Mary C. Henry

Late last fall, I joined the steering committee for the Ohio Geographic Alliance (OGA). A retired colleague (Professor Emeritus Dr. Howell Lloyd) was stepping down after many years serving on the committee. We attended my first meeting together and I was thankful to have someone at the meeting who I already knew and also someone to help me navigate to Ohio State University for the first time (where OGA is based). OGA is one of many state geographic alliances and is sponsored by the National Geographic Society . Established in 1990, OGA is an organization devoted to enhancing geography, as both a physical and socialc science, in Ohio's K-12 curriculum. It is a partnership that includes K-12 teachers and university geography professors who work together in pre-service, inservice, materials development and public engagement activities. (from OGA website ). I was very excited about the prospect of joining this organization, because I have wanted to get involved in K-12 education and ...

So academics have their summers off, right? We may not be teaching (although plenty of us teach at least some summers), but we have plenty of other things going on. Here's what I have on my plate this week: Meeting with my REU student to go over more preprocessing steps. We have five Landsat images to process and analyze and are just getting into the preprocessing now. It can be very tedious and requires great attention to detail. Attending a MA proposal defense. Graduate students have to have committee approval of their proposed thesis work before their travel funding is released. Most students finish this in April and May, but some are still working to plan their field visits in what remains of the summer. Attending a REU cluster meeting. We are going to be discussing articles from two visiting speakers. I still need to read the papers and they are on topics quite outside of my discipline and area of expertise. Reading like this is usually best done near a computer so that I can ...

We had a cluster meeting today and spent the entire hour letting the students update us on their research progress. The projects include lake water sampling, monitoring ant populations, relating plant cover to remotely sensed data, and modeling BTU output for potential biofuel applications**. Each student talked about what they had been doing so far and what kind of data collection and analysis they would be doing. Some common themes ran through each discussion, such as steep learning curves and struggling with defining and explaining research. In this program, we mentor students, but expect them to take ownership of their projects and ask them to explain their planned work early on. It's always a struggle for me to keep quiet when my student is talking about the work at this stage. I always worry that I am not providing enough guidance (or too much guidance without being clear about the big picture). It can be challenging for the students early on, but I thought they all did a goo...

One of the reasons that I wanted to start a work-related blog, was to give me an opportunity to do some less formal academic writing. All the wise academics recommend writing on a regular, even daily basis. This is not something that I have been able to achieve over my academic career, but I would love to get to that point. As an academic, I do a variety of writing: teaching related writing includes things like syllabi, assignments, lectures, and exams; and research writing, which means writing abstracts for conferences, full-length research papers, and proposals. And let’s not forget all of the email correspondence that is required these days: student emails, emails from collaborators, administrative emails, etc. When contentious issues arise, these emails can take a lot of time to read and compose responses. A lot of my research writing lately has been collaborative, so paper and proposal drafts have been emailed back ...