training wheels
Well, I am the department chair, but I’m still the chair-in-training. The dean, who was semi-chair last year, will come to me from time to time (some days, several times), with little jobs. She doles them out to me to see how I can handle them, I think. First, it was the angry parent who wrote a letter to the college president because her darling child had been assigned an Annie Lamott essay with barnyard terminology in the title. Well, after reading the essay, the dean and I both want to use it in our classes. Then, there was the problem of one-year evaluations. How can I evaluate faculty whose first year was last year? I was called in to observe them, as a sort of minimal participation in the evaulative process, but then it was discovered that they had been observed, and I was off the hook. Thursday, it was Spring schedule double-checking. Friday, it was new position requests.
The jobs are increasing in frequency — either the dean trusts me, or is just really sick of doing all this stuff herself.
A little from column A, and a little from column B, I’m guessing.
I just had to print out the Lamott piece and read it, out of curiosity.
Wow. That’s great. I would think it would be a wonderful teaching tool, and the people offended by the title need to get over it.
I think it sums up my attitude about what National Novel Writing Month is supposed to be all about. My problem is, I’m apparently not a skilled enough fiction writer to go back and fix up the sh*tty first draft.
My NaNoWriMo novel last year, the one which drew from my mission trip experiences, was typical. I know it’s bad; I’m just not sure how I could ever make it good, even though there are parts of it I really like.
My old college scriptwriting professor e-mailed me earlier in the year about some unrelated issue and when she found out about the novel, she offered (I did not ask — she offered) to take a look at it. I sent it to her, and heard nothing back for many months. I figured it was just truly and deeply horrible. I worked up the courage to ask this past summer and she claimed she hadn’t even looked at it yet.
I didn’t do anything while I thought she might be working on it. I’ve been meaning to pull it back out and see if I have any fresh insights about overhauling it.
How do you think that would fly around here? By the way, my blog is back from its late summer hiatus . . . Slowly but surely . . .
well, there are plenty of Lamott fans in your neighborhood, so you could probably get away with it. I think your chair has used _Bird by Bird_, the book that essay comes from, and I know the associate provost (or whatever his title is nowadays) is a huge Lamott fan. It doesn’t matter whether the kids’ parents can handle it — it matters whether the admin will back you. Althoug hif the admin has to back you too many times, it can begin to be perceived as an “issue.”
You’re right about admin support - I apparently get it, behind the scenes, with some regularity. As we all should. I’m intrigued at how the students and their helicopter parents actively resist becoming educated persons. How alien and uncanny we must seem to them, as they do to us.
Lamott’s piece is awesome. I went to college before word processors and I used to hand in my shitty first drafts in longhand. Yikes. It did teach me to improvise better. Word processing introduced obsessive rewrites during composition - continuous drafting/redrafting rather than distinct numbered drafts. It sucks, I don’t recommend it, Lamott’s thing is much, much better.