Most of us probably pick our socks to match our outfit. If we have more than one pair of socks to match a particular outfit then we pick between those those pairs. My son’s strategy is completely different.

First, he doesn’t feel limited by what “matches” his outfit. C. picks his shirts and socks independently of one another. For him, the driving force is what looks interesting or “cozy.” Green shirt with red and white striped socks? Fine. Blue shirt with brown and orange socks? Fine.

Second, the fact that socks come in pairs is interesting but ultimately irrelevant. If C. looks in his drawer and likes the blue sock with stripes and the green sock with brown trim, he’ll wear one of each. Two random socks without mates floating around the drawer? Put ‘em together and he’s good to go for the day. (Another solution to the problem of choosing between socks is to wear more than one pair – something both my kids did until the day they both wore three pairs at once and couldn’t get their shoes on.)

So I’m left wondering . . . what other rules of life do I follow that are ultimately as arbitrary and falsely limiting as pairing socks?

Over the past year, this saying has become almost a mantra in our house. Bob gone for two weeks straight on business travel? We’re grateful he has a job that pays well. Rainy, cold day? We’re grateful we have warm clothes, a dry house, and the ability to pay the heating bill.

This morning I found something else to be grateful for – I have really nice neighbors.

I was awoken at 6:30 am by a woman screaming, “Help me! Help me!” It went on and on and at first I thought someone was being attacked. I ran out the front door to figure out where the sound was coming from to find a woman lying in the middle of the street in front of the neighbor’s house. She was older and it appears that she fell while walking, although I’m still not quite sure what happened except that she hurt her back.

By the time I got outside, other neighbors were also on the scene, many, like me, in their pajamas (although one man in a suit later drove off in a Mercedes parked nearby, so he must have been on his way to work when he came upon our little street scene and stopped to help). One neighbor was on the phone with 911, two were kneeling in the street comforting the woman and trying to call her husband, one ran to get a blanket from her house, and others stopped passing cars from driving through the area (this involved running into the street when we saw headlights coming up the hill-and-blind-curve near my house). My husband ran to get a flare and another passerby stopped his truck in the middle of the street and put on the hazards, effectively blocking any traffic from that direction.

Within ten minutes (five?) the paramedics from the local fire station were there – something else to be grateful for: fast, well trained emergency services that we can depend on – and people started melting away. I sort of doubt I’ll ever know what actually happened to cause that woman to be lying in the street this morning. But, I did learn that I have really nice neighbors who will come running if you scream “Help me!” and who will kneel in the middle of the street in the dark for someone they don’t know.

I could be grumpy to be woken up early on a holiday, but instead I’m grateful to live in such a nice place.

First, this article about tracking faculty technology use via hits in a CMS. The article is short, but as so often happens, the comments are where the interesting discussion occurs. Here the discussion turns to use of technology vs. quality teaching.

Then, there is this article, “Educause Names Top Teaching with Technology Challenges for 2009.” The first issue? using technology to foster “active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning and knowledge creation.” (Librarians will be happy to see IL as part of the second important issue.)

I love the editing capabilities. Unlike Moodle and Blackboard, the editing is always on and the editing links are subtle – they usually pop up as you roll over a section of the course. And, editing seems faster than in Moodle. One aspect of Moodle I dislike is that when you make a change, you are taken back to the top of the page, so that I spend a lot of time scrolling back down to where I was working to make the next addition to the page. Angel returns me to where I was before and overall, there is a lot less scrolling.

Angel’s layout is very efficient – it uses tabs at the top so that users can switch between different windows with different content. It is clean and intuitive.

However, once you go into the windows, you realize that there are odd differences and overlaps. Forums can appear in at least three places, but often with different views; course email appears in various places; etc. I ended up removing some of the tabs and boxes with redundant content – it felt like information overload.

Different windows have different layouts – most windows have boxes for different content elements, but the most crowded window (where forums, assignments and lessons all have to share space) only allows a list view. From that perspective, I prefer Blackboard - I can create the left hand menu categories I want to organize my content and then the pages within there are presented consistently.

I haven’t had much opportunity to work with the forums, but it doesn’t look like I can get a list of all the forums and then see if they have new posts (whereas in Moodle and Blackboard I can see a simple list with notes on whether each forum has new posts). However, I did not like how Blackboard’s forums worked, so I’m remaining hopeful that Angel’s will work more intuitively (although I really like the simplicity of Moodle’s, so…).

Anyway, those are some initial thoughts. Stay tuned for more as the semester progresses!

• Student evaluations – I was able to read my fall evaluations from UIUC this week. My reference students had some great suggestions to improve the course, including that I require six Sources assignments rather than three. Yes, folks, my students are suggesting I assign more work. So, I did (I also took their advice to require five questions per assignment rather than ten). I also took their advice to drop the forum participation requirement – this one makes me nervous, but I believe it is important to listen to my course evals and be open to new things. We’ll see how it goes.
• I learned to use the Angel course management system this week. There are a lot of aspects I like and some I find puzzling. For instance, on some pages the content is arranged in boxes that I can move around, while on other pages I can only have a list of links/folders. I’m sure I’ll learn to use all the features more effectively as time goes on, but for now I find myself taking away options that I don’t plan to use (most content is repeated in multiple places, which I think will cause information overload, so I simplified and relabeled my course site).
• My last post about not knowing when to knock off work resonates more than a month later – I was having the same thoughts earlier this week and was pleasantly surprised to discover I had written a blog post about it in December. Perhaps my new semester’s resolution should be to create a work schedule, stick to it and turn off the computer more.
• Technology can get in the way of learning. As mentioned above, I learned to use Angel this week. While it is a nice system and SJSU provides good support to instructors, there was still a learning curve. I lost a day and a half of my life trying to learn the gradebook, a feature I don’t even want to use – email submissions work perfectly fine for UIUC students and should work equally well for SJSU students. I’ve resolved to stop worrying about the gradebook and spend my time revising weekly lessons, where the real content of the course is.
• I love academic life – lots of time off for the holidays (even if I have had to work on syllabi and course sites) and no stress about what to do with the kids while they are on break. And, I love the fresh start of a new semester – it is awesome to start over three times a year.

When I had an office job is did work at home – I took home papers to grade or I checked email at night. But, there was also a sense of “leaving” work at the end of the day – I had put in my hours, accomplished what I could, and if I was working at home that night, it was clearly “extra.”

Now that I work at home, I never have a sense of being “done.” Today I graded 18 assignments -basically, when I wasn’t directly attending to the needs of my children, I was grading. My day went something like:

1. Get kids ready for school, make a lunch, get everyone out the door and into the car, take E. to school.
2. Come home. Do a few necessary chores. Feed dogs.
3. Grade for 2.5 hours.
4. Make lunch for me and C. Take C. to library to return books and get new ones.
5. Go get E. at school.
6. Come home, get snacks, simultaneously supervise homework and grade.
7. Shower.
8. Take E. to swimming lessons, take nightly drive to see Christmas lights.
9. Get home. Simultaneously make dinner, supervise showers, and feed dogs. Eat dinner and work with E. on spelling words.
10. Answer email. Grade.
11. Get kids to brush teeth and get into bed.
12. Grade.
13. Finish grading last of this assignment. Short burst of relief, followed by wondering what to do next – work on spring syllabi? look for articles? check date spring reserves are due? read course forums (haven’t done that yet today)? start grading next set of assignments? class prep for Wednesday? class prep for Thursday? for next week?

And it is 9:00 at night. It is really hard to know when to call it a day and curl up with a good book, because the work is always there.

First, I read an article in a prominent professional publication about a librarian who taught a credit course. I taught a similar course for six years and loved it. While I have seen some of the same frustrating student behaviors that this author did (first-year students do tend to complain about workload!), the overall tone of the article felt off – the author encouraged readers to try this type of teaching, yet I did not get the impression that she enjoyed teaching the class or the students.

Second, I had a fantastic speaker in my instruction class today. Susan is a good friend; she teaches composition and speech at the College and is a teacher I greatly admire. She has incredible energy in the classroom and is able to engage her students in that way the best teachers can. As she talked about teaching today, it struck me again how much she loves her students – she may get frustrated with them and she certainly doesn’t tolerate “bad” behavior, but at the center of her teacher is a genuine affection for the population she is teaching. 

For my first seven years at the College, I genuinely liked the students. The last year, I found them harder to tolerate. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t teaching credit courses and I wasn’t serving as an advisor – which meant I did not develop the close relationships with students that I had come to treasure; perhaps it was because I was just burned out.

In any case, I feel lucky I was able to walk away to focus on teaching my graduate students, who I like a great deal and who inspire me professionally. I love the job I do!

Addenda: Coincidentally, I re-read Rebekah Nathan’s My Freshman Year last week – she is upfront about the less desirable aspects of student behavior, but at the end of the book what emerges is a sympathetic portrait of modern undergraduates. She doesn’t condone all their behavior, but she tries to understand what drives the behavior and she *likes* her students. It is a great (and quick) read that I highly recommend.

One problem is that I’m overly ambitious – some of my goals, such as total household organization within a month, were not realistic. And, yes, it pains me to admit I may never have total control of my house. Another problem is that I overcommit myself.  I know, my friends, you are shocked (shocked!), aren’t you?

Every month I’ve made a resolution to focus on my long-term objectives – blogging, writing an article, weeding stuff out of the house, catching up on scrapbooking, swimming with the kids regularly, talking to my siblings more often - and I still haven’t quite gotten there. I know I need to start saying “no” more often – to the PTO, especially – or I won’t achieve my goals. I’m also experimenting with new ways to organize my goals and time. I’ve started a notebook where I write down monthly goals; this has helped me stay attuned to my long-term goals, which is a good start, I hope. I’m also going to start writing down my weekly schedule and blocking off time during the day for different tasks. This technique was helpful last summer, in part because it helped me be realistic about what I needed to do, how much time was available and whether I had time to commit to anything else.

Rather than be disappointed by what I have not yet done, I’m trying to be proud of what I have accomplished and see this as a time of transition and growth. There’s room for improvement, and luckily, time as well.

It will be a short visit – just an hour or so – but I’m excited to see what they are doing. This is an area of librarianship I know very little about, so it will be an interesting professional experience.

Plus, I’ve never been in a prison before! I like to think that this new phase of my career has room for adventure and unusual experiences.

I’ll admit I’m a little nervous. My contact at the prison was very enthusiastic – the kind of personality that just sucks you in. But he did tell me at the end of the phone call that I should wear pants, long sleeves and a dark color (no khaki). Oh, and that as a new face. I would be stared at by everyone. Everyone. And I need to fax back a NCIC clearance form.

I find Mark Salzman’s True Notebooks, about his time leading a writing program in juvenile hall, fascinating. He was nervous about his first visit, too, but it ended up being a transformative experience in his life. I don’t think my short visit will result in a book, but I do think it will be eye-opening and interesting and that’s not bad for a Thursday afternoon.