Back to work

Ugh - it's back to work time, when summer officially ends. I went to campus three days last week and every day this week (though I officially have no contract yet - another story another day). Jacob has started back at the children's center, and we've arranged babysitters to watch Allison every day except next Tuesday (the high schoolers go back on Tuesday, but the elementary schoolers go back on Wednesday) so Brian is going to take the day off.

Tuesday was an exciting day of campus retreat where we learned to love our campus and I knew a surprising number of answers to the "campus trivia" quiz even though this is only my third year. No one at my table was apparently paying attention, as they gave us many of the answers in the morning sessions. And even though I insisted there were only three speed bumps in the parking lot (they are more fun when you bike), our group nominated me and the new math guy to go out and count them. Team building. We also heard a presentation on how to spot a campus mass murderer and what to do if someone starts shooting in your classroom (run, call 911, hide, all else fails - fight them). Hum.... they paid someone to come up with that?

Today I learned everything you wanted to know about clickers and more. That is to say I learned nothing about using clickers. It's a new technology and to do the presentation, it seemed like our head IT person spend about 1 hour testing it out and then showed us what she did. BTW - did anyone know that if you were born in 1982 or beyond you are part of Net Gen (though my colleague's moniker of Gen Tech sounds better, I think). High school enrollment is dropping which apparently has something to do with birth control in 1966. It's cyclical. This means we need a whole new revenue building plan at the college level. As you can see, I learned little about clickers, but gained an incredible amount of trivia knowledge. So it's "to each his own" regarding the clicker business, which should be interesting.

Tomorrow, we have an all day meeting in Fond du Lac. Party on! I realized (at about 3:30 this afternoon) that I was supposed to take all this software stuff with me to the meeting - which is an incredibly long story and even longer rant. And then the lab tech spent the morning trying to figure out how to dry green beans and keep them crispy (which was an off-hand question I had) rather than going into the lab and changing the papers on the desks and washing out the ceramic dishes, which is the request I put to her just prior to the offhand comment about green beans. That'll show me to make small talk.

I guess this post is me ranting about Jamie stuff - as opposed to filling you in on kid stuff. Variety is the spice of life!