![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
looking back east...
Aug. 15th, 2012 11:19 pmJust ordered myself a truly egregious computer, which I'm going to stash in the lab in the Linguistics building. It's one of these, from System76, and I opted for the quad-core i7s and the 32 gigs of RAM. I will use it to process the hell out of some natural language, and also to typeset the hell out of my dissertation.
I nearly exploded in a fiery ball of rage yesterday. I was cc'd on an email from the professor who does all the TA assignments (who, every single semester, does this at the last possible instant), explaining to another professor that he was re-assigning my TA to be a grader for intro theory, and that I wouldn't be given another TA.
Given my earlier emotional state, I didn't take this well, and as soon as I stopped shaking, I wrote back, telling them both that they should take a different TA, that this was a great disservice to everybody involved, and that I had thirty students who were excited about taking a good class. That Can (the 'C' is kind of like the Japanese sound at the beginning of "tsunami") really ought to be helping teach NLP because (a) I seriously need the help, and (b) she cares about NLP and don't we want to put good, inspiring teachers in front of the kids? He wrote back to say "LOL, sorry, no! We have to think about the good of the department!!"
At this point,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lindseykuper was springing into action, drafting plans to rally the student body (particularly, CS Club) to come to my aid, because she's the best; I was thinking about getting my students to write angry letters to this professor too...
All of this ended up not being necessary, though, because my advisor Mike also sprung into action, and told the professor involved that he totally agreed with me and that Can really should TA for the NLP class. The other professor then found a way to make it work, shuffling around some other people. It just took an adult with some clout to tell him to do it, because clearly a grad student teaching a course has very little. Mike is such a great guy, though, and I'm really grateful for him rescuing the class. I don't know what I would have done.
Suffice to say: I guess I'm thinking a lot more about Indiana now than I was previously. Class starts in less than a week.
I nearly exploded in a fiery ball of rage yesterday. I was cc'd on an email from the professor who does all the TA assignments (who, every single semester, does this at the last possible instant), explaining to another professor that he was re-assigning my TA to be a grader for intro theory, and that I wouldn't be given another TA.
Given my earlier emotional state, I didn't take this well, and as soon as I stopped shaking, I wrote back, telling them both that they should take a different TA, that this was a great disservice to everybody involved, and that I had thirty students who were excited about taking a good class. That Can (the 'C' is kind of like the Japanese sound at the beginning of "tsunami") really ought to be helping teach NLP because (a) I seriously need the help, and (b) she cares about NLP and don't we want to put good, inspiring teachers in front of the kids? He wrote back to say "LOL, sorry, no! We have to think about the good of the department!!"
At this point,
lindseykuper was springing into action, drafting plans to rally the student body (particularly, CS Club) to come to my aid, because she's the best; I was thinking about getting my students to write angry letters to this professor too...All of this ended up not being necessary, though, because my advisor Mike also sprung into action, and told the professor involved that he totally agreed with me and that Can really should TA for the NLP class. The other professor then found a way to make it work, shuffling around some other people. It just took an adult with some clout to tell him to do it, because clearly a grad student teaching a course has very little. Mike is such a great guy, though, and I'm really grateful for him rescuing the class. I don't know what I would have done.
Suffice to say: I guess I'm thinking a lot more about Indiana now than I was previously. Class starts in less than a week.
