CSUMB tribe wiseman

Partificating the chairs meeting. All other chairs are rather new and I have been doing this for a lot of years. I've become the tribe's wisesman. There is a certain comfort in this since almost all issues discussed, I have some anecdots, success or horror stories to tell. But I also felt old, it maybe time to move on.

The educational effectiveness is become so much of an emphasis on many campuses, including CSUMB, there is a clear and present danger that we take faculty's time off their primary focus: study, evaluate, generate, document and deseminate knowledge and compel them to spend too much effort on education and assessment. We might have a lot of professors that are very good at measuring student leanring, but not as good as their core function. That would be sad for higher-ed.

The missing items in many of the discussions are "excellent" and "motivation". Which are crucial in any educational process and prominantly missing in public K-12, and now in some colleges and universities, also.

Priority, choices and consequences

When I was a bit younger, like all other naive beginning professors, I believed I am do everything: getting million dollar grants, teach five courses, public 6 papers, supervise 20 students on their capstones or thesises, play tennis three times a week, swim two hours a week, practice my cello everyday, run a department, design new degrees, mentor new faculties, participate 10 committees and still can put my feet on the coffee table every night watching Sinfield re-runs.

Then the reality hits me hard. Covering everything made my involvement superficial, quality of work is out of the window, little time to spend on individual students, and hundred of emails left unanswered every week.  I have to return my phone calls during commute, writing proposals till 2-3 AM. 

Selecting what are important is challenging yet has to be done, I replaced swimming with more time efficient running, two papers a year only, ask other faculty to step in for advising.  Over the summer, I need to review what I been doing over the last few years and have to make the difficult decisions: what valuable activites I will NOT do.