Michelle F. Eble

Classes begin tomorrow, Friday, and I’ve been quite busy making lists, so that I can begin checking things off. So much of being an academic is time management, and because each day is different in many different ways, it is hard to come up with a productive routine. For now, there’s advising and syllabus writing, assessment and IRB reviews, there’s writing a textbook and writing an article and playing with new technologies. Already so behind on this although I did learn of a new one today that I plan to use to call a meeting of the undergraduate committee–doodle.com

As I write this, I think using twitter or facebook makes more sense than having this page. hmmm, stuff to ponder in the new year…my digital identity. Happy New Year!

October usually brings signs of fall around here with cooler air, lots of leaves, and pumpkins. I know it’s fall because students are beginning to contact me about courses for next semester and we have a two-day reprieve next (some call this fall break) week in order to catch up. In addition to teaching a graduate level (mostly the PhD students) research methods course, I have been finalizing assessment reports from last year, planning assessment for the coming year, and compiling the department’s self-study. This is all non-stop work, but I am enjoying it not the least of which I love data. It seems fitting to teach students how to conduct research when almost every day is a little research project. How many of our graduates went to grad school when they graduated? How many stayed at ECU? How many went elsewhere? How many of our MA students teach in community colleges? Which courses did students take as part of their undergraduate program. And with pie graphs and bar charts, I report the data. Now, what does all this mean for a large department searching for a new chair? It means he will have a snapshot of a hard-working department that cares about students, provides them with learning experiences inside and outside the department, within NC and abroad, and a group of sholars contributing in intellectual productive ways to a wide variety of disciplines that focus their attention, knowledge, and inquiry on texts and language. The question I most often get from students and parents is you guessed it–what can I do (or my child do) with a degree in English. My answer is always, what can’t you (they) do?

I will be starting my 8th year at ECU this year. Time does certainly fly. I have had a very eventful summer, and I wish I would have gotten more done, but that seems to be the curse of being an academic. Work is never done; it’s only due. I tell my students all the time, “Writing is never done–only due!” I should follow my own advice. Planning to spend much less time in meetings this year and more time on getting others to help me recruit new majors, minors, and certificate students. I will also be introducing an undergraduate studies in English blog in the hopes of helping the undergraduates form a community. If you’re interested in English @ ECU, shoot me an email–eblem@ecu.edu, and I would love to speak with you about our awesome department! See the right column for walk-in office hours and where you can find me when. Have a fabulous semester!

I am not exactly sure where the spring semester went, but I am now teaching two five-week graduate online, so I have been working insanely to get these course websites up. Should be a great five-weeks!

I wish I could say that today was not a typical day, but it is becoming more and more common. I got to the office, talked to my new bff at ITCS (I am not even sure I could tell you what ITCS stands) about the server that Will and I administer in the department. We have maintained this LAMP server for 5 years, but we did some updates this weekend and all of a sudden our php pages quit working. Years, the university wouldn’t support a Linux server, but I hoped that things had changes so I submitted an online ticket on Tuesday and my new bff called and said he could help me out, and that he did. So, this morning he was telling me all what he did while I took copious notes. Anyway, I told him he would be hearing from me again. After answering some emails, running some reports for our faculty meeting this afternoon, and talking with a member of the staff, I ran to my car and over to my IRB meeting. From there, I came back for a faculty meeting where I gave a state of the ug studies address. Now, I am getting ready to go home, and I need to prep for tomorrow’s course, write exam questions for one of my phd students, finish ATTW fundraising, write 4 peer observations, and plan for a sedona training workshop for the faculty. It is going to be a late night and an early morning.

A new year and a new semester! It is one of the things I really love about being a professor. While I didn’t do a great job of documenting anything last semester on this, I hope to do a better job this year. Suffice it to say, there was a larger learning curve to becoming Director of Undergraduate Studies than I originally thought, and I hope to move from putting out fires to preventing them from occurring in the first place. Some would call this naive, I call it hope and sanity!

The summer certainly blew by as I transitioned into the role of DUS in the department. I met with incoming English majors at 8 separate freshman orientations and 2-3 transfer orientations. The students and parents I met were enthusiastic about the Engish department, and so these experiences were energizing if also exhausting. After one last trip to the beach, the 2008-2009 school year began in ernest on Monday with students needing advising, special adding, and help registering for courses. I love the start of a new school year. I have a new office (very large) with a window, and I have new responsibilities, and I am tenured and promoted! If nothing else, it should be an exciting year!

I am teaching a bunch of online courses for the next 5 weeks. It is lots of work, but it is very exhilarating because it is graduate students (and they are smart and make me think), and I spend so much time writing. I write emails, discussion topics, blog entries, comments, feedback, texts, instant messages. It feels like it won’t ever end, but then it is over, and I am primed to write a chapter or article or something because I just feel like writing. It just so happens that the courses deal with two of my favorite subjects: digital writing and delivery and medical/health writing. More as the summer goes by.

So much for my experience in documenting work this semester. I have several posts in the works that I hope to come back to. Today I am working at Panera, and I am reminded about how much I can get done when I am not on campus. It is truly amazing the number of interuptions that can happen during a day. Today, I am compiling publisher agreements for the edited collection, Stories on Mentoring, due out in August. I am also grading papers, finishing my annual report, meeting with the administrators of the Office of Economic Development, collecting final projects, thinking about my summer courses, my new role as Director of Undergraduate Studies, the department website, and the cruise we leave for on Saturday, May 10.

I spent the last week of February helping my colleagues learn to use Sedonaweb, which is a self-service web database application that allows faculty to record and document their teaching, research/creative activity, and service. It is a new system, and while entering information into the system is fairly user-friendly, the pre-defined activities and categories–for the “work” we do–is causing interpretative issues. While it doesn’t seem to matter where faculty put things this time around since it is the first time, and kinks will need to worked out, the administrators will be disappointed in the aggregation of information because the categories and activities were not standardized across the university, colleges, or departments.