Don’t ask the new guy

Following my advice regarding faculty mentoring, here is another piece of advice for the colleagues of new faculty members: when you need a volunteer for a campus event, don’t ask the new person. Beyond the fact that the new person is probably naive enough to say yes as senior colleagues ignore these requests entirely, there are two reasons why this is a bad idea: The new person is not supposed to be doing service this year and the new person doesn’t actually know that much about the curriculum (at either the college-level or the department level). This can’t work out well for anybody other than the senior colleagues who do not have to spend a nice spring evening on campus.

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The gentle transition that isn’t

Before each semester begins I look forward to the gentle transition back to teaching.  When each semester begins I contemplate the reasons that this transition is actually abrupt.  The reasons I’ve considered range from teaching a new prep to heavily revising a previous course.  This semester, I filled my “transition” weeks with student meetings, hoping to prevent some of the problems that appeared in a spring course.  Again, I thought of how nice it will be when I finally encounter the mythical smooth transition.  Of course, this semester is also my first with advising and committee duties, which promise to interfere with these transitions for years to come.  At this point, it may be time to realize that the best transition is not found at the abrupt beginning of the semester but at the equally abrupt end.  Until then, I guess that I will embrace the distinction between break and not break by diving into teaching, research, and service, which reminds me that I still need to find some mythical time for research during the semester…

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