chaos central, and some photos

Greetings from the Office of the Perpetually Escalating Crisis. Today’s crisis involves a creating a seemingly-simple list of names and emails for teachers who had a student teacher this semester. Suddenly it is of utmost importance that we get every cooperating teacher’s email address so that the dean can send them some sort of survey. They need to gather data for the NCATE visit. The survey email must be sent out TODAY. When was this scheme cooked up? Why, yesterday, of course. Hey, let’s not get all carried away and engage in any of that planning in advance nonsense! Like, figuring out you’ll need this data for next year’s visit in time to actually put it together and get it to the teachers.

I’ve got the names – well, I kind of have the names, but since the names were scrawled by hand on cards that the supervisors give me when the student teachers are placed, and then entered by me or a student into our database, I wouldn’t bet a whole lot of money on them being spelled correctly. And of course since their email addresses are based on their names, there are probably going to be a lot bouncing back. To the dean, because he’s sending out the email. Yeah, we should have a more accurate list. But, you know, WE DON’T!!! The associate dean, who was the one dragging me into the middle of this, looked aghast when I gently warned her of the likelihood of misspellings – and names that are just Ms Whatever, no first name, and we need the first initial for the email address – but I don’t think she was up to dealing with that till the emails start bouncing. She just said, “We REALLY need to get them to do everything electronically!!!” She and her grad students have also been trying to decipher illegible handscrawled observation reports for other data collections they’re doing.

ANYHOW, I spent all day long on this. (I’m now at home, having been drug back to the Project From Hell as I was writing that second paragraph and trying to hide in my office.) The best part was that there were five people involved in making these lists of names and email addresses on four different computers, and naturally we discovered this afternoon that three of them didn’t understand what they were doing, and had either used the student’s name instead of the cooperating teacher’s name, or hadn’t come up with the right email address. You had to figure out the email address according to what county they teach in. Somebody misunderstood how you did that, and had used website addresses, which were a little different. K’s student and I were the only ones actually doing them right, and that’s because I use the student teaching list all the time, as well as the Education Directory, so knew what I was doing, and the other three had no idea what they were doing and had this thrown at them at the last second and were totally rushed so of COURSE they didn’t do it right. So K’s student and I worked all afternoon trying to fix it. And we got it done, although I dread hearing how many bounced back.

If I’d know this a week or so in advance, I could have had all the student teaching supervisors just email me their students’ cooperating teachers’ email addresses. But no, that would make sense. God forbid we do anything that makes sense.

So, that’s all I did today. Aside from attend our new Chancellor’s Installation Ceremony. Which sounded much more like something you do to new cabinetry and not to the leader of a university, but whatever. It was WAY longer than I expected – it started at 10 and since they’d only cancelled classes till 12, I figured it would be over at 11:30, but no – it was still going strong at 12:15 when I finally left because I was freezing and bored out of my mind and starting to panic about the List From Hell. I’d never been to the Installation of a Chancellor so thought it might be of historic interest, but mostly it was a whole lot of people congratulating one another and telling one another how wonderful they are.

I did enjoy how each speaker would start their speech by saying they brought greetings – “I bring greetings from the Alumni Association!” “I bring greetings from the Board of Directors!” “I bring greetings from the Town of Boone!” It was like a king’s coronation with delegates from other countries paying their respects.

It was also fun watching all the faculty parading around in their regalia. They did a very poor job of filing in – they’d lag behind and nearly have to run to catch up, and some came in single file while others were double – it was very lackadaisical. My favorite thing, though, was the guy in the most bizarre cap I’ve ever seen. Usually they are the mortar board things or perhaps a beret-type hat. This one was a closefitted cap, kind of like a beanie, with long fringe all the way around it. And it was bright orange. It was amazing. It looked like he was wearing a Victorian-era lampshade on his head. Like he got his PhD from the University of Really Bad Parties. I think it was worth going just to see that cap.

Okay. I actually have some photos already developed and already scanned, so I’m going to post a few lest I do like I usually do and never get around to it.

One of many many waterfalls. Of course I’ve forgotten the name. It’s near Highlands.

This is the confusingly-named Dry Falls, also near Highlands. They call it Dry Falls because you can walk behind it. It is not at all dry back there, though, and despite watching everyone else take photos from behind it with their fancy digital cameras, I wasn’t about to get my camera wet. So this is about as close as it got.

A nifty rainbow in the creek below Dry Falls.

Old old gaspumps outside an old store near Sky Valley. Which I think is closer to Highlands than anything else, although not very close to anything at all.

Same store. I especially liked the groovy funky 1970s sign.

And another old sign. And perhaps there will be more tomorrow.