To find that I was by the sea gazing with tranquility

[austin_dern]

So some more features of the job, largely things that keep making me think I'm being warned off: for one, I'd be taking a pay cut to work there, although that's compensated largely by the pension plan they provide. I am saving nicely and I've got about the in-case-of savings cushion that I like now, but I haven't started a real retirement savings plan and need to do that. My living expenses are pretty cheap, and the risk of steady moves encourage not weighing oneself down with frivolities like, oh, twenty 20-kg boxes of books, so having money going effectively directly to savings would be pretty much what I'd do regardless.

It's not a tenure-track position, although what is anymore; but it's also a one-year renewable contract because their contract itself is renewed annually. It's been stable for decades, but they don't ever have the reasonable assurance of perpetuity that, like, Onondaga Community College might command, nor the chance for two- or three-year contracts. I wouldn't be expected to do any research or writing, at least not as a demand for continued employment --- which they present as pretty much a given, at least as long as the employee wants to keep going --- and as all the courses would be basic introductory material I could expect to need little preparation time and so would have the chance to do my own research and writing. Classes would be rather heavily focused to standardized syllabuses, including region-wide standard final exams (a practical necessity, as students can't be expected to take subsequent classes from the same instructor and have to be brought to about the same proficiency regardless of where they take the class), reducing my workload but also reducing the amount that any course is mine.

And even then there's drawbacks. They'd have base libraries, but not any sort of academic library, although I'd be able to request books from the home university through interlibrary loan. So I could probably get references material as I needed it, albeit with enormous shipping delays, and I'd be unable to rely on the serendipity that makes university libraries such a joy to me.

A lot of the sides of this are making me feel instinctively that ``this isn't right for you''. I suppose that suggests my answer already, but I don't know how much to trust my instincts.

Trivia: William Moulton Marston, of lie detector and Wonder Woman fame, was hired by Universal Pictures head Carle Laemmle in 1929 ``to apply psychology to all departments of the motion picture concern'', in no small part to present movies in ways safe against potential censorship hazards and controversies. He did not last out a year in the position. Source: The Lie Detectors: The History Of An American Obsession, Ken Alder.

Currently Reading: The Great Hedge of India: The Search For The Living Barrier That Divided A People, Roy Moxham. ... You know, when it gets down to the level of interacting with the common people, the British Empire spent a lot of energy being jerks.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Retirement savings plans are quite important. I take it your current workplace does not offer a 401(k) or IRA plan?

Base libraries tend to be small but rather well and intruigingly stocked, to note. The one at the New London Subase had a solid sci-fi section and a frankly _ridiculous_ amount of Martin Gardner books, double the size of the mail local library, which was five times the size if not ten.

I think you have enough solid objections here that your instincts are correct ones.

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced my current workplace has any kind of plan for anything. (Formally speaking I'm there on a contract consisting of a handshake and an oral agreement, for example.) I should probably check the employee's manual, assuming one exists.

My objections do seem more substantial the more I outline them. I'm glad I am taking such time to understand my feelings about this.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

and as all the courses would be basic introductory material I could expect to need little preparation time and so would have the chance to do my own research and writing.

Speaking from experience, I think you're mistaken about this. It's a notorious fact about jobs like this that they drain your energy away from research. You've never had a teaching load this heavy before, so I'm not sure you know how exhausting it will be. It's not about actual preparation of material. It's about explaining how grades will be assigned, then explaining it again two or three more times, then assigning grades, then explaining how grades were assigned, then arguing about how the grades were assigned. Throw in some problem students here and there and the overall weariness of teaching the same classes over and over and over, and you'll find yourself not wanting to do a damn thing with your free time.

Or maybe I'm just a bad professor. I do suspect that often.

[oliver-otter.livejournal.com]

I don't think you seem like a bad professor. You seem like a professor lacking confidence.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

She's had some really awful classes, though. I've had an easier time of it on every possible count throughout my career.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You are right, of course, about the teaching load; I've never had more than two courses entirely my own per term, or three sections of a course I was TA'ing. And I was making the assumption that a low-level course would require less preparation work on my part, mostly because I know the hardest part of the classes I'd taught was preparing my angle on the subject and the examples to demonstrate, and the hard part in those is working out the logic of examples. There's a reason I have only a handful of convective-current finite-element differential equation problems, whereas I can improvise a chain-rule-of-differentiation problem.

But there are the counterbalancing factor of finding the students' level and preparing material that hits that balance between ``hard enough they have to work at it'' and ``not so hard that they give up'', and that can be a much narrower band at the lower levels ... at my remove it's hard to remember exactly where the hard parts of Calculus I were and teaching well is in part finding those spots and teaching sympathetically to that.

[xyzzysqrl]

Oops. I posted to the one before this, without seeing this post up somehow.

What I said, I think, applies still.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Thank you, though, they're useful thoughts.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

The Great Hedge of India

How very bizarre! I'd never before heard of such a thing. You often unearth these weird bits of the world that I'd otherwise miss :)

[xolo.livejournal.com]

And, synchronously enough: African leaders are meeting in Chad to push the idea of planting a tree belt across Africa from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/africa/10344622.stm)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Tree bands as an attempt at ecological engineering aren't unknown, although I don't know of many examples, mostly because I don't read much about trees. I know that multiple bands of trees were planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the hopes they'd break up the winds that produced the Dust Bowl. It's true there hasn't been a Dust Bowl since, although there were quite a few changes in land use so it's hard to say whether that made all the difference or was just one of the contributing factors.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I never had either and encountered it only through James Nicoll's writing on rec.arts.sf.written. It's an odd thing that's almost completely undocumented, and part of Moxham's book tries to explore why that is. The most plausible explanation is that it fell into an embarrassed cough of history --- it roughly followed the Customs Line (a Great Hedge across the subcontinent sounds like British Whimsy, but it was there for a particular purpose), and was designed to make it easier to enforce the internal tariff barriers, so that any discussion of its purpose would be soaked up by the Customs Line itself.

The British wouldn't have much reason to take custody of the history of the line or its subsidiary features like the Great Hedge after they left India; and India wouldn't have much reason to take custody of its history either since they wanted the Customs Line gone. And as the hedge was mostly foreign species and needed care to thrive, it mostly died out on its own. So what was left was a very faint impression.

Much of the book is Moxham's journey of trying to find the hedge, or evidence that it existed, or where it existed, and it's quite hard to do. It just vanished.