SURFS Up Assembly

Friday, students and families at Macdonough attended the SURFS Up Assembly. Students and families enjoyed singing along to "Knowledge is Power," and listening to the second graders fable. The second grade teachers then did a read aloud of one of the new books about bullying to the students. We also welcomed new staff and family members to Macdonough. Afterwards, we watched a video of the fifth graders and Wesleyan students doing their own version of the "Harlem Shake," and congratulated Macdonough's basketball team and Coach Jukins for their hard work at the Staff vs. Students game. Other students and classes received certificates and books, and won golden awards. We ended the assembly by recognizing our SURFS Up winners.

A special thanks to all of the families that were able to attend our assembly today!

 

Teachers Run for a Cause

This morning, some of our Macdonough teachers ran in the Sandy Hook Run for the Families.  There were 15,000 runners at the 5K race that took place in Hartford.  The Macdonough team raised over $125 for the cause!  It was a very cold morning, but the teachers had a great time!

Superintendent Luna Opposes Pay Increases for Constitutional Officers

Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna testified today before the House State Affairs Committee in opposition to legislation that would increase salaries for Idaho’s constitutional officers.

In his testimony, Superintendent Luna asked the Legislature to give all constitutional officers, including himself, the ability to reject pay increases, a provision not in the current legislation.

“I would ask that you consider giving constitutional officers the same ability you have, which is to reject increases to your compensation when they come before this body,” Superintendent Luna told legislators this morning.

Under House Bill 692, the salaries for constitutional officers will be reduced by 4 percent next year and then restored to current funding levels in 2012. For 2013 and 2014, all constitutional officers’ pay will then increased and set based on a percentage of the Governor’s salary. While Superintendent Luna supports the reductions in pay next year, he remains concerned about the pay increases in future years and the exclusion of any provision that would give constitutional officers the right to reject future pay increases, especially in tough economic times.

For two years in a row, Superintendent Luna has stood before the Legislature and asked them to address this issue.

“Constitutional officers continue to receive pay increases even in this tough economic time, and it is not right. This must change,” Superintendent Luna told members of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee in January. “My employees and other state employees are taking furlough days, while the state is forcing its constitutional officers to take pay raises. We should not be taking this additional money from taxpayers at a time when Idahoans are losing their jobs and taking pay cuts.”

Under the current system, the Superintendent’s annual salary is set by the Legislature and according to an Attorney General’s opinion published last year, it is illegal for any constitutional officer to refuse an increase in pay. The opinion states that even in tight budget years – while all other programs and salaries are being cut – no constitutional officer can refuse a raise or take a decrease in pay.

Superintendent Luna has donated the increases in his salary to charitable organizations for the past two years but said that still is not fair to Idaho taxpayers. “We are still taking money from taxpayers to fund increases and then turn around and donate that money to a charity of our choice. I would rather that money remain with the taxpayer,” he said.

House Bill 692 was sent to the amending order in the full House.

~ Melissa M.

Our New Custodian!

 

Please help us welcome our newest member to the Macdonough family, our new custodian, Mr. Martin Martinez! Mr. Martinez has transferred from Snow School. Martin attended Macdonough School as a child (in Mrs. Spaman’s class) and currently has a daughter at Macdonough School (also in Mrs. Spaman’s class).  He also had Ms. Jukins as a teacher!

Terrific Treats for Outstanding Work on the CMTs!

Today marks the last week of CMTs! Mrs. Ellis's class enjoyed their last bunch of encouraging treats for CMTs. They received "You're O' "Fishally" done with testing" with Swedish Fish, "Let's not have any Snickers. Do your Best on the test!" with a Snickers bar, and "You're on a roll keep up the hard work!" with a tootsie roll.

Good job on the CMT's fifth graders!

Ask the Radical: Blogging and The Untenured Academic

Leaving the country often has the happy effect that people stop sending email to me almost entirely. Why sabbatical doesn't accomplish this I do not know, particularly given the vivid bounce-back I composed this time around. Only the chair of my department removed my from the distribution list in September, but I am pleased/dismayed to see that now everyone else has too. Perhaps while I was still state side some secret hope was cherished by many colleagues that I would, in fact, come to advertised meetings of various kinds? If so, I am happy to say that they have not taking to dashing their brains on the flagstones in despair that their coy invitations have gone unanswered.

Since arriving in Cape Town, South Africa, the most sustained correspondence I have had to date is with a group of very capable people who are taking care of my affairs (dog and house) while I am away. We have been in correspondence about the circumstances of a mysterious "alarm event," as ADT Security calls it which, as it turns out, was probably caused by my efforts to draft-proof the front door. But that is all.

Anyway, the lack of email allows me to catch up on messages I have failed to respond to all fall, either because they were too complicated, or because I was ambivalent about them in some way, or because I didn't know what to say. For example, the following questions were asked by a graduate student who heard me and several other bloggers do a panel several months ago. Since there is no point responding to the actual person (as the date of the assignment s/he wanted the information for is long past) I will answer these questions publicly:

1. What are the challenges non-tenured professors face when deciding to keep a personal blog?

Not using the blog to: a) spend most of your time venting about the oppressive condition of being you; b) publish humorous pieces that are just another way to express your boundless rage at those who offend you; c) say witty things about your students that portray them to a national audience at their most foolish and naive; d) waste so much time blogging, reading blogs, commenting on blogs and checking your Site Meter that you don't write anything else; and e) blog constantly about your cats (even though they are very cute and do twee things to distract you from working.)

2. What were your main concerns before you exposed your identity on your blog?

Unfortunately, I had no concerns. This is why I made a some critical errors (see 1a, 1b,and 1c above) that required varying levels of apology to others. I probably would have done d) and e) as well, except that I write about eight hours a day when left to my own devices, I no longer participate in memes, and I have no cats.

3. Do you think that blogs should be considered, in any respect, when a professor has yet to attain tenure?

Since the discipline in which I hold tenure (history) has barely dealt with electronic publishing at all as part of the promotion process, and also has a mixed record on how it regards pre-tenure scholarship published to a trade audience, I would hope that we would not start having a conversation about blogs that was not preceded by one that addressed these other critical issues. But I should think that participation in group blogs that serve a field or a discipline should be taken into account as much as book reviews or encyclopedia entries, which everyone lists in endless, boring detail on their vitae as if they took more than a day to write. Would I hold a blog against someone? Sure! If I was certain that a person had been caught in a huge bloggy lie -- plagiarism, seducing people on line by pretending to be someone else, and masquerading as a variety of different, malicious sock puppets on their own and other peoples' blogs are three examples that come to mind -- it would cause me to wonder about that person's general integrity and scrutinize other aspects of the tenure case a bit more carefully for similar flaws. It has been my unhappy experience that people who lie don't just do it in one context, and they tend to keep doing it. I stumbled onto the website of someone whose first book was plagiarized in the manuscript stage (although when this was pointed out, innocence was claimed and the problems were at least partly rectified.) Many years later, the web page was full of flamers about said person's personal history that were entirely irrelevant to scholarship but that fabricated a far more dashing past than the individual actually had. Honesty in personal relations strikes me as equally, if not more, important than scholarly integrity, since in most of our daily work we count on people to be honest in all their relationships.

Ask The Radical: Search Committee Smackdown, Part Eleventy

Buy this poster while you wait.

It's that time of the year again.  You've gotten all gussied up in your glad rags.  You polished your power point and talked the talk. You perfected the technique of subtly checking your teeth with your bread knife at dinner.  You left -- well, you left that fly-back academic interview feeling good about yourself.  And then:

Nothing.  They never call, they never write.....

Dear Professor Radical,

I have appreciated your blogs about the job market.   I've tried to follow the rules-- both written and unwritten.

Could you post another one about the rules for search committees? The closer I get to a job without getting it, the more their etiquette seems to break down. I'm a big girl and I can handle rejection. But I don't like this awkward silence for weeks after the interview.  It makes me feel like a dirty one night stand. 

 If a search committee chair doesn't know to write a letter of rejection -- well, no big deal except that neither place I interviewed has had the decency to tell me they've moved on. I'm smart and figured it out. But it just seems decent to tell me before I read it on the Wiki or, God forbid, from another candidate.

 Can't we elevate the job process to a level that is more professional than bad dating ??  Thank God for basketball or I don't know what I'd do.

Well, you should also thank the Goddess that you aren't in my NCAA men's fantasy bracket, because I'm shooting a honkin' 96%!

OK, seriously.  This sucks   And you know it's wrong, but the question is, why do they do it?  I'll tell you the top five excuses for not talking to the candidates.

#5:  "We haven't finalized the deal with the candidate we did offer the job to, so don't alienate the other candidates in case we have to go to our second choice."  You know the worst of it?  They really believe that it would cause an unrepairable breach if, in this crummy market, they offered you a job as the second choice candidate.  This is what often prevents them from making a call that says, "You know, it came down to field, but we've offered the job to someone else and s/he has two weeks to respond.  We'll get back to you the week of the 21st, for sure, and let you know what is happening."  You're thinking, "Those d00ds have their heads up their a$$es!"  Not really -- they have their heads back in the 1970s, when getting the job as a second choice really was a ticket to nowhere and the people who voted against your hire also voted against your tenure case, just on principle.  And they would have been heartbroken to be a second choice, so you would too, right?  Right?  Uh -- I can't hear you, the industrial dishwasher is too loud.....

#4:  "Was that my job?  I thought the dean was supposed to be in touch with the candidates."  At many schools, some people will never run a search in their lives, and in small departments, many people may never even be on a search committee.  I know at Zenith, you have a meeting with administrators prior to commencing your search.  They cover all the parts of the process that  have to do with affirmative action diversity hiring, but there is no instruction, written or otherwise, about how to run a search in a way that is gracious or efficient.  The assumption is that you have learned this by being searched for (the same goes for tenure:  everything you need to know to decide someone else's fate for the first time, you learn by coming up for tenure.)

As an added wrinkle, in many departments, once the candidates are produced, the search committee dissolves, and it may be no one's job to be in touch with the candidates.

#3:  "When the heck are we going to get budget approval for this hire?  Can someone call the dean, fuh Chrissakes?"  Believe it or not, at many small schools, the administration approves multiple searches, but only actually has funding for X% of them.  Departments propose their candidates, and the administration decides which ones are the "best" -- and only those departments get a new hire.  This, and other budgetary shenanigans, can hold up a process for weeks.  Throw a spring break in, and it's a real clusterf**k for the candidates.

#2: "We got our first choice! We got our first choice!  Uh -- What other candidates?"  This is what you fear, and I am afraid it is often true.  Academics can be narcissistic a$$hats, and unfortunately, because you no longer have anything to do with them, it's as if you never existed.

#1:  "That's a really awkward and unpleasant call to make and I would really rather not."  Really, this is the reason that most finalists never hear from anyone.  It's gotten too personal, and they don't want to disappoint you in person.  What they don't get, because they can't cope with this, is that you already know and you would rather be treated like a person!

But seriously, guys. This is the second person I have heard from this week who was told they would hear something in a certain time frame, and they haven't even gotten a call to be told that nothing is decided yet.

WTF, search committees?  Don't you read Tenured Radical?