The shape of fall quarter

Classes started on Wednesday, and with them the middle-distance sprint that is the academic quarter. Below is a rundown of what I'll be doing between now and December 10 when grades are due.

Teaching
UWP 18: Style and the Essay. Twenty-five students, lots of writing to read and respond to.

UWP 120: Rhetorical Approaches to Science & Technology. Twelve students, and a brand-new class (not just to me; this is the first time it's being taught at all). I'll be working on materials for it, as well as responding to student work, all quarter.

Presenting at conferences

Conferences offer two kind of opportunities for academics. First, they let us test-drive ideas with a live audience of fellow scholars, getting their feedback before we commit the ideas to paper and attempt to publish them. Second, they let us hang out and talk shop with like-minded colleagues. Most academics (at least at a research-oriented place like UC Davis) are pretty specialized,

This fall I have two conferences with two different groups of fellow scholars.

In ten days at the ASBH (Association for the Study of Bioethics and Humanities) conference I'll be talking about the problems with, and alternatives to, the metaphor of "gene editing." I'll also be hanging out with people from a huge range of fields who are brought together by an interest in science and ethics. I haven't been to ASBH before, but I expect there will be a lot of conversations about our different disciplinary perspectives and how they can work together to support ethics in biology-related research.

Two weeks later I'll head to San Diego for the WSRL (Western States Rhetoric and Literacy) conference where I'll meet a group of fellow writing teachers and present on how I teach critical scientific literacy in UWP 11 each winter. I go to WSRL every year and know there will be lots of shop talk about writing programs and writing pedagogy.

Writing

Writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. This includes meeting with my writing professor pals in Martinez (where we converge from three universities) every other weekend.

Going to meetings

Let's see.

There will be at least one UWP meeting that I will attend (another is scheduled for when I am in San Diego).

The Grade Change Committee, which I am chairing this year, will meet three times in Fall quarter and will review and vote on 60-100 petitions each time.

There will also be meetings with the bioethics folks in Davis, at Davis's medical campus in Sacramento, and in Berkeley.

I'll meet at least once with an undergraduate I'm mentoring.

I'll have  and will have pre-quarter meetings with my winter 2017 TA team.

I'll also head out to the design center 5-10 times this quarter. I think there's also an Office of Research meeting related to that as well.

I may be part of a search committee or two (hiring people).

Probably there are other meetings I'm forgetting.

Having a life

Time with Orhan and friends. Maybe a trip to MN to see Eli at college. Staying in touch with other people too far away to visit.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

UWP 018: Style in the what?

Image
I have taught  UWP 018: Style in the Essay  once, in Fall 2014, and am looking forward to having it again. As you can see from the official course  description , it's pretty poorly defined, both in general (so many goals!) and in specific parts (e.g. "Students should be familiar with the general principles of good writing upon entry into the course," whatever that means). Even the topics are hard to pin down, especially "the essay." It's vague enough that Phillip Lopate's anthology  The Art of the Personal Essay  covers 2000 years (starting with Seneca) and several countries and languages (with translations from Latin, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese). Round 1 (2014) Given this range, I thought for a long time about what  the essay  is before teaching UWP 018 for the first time. I thought back to what I read during my MFA in nonfiction writing, not only essays but also books and articles about the various forms of nonfiction prose. I also ...
Read more

Some architectural comments

Image
Some Vancouver locals call it The Rainy City, or Raincouver. I call it the City of Balconies. The city has extremely high population density, achieved in part by having lots of high-rise residential buildings -- and by lots, I mean all over the place, with more going up all the time if the number of cranes and construction sites are any indication. This is part of downtown Vancouver: And this is the view from our hotel window, out in Burnaby (part of the metro area): Some of the buildings are fairly bland. Some I like because they are reflective, and I enjoy taking pictures of things reflected at the scale of an entire building, especially other buildings. Some of the buildings were lovely and unique. We saw the Woodward's Building from several angles, starting with noticing its rooftop grove poking up from behind another building: When we got closer, we saw the lovely exoskeleton: It turns out the building was torn down and rebuilt just a fe...
Read more

Moray Coast, Day 2: Findhorn to Hopeman part 2

Image
I was pretty bushed by the time we stopped in Burghead; we'd talked about resting a mile or so before town, but there was no shade, so we pushed on. Dev, of course, has ridiculously long ostrich legs and therefore was not fatigued at all. (Also, he rode in my pocket, though he prefers I not point that out too often.) He found some interesting items in the cafe, such as these ship-building tools used by Daniel Young Hopeman: This is the boat Dev would like to have built if he had Dev-sized versions of Mr. Hopeman's tools (and the skill to use them). We didn't have time to look up Mr. Hopeman at the time, but later investigations revealed that he was a fireman on drifter (a kind of boat, I assume) that sank on June 10, 1931. The Glasgow Herald reported: Dev also was intrigued to learn that Rhubarb! (And, of course... Custard!) Our next stop was a local shop where I attempted to buy a sun hat. We were ready for rain, but we were not ready for so much...
Read more