A week in the life

By -
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 look up unfamiliar terms.
  • Attending a meeting for the Ohio Geographic Alliance (OGA) in Columbus. The meeting is scheduled for four hours and it takes more than two hours to drive each way, so this is essentially an all day meeting for me. I will be writing a separate post about OGA (hopefully this week). I recently joined the steering committee and so far have just attended meetings. We are holding a workshop for teachers in August, and I am excited to see how that goes.
  • Taking care of a range of personal and family obligations such as taking my daughter to the orthopedist (she injured her elbow in a bike crash a few weeks ago) and a jewelry class, and picking up my husband at the airport. My daughter is out of school now, so she either comes with me to the meetings above or plays at a friend's house.

Comments

  1. KorineJune 14, 2009 at 1:20 PM

    And most of us are on 9 month appointments, so not only do we work during the summer, but most of us don't get paid for doing that work (unless funded on a research grant)!
    I do appreciate the flexible summer schedule though...

    ReplyDelete
  2. MCHJune 14, 2009 at 1:58 PM

    Good point, Korine! I do have some summer research money this year (0.5 month) and get some professional expense money for the REU program (i.e., I can buy books, data, supplies, save it for travel, etc.), but the rest is not paid. Of course, we are expected to do service and I volunteered for that steering committee position! :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to classes with almost no concern for COVID

By -
Image
Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash   Classes start next Monday and I will be there with my KN95 mask on. I might be the only one since Miami University is not requiring masks despite CDC recommendations for our county being to the contrary. I can't see how this will go well. People are still being hospitalized and dying of COVID. Why should we pretend otherwise? I had hoped they would start with masks with all the students returning to campus, but that is not the case. It's very frustrating. I am not immune compromised, but I'm sure there are those on campus on who are. This policy just seems very misguided. I watched the webinar posted on the U website and that was even more worrying to me. It sounds like they want to rely 100% on personal responsibility for keeping COVID numbers down. Yes, there are people who will be careful, but not everyone!  So that's how I'm feeling a week out from classes. I do get to teach Landscape Ecology again- it's only
Read more

Teaching with Documentaries

By -
As I prepare for fall classes, I am having my annual dilemma over content I want to share with my students. This semester I'm teaching two classes that I've taught before: 1) Global Perspectives on Natural Disasters and 2) Global Change (I'm team-teaching the second one). In both classes, I use a textbook but also assign additional readings and show short and long documentaries during class.  I like to think of the videos as multimedia reading assignments that give students something to think about and discuss. But just like articles and books, I can only show the same documentaries for a while until they become outdated. So each time I have to decide if it's time to retire that favorite video or show it one more time. A great example is The Trouble with Malaria . It's an episode of the CBC series " The Nature of Things " and gives an excellent overview of the disease and struggles to fight it. But it was made 20 years ago! I've been showing it in GE
Read more

Summer Plans

By -
We've reached the halfway point of the summer here at Miami (we start classes on August 24th), so it seems like a good time to take stock of what I've accomplished and what I still plan to do this summer. Progress Most of my work this summer has focused on REU and with the help of my student, we have made some good progress on a project. After some debate, I decided to stick with using some methodology that we've already used in this research, but apply it to different data. Most of the work done so far on this project (and the pilot study before the grant) focused on using fall imagery to detect Amur honeysuckle in forested areas. This shrub expands its leaves earlier in spring and retains them later in fall than the overstory tree species, and thus far, we have used fall imagery in our analysis (we felt that too many other plants were also green in spring). Recently, I started to reconsider this approach and tested some spring images for a conference presentation this spr
Read more