Living in the Academic Bubble

When you have co-author who highlights and color-codes everything in your draft. 

So I get an email today from an undergraduate who has been doing average/below average in my class (think Cs and Ds). This all stems from him not turning in assignments on time.

He wanted to explain to me that he was going back and doing all of the assignments he missed, not to get points, but just to learn the material. He thanked me for believing in him and said that he had a change of heart. He went from not wanting to do the assignments “because it’s a zero anyway” to wanting to do them just to learn the material.

So I remember being so enthralled by conferences as a doc student, and even the first two years of attending, it was still so exciting and new. Now I find the sheen has worn off. I’m seeing these people I once idolized as just regular humans, and humans that I don’t particularly even like that much. Why? Because I hear them laughing about how they just finished their presentation on the plane or just before they presented; because I hear the same tired story of how our profession needs to change, yet they do nothing to change their own pedagogy or change the culture at their schools; because I see people only interested in hearing themselves speak and not being open to the ideas of others.

This isn’t all of the conferences I go to, but the big ones for my profession have definitely left me disheartened with the irrelevant research being done (it’s my blog so I can state my opinion; other people may find it fascinating). I’ve just not had a good time.