I got the #)$(*&_#)$(*ing, wretched R&T dossier completed. James Boswell once said, "There is nothing like the thrill of having written," and I couldn't agree more--especially when it comes to administrivia. The dossier was handed in on June 29 at 4:45 p.m., right before we left for vacation (sorry, 5-Thingers, I've been out of town and thus am behind on reading everyone's progress). So, for better or for worse, I can check this one off the list.
If I make full professor, will I have to admit I'm a grown-up?
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Complete Rank and Tenure Self-Eval
If you don't want a nuts-and-bolts explanation of academic administrivia, this is the post to skip.
On college campuses, "tenure" indicates the granting of permanent status, after some sort of probationary period, and "rank" indicates one's title or standing, and is broadly associated with length of employment. For instance, I started out as an assistant professor, and I am now up for consideration as full professor (the top rank! whoot!), while I got tenure almost two years ago. Practically speaking, rank indicates salary level.
So I've got the rest of my R&T packet together: I have crunched the numbers from my student evals and displayed them prettily; I have had the requisite number of peers visit my classroom and send in their evals; my chair has written her letter; I've updated my curriculum vitae (what the rest of the world calls a "resume"). Now I must write my self-eval, judging my own performance over the last two years, and making the case for a change in rank. It's due during the first week in July. I actually was up for rank last summer, but had such a bad year and was so unprepared that I just plain skipped it--salary increase and all. I just couldn't get my act together; partially because medical leave made me short some evals (which the R&T committee probably would have waived, given the reason), but mainly because I just couldn't face the self-eval.
So I've got to get this monster done. I'm a business writer: I can do this.
*sigh*
On college campuses, "tenure" indicates the granting of permanent status, after some sort of probationary period, and "rank" indicates one's title or standing, and is broadly associated with length of employment. For instance, I started out as an assistant professor, and I am now up for consideration as full professor (the top rank! whoot!), while I got tenure almost two years ago. Practically speaking, rank indicates salary level.
So I've got the rest of my R&T packet together: I have crunched the numbers from my student evals and displayed them prettily; I have had the requisite number of peers visit my classroom and send in their evals; my chair has written her letter; I've updated my curriculum vitae (what the rest of the world calls a "resume"). Now I must write my self-eval, judging my own performance over the last two years, and making the case for a change in rank. It's due during the first week in July. I actually was up for rank last summer, but had such a bad year and was so unprepared that I just plain skipped it--salary increase and all. I just couldn't get my act together; partially because medical leave made me short some evals (which the R&T committee probably would have waived, given the reason), but mainly because I just couldn't face the self-eval.
So I've got to get this monster done. I'm a business writer: I can do this.
*sigh*
Scan in a Centlivre Play
Susanna Centlivre's A Bold Stroke for a Wife is my favorite of all her plays. Two main issues have kept me from staging this one: first, it's a real tour de force for the lead actor, who gets to send up all the other lead (stock) characters--if the lead can't mimic all of them, then the show goes nowhere. Second, Centlivre was able to rely on a handful of stage tropes without minding too much about political correctness: her demographic was delighted by equal-opportunity offensiveness.
In discussing this piece in both the classroom and in theatre sessions, I've been kicking around the idea of modernizing it. "Modernizing" in the sense of how The Oregon Shakespeare Festival manages it, though: preserve most of the language, but feel free to edit/fix anachronisms/update settings/etc. For example, several of the stock characters aren't easily recognizable to the modern audience: while one can easily "translate" a changebroker to a day-trader, say, what to do with an "antiquarian"? So the trick is to figure out what abstract idea or issue the stock character is being used as shorthand for, and see if there's a substitute.
An easy one: on the 18th-century stage, the portrayal of Quakers was usually used to show a certain nervousness about religious over-enthusiasm in general. No point in taking a potshot at the fairly inoffensive Quakers in this day and age, right? But how about...corrupt televangelists? And voila, Obadiah Prim and his wife become Jim and Tammy-Faye Bakker style characters, and the lines still work, pretty much!
So that's an example of what I've been thinking about. I've gotten David sucked into it, and he's currently noodling around with one of the scenes. But in the meantime, I want to do the dramaturgy, and that requires getting a clean, digital copy into the computer, scanned from my facsimile copy of the first edition, so we can edit out the 18th-century typographical weirdness (such as the long "S" for the letter S, and the use of the dash to end almost every line), regularize the spelling, and format it like a modern script. After that, we can start playing in earnest (and I'm sure this process will keep showing up here).
In discussing this piece in both the classroom and in theatre sessions, I've been kicking around the idea of modernizing it. "Modernizing" in the sense of how The Oregon Shakespeare Festival manages it, though: preserve most of the language, but feel free to edit/fix anachronisms/update settings/etc. For example, several of the stock characters aren't easily recognizable to the modern audience: while one can easily "translate" a changebroker to a day-trader, say, what to do with an "antiquarian"? So the trick is to figure out what abstract idea or issue the stock character is being used as shorthand for, and see if there's a substitute.
An easy one: on the 18th-century stage, the portrayal of Quakers was usually used to show a certain nervousness about religious over-enthusiasm in general. No point in taking a potshot at the fairly inoffensive Quakers in this day and age, right? But how about...corrupt televangelists? And voila, Obadiah Prim and his wife become Jim and Tammy-Faye Bakker style characters, and the lines still work, pretty much!
So that's an example of what I've been thinking about. I've gotten David sucked into it, and he's currently noodling around with one of the scenes. But in the meantime, I want to do the dramaturgy, and that requires getting a clean, digital copy into the computer, scanned from my facsimile copy of the first edition, so we can edit out the 18th-century typographical weirdness (such as the long "S" for the letter S, and the use of the dash to end almost every line), regularize the spelling, and format it like a modern script. After that, we can start playing in earnest (and I'm sure this process will keep showing up here).
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)