spent actually working. That's 170% of a full-time job, by my reckoning.

Gail Kinman at the University of Luton, along with Fiona Jones, at University of Leeds, have put out another report examining the same issues looked at in the 1998 report Pressure Points. This new report Working to the Limit Stress and work-life balance in academic and academic-related employees in the UK (summary) shows that stress is still a big problem and overwork is institutionalised. This is certainly in accordance with my experience. I don't know how other people cope, especially if they have young children.

Last night was particularly bad. I finished preparing my lecture around 3am, and whilst wandering through the University buildings to start my journey home, got accosted by a student taking pity on me who was worried about why I was out and about so late, and thought I needed a lift home. I explained I'd just finished writing my lecture notes, and I'm not sure whether I then acquired "mad" or "hero" status! This was the worst of recent times though, I haven't had to work that late for a while. I've been consistently short of sleep all this week, and this morning in particular, it was a huge effort to drag myself into work in time to give that lecture. I felt so tired, so drained, so physically wanting to curl up and go to sleep.

But in the lecture theatre, something amazing happened... as I knew it would. Adrenalin arrived, and my tiredness went. I was transported into a world of explaining concepts to students who had never seen them before, and trying to get them to understand and see how amazing some of the algorithms were, and how they could be of real practical use in solving practical problems. They even laughed at a couple of jokes I managed to crack (I am not great at the whole jokes and camaraderie so this is something, for me). Now, post-lecture, I feel much better, and the dying rays of the sun shining across the frosty grass make me feel exhilarated. I feel alive.

Shrieks of Triumph

2004-11-30T13:47:00.000Z

... for getting my MOSS script to work on the new computer system, after four hours of prodding it. A fabulous service, is MOSS.

Student plagiarists, beware! Ve haf tools to help detect your copied verk!

Things that students manage to do that delight me (No. 2)

2004-11-25T18:10:00.000Z

Tell me that they thought it was a really good lecture, and the concepts were presented really clearly.

Things that students manage to do that delight me (No. 1)

2004-11-24T19:44:00.000Z

Sound enthusiastic about the idea of doing some programming.

Things that students manage to do that irritate me (No. 2)

2004-11-24T14:06:00.000Z

Student

"Ah, there you are! Could I ask you something about..."

Lecturer (carrying heavy bags and needing to go to the loo)

"No, I am not available right now."

Thinks: Not again! Hasn't that student had enough help yet?

Student

"But I just wanna...."

Lecturer (disappearing off in the direction of the toilets)

"No. No 'just wanna'."

Wanted to say: "I am so tired, and I will end up working into the small hours yet again tonight, preparing a lecture that you'll be attending tomorrow. Every minute of time I spend talking to you is time I will lose off my sleep tonight, which I desperately need in order to be semi-coherent for tomorrow's lecture. Why can't you and all the other students FUCKING TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER?"

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks things like this.

Things that students manage to do that irritate me (No. 1)

2004-11-22T13:48:00.000Z

Do not apologise for looking something up in a book!

Do not apologise for being keen and wanting to know something extra and actually asking me about it!

Submitting work (or not)

2004-11-19T19:24:00.000Z

Lossy's Law (No. 1): The size of the student's excuse is directly proportional to the size of the submitted work to be handed in.

Why? Why should that be? For example, for programming assignments we get excuses like "I had flu", "Oh I thought the hand-in time was 9pm, not 9am" (really?), "I thought it was due in on Wednesday". On the other hand, for an assignment for five times as much credit, we get pleas to hand in the work later because of reasons like a broken leg, divorce, homelessness and bereavement.

I don't get it. How does the flu virus manage to miss all the students who have a really big assignment submission?

Extra-Curricular Learning

2004-11-16T14:05:00.000Z

One thing I like about Universities is that you can learn about and experience things that are not just those related to your field of study. I've seen a lot of wildlife in and near to University grounds: rabbits, ducks, squirrels, deer, and a wide assortment of birds. Some of those sightings were things I've never managed to see before:

Badger: There are occasional advantages to working into the small hours of the morning preparing lectures - badgers are nocturnal.
Green Woodpecker: As large and shy as the RSPB website says it is
Red Kite: The sun kindly uplit this bird as it was hovering, so I could see its classic colouring
Redwing: Yes it really does have a red wing. Sort of more a red armpit, as far as I could see.

I also heard some very strange noises coming from the darkness outside the lecture theatre yesterday, whilst I was trying to talk about the web, but that was just the local student wildlife.

Programming (2)

2004-11-10T20:10:00.000Z

My students have an assignment which involves programming due soon, so my inbox is busily collecting pleas for help fixing errors in programs. These are all variations on the short theme of "it doesn't work" (see article referred to in a previous post).

Hopefully my students will one day know How to Be a Programmer, but until then I'm going to have to keep sending replies along the lines of:

Your faith in my divination is touching, but I'm afraid you are actually going to have to let me see the code before I can help you in any way whatsoever.

Elections

2004-11-03T21:21:00.000Z

All this US election tenterhooks that we woke up to this morning has done absolutely nothing for my progress with writing lectures, preparing worksheets, and the program I need to finish. Still, perhaps getting on with my work will take my mind off my disappointment, and that interactive map was rather a nice use of multimedia in the election report on the BBC's website. I must remember that next time I give a lecture on multimedia.

Programming

2004-11-01T14:09:00.000Z

Somebody forwarded me an interesting link on How NOT to go about a programming assignment, which manages to provoke both amusement and weary recognition. Students really do do this sort of thing, a lot. I was going to say that the only one of these circumstances I haven't come across was the SMS messaging style of text, but a few days ago, I got an email message that even someone as ignorant of texting as I am couldn't fail to recognise as Symbol-ridden Meaningless Sayings.

Procrastination

2004-10-27T20:59:00.000+01:00

I was going to post something on procrastination. But I'll leave that to another day.

Honestly.

Not a Red Letter Day I

2004-10-20T19:50:00.000+01:00

Today was not a red letter day. Reasons why:

Had to get up at 6am in order to get sufficient work done in time for a meeting.
The people who convened the first meeting turned up 40 minutes late. Yes, I could have use 40 minutes more sleep.
I don't know what was more depressing, the fact that the first meeting was conducted entirely using University acronyms, or that I understood all the acronyms. At least, I think I did.
Students banging on my door all day when meetings are going on.
Similarly telephone calls. I never remember that the plug in the telephone socket is removable until too late.
Students turned up for project meetings having not done any work. At least some of them were honest about it.
Being forced to present something to Very Senior People in a Very Important Meeting and being scared I would say something stupid. I didn't, but I managed to interrupt in several wrong places.
A meeting where I was called on the carpet by senior colleagues to explain my checking of a test paper they had written. They were explaining to me what the questions meant, and I'm thinking "Don't explain to me! Explain to the students taking the test! Write the test paper better!"
Because of all the meetings, I had to miss out on a meeting of the sports club I go to, and write a sheet for a practical session instead. How to do Drag and flippin' drop. Whoopee doo.

Maybe I should perceive a clue here. Day has lots of meetings. Day doesn't go so well. Hmmmmm, connection?

Red Letter Day I

2004-10-14T17:23:00.000+01:00

Sometimes you get a whole cluster of nice things happening to you on one day. Today was one of those days. Firstly, one colleague brought me a really nice resource that can be used by students on a course that I organise. Secondly, another colleague offered me some teaching next term that will reduce my workload. Thirdly, one of my project students had done some really nice work on his project, and brought some lovely little examples for me to look at. I love seeing students get really interested in their projects and looking at the results of their work.

The Devil is in the Detail

2004-10-13T13:28:00.000+01:00

There are lots of topics I do know something about, but one thing I know very little of is English literature. I have no idea about quotations, and I can't cite who might have said "the devil is in the detail", but it is certainly true when it comes to writing programming worksheets, one of today's tasks. One little error in the details of the information given on the sheet, and you can spend many minutes in the lab paying for it (as will all the other poor tutors that have to teach from it).

For example, ask students to use a certain function to solve a problem, then if you forgot to tell them that it already exists and all they need to do it use it, then you'll be faced with lots of students looking blank, as they try to define the function for themselves.

Give the wrong location for a file that they need to access for the work, and they'll all tell you "I can't find the file" individually at 2 minute intervals. If you attempt to circumvent this by telling them en masse, this refrain will change to "Where did you say that file was again?", and if you attempt to circumvent that by additionally writing it up on a nearby whiteboard, the refrain will change to variations along the lines of "What did you say earlier?" or "Is that an 'a' or a 'd'?". All of this could have been avoided if you'd got the location of the file right in the first place!

The dratted thing is that even when you attempt to go through the sheet with a fine tooth-comb, to weed out mistakes, you can't find many of them, because you're not looking at the sheet from the perspective of someone new to the material, you're looking at it from the perspective of the author who knows all the stuff on the sheet and is fed up of it by now. Really you'd need to leave it at least a week before checking it, to try and get more of a fresh perspective. But rarely do we manage to find the luxury of that amount of time in advance of the practical session itself.