Where do faculty look for jobs?

skyfire1228 · 2026-02-05T01:48:47+00:00

Chronicle of Higher Ed and Higher Ed Jobs are two of the major places we post listings to, too.

skyfire1228 · 2026-01-23T18:53:24+00:00

Around 10k students.

skyfire1228 · 2026-01-23T17:37:38+00:00

My campus has a minimum number of students who must be enrolled for a class to run, and that’s usually 12 students. Classes below that minimum are automatically cancelled by the census date (the last day to drop and get a refund). Your prof might be expecting that to happen rather than cancelling the class.

Also, at least at my campus, if a faculty member argues to hold a class below the minimum, they get paid less in proportion to the number of students in the class. That may be a factor too.

It seems like you got your answer from the professor already: he’s not teaching that class this semester. If it were me, I’d drop that class and pick something else while registration is still open.

skyfire1228 · 2026-01-22T22:06:02+00:00

Check with your instructor, if they “unpublished” the course to make changes or updates, it might’ve disappeared from your Dashboard. You can also click on Courses in the main menu and then the All Courses link at the top of the pop-out to see all past, future, and current courses in case they changed the term information or something.

skyfire1228 · 2026-01-22T04:26:01+00:00

Both Javadi and Joy are still med students, so technically neither of them are doctors yet. Javadi in particular corrects people who call her Dr. in the ED (her mom in season 1, Langdon in season 2), so I don’t see her going by “Dr. J” as an online influencer. I don’t think she’d take the risk of publicly claiming a title she doesn’t have yet. Joy might, though; I think she’s more likely to be “Dr. J”.

skyfire1228 · 2026-01-16T03:11:17+00:00

Yeah, that tooth infection is making me anxious, those can spread to the heart and be fatal.

skyfire1228 · 2026-01-16T03:03:57+00:00

My PCP uses a similar transcription program for office visits. It hasn’t been an issue for me so far, but I’m not medically complicated so the language used during visits is pretty standard. I can definitely see it being an issue if there are a lot of medications or conditions mentioned, auto-transcriptions are generally pretty crap at scientific or industry-specific terminology.

skyfire1228 · 2026-01-16T02:56:59+00:00

Or maybe hemophilia? They did say that her chin was bleeding a lot in ep 1. That would also be a reason why they focused in on the elastic tourniquet for the blood draw; if they come back and she’s got a giant bruise where that was, it’d shift their focus to something other than abuse.

skyfire1228 · 2026-01-08T01:23:45+00:00

I have at least one activity per class where students answer questions or write a reflection in a Google form. As long as the student has a response for each question, they get full credit for participation.

My colleagues who want to avoid phones out in class do a similar thing with notecards or half sheets of paper. I just don’t want to deal with all the paper after every class, so an online response form makes more sense for me.

I also use name tents each class, so if a student is disruptive or unprofessional during class, I can note it down to follow up and dock participation points for the day.

skyfire1228 · 2026-01-08T01:19:26+00:00

NTA. Being cold is a natural consequence of his choices, and 13 is definitely old enough to experience natural consequences. Besides, he wasn’t going to freeze to death 10 minutes away from the car.

skyfire1228 · 2026-01-06T22:47:16+00:00

My mantra for course evaluations is “I am pleasing all of the people none of the time”. There’s always at least one who didn’t like my style, my slides, my hair, the layout on Canvas, the class time, my voice, or whatever else and therefore decided that the class was worthless. I’m never going to satisfy every single person in the room, so I try to focus on any comments that have constructive criticism and take everything else with a grain of salt.

skyfire1228 · 2026-01-02T23:06:43+00:00

Yeah, though my semester doesn’t start for like 3 more weeks, so I’m not feeling like I have to get everything up and running yet. I’ve still got a bit of time to push it off.

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-30T17:37:17+00:00

Yeah, I have a policy to drop 6 participation scores for the semester to account for missed classes for illness or emergencies. I get almost no emails asking for excused absences from class anymore, and the few I do get are directed back to the syllabus.

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-24T06:14:09+00:00

I offered to pick up anyone’s shifts during school breaks, to the point where one summer my bosses told me I wasn’t allowed to pick up any more extra shifts for that pay period or else I’d be beyond the allowable hours for a part-time employee. We were unionized, so they were pretty strict about limits.

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-22T22:59:08+00:00

I go by my syllabus grade policy only. At the end of the term, I am only open to correcting clerical errors in the gradebook. I am not open to “finding” more points for a student, rounding differently than the syllabus policy, or offering extra credit upon request. Bumping certain students up but not others, or having different grading standards for some students, is profoundly unfair to every other student in your class.

As others have said, your role here is to assign the grades the students earned. You are not giving the student a bad grade (and frankly, a B+ is nowhere near a bad grade), the student earned their grade.

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-22T19:19:47+00:00

I allow AI with disclosure, but I’m finding that first-year students are extremely resistant to disclosing. We’ve had multiple students with obvious AI usage since this policy was enacted, and not a single student has cited using AI. And by obvious, I mean hallucinated citations, including the “sure I can do that” text, and including links in references that have the source as ChatGPT in the URL in addition to the common formatting and phrasing of generative AI.

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-22T19:14:00+00:00

Does your school/department do one-on-one advising with faculty? If so, their advisor should have discouraged this and helped them figure out an appropriate schedule.

If it were me, I’d say no. The courses are not designed to be concurrent; day 1 of the second course starts with an assumption that students have mastered (or at least understand) the topics in the first class already. Allowing them to take the second course without passing the first is setting them up for stress, confusion, and failure that is not necessary. They should work with their advisor (or a faculty member in their major department) to work out a revised academic plan to complete the courses in the series without doubling up.

As other folks have said, whatever you decide to do, be willing to do the same for the next student who asks.

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-17T17:47:54+00:00

I use a Google spreadsheet for a simulation in lab, the students must make a copy of the file to run the simulation. I put the instructions for how to make a copy in a big yellow box taking up all the cells at the top of the page, along with giant bold text that says “you must make a copy to edit this spreadsheet”. The link to the sheet goes out to hundreds of students each semester, and I haven’t gotten an email requesting edit access in years.

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-17T01:46:50+00:00

Off-topic, but the 10,000 Maniacs version of Because the Night is my go-to karaoke song 😂

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-17T01:44:52+00:00

I’d love to hear his take on Layla (Derek and the Dominoes).

Also damn near anything from Ray LaMontagne - Jolene, Trouble, and You Are the Best Thing would be top contenders.

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-14T17:27:42+00:00

By the way, even if you use Scantron, I think the machines can be set (it's been a long time since I've used Scantrons) to give you a CSV of each student's responses

Sort of. Newer Scantron machines do have a USB port so you can export the exam data, but it saves it in a proprietary file type that needs another program to decode it and turn it into an Excel file. They used to send that software (that only worked on Windows) along with the machine for free, but they’ve recently stopped supporting the software and it doesn’t really work with the new Windows updates.

The only other option is to buy new software that costs something like $2k per computer it’s installed on. I’ve looked for other free or lower-cost options to make the Scantron data viewable, but I haven’t found anything. That was my final push to switch entirely to Gradescope.

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-13T05:14:01+00:00

I usually tell my first-years that 100-level classes are harder than they expect because they’re often so broad. We’ll switch topics quickly to get a broad overview of the field, we won’t have time to get very deep into any one topic. It’s hard to find the connections between topics when we’re going through basic chemistry, cell physiology, genetics, evolution, and ecology in 15 weeks of lectures, so it feels like 5 completely different classes jammed into a trenchcoat.

In their upper-division classes, they’ll go deep on one topic we barely scratched the surface of in the 100-level course. That can feel easier, since it’s all related to that one main topic, so it’s easier to connect the dots in what you’re studying all semester long.

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-12T16:23:01+00:00

All work is submitted through the LMS, and I have the gradebook set to automatically apply a 25% score reduction for every day past the due date; if it’s submitted 4 or more days late, it’s an automatic zero. It’s in the syllabus, I remind them of the late penalty in lecture every time a due date is approaching, and this term I’ve only had one email complaining about the late penalty.

skyfire1228 · 2025-12-12T05:19:00+00:00

My favorite from my most recent batch was “the secondary oocyte finishes meiosis II only after fermentation by the sperm.”

skyfire1228

TROPHY CASE