Work: That Was the Week that Was

It suddenly appears that I am earning my salary. ;-) Tomorrow is the day we measure growth and the day based on which we get funded. As of Friday it looks like we will go into this term with at least 4% growth (it was 5% on Friday, but I don’t want to count any chickens) and its not an exaggeration to say a lot of that comes back to me. This will place us exactly in the middle/top of our goals for the semester (which I felt were optimistic to start) and I will be able to go back to the various shareholders at Swamp Valley College and report the win. This is particularly important with respect to the Faculty Senate, which has a sizeable percentage of wingnuts, malcontents, and adults who barely grew out of shaking and moaning in the corner of their “special” classes in elementary school. Some of these folks fear change, and some others have been in the Ivory Tower so long that they are covered in glycoside burns and roots…. There are also some excellent and thoughtful members of the Senate, but the mix of the aware and the drooling has always amused me.

Part of this growth has been achieved after substantial hammering on one of our VPs. Now he’s getting a bit chippy. We had an email exchange last week in which he warned me that my use of the phrase “Good German” (applied to myself) represented a failure to adhere to our developing “cultural competency” criteria for administrative evaluation. He also told me that if he were my administrator this would have been a “black mark” against me. I resisted the smart-assed urge to respond that the phrase “black mark” was clearly racist in and of itself, and instead did a quick bit of research that demonstrated that the phrase was a perfectly legitimate one in cultural anthropology and that it had a provenance that was explicitly culturally competent.

This ended it, but man I wanted to go after him for “black mark” and the fact that as I am not an administrator, applying administrative evaluations to me would seem a bit.. well.. odd.

Anyway, the growth is a good thing and if I can just get some love in building our summer program, we can grow even more. This will give me that success on my resume that I would like to have before I consider going to Korea to teach. In the near future I’ll have to talk a bit more about how that idea is evolving