Mary C. Henry

My job can be really funny in some ways. I go from having ultimate flexibility in the summer to the structure and schedule of the semester. There is no transition. One day, I just get up and classes are back in session. I am teaching mornings this semester, so I have gotten back into a schedule of getting up early and coming into campus to teach. My afternoons are more open for labs, meetings, research, class planning, etc. and by 10pm, I am pretty wiped out. The first week back is always a shock to the system- I slept for 10 hours last Friday night! Once I get back into a routine, things are fine. I feel pretty good about how my classes are going so far. In my intro physical geography class, I am trying online quizzes for the first time. Every Monday morning, a new quiz is up for the students to take and they have until Friday night at 10pm to finish them. They are graded automatically, since I have the correct answers built into the quiz. There were a few technical glitches for the f...

It's that time of year again. The students will be arriving this week and classes will be starting next Monday. I feel pretty ready, since I started working on class planning extra early this year, but I still need to finalize some things and catch up on some new reading assignments. We have a lunch with the new graduate students this week, but otherwise, everything happens next week. I am teaching five days a week this semester. That may seem like an unreasonable complaint, but teaching is not the only work I do. I need time for research and service*, too- not to mention time to plan what I teach. I like semesters when I have one or two days a week that I can work at home. My schedule this semester won't allow that, so I'll have to be more creative about planning my days and work schedule. I'll post more as the semester gets rolling! *I am missing an OGA meeting next week, since I have class. If I didn't teach every day, I might have been able to go! (If it weren...

One of the first things I do to prepare for a class is to write the syllabus. It's the first document the students receive and contains all of the vital information about the course, such as required books, expectations, grading policy, and the schedule for the semester. Mine have tended to get longer and longer- especially for the large general education course that I teach. My syllabus for GEO 121 is currently four pages of text, a page with the schedule, and an additional page describing the requirements that the course fills. For my upper-level courses, they tend to be shorter (three or four pages total). Why is that syllabus so long? First, I like to explain more about the course content than in other courses. Most students taking GEO 121 are not geography majors and never will be. They have registered for the course because they need it to a fill a requirement (a physical science with a lab) and usually have very little interest in the subject (although maybe this changes at...

We have just over four weeks until classes start, so I am trying to get things organized and finish a few things before the students get back into town. I am teaching three classes this semester and need to write the syllabi and plan those for the semester. This means I have to make my final decisions about attendance monitoring in GEO 121 , update reading packets for GEO 333 and GEO 444/544 and plan out the sixteen weeks that start on August 24th. It will be hectic when classes start, so the better I plan things now, the easier things will go then. I also need to think about how to revise assignments I've used in the past. For instance, I always have some kind of journal assignment in my hazards class, but usually tweak it a bit each year. I'm still not 100% satisfied with it, so I need to think about how I can modify the assignment. I also need to decide on some things for GEO 121: whether to keep the paper assignment this time (or put more weight on exams), decide about usin...

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...

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 ...