Tenure portfolio: submitted!

[steuard]

I'm up for tenure this year, and as part of that process I'm required to submit a portfolio that "makes the case" that I've fulfilled the college's requirements for tenure and promotion. That's been hanging over my head for months, but at long last it's finally finished! I turned it in on Tuesday, which means that my part of the process is essentially over. (I may have one or two more peer reviewers visiting my classes over the next couple weeks.) Now I can just forget about the whole thing until the end of the semester: I won't hear anything one way or the other until then, so there's no use worrying.

I'm optimistic about the outcome. I feel pretty good about my portfolio itself and about the accomplishments that it describes. On the scholarship side, I got to include the peer review response from my latest journal article: the reviewer didn't have any suggestions to make other than adding a few references, and I directly quoted its concluding line: "In summary this is a high quality piece of work that addresses a well known question and answers it!" For teaching, while there's always room for improvement, I think I do a darn good job, and I decided to pull a few favorite quotes from my end of semester teaching evaluations: "Lots of work, but I’m smarter than I was when I started.", "Most enthusiastic teacher I've ever had since kindergarten. ...This nutjob truly loves this class & loves to teach physics and is the coolest prof I've had to date.", "I had always disliked Physics so I had to put in a lot of effort, but it turns out I like it more than I thought.", and perhaps the highest tenure-credit-per-word quote of all for a liberal arts college, "I look at the world in a different way now."

Classes have been awfully intense, too, but maybe I can finally start getting caught up, without dreading all the high-stress work that the next week will bring my way.

Comments

[beth_leonard]

Any college that does not give you tenure doesn't deserve to have you. I know it's high stress and lots of work anyway. Good luck!

How is your physics department doing in general? Do you have more students now?

--Beth

[steuard.livejournal.com]

The department is doing reasonably well, though the student count each year still seems to be a random variable with a mean around 2.5. (That's not altogether atypical for liberal arts college physics departments, though.) We've recently hired an additional person in a combined teaching/administrative position as a "pre-engineering coordinator": we're hoping to get some 3-2 engineering programs (re-)established, which our admissions staff tells us is one of the most-requested career paths from prospective students that they've had to say, "Sorry, no" to. I'm also working on a redesign of the courses in the major to make it possible for students to decide to switch in to physics after their first semester, which could help us out an awful lot. (That proposed redesign was covered in depth in my portfolio, of course. :) ) We'll see how it goes.

[kirin]

Wait, am I reading that wrong, or do you have to decide a major before actually taking any classes, and many of them are difficult or impossible to switch into later? That sounds... distressing.

Meanwhile, congrats on finishing off a big stressful thing, and those assessment quotes are indeed killer.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

The issue is that if you aren't taking intro physics and basic calculus in your first semester in college, it is essentially impossible to finish the physics major in four years. We have a two-year intro sequence (much like Mudd did while we were there, in fact, if you count the core elective), and then you have to take five upper-level physics classes, most or all of which have the full intro sequence as prerequisites and most of which are only offered every other year.

So there's no requirement to declare a major before you arrive, but physics is one of a handful of majors where you more or less have to have "kept that option open" from the very start. Mudd's common core meant that we never had to worry about that, of course, and it's less of an issue in non-science disciplines where the courses aren't so sequential. It would also be less of an issue if students had space in their first-semester schedule to take the entry-level courses for every discipline that interested them, but (as at most schools) our students tend to take just four courses at a time, and one of their first-semester classes is generally a "first-year seminar" that doesn't count toward any specific major. That doesn't leave a whole lot of space for "just in case I change my mind" courses.

[kirin]

Ah, I see. That makes some sense, but yeah, it would be great if you could engineer a way out of the problem somehow. Sounds tricky. Good luck!

[steuard.livejournal.com]

I have a rather clever plan in mind, that I hope will work as well as I suspect it will. The basic idea is this: let's say that our current intro sequence is four semesters 1, 2, 3, and 4, where each course depends on the previous one(s), with odd numbers offered in the fall and even in the winter. (Upper level courses list 1-4 as their prerequisite.) Then:

1. Reduce the four intro core semesters to three: 1, 2a, 2b. (Lost topics can be moved into an extra upper-level course if necessary.)
2. Offer course 1 every semester.
3. Offer course 2a each fall and 2b each winter: they body depend on 1, but not on each other.
4. Make upper-level prerequisites more specific: each will depend on 2a or 2b, but never on both.

Taken together (and with details filled in), that should allow students to begin the major successfully either semester of their freshman year (or, if they push things, fall of their sophomore year). It may make some things work better for folks from other majors, too. I'm quite optimistic about how it will work out, once we put it in place.

[beth_leonard]

That sounds very reasonable, as long as the prereqs can be successfully detangled for the upper level courses.

--Beth

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Woohoo! Great quotes, too :)

[silentmonster.livejournal.com]

Yay! How exciting! Good luck!