A Cup of Tea

[Bobchillingworth]

I must confess a morbid curiosity as to what acts of deviancy one must perpetrate to get fired from the USPS. Civing on the job???

[thestick]

Re: Chevalier, wow. Have no idea how to respond to that outpouring of emotion, so I'll just let it lie.

Re: superdeath, good luck. With apologies for being a downer, what happens if the arbitrator rules against you?

[Cyneheard]

sometimes it feels like the attitude of people in the department is almost designed to turn me off.

Could you tell me more about this? What's the attitude of the people in the department?

Example 1:
Professor who doesn't show up to class for 40-45% of lectures, however is present in their office immediately following class?

Example 2:
Professor who gives answers to the exam DURING the exam, going so far as to write certain things out explicitly on the board.

Example 3:
The department administrators refuse to give committed undergraduates TA positions, despite their offer to hold office hours when these classes traditionally do not have them. Instead, positions are granted to grad students who do not have the time/do not care enough to help students.
This is not an issue with finding jobs for grad students to pay them a stipend - plenty of undergrads TA lab sections. The math department does not have this problem at all.

Course offerings have not had too much thought put into them for the past decade it seems. Frequent rotation of professors between courses is pretty detrimental.

These issues are only compounded by the fact that the university is spending a few billion of dollars on new construction and renovation, and around 0.001% of that is going towards physics/math.

Sounds like my experience a dozen years ago hasn't changed all that much. UPenn as well, and Physics was one of my fields. Now I work in education policy/research/data analysis.

DRL isn't getting any of the renovation money? That building was a joke when I was there.

[Charriu]

Fell on ice? Failure to follow

While reading that, I imagined your supervisor walking in front of you across ice and you walking and falling behind. I guess in that case you definitely failed to follow.

But anyway. Hope everything goes well for you.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Going postal, I believe the expression is.

[Rusten]

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

We're now entering the third week of coronavirus quarantine at school. Everywhere you go, people are in masks, and finally I can get a seat on public transport which is nice. But I am getting antsy - at this point I haven't taught since before Christmas last year, which is the longest winter break I've ever had. Eager to get this new school year started and underway. Especially since the longer quarantine lasts, the more likely we are to cut into summer break and other holidays, which is when I had planned to visit home. If we don't get it, then I'll go years without visiting the States, which I won't be happy about.

Ah well, it could be worse - I could be sick.

New year starts on the 23rd at this point, a solid month after it was meant to.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

With this coronavirus bs, almost all colleges are going over to online education. Gonna be home for the next few months, so please start like 10 pitbosses.

[thestick]

If I'm not misremembering books I read years ago, Newton made many advances towards universal gravitation while he was stuck at home due to a plague outbreak. Who knows, maybe we could all become mind readers.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

bastard also invented calculus at the same time

meanwhile, I'm sitting here shitposting on Civ IV internet forums.