While I am becoming a student with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), I have been for at least 4 (non-contiguous) years a student of Professor-Graduate Student Interaction. I think trying to decide how to interact with your professor is an interesting problem. Coming from industry, I know more than I ever thought I would about image management. Do I want my professor to know my like my framily know me? Like my coworkers know me? Like my bosses have known me? Of course this is also dependent on to what kind of relationship the professor is open (grammar?).
As I move toward becoming a professor, I will also have to think about the kind of relationship I want with my students, and other colleagues.
Having come from families (divorced parents) with low SES, I have known and seen others who believed the myth that if we just work toward a higher education, we will be more marketable in the job market. This article that Nathan sent my way is quite cynical, but probably an important discussion starter especially for those pursuing higher education, more especially if it’s in liberal arts.
Quick notes on manipulatives to help teach data structures and algorithms:
- tinker toys for trees
- fish bowl for set
- baby beads for linked list
- stacking cup for sorting
How can any particular grade-giver give out actual, uninflated grades, if this is not the status quo? For example, if a particular professor resists grade inflation, will they just wind up with very few unfortunate students in their class (especially with the rise in popularity of sites that report a professors typical spread of grades such as koofers.com, pickaprof.com [apparently now myedu.com?], and ratemyprofessors.com)? While it seems unfair to inflate grades, it also seems unfair not to inflate grades if the students will have to compete with other students who may not have received uninflated grades. Many students would want higher grades, many institutions would want their student bodies to have higher grades, many companies hire based partially on higher grades, many grad schools admit based partially on higher grades…
So being new to the whole publishing thing, but hopefully entering into it for the long term (as I intend to be a Computer Science professor), I have never thought about authorship. I have two main questions:
- What should an individual be expected to do to be included as an authro of some intellectual property?
- What actually determines who is listed (and in what order, since this seems to communicate information)?
When I googled (yes I actually use it as a verb because it’s the only search i seem to use, not sure how I feel about that…) authorship, to make sure I was using it correctly in describing this issue that I am contemplating, the first result was to the Harvard Med School’s Authorship Guidelines. I plan to read a bunch of such guidelines to think about what people generally expect and what is actually practiced. It seems like it’d be a form of plagiarism to approach authorship in some ways.
This feels very similar to grade inflation. I will probably be writing a paper on grade inflation for my Preparing the Future Professoriate class.
This video is from a Rice University survey that floated around last semester. It’s making me watch my professors closely for how they interact with their respective families. How many hours will I be able to work each week after I have taken the time necessary to be the kind of parent and partner I want to be?
In our Research Methods in Computer Science course last fall, Dr. Quek quoted one of his old professors ([citation needed]) by saying something like, “To become a professor is to stop living in the present, and to live only in the past and the future, constantly writing grant proposals for work that you will do, and then writing papers and reports on what you(r grad students) did.” I am not sure that I want that. It seems like this may indeed be what actually happens in many cases. How can I be an efficient and productive professor and not completely delegate research to my students? It seems like I would just have to limit how many other work things I allow myself to do that would take time away from research…