insanity

1. my book proposal has been accepted

2. i got a TESOL award for best proposal on NNEST/NEST issues for seattle's conference

3. i sent my big TQ article, cross your fingers

4. i have not started writing the book review i need to send in january

5. i will serve (starting in march) on the TESOL Publication committee for the next 3 years.

just shoot me.

done!!

that's it, the semester's over, i taught my last course yesterday. this feels very good. i must grade papers, now, and meet with tons of students who have different questions, who must tell me about the book they read, who want to convince me to change their grades from an F to an A, who must take a test to be placed in different courses next semester... so, two more weeks on campus and then i'm really done. but not having to teach is a good start!

i had lunch with my chair on thursday. my only complaint was that i felt terribly isolated from the rest of the department because i'm the only one not doing literature. her only complaint was that i spoke too much and "during your first year, it's better to observe and listen"...

who cares. i'm almost on vacation :)

end of semester blues

i've caught at least 3 students cheating on their last test. one was very obvious. i thought about it for a whole afternoon, talked with a couple of other teachers, got a serious headache, and let it go. i don't care, it's their lives. plus, either i talk to the students one on one and if they don't admit it, i'll get in serious trouble, or i have to go through the "official channels" and it'll take forever and i'll be super mad. so there. i hate being a teacher sometimes!

new and improved

i went to this conference yesterday and today. you have to know that since i've moved to my new country of adoption, i've felt like i was on another planet, professionally speaking. the school system, regulations, education, research, problems, everything is different here and it's been interesting to learn how things work but i've felt very isolated too (and i've talked to several people in the field of TESOL who, when they left the US, felt the same. TESOL/ESL is a very US-centered field). plus i'm not working in my "area of expertise," which has been a constant worry since i didn't know if i should keep my old research topics or start anew with something related to my current job.

after talking with two important people at the conference (one from here and one from the US who knows exactly where i come from), here's the conclusion: i'll keep working on the stuff i know best, try to integrate some "sellable" stuff into my current job in case i want to go back to my old field some day, and look for another job in a year if things don't improve.

this is going to be tough because i feel very "removed" from my old "world." issues that were issues before are no longer issues here. i work in a different context that doesn't care about no child left behind or TESOL or TQ or english only or ... i work in a country where esl is seen as nothing more than "last resort help for people who can't survive without it and that we can't kick out at least not yet because they bring too much money in." i work at a school where we can't teach an esl course because it would lower the prestige of the university and so we have to call our course by a different name and also teach other things than esl skills and accept students who don't need esl help in our course in order to have the right to have a course for esl students. i am so sad for this school and for this country.

if i look for a job, though, it will be in this country, i don't want to go back to the US, even if i miss the professional environment a lot, and i mean A LOT. i certainly don't miss a certain president...

bad memories

when i am really really really tired and in my office (or in the subway), like today, and when i have my office door open and hear students and other teachers speak in the hallways or in their offices, i feel like i am in the hospital. it's a very strong memory i have from hospitals, being half awake and hearing people speaking around me, nurses, doctors, visitors... so now, every time i am in this state of mind, when i'm beyond tired and unable to concentrate on things (you should've seen me try to work on my article, it would take me 3 attempts before i could write a word correctly), i feel like i'm at the hospital again...

this is a bit annoying...

ok, i'm really upset, actually. or sad, rather. i know i look young and irresponsible but i'm not an idiot, dammit. i don't think i'm the youngest person in our department but i certainly look like the youngest one. i also teach less than the other new hires because i'm also rewriting a curriculum and intensively learning about the writing centre, but i guess it looks like i'm a joke. or it looks like i've been hired to fill some quotas. i'm a good one, that's for sure, i fill 3 quotas: woman, disabled, and international faculy. great.

so anyway, the problem started a long time ago but it really hit me yesterday. i'm the member of a committee but obviously, my opinion doesn't count and i am not expected to do any work. the other member of this committee has 1) worked on the projet on his own without telling me and presented the results to our department chair, and 2) complained to our chair that he couldn't do all the work alone and needed a third committee member, even though i've tried to talk to him several times, i told him when i was free to meet and that he should just tell me when the time was good for him, and i sent him some ideas to which he never responded.

and then again this morning. i am the member of another committee, and i said i would compile responses to a questionnaire that was sent to everyone and bring the responses to our next meeting. so i compiled the responses i got and made copies for everyone to bring at our next meeting. then on friday i wrote to the chair of the committee and said "could you send a reminder email to our faculty, because some people haven't responded yet" and she replied "oh don't worry, we won't need the responses at our next meeting (???), i'll send a reminder email again in a few weeks." and this morning, i got an email from her asking me for MY responses to the questionnaire, and she tells me that she has been gathering the responses too, and will be presenting the preliminary results at our meeting today!! WTF?? i am not lying or exagerating, i have printed both her emails. this makes NO SENSE!

i feel cheated and pissed off. and very very scared! something is very wrong, either with me or with this department. and i am not sure what i should do about it.

good not good

i've been observed twice. the first time went great, except that many students came in late, so the only negative comment was "make your students come to class on time." so the second time, i told my students "my big boss is coming to observe me, PLEASE come to class on time next time" and they did, except that they were intimidated and didn't participate. so there, my second observation was a nightmare.

we're going to have new blinds in our office. every faculty member could choose the type of blind and the color they wanted for their office! crazy!

i can get reimbursements for everything i spend for work: conferences, books, journal subscriptions, pens and pencils, etc. i just sent a form for a $550 reimbursement... i like that! oh, and the two proposals that i sent to TESOL have been accepted so i'm going to seattle next march (and going reimbursed for everything!).

i also need to go to spain (i decided i needed to) to work on an article with someone who lives there, so i was asking my chair when i could leave school in the summer and she said i should go during the "reading week" in february. if i play a little with my schedule, i could be in spain for 8-10 days right in the middle of february, when the winter is at its worse! yeah!! this definitely sounds like a cool trip to look foward to!

i got my first back-stabbing on tuesday. i was so disappointed, it was someone that i thought was on my side and said she was, but who then didn't support me at all when in front of other people. that hurt. i've decided to forget about the project we were working on, who cares anyway... i think i was the only one who cared and obviously, no one will miss me. oh well. (i'm not mad, it's one less thing to worry about!)

anyway, spain.

oh, and a short article of mine will appear in essential teacher in march. i can't figure out if this is a peer-reviewed publication, though.

spain.

relief

i had lunch with one of the nicest people in my department, someone i think i can trust and who's been very nice with me. she's also new here, and we decided to have lunch together today. we talked... and talked... and talked... and i was very happy to realize that i was not the only one feeling somehow disconcerted at the way things work here. she also feels disappointed by the way we were in a sense lied to, during our job interviews, when we were told that this and that were going to happen and we would create this and we would change that and there were so many opportunities at this university etc... and in the end, nothing happens, every time we wante to do something we're told that we can't because it would upset someone or some other department, and in general, things are a mess. i was so glad to hear her say that.

in the end, she said she gave the department two years to make her feel the way she should be feeling now, the way she was promised to be feeling now... it amazes me that she left a wonderful job at a very large university somewhere else to come here (she transfered her tenure here). so she knows what she's talking about and i can see that it was not just me complaining about things but that there is a real problem in this university.

we also both think that this university needs to learn about drinking fountains and provide at least one per department!!!

$10,000

some days i love my job, some days i hate my job. most days, though, i just wonder why i've been hired. i think the thing that bothers me the most is that even if i end up loving what i'm doing, it's not in my "field" really, and if i eventually decide to find a new job in teacher education, i'll be in trouble because i won't have done anything in this area. also, i'm starting to feel schizophrenic because i am still working on articles that relate to my previous life (teacher education, esl) and i'm soon going to be expected to work on projects that relate to my current job (which is what? i'm not sure yet).

so, i've been working on the creation of a new course that has absolutely nothing to do with anything i know, but i must admit that it's been fun (although i look like an idiot when people ask me what i'm doing and i have to tell them that i don't have a clue). i've baught two hundred thousand books on the subject and i'm trying to learn as much as possible. i'm talking with tons of people who usually don't know about all this any more than i do, which is a relief, and i've presented the first outline at our departmental meeting yesterday for a first approval. so far so good.

anyway, i just got a photocopy card with $10,000 on it... i guess this university's got money! maybe they could also increase my salary?

moving in the right direction

two good things happened recently, two victories, in a sense. first, i met with the current writing center director and i'm now working with her more closely to get to know the writing center and the people working there so that i'm ready to take over next year. there's a lot of work that needs to be done and i've ordered a few books on writing centers because i'll need all the help i can get. the tutors seem nice and i'm excited to work with them more and more.

second, i decided that i really didn't like the way the class i teach is being taught (all sections have to teach exactly the same way)! next semester, only one section of this course will be taught and i've asked my boss if i could teach it instead of teaching another course as i was supposed to do. i explained my reasons (changing textbooks, problems with cheating, organisation of assignments, etc.) and my boss said ok. was supposed to teach only 1 class next semester and i don't know if i'll teach only this class or if i'll teach this class IN ADDITION to the other class i was supposed to teach, but i don't care much, i'm not terribly busy yet and it'll keep me busy during the long winter nights.

i feel a little better...

job hunting

i wonder if i should start job hunting again... i'm bored and i want to do teacher education, not undergrad babysitting...

blah

why am i not writing here? because i don't know what to think. i feel so much like a graduate student, still. i teach 2 days a week, and the rest of the time, i go to a few meetings here and there and i work in my office from time to time... i am not sure what i'm doing, actually. i still have tons of things to do to get settled here, like getting a new driver's licence, new licence plates, parking permits, health insurance, car insurance, home insurance, stuff like that. i guess monday is my "real life" day. tuesday, i try to work in the office. wednesday, i prepare my courses and do nothing. thursday and friday mornings i teach, and then in the afternoon i try to work in the office. that's about it.

i drove to school today, instead of taking the streetcar + subway. it's much faster (15 to 20 minutes instead of 30 to 45 minutes) but i paid $12 for the parking!

ok, on a happier note, i found two nice photographs (tulips) to hang in my office. i'll also bring my huge world map and maybe the guggenheim museum picture too... it feels so... dull, still. and yesterday, i was down in the big liberal arts office to give my transcript to someone and took this opportunity to ask about getting some "stuff" like enveloppes, paper clips, etc. because i have nothing at all in my office... and the nice person gave me the bookstore catalog and told me to choose the stuff i wanted and he'd go get them for me! pencil sharpers, file organizers, tacks, post-its, markers, book holders, note books, staplers, erasers, ... ... it felt like christmas :)

one last thing: yesterday i sent an application to tesol to be on the publication's committee...

job

i think that with time, i'll be able to make a difference in this program. i see now some of the limits, some of the restrictions i'll have to work with, but maybe within my department, with the courses that we do teach, at least, i'll be able to change a few things. i am not thinking that my job will be horrible or anything. i'm just disappointed because i realize that the people who hired me had no idea why they hired me (not me in particular, they just didn't know why they needed someone). the people i work with are nice, my office is very confortable, my teaching load really light, the benefits are excellent... and when i think of job offers some of my friends got, i know that i'm very lucky.

however. there's a big however. i want to be in teacher education. that's my specialty, my expertise, my research, my passion. so one day, i'll have to get a new job...

things i must work on:

- article for TQ about my dissertation (due this december)
- book about teacher education (due ?)
- small article for ET about caucuses (due in october)
- state-of-the art article for language teaching (due in march, not even started...)
- and now a book review, haha :) (due in january)

ps. i'll make this blog "private" very soon. so if you want to keep reading it, let me know, at misslulu at rogers dot com except if your name is xiaoye or kiara (you'll get some odd invitation from blogger and hopefully it'll work) ;)

day 2

the weird thing is that it's hard for me to think of myself as only a teacher and no longer a student. yesterday, when that lady was being stupid about starting class at 11:00, i should have acted as a professor, not as a TA. i should not let people give me orders, i should not be intimidated by people, i should not shut up during a meeting with the dean of engineering when the topic is esl students and i'm the expert. i must find a way to see myself as "just as good as they are." it'll be a long process.

i also feel that for now, i've been hired as an "image" of something but i'm not supposed to really do anything except teach and publish. my job description talks about leadership in this and leadership in that and revising the curriculum and upgrading the course and blah blah... but really, i don't think the esl instructors see me as something else than "just another esl instructor who knows nothing about nothing" and every time i make a suggestion, they say "oh, no, we've been doing things THAT way for many semesters and..." and they won't change. their excuses are either that "it works" so why change it, and also that "it's not university policy" so we just can't change it. for example, we all have to have exactly the same assignments at the same time, and we need to grade everything exactly the same way. i want to add an extra chapter? no can do! i want to penalized my students if they come late to class or miss class? no can do. i want to use different examples than those in the (british!) textbook? no can do!

something else is highly disturbing: the esl instructors see all their students as cheaters and liers. for example, we can't assigned them to write essays at home because "they'll ask someone else to write the essays for them." so we have to ask the students to write each essay (it's a composition class!) IN CLASS and then we initial EACH PARAGRAPH before they leave class and then they can revise the essay at home once and we only grade the revised essay. forget about the importance of revision! we can't ask them to revise the ideas but only to revise grammar. why bother about the ideas, the organization, the sentence structure, etc.?! another example is, we MUST all have our exams on the same exact day and we can't have exactly the same exam (but then we're supposed to grade the exams exactly the same way!) "because they'll memorize the questions on the exam and they'll tell their friends in other sections." etc. etc. etc. it's not like everyone is innocent until proven guilty, it's everyone is guilty, period! i absolutely hate that. on the one hand, we have to "treat them like adults" so we can't take attendance, and on the other hand, we treat them like kids and can't even ask them to write an essay at home because they'll cheat. right. this is so screwed up.

day 1

first teaching day today. i was so sick to my stomach this morning, i almost arrived late!

13 students showed up (my roster says 25), 8 of whom are from iran! i hate first weeks, when students come and go and you start building something with the students and then you have new students coming at the end of the second week... so far, the students seem nice.

the schedule is one 50-minute course one day and one 110-minute course another day. so we start at 10:10 for example, and end at 11:00. and today, first day, a b*tch came into my classroom at 10:57 and screamed "my class is starting at 11:00, you know, you need to get out of here!" i said "no, your class starts at 11:10 and my class ends at 11:00." she said she needed time to get her stuff ready and waited right next to me while i was finishing my class. i felt rushed and couldn't even answer my students' questions at the end. how rude. she'd better not do that again!

teaching 2 hours, tomorrow, will be tough. i've never liked that, and we have so much to cover i don't know how i'll do it.

odd stuff

there are tons of weird things at my university. one is that the course numbers do no mean anything. usually, 100-level courses are to be taken first, and then 200, and 300 and 400-level courses are for junior and senior undergraduates... and 500-level courses and above are for graduate students... but here, freshmen can take geography 690 their first year of school, and then the next course in the sequence could be geography 248. oddest thing in the world. numbers are assigned completely randomly.

another strange thing is the "service departments" that they have. the regular departments offer minors and majors, and you can graduate with a degree in information technology management, for example. but then they have 13 (THIRTEEN) service departments that offer course but not degrees! one of them is english! others are maths, history, psychology, geography, computer science, physics, etc. these departments only offer courses to students from other departments. for example a student in arts and contemporary studies has some options, like french or history or english options, and then they take courses in the french or history or english department. so basically, these service departments are seen as "secondary," and way less important than other, "real" departments, which means less money, less space, less respect, less power, etc. oddest thing in the world.

another strange thing is that they have "prerequisite" courses, like everyone else in the world, but they also have "antirequisite" courses, which means that if you take, say english 423 you cannot also take english 863 and vice-versa. which means that some courses are basically the same, which sounds like a waste of resources to me... except when you remember that there are between 60 and 150 students PER SECTION in those classes... i don't know why they wouldn't simply have different sections of the same course, but then maybe it's because the teachers who will teach those sections want to do their own stuff... oddest thing in the world.

these 60 to 150 students per section is another odd thing. they have the most complicated (dis)organisation of teaching assistants, marking assistants (we don't give GRADES here, we give MARKS), and other assistants whose names i can't remember (those who assist with exams, etc.). they have scientific formulas that take into account the number of students per sections, the number of assignments, the number of credit hours, the number of textbooks used, the number of sections, and the age of the teachers (nah, i'm kidding on that last one) and then they're given a certain number of hours when they can use assistants for certain things. so they don't have a system like in the us, where graduate students become teaching assistants and teach hundreds of students on their own so that there can be more sections of the same course with fewer students in each section. craziest thing in the world!

and THEN, teachers who can have assistants must actually post their job offers online through a special system, and people from our university but also from other universities and the community can apply for the position and the teachers have to read tons of CVs and interview the potential assistants and hire them and that's another big mess because some are our own students but some are not. the reason why few of the assistants are actually our own students is because less than 2% of our student population are graduate students and few teachers want to hire undergraduate assistants. craziest thing in the world!

ok, last one for tonight: in the us, people say "bilingual" as bye-lin-gwal, in 3 syllables, but here, in canada, they say bi-lin-giu-al, in 4 syllables. haha! funniest thing in the world!

last days

classes start on tuesday. i'm enjoying my last days without anything to grade or worry about... except that i am not ready at all to teach my first class. the good thing is that i only teach on thursdays and fridays... but we have our first esl meeting on tuesday, and since i'll be the "chief" of this thing, i should really try to prepare something so i don't look too much like an idiot.

ok, story time: a couple of weeks ago, there were two big "placement days" for our part-time (community) students. representatives from all departments were gathered around tables and students would go around and talk to the people in the departments they were interested in taking courses from. very often, they were given placement tests and then were assigned to different classes and levels according to the test results. there also were people from the esl sub-department, placing students in our grammar, writing, culture, and pronunciation courses and i was helping. i was sitting next to mary at a table and learning as much as i could and then tentatively helping with the "easiest cases," and other esl people were sitting at other tables. at some points, when there were fewer students to take care of, some of the other teachers would come and talk to mary about certain problems... and each time, mary would introduce me, since i'd never met any of the other esl people before. ...

... and each time, these other esl teachers would say, when mary introduced me, "oh, you're dr. lulu?! i thought you were just a student helping mary..."

as soon as i get my next paycheck (in 2 weeks, dammit), i'll have to go spend a LOT of money on clothes that look a little more professional, and makeup, and i don't know what else... because right now, i look like a freshman right out of highschool and that's NOT good!

survival

the biggest difference for me, between being a student and being a full-time teacher, is 1) i won't be able to work from home as much as before, and 2) i meet and talk to a lot more people than before. when i was writing my dissertation, between january and july, i went out of my apartment maybe twice a week, sometimes even less, and talked to very very few people. some days i didn't see anyone, sometimes for four or five days in a row. i could stay at my house, in my pj's, ugly and dirty, and no one would care. now, i have to be at work four of five times a week, look professional, pretend to be smart, meet with tons of people that i don't know and whose names i won't remember, try to understand thousands of new things that make no sense to me, and talk talk talk talk talk!

and then i have to walk. the kind of walking that you do when you're a tourist in london or something. but every day. some days are ok, but for some reason, some days are really hard. yesterday was hell, for example, and because i couldn't rest today, i'm still half dead ... 3/4 dead in fact. every bone and every muscle in my body hurts, even my hands.

so basically, i am beyond tired, physically and mentally! how am i going to survive??

little me

here's an example of the kinds of problems i'm facing at my new job:

the department where i now work has been offering some esl courses to the engineering and geography departments (don't get me started on that!) for about 15 years. no full-time person worked there. one person, we'll call her mary, has been working (part-time) as the supervisor of 5 part-time esl teachers for many many years. mary is excellent at her job and the esl teachers have worked well with her. last year, the department has decided to create a full-time esl position that would kind of take care of all this and help the esl section work better (and ultimately become a separate department (don't get me started on that one either!)). many people applied for the position, including me and mary. i got the job. mary didn't and is still employed only part-time by the university. now, mary works "under" me, between me and the 5 esl teachers who, every year, don't know if they'll have a job or not, depending on the number of esl/bilingual students enrolled that year. i'm going to have to supervise 5 teachers without knowing a thing about them, how they work, why they do things the way they do them (and trust me, i don't know if i'll ever understand why they do certain things the way they do!), and to tell them what to do when mary's been doing this very well for many years. i am not confortable at all with this position, to say the least. what am i supposed to do? tell them that everything they do is wrong (after all, that's what i was hired for, right?) and change the whole darn esl program and they'll all hate me? tell them that everything they do is great so that i don't offend anyone and change nothing? how can i become the leader of a tight group of people (definitely much older than me) whose names i don't even know and that's been working so well for so many years? where can i find the authority and how can i become respected?

back from the dead

hi all, i'm back, i couldn't not write about my new job!

ohhh goodness, i have so much to write!

this is going to be a public blog for a few months/weeks and then i'll make it private and i'll give access to only those who want it because it's going to be too hard not to give up any details about my new job and my new life.

for now, i'm going to the vet.

see ya here very soon :)