Mary C. Henry

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...

That title is really overstating what I'm going to write about, but obviously that is what everyone, everywhere is thinking about a lot of the time! I'm lucky that my university has decided to keep classes remote the first five weeks (at least). We started classes this week (August 17th), which was a week earlier than originally planned. Initially they wanted us to start in-person so the logic was that the early start would allow us to finish before Thanksgiving, do remote exams, and reduce some COVID spread by not having students travel and then return after that holiday. We kept the early start date, but for now are also remote. I'm hoping that we stay remote, because the idea of returning to in-person classes- even with masks and social distancing- is just not going to work. We've just had (at least) two schools switch back to online classes after just one week of face-to-face classes. It seems much more disruptive to have students move back here (or here for the fir...

I think most of us in academia complain about teaching evaluations in one way or another and many articles have been written on the problems with student evaluation of instruction. Since we made the switch to online evaluations another problem is low response rates. Some faculty have "tricks" that they claim work: offering extra credit if a certain response rate is reached, threatening not to grade exams if a certain response rate is NOT reached, giving in-class time to fill them out. I've tried some of these but the rates are still quite low. For online classes it's even worse. So on top of the other issues with student evaluation of teaching, there may not be enough data either. At my university, they encourage us to use "multiple measures of teaching effectiveness" in the form of midterm evaluations of some kind. I have used Small Group Instructional Diagnosis several times to get feedback on what is and isn't working in classes. This semester I...

Is it ever appropriate for someone to yell at someone else in an academic faculty meeting? I would say no. Especially so if you’re a higher rank than the person you’re yelling at. Especially not during a brainstorming session on a Friday afternoon. Especially not if you’re a man and you’re yelling at a woman. I just had another taste of how people at work don't value me or my opinions. The comment I made was clearly not going to be a major focus of what we were doing, but I thought I had a valid point and should be allowed to make it. If no one felt it was worth pursuing or discussing further, that’s fine. However, my comment was met with anger and aggression from one colleague. Nobody else said anything. I felt uncomfortable for being yelled at so I left the meeting right then. One (female) colleague emailed later to ask if I was okay. Another (female colleague) did on Sunday. The person who yelled emailed to apologize, but apology also pointed out that I was wrong. So that’s ...