It is that time of the year again, when the thoughts of faculty turn lightly to WTF, why do we do this, WHY.
Faulty evaluation time.
Holy hell, why.
We must assess ourself, y'all.
We must set goals.
We must say what we hope to achieve with these goals.
We must say how we will assess those goals and achievements.
And -- but of course -- it must not be in English. It must be in adminspeak.
We must create one document* for 2015 (the present calendar year) and one for 2014 (the completed calendar year), the former detailing what we hope to achieve, the latter assessing what we have achieved.
Due on Monday, in both electronic and hard-copy form.
These are the days when I wish I had chosen the life of a quarry worker instead.
*create a document = admin speak for "write."
1 hour ago
6 comments:
And let me guess, there is no money for pay raised, merit pay, or anything.
And these documents must be in assessment-speak, so you have to know the difference between "goals" and "outcomes" for them.
Grrrr!
UGH. We have to do the 'last year' one in two different formats one for the department and one for faculty. Of course it is not possible to copy and paste between them, other than line by line. SIGH
Yes, we will not be getting anything for this work -- no raises, not even COL.
And Jane -- us, too! That's part of what's so annoying, the (what feels like, anyway) deliberate attempt to waste our time.
If there's nothing in it for you, do the minimum effort and call it good. This kind of busy work is absolutely insufferable. I can't imagine putting forth much effort into these things after achieving tenure, especially if I know I'm not getting any recognition for that effort.
Do the administrators actually read the reports?
Fie -- That's gonna be my approach.
Shannon -- The dean does, at least. We all have to have a sit-down meeting with the dean, in which we "conference" over our past year's work and our next year's "plan."
It never seems to actually matter whether the previous year's plan matches the work we have actually done, so far as I can tell, tho.
The theory I am given is that these evaluations we submit (all 200+ faculty) then are submitted to the provost and the chancellor, who then in turn submit them to the Legislature.
That would be all evaluations done by the faculty in the Arkansas system. I would not be surprised if this were true -- if there were some poor fella, or woman, it's probably a woman -- who has to read through all of these evaluations and make some sort of report about how much work we have all managed to get done this year.
How do you suppose she assesses the two short stories I published in 2014 and the 10 issues of Crossed Genres I edited?
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