Queen of To-Do Lists

It was inevitable that I would have a list on my blog because I make lists all the time. I've calmed down a bit on my Post-It habit although every now and then I find myself feenin' for a fluorescent pink sticky note. But seriously, if I don't write it down, chances are, it won't get done. (I know, I know some Greek guy predicted long ago that writing would be the end of memory--I'm not in the mood to flex my ancient rhetorics muscles tonight). A trip to Walmart without a list generally means coming home without something I needed and with a bunch of stuff I definitely didn't really need. Today was no exception. I went to Walmart without a list--forgot some mailing labels I needed. But I made a few lists for the job search. I spent a lot of time today organizing materials for the search, and worked on all of my cover letters for the assistant professor positions (6 total). [I think I'm going to put off starting in on the postdoc letters next month.] I typed up checklists for each of my application files--that made me feel ultra-organized and all warm and fuzzy inside.

My teaching evals are all together now and I realized that I'm missing my two most recent semesters. My department's very sweet adminstrative assistant is trying to track those down for me. I've decided I am going to work on creating a graph of my quantitative evaluation scores. On the two measures that my department takes most seriously--course quality and instructor quality--over the past four years, my scores have consistently climbed. So rather than having the search committees wade through 20+ measures by which we are rated (multiplied by the 10+ times I've taught the class), I'm thinking that it might be helpful if they can just quickly "see" how my performance as an instructor has improved the longer I've been in school. My very first semester teaching evaluation scores were weird--in one section the marks were quite abysmal while in the other, they were rather high. Since then, they've been consistently going up, so I'm trying to revive some old computer skills to make a graph to reflect that. I honestly can't remember the last time I made a graph. Probably not since my TI-85 crashed.

While I often rail at the fact that I was a graduate student in one of the heaviest graduate student teaching loads in the university, I am grateful to have had so much trial and error experience. I'm grateful to have never been a real TA--I've never worked under another professor and with the exception of some general department requirements for our gen. ed. course, I've had pretty much complete autonomy over all of my sections. So I'm grateful for my level of comfort in the classroom, whether there are 10 students, 30 students, or 150 students. I'm looking forward to working up these sample syllabi--I have a lot of ideas for possible courses--and although I know some things probably work better in my head than on paper, I'm actually getting a little excited about the idea of teaching again. A little.

And of course, the big thing still on the lots to-do list is the teaching philosophy statement. I'm tired of talking about it, I need to be about it. But. It continues to allude me. I'm trying to do some freewriting tonight to get it out of my system. We'll see how that goes....