Sometimes, I don't like you very much.

I have this colleague, "M," who I consider one of the people I am closest to at school. Ze is a year or two younger than me, outspoken, opinionated. I respect hir knowledge and abilities a lot. We've worked well together on a number of projects, large and small, over the years. Maybe because I'm mostly passive and ze is more aggressive, I get quite upset when we disagree or when I feel ze is acting like a jerk. The few times I've objected to something, ze has just shrugged and refused to budge, so I usually don't speak up. I guess I feel a little betrayed when this colleague doesn't live up to my expectations or doesn't act within what I think are proper boundaries. I know that's ridiculous, of course. Ze is an adult and acts in whatever way ze pleases; it has nothing to do with me. Still.

This summer, I've been working with a local high school teacher to find research internships for some of her students with our summer research teams. I actually thought it was a great opportunity for everyone involved and a good way to foster connections with the high school. The response from my colleagues has been disappointing as it took several prods before any of them grudgingly agreed to consider participating. M was one (of two) who finally met with a couple of potential students, and eventually committed to supervise one high school student for a few weeks. I was grateful for that, but I felt that M could have been a bit more gracious. Ze acted like it was a huge imposition to bring another person into "the M lab" as ze called it, where ze was working with a single undergraduate. That pretentiousness rankled ("the M lab" seriously? It's just an instructional lab they're using for the summer, not like it's M's personal space), but I tried to ignore it.

As soon as the high school student was accepted, ze sent me a series of emails. These were related to hir ancient complaint, repeatedly voiced every summer, about student access to the building and labs. Could the high school student get an ID card for access to our building? If not that, could the whole building be left unlocked all day, every day? Because it would be tedious to have to meet the student at the door to let him in each day.

Ze already knows the answers to these questions are no. It is not hir first time through this. It's annoying that ze keeps asking even though nothing has changed and I do not have any authority to change it. The campus safety department will not just leave the buildings unlocked all day. I won't even ask for that, because I actually prefer that the building is closed to random passers-by during the summer months. Our building is on a relatively busy city street and neighbors often walk through campus with their kids and dogs, but absolutely anyone could do the same. There are times when I'm the only person in the building and I don't want to suddenly run into some stranger on my way to the restroom (which has happened). I've talked about this with our administrative assistant, who is alone on the ground floor much of the time, and she agrees she feels much safer with the exterior doors locked in summer. Safety might be willing to issue an access card to the student, though I doubt it, but because this colleague brings up this access issue every. single. year (usually when complaining that we don't give interior room keys to students) I'm not even going to ask. The selfishness of the request rubs me wrong. I just say that non-employees and non-enrolled students do not get cards.

So it's the selfishness and the pretension, but also the lack of consideration for other people that irritates me. In many other ways, I think M is pretty cool, but when this side of hir shows I don't want to know hir. I feel bad about that, as if I'm letting M down by feeling let down myself. It takes me awhile to recover my equilibrium and to want to be around M after an episode like this. Plus, I kind of think I'm right about this issue.

I worry that I might have such a high standard of behavior that I'm not able to make or keep friends who don't measure up. I don't know if other people feel the way I do, or if there are ways to deal with the feelings more competently.

Chocolate Mousse Cake, King Arthur Flour Bakealong for February

This week, I went back to February for the Bakealong recipe. It was Chocolate Mousse Cake with Raspberries, a wonderful-looking layer cake filled with chocolate cream and raspberries. Yum!

I needed some ingredients and was too lazy to shop on Friday or Saturday (plus there were things scheduled, like a graduation party and a horse race), so I didn't start until Sunday morning. Making the cake batter was not too difficult and I thought I could do the baking while working on some other chores. I only have one round cake pan, as it turns out, and I needed at least three layers. The recipe says not to worry because the batter will be fine waiting its turn in the bowl. And it was!

But (and boy-howdy!), I messed up the baking. Since the recipe is written for people who have multiple round pans (read: sane people), it suggested baking times for different numbers and diameters of round pans, but not exactly what I had. I ended up guessing how long to bake mine, and I was wrong by about 20 minutes. My cake had started to pull away from the edge of the pan, and I only had a few crumbs stuck to the tester when I tried the center, so that seemed all right. The second thing I did wrong was not let the pan cool long enough before trying to get the baked cake out (remember, I only had the one pan so I was kind of in a hurry to get on to the next layer).

The first cake was really hard to get out (should have been a clue) and then only the top finally flopped out, missing the cooling rack by about half and leaving the bottom still in the pan. A not-quite-cooked chocolate cake makes a mess when it falls pretty much in a heap on the counter.

With the second cake, I baked it a little longer (it looked the same as the first when I took it out) and again failed to cool it enough, so I had a second flop. The third one I finally did correctly, with a baking time almost twice as long as the first cake and I remembered to cool it a full 15 minutes before attempting to extract it. That used up all the batter, so I washed up and had an hour or two of distraction, feeling pretty unimpressed about this cake.

I almost threw in the towel at this point. Stupid cake!

However, the flopped cake still tasted good, and I had all those other ingredients - especially the fresh raspberries which were hand-picked by virgins at $4 a half-pint. So.

I started over and made another batter. I used up all the granulated sugar in the pantry, of course, and substituted some powdered sugar for the 100 g or so I was short. That seemed fine. This time, I baked three cake layers for the proper time and cooled them properly before attempting to remove them, and all three came out nicely (duh, the way they were supposed to all along).

After cooling, I made the fluffy chocolate whipped cream filling and started building the cake. One layer of cake, a layer of filling, then hand-sliced raspberries.

Repeat this for two more layers (since I had four useable cakes) and put the top on.

Another thing I noticed while baking six cake layers is that our oven is not level. The cakes came out thicker on one side than the other, so after the first three I started rotating the pan in the oven about half way through the baking time. This helped a little, but I still had to arrange the layers carefully to compensate so that the whole stack didn't tilt. You're supposed to refrigerate the cake to make it firmer, so I left it in there overnight. It was early-evening on Sunday by this time and I felt like I had done nothing all day but bake cakes (and wash dishes).

Monday after dinner, I made the frosting. First you do a crumb coat, which is a very thin layer all over the cake, to hold down the crumbly cake bits. I refrigerated that again and then put on the final layer. 

Since I also don't have one of those narrow frosting spatulas, I applied this with the spatula from the robot culinare, and it left some striations and isn't quite perfect. But I'm well satisfied with the result.

It tastes amazing.

Butterflake Herb Loaf, King Arthur Flour Bakealong for June

This week, a new recipe was released in the King Arthur Flour Bakealong so I made it. This recipe makes a kind of pull-apart bread in which the pieces are stuffed. I made a savory loaf with butter herb filling, and a sweet loaf with cinnamon sugar butterscotch filling. 

The King Arthur blog suggested a couple of modifications of the original recipe. One was to use the tangzhong technique for increased bread softness. You cook part of the milk and flour into a slurry before adding the other ingredients (butter, salt, sugar, yeast) and adding the flour. I did that, but I was confused by the next step and accidentally poured the rest of the milk into the four cups of flour first. Then I realized what I should have done and poured most of the milk out again. It seemed okay, but the instructions could have been clearer (specifically, after doing the tangzhong step, the note should have said to continue with step 1 of the original recipe).

Secondly, the original recipe called for cutting biscuit rounds of dough and stuffing each of them with filling before placing in the loaf pan like a monkey-bread. The revised recipe makes rectangles of dough that are stuffed and then cut into little square "sandwiches". I didn't get my dough quite long enough before stuffing, so I only had six sandwiches instead of seven, and that didn't quite fill up the loaf pan. It was fine, but the last sandwich sagged a bit while cooking, so the loaf isn't as pretty as it might have been.

Overall, both loaves are delicious. We at most of the sweet one for breakfast today. I'm not sure I enjoyed the process enough to make this again.

Gruyere-Stuffed Crusty Loaves, King Arthur Flour Bakealong for March

This weekend I made the Gruyere-Stuffed Crusty Loaves that were the March recipe in the King Arthur Flour Bakealong. The recipe makes four little loaves of bread that are about four servings each, I would estimate. I baked two and froze the others for later.

This recipe took the most time of the three I've done so far. There was a lot of "inactive prep time" for the dough to rise and I kept thinking of the Great British Bake-off tent while I was waiting. On Saturday night, I made the starter. It was drier than the one on the King Arthur blog, even after resting overnight. Then I made the dough Sunday after grocery shopping - because we were out of bread flour and I needed to buy the cheese - and it needed to rise another two hours. After lunch, I shredded the cheese and patted out the dough. Once covered in shredded cheese, the dough was rolled up and sealed, then left to rise again for about 90 minutes. At last, I cut the roll into four slices and baked two in mid-afternoon. Luckily they turned out great and the one we ate right away was delicious. The cheese makes the slice taste a bit salty, and H. thought they reminded him of soft pretzels.

We reheated the second loaf today for lunch. It was still excellent. The next test will be whether the frozen ones turn out as well. They looked pretty sad and flat when I took them out of the freezer and wrapped them up today, but hopefully the dough is resilient.

Almond Puff Roll, King Arthur Flour Bakealong for April

 Since I don't have much time for baking during the academic year, I haven't participated in the earlier Bakelong recipes. I decided to go backwards while I wait for the new June recipe from King Arthur Flour. This was Almond Puff Loaf from April.

It was not hard and did not require any unusual ingredients. H and I went shopping for a new sofa in the morning, during some spring rain. We successfully bought a sofa (delivery in 3-5 weeks), and went to our favorite stores (World Market and Tuesday Morning) afterwards, then had lunch at Culver's. We were going to a friend's house after supper to play board games, but we had the whole afternoon available, so I decided to make the recipe.

First, I made the bottom crust, which is essentially a biscuit dough shaped into a flat rectangle. I didn't like this part because it was super sticky and I wasn't sure it was coming out properly. The top crust is a choix. I've never made one before, but it was easy. One spreads that on top of the sticky bottom layer with a spatula, and it looked a bit like whipped potato. Then one bakes for an hour and the choix puffs up into a rounded oval loaf. When you take that out of the oven and it starts to cool, it sinks and leaves a flatter pastry that is something like a Danish (without filling). Finally, you spread the loaves with jam (I used raspberry, which I bought at Tuesday Morning) and powdered sugar icing. Both the choix and the icing are flavored with almond.

These are the loaves before slicing. The pastry was light and flaky and not too sweet, but there was plenty of sweetness from the toppings. We took one loaf to board games and kept the other for ourselves. I still have a few cookies left from last weekend, but we're eating well. And it's raining again.

Rugelach, King Arthur Flour Bakealong for May

Yesterday afternoon I made some rugelach, a pastry I never heard of before discovering the King Arthur Flour Bakealong. They were surprisingly simple to make. I had to walk over to the neighborhood market for some supplies, but that was an opportunity to get a little exercise on a cloudy, drizzly afternoon. The dough is just butter, sour cream, and cream cheese mixed with flour. You roll it out and cover it with the filling, then cut it into wedges like a pizza and roll up the pieces to make these little crescents. The first photo above shows rugelach with a chocolate filling.

This next batch had a walnut-raisin-brown sugar filling. I wasn't sure I would like it, but it turned out lovely (and I accidentally made too much filling so I may need to make another batch of dough to use it up).

The third batch had my favorite filling: apple cinnamon. Made by grating an apple (I used a Fuji) and cooking it with cinnamon, cornstarch, and lemon juice until thickened. The grated apple was fantastic by itself, but delicious in the pastry.

I don't know how many of the Bakealong recipes I'll make this summer, but I'm going to shoot for one a week and see how that goes. King Arthur releases a new recipe every month, but I could always go back to a previous year for more, if I need to.

You Can't Go Back

The view from a colleague's office this week shows the new building looking dangerously like a building. There are dozens of contractors installing utilities and putting up frames for the walls. The floors were poured just before final exams. Now that the semester has ended, the construction has gotten intimately close. All the faculty with offices on the west end (those facing this sight) had to clean out and move their furniture this week. Some could just shift things away from the windows, others needed to completely empty the room. On Thursday, crews came to move the heaviest items into storage (in my labs, because where else?) and Friday different crews came to disconnect the heating fixtures and begin to build temporary walls. After the temporary walls are up, the exterior wall will be demolished and replaced with a new wall, which will form one side of the three-story atrium that eventually will join our existing building to the new construction. In the photo above, you can see the two bridges that will span the atrium so that we can get from one side to the other. My department will move up to the top floor.

We are all coming closer to accepting that this is happening. That we will have to move out of our offices next spring into temporary spaces, and that the building we've known for years (up to 30 years for some people) will be transformed into something different. Already, the new construction has made irreversible changes. The basement is no longer department storage and student study space: it has been gutted in preparation for the new mechanical equipment. Our rooftop greenhouse has been deconstructed and now one can look out over an almost-featureless rooftop from the hallway windows that used to provide a sunny view of tame jungle. Part of me wants to cling protectively to the familiar, shabby, grimy walls and fixtures. Another part of me knows that's silly and hopes that the shiny new stuff can help me forget the old stuff. This time of transition, which will last at least another year, is going to be difficult.

I spent the first half of the week finishing my grading and calculating final grades. I did some cleaning: throwing out decades-old sets of textbook transparencies, packing books for recycling, putting the detritus of the just-ended semester in order. Next week, I'll get serious about my summer goals. I have a list of about 18 things I want to do; that's not entirely realistic so we'll have to see how much I actually do.

Blackjack and the End of the Semester

I finished this shawl (Blackjack by Romi Hill) a couple of weeks ago, but it took me a while to block it and then photograph it. There are glass beads at intervals along the bottom edge that make it hang nicely. I made an obvious error in the middle just above the area in this photo (it looks like the yo's are stacked instead of alternating) and I didn't get the bind off coordinated correctly with bead placement. Still, I think it's all right and I'm happy to have finished it after having the yarn and pattern in stash for something like four years.

On today's homework, my students struggled to write an acid dissociation equilibrium. This was something from last semester (and actually from before that). One wrote the reverse of Kb, another must have written and erased a bunch of times because the paper is all soft and fuzzy (but still wrote a Kb equation). All we did in class this morning (our last lecture period) was a quiz. I haven't looked at the papers yet, but nobody finished in less than 45 minutes. Most students took an hour. I fear it will be ugly.

The second-worst class ever.

This is a photo of a ball of yarn because I am wishing I could be at home, sitting next to it, knitting.

This semester, I have the second-worst class I have ever had. The worst was several years ago. I had recently become chairperson of the department and we were in the habit of offering one evening class for general education each term. Usually an adjunct taught it, but our regular adjunct had decided to take another job and moved away three weeks before the class was to start. The class was scheduled with an accelerated format that began halfway through the normal term, so all the potential instructors I contacted were unavailable. None of my colleagues could, or wanted to, take this on. There were 24 students registered, so it was fully subscribed, and I felt it would be not nice to cancel such a full class. In the end, I decided it was my duty, as chair, to teach the class.

I had three weeks to plan the class, working on it while teaching my usual schedule as always. I put as much thought into it as I could: planned what I thought would be interesting and novel lab experiences for the students, considered the likely backgrounds of the students (all non-science majors taking the course to fulfill the dreaded lab science requirement), and prepared texts and assignments that I hoped would allow them to appreciate some of what I love about chemistry. It wasn't the best class I had ever designed, but I thought it would be satisfactory and maybe even good. I was hopeful.

Nope. From the first night, the students seemed shocked that I expected them to actually pay attention, do the homework, and show understanding of the topics. Some of them did not come to class with paper to take notes. Some flipped helplessly through the text instead of making eye contact with me. After the two-hours of lecture we took a ten minute break and then reconvened in the lab. Some students would show up for the beginning of lab and then sneak out when my back was turned. Did they really think I wouldn't notice? The rest would do the absolute minimum work as fast as possible and then leave, sometimes less than half an hour after we'd started.

As the weeks progressed, a few students became a little hostile. They would answer questions I posed with a defiant "I don't know" and then just stare at me. I discovered two young men were copying each other's lab reports (so they could take turns skipping the lab time) and I kicked them both out of the class which did not improve morale for the others. Anyway, I was disappointed and frustrated, but I had a full schedule of other courses to teach so I tried to do the best I could with the time I had. Ever since, I have described this class as my worst-ever. And my department has never again offered that course in the accelerated, evening format.

Well, my current class is causing almost as much unhappiness. This is a class I regularly teach every year. It is required for our majors and it occasionally attracts some others. Students take it as juniors or seniors, so they normally have two or three years of background in chemistry and I expect them to use it. The group I have this year is terrible. So terrible that I don't know how they managed to become juniors and seniors in this major. I now wish that I had been documenting all of the ridiculous things that have happened since we started in January. I suspected that I would have some problems with one or two of the students, based on having them in a previous class, but I boggle at the scale of things. Example: in class one day, not one of the students knew how to convert between two SI units. This is taught in the very first week of the very first course in our major, and it is used frequently thereafter in all courses.

The straw that broke the camel's back happened in lab. We were performing an analysis of lead in samples of brass and each student needed to clean and weigh one piece of lead (as a standard). In my announcements at the start of the period, I said as clearly as possible that each person should take one piece of lead, but I noticed that most of the students had actually taken more. All right, I thought, it might be difficult to transfer a single tiny piece of metal from a small bottle into a beaker. We'll just collect all of that extra at the end. It may be indicative of how the first 14 weeks of the semester have gone that I wasn't even very upset that they had disregarded my direct, specific instructions. Next, each student weighed their single pieces of metal and took them into another lab for the analysis. I went with them to help set things up and describe what was going on. As each student finished, he or she went back into the first lab and thus I was the last person to return. Upon entering the original lab, I said to the group, "Who has leftover lead for disposal?" The student closest to me looked up and answered, "Oh, we threw it in the trash."

I definitely lost my cool. Did you not just write a risk assessment while preparing for this lab experiment in which you all wrote that lead is toxic and harmful to the environment and should always be collected for proper disposal?!? Yes, they did. Why then did you think it was all right to throw the lead into the trash? Because G. [one of the students] said it was OK.  What?!?!?!?!?

At this point, I mentally flashed to a recurring conversation I've had with a colleague from another department. We sort-of-but-not-really joke that there are certain things that should be grounds for automatic failure in some courses. I am standing in my lab, listening a student say something incredibly stupid, and I'm actually thinking: you all just failed this class - get out of here right now. But of course I didn't say that out loud. I was the most speechless I have ever been. I'm a little surprised I didn't faint dead away.

Since that lab, I'm just counting the days until the end of the semester. There is nothing that can salvage this one.

Keep Your Boots On, It's Still Not Spring

Well, unless spring has winter storm warnings full of ice, snow, and sleet.

Yesterday I fell asleep on my sofa after dinner. I meant to keep plugging on my current sock and use-up-old-stash projects when I sat down. Instead, I read a bit and then I felt cold and my feet hurt so I curled up under the blanket. The next thing I knew, the noise of H coming home from work woke me.

I am reading Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher. It's a book of recommendation letters (an "epistolary novel" I'm told) allegedly written by a middle-aged English professor at a second-tier American university on behalf of students, colleagues, and friends. This professor fills his letters with asides referencing his relationship with the intended recipient, unflattering details about the people he is supposed to be recommending, complaints about working conditions in his office, and melodramatic sobbing about how poorly regarded the English department is on his campus. I'm reading it because H read it last year and laughed his head off. I don't like it. I was hoping for humor, but I'm simply disgusted with Professor Fitger. I find him conceited and whiny. I want him to get over his divorce, his lack of book sales, and his enmity of the Economics department and do something productive.

The letters I do like are the ones in which he rails against the increasingly impersonal, online recommendation format (maybe because I've had to complete those awful tables of check boxes, too). I also enjoy the occasionally clever phrasing he uses, for example, when describing a student he has known for "eleven minutes."

I think the plight of the underappreciated English professor is nothing new in books. Writers write what they know (so I've heard, anyway), and I guess many of them are English professors struggling with feelings of inadequacy. If I had any belief that I could write a novel I would be tempted to write one about a university where the exalted English professors regularly proclaim their undeniably accurate understanding of politics at near-campus watering-holes, preach 19th century British literature to classes of adoring fans, and spend breaks traveling to sunny villas with suitcases packed with bottles of wine. They sometimes deign to marvel at scientific news then proudly state their pure white ignorance of science and math. Maybe I'm just jealous.

The End Is Near

The end of the semester is near, and it seems to have struck people between the eyes this week. At the end of first semester, in December, I know I feel overwhelmed, too, but there is also a sense of relief that there will be a break and a chance to relax. Maybe there's also a sense of excitement, anticipation for the start of second semester. But in April, at least this year, the approaching end feels heavy and unpleasant to me.

Last week I caught two plagiarists on two different assignments. I am certain that neither of them was trying to deceive, or slip anything past me, or cut corners. They each made mistakes, unfortunately. Mistakes that they should have known better than to make and should have been able to avoid. My first reaction, was sadness. Sometimes when I catch a cheater, I do feel a little victory. Like I'm doing a good thing. In these two cases I immediately wished I could unsee the evidence and never look at it again.

The first student is having some personal problems outside of school, and maybe ze made this mistake because zir thoughts were focused on other things. Ze was upset to tears by our conversation, and after ze left my office I was not able to do any meaningful work for the rest of the day. Ze seemed to understand the problem as soon as I explained it and accepted the penalty without much comment. Since my job is to help students learn, I advised Student #1 to look over the next assignment (which had already been turned in) and make sure the same mistakes did not occur there. I allowed the student to use the weekend to check, accepting the assignment late without further penalty, because a second offense would automatically result in failing the course, and I don't want that.

The second student is typically slow to grasp things, and was slow to catch on how serious the situation could be. This student kept talking about fixing the mistake, as if ze thought I could allow a re-do to just make it all go away. Ze spent the last several days visiting various support offices on campus and revising the assignment. Today, Student #2 described all of this work to me and then stated that it should (somehow) counteract the original mistake. That I should be eager to read this work and restore the points. This demonstrates the complete misunderstanding that has taken place. Ze does not recognize the great fortune in not having already failed the course for this.

All of this takes so much energy to deal with. To be calm and professional. To remain so when the students are weeping, or being exasperating, ungrateful, or angry. Afterwards, to review these interactions repeatedly in my mind, checking whether I could have said something better or handled the situation in a different way. Only three more weeks, we say among ourselves. The end of the semester is in sight. Hold on just a little longer. We have done it before, and we will do it again.

It's Not Spring Yet, People

Note: I had two posts on my old blog when I decided to move it here. This is the second of those.

We've had light snow for the past three nights, so it doesn't look very much like spring. I'm grateful there hasn't been enough to require shoveling, and most of the snow melted during the days. The sky today would be described as "leaden" and it's pretty chilly out (-1 °C). On the one hand, I'm not tempted to go outside which should be helpful for getting necessary things done; on the other hand, it's not very nice. Yesterday the snow was pretty and the sun was out for a while:

I was inexplicably grumpy on Tuesday, maybe because my sleep was interrupted Monday night by H coming home from work at 3:30 a.m. and then some indigestion. We had the board game group over that evening, and I played three games. The first one was new to all of us, had some very clever aspects, but was unintelligible to me. One of the other players was new to the group and I found hir irritating. The second game was an old favorite. The third game was another old favorite, but with Irritating New Person. I slept better Tuesday night, but felt almost incapacitated Wednesday. I sat at my desk feeling stupid, unmotivated, depressed, and overwhelmed as long as I could but after lunch I decided to just go home. I lay in bed, reading, until H came home and that seemed to help.

H and I had a nice outing last night with friends. We did an escape room together, our second with this group. This one was non-linear so we had an hour to solve as many puzzles as we could. We ended up with an about-average total score, but we could have done more if we'd noticed one clue that was almost in plain sight. That adventure, plus frozen yogurt, plus a late dinner with craft beer, turned into a nice evening.

Today I've finally written a quiz that was the #1 thing on my to-do list for the week. I have been working on the green chemistry bibliography all week, reading about five or six articles each day. I started with the oldest (1970) and have been working forward chronologically so I'm up to about 2004 now. These are all laboratory exercises for undergraduates. Most of them are for organic chemistry, but a few have been appropriate for courses I teach. My goal is to find at least one to implement next fall.