You fly around like a bee

[austin_dern]

I don't want it believed that only my real work is filled with silly or wondrously odd events. I suspect that I just attract them, since I'm a fundamentally silly person who doesn't belong in whatever situation I'm in. But they turn up a bunch anyway.

Some of them involve paperwork for the classes I'm teaching. The college sent out a Faculty Qualifications Form, which requests that everyone teaching a class list the classes being taught and identifying what in their graduate or undergraduate transcripts (or work experience) proves their qualifications to teach that subject. One course I'm teaching is Elementary Statistics, although I must confess that despite getting a thesis (and two textbooks!) which are based on statistical mechanics published, I don't have any college courses in statistics to my credit. I wrote in some courses like Thermodynamics which should cover the topic. But the other course is the Introduction to Algebra. To get to my intro-algebra course I'd have to go back to middle school, and I'm not positive but I think I failed it. So I wrote as my qualification to teach introductory algebra that I have a PhD in mathematics.

The department secretary said she doesn't know why this form is needed, by the way. I had supposed it was fallout from a relatively recent phony-credentials scandal that had afflicted a nearby school, but apparently not. Her theory is that the school is coming up for Middle States soon and they want to get any embarrassing items cleaned up sooner. I turned mine in, and learned they needed it typed in; I typed it in using Mac's Pages, and turned it in again; it turns out they need it in Word format, so I'm hoping that Pages can turn things back into Word on some level that they can accept. I hope.

The other amusing form is the official class census, designed to check who's actually attending versus who's given up after three weeks of class. This isn't so amusing in itself, but the forwarded note from the secretary is: it asks department secretaries to say the census results have to be reported by the 7th, because while the actual deadline is the 13th, if they say the 13th nobody will turn in their results on time.

Trivia: A November 1916 military inspector's investigation of chocolate magnate George Cadbury's personal accounts found he gave three-quarters of his income to philanthropic causes, but none were anti-war campaigns. Source: Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between The World's Greatest Chocolate Makers, Deborah Cadbury.

Currently Reading: Swan's Song, Ursula Synge. Light fantasy: it's apparently a sequel of sorts to that fairy tale where the ten brothers get turned into swans and their sister has to stay silent for a year and knit shirts out of thorns for them, although largely not from the last brother's (left with one wing because the shirts weren't quite done) perspective.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

You should, hopefully be able to export to RTF, which Word will happily gobble up. Worst case, there's txt.. ^_^

Sad to see the end of Cadbury now, ne? Such a rich history, now just a brand identity for a rather unpleasant multinational.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Happily I was able to export to a version of Word, through Pages, which they were able to read.

And, yeah, it's sad when companies, particularly ones with interesting histories like the Quaker chocolate companies, become just brand identities for OmniCorp Ultd. Personality's stripped, however hard they might try keeping it. It's like when a company drops the geographic identifier of where it originated.