Was Yesterday a Dream?
Because my brain is trying to convince me I hallucinated the whole thing. There’s no way I should have tenure.
I have to keep re-reading that email I got confirming the decision.
And I can’t concentrate on anything else today, haha.
I GOT IT
I got tenure.
That is all.
Yeah, No Thanks
Article (not sure if you can access it without permissions, though)
But here’s the abstract:
Dressing formally or informally as an academic may be a trade-off when it comes to managing impressions towards students, but the extant body of literature remains limited with only mixed results. This research is the first focussed investigation to examine the effects of academic dress formality on the ‘big two’ of impression formation, perceptions of warmth and competence. In a series of three controlled laboratory experiments (total N = 1361), we find dress formality to increase perceptions of competence but to decrease perceptions of warmth, which leads to ‘downstream’ effects on students’ evaluations of instructors and behavioural intentions to enrol in a course. Furthermore, we demonstrate that perceptions of competence may be subject to other information cues (success communication and discipline norms) that can mitigate negative effects associated with dress informality. Implications for higher education practitioners are provided.
Yeah, I’m never going to change the way I dress. I don’t care how “incompetent” it makes me look. I’ve always worn weird and colorful clothing. It’s part of who I am. And I will not sacrifice that part of my identity to “look the part” of an academic. It’s not like I’m showing too much skin or wearing offensive graphic tees or wearing jewelry that clinks together and makes noise when I lecture.
I wear color. I keep it bold but simple. I usually stick with two main colors (pants and shirt) and match one to my earrings and the other to my eyeshadow.
Oh yeah, I’m not toning down the eyeshadow, either.
Students can think what they want of me. I like to think I earn “looking competent” by, I don’t know, being competent. If they can’t get past the way someone’s dressed, that’s their problem.
Also, I’ve never had anyone comment on my apparel other than to say that the colors help brighten their day or that they like the way I always match or that they like that I don’t wear “blacks and grays.”
So fight me.
On Wednesdays we wear THE BLOOD OF OUR ENEMIES
Ahoy!
So next semester I was slated to teach STAT 323, STAT 327, and ASHA 222, right? Well, we have a new hire in the department, and because she’s already taught 323 and is thus familiar with it, to help ease her transition into the department, I’ve been moved off 323 and will be teaching SCIE 301 instead.
I’ve taught 301 before, but it was only once AND it was during the initial Covid semester (Winter 2020) when we had to move online halfway through the semester and everything was chaos.
But I’m excited to teach it again! It also works a lot better with my schedule than 323 did. Now I’ll have two back-to-back classes on Tuesdays/Thursdays and one class in the afternoon on Mondays/Wednesdays/Fridays.
Plus French.
Can’t forget French!
Ravioli Rigatoni
Me: I am so busy this semester that I don’t even have time to make dinner like five out of the seven days of the week.
Also me: I really want to do NaNoWriMo in November.
H I L A R I TY
It’s Like a Reward
So for whatever reason, I’ve decided that I’m not allowed to decorate my office door with cartoons and the like until (unless) I get tenure.
That’s…that’s just the rule.
BUT, while I was running this morning, I thought of a cool way to display said cartoons should I actually get tenure. I could make like a little Cartesian plane on my door with one axis that goes from “no math” to “math” and another axis that goes from “not obscure” to “obscure” and then plot a bunch of cartoons according to these to criteria.
If that’s not a perfect way to display cartoons in a math/stats department, then there isn’t one.
Submitted.
And now we wait.
On the Right Track
I just got an email today saying that my tenure track renewal got accepted!
Obviously that’s not as exciting as GETTING ACTUAL TENURE, but it’s good to know that a) my application was good enough to grant an extension should I need it, and b) now there’s, y’know, an extension in case of unusual circumstances that prevent me from actually applying for tenure next year.
This notification is also a lot earlier than the timeline said it would be (it says mid-May), but maybe they do the renewals at a faster rate than the actual tenures.
ALSO, I did a LOT of work to create my application packet; it will be the same things that I’ll need to submit for tenure (with some more info added, of course, based on what I’ve done this past year), so a big chunk of that work has already been done and I don’t have to worry about starting from zero in the summer.
YAY
*SCREECHES IN TENURE TRACK*
I submitted my tenure track renewal package today. If it gets approved, I’ll have an extra two years to apply for tenure beyond next August.
I don’t plan on delaying my tenure application past next August, but you never know what weird stuff could happen to require a delay.
So it’s a “just in case” sort of thing.
Anyway.
Last Day of Classes!
I’m freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
At least until the actual fall semester starts, haha. Having spring off was REALLY nice, though. I’m not sure which of the two shorter semesters is better for teaching. Spring is nice because then you have a really long break until Fall, but Summer is nice because then you get a break right after the Winter semester and there is NO ONE on campus in the Summer.
Meh.
Opportunity!
So back around the middle of last semester, I met with Dr. Ware in sort of the annual “all tenure track employees should meet with their Department Head to make sure they’re making reasonable progress” sort of meeting. At that meeting, he mentioned that he’d been approached by the people running the Art and Science Honors Academy (ASHA) about having someone from the Math/Stats department get involved in the program. ASHA is, according to Dr. Ware, designed for undergraduate students who show an interest in both the arts and the sciences. All of the courses offered in the program involve some mix of information from the arts side and the science side.
Of course, this sounded absolutely fascinating and I intimated that I’d love to teach something like that.
Well, I got contacted today by the ASHA people and they said they’d like for me to teach their intro class if I still wanted to. The intro class, unlike the higher level classes, is a full-year course that is often co-taught, preferably with one instructor coming from the Faculty of Arts and the other coming from the Faculty of Science. They also said they’d never had anyone from the Math/Stats Department involved in this before.
So I readily agreed! There are no further details other than that right now – I don’t know who I’ll be teaching with or what exactly we’ll be teaching – but I’m super excited for this chance. Based on what I’ve read about this program, it sounds like something I would have absolutely LOVED as an undergraduate.
Woo!
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