The madness descends soon

Classes have started. We’re 3 days in, and so far I’m only 2 days behind, so I’m doing well. I’ve given myself a few weeks of grace to get settled into the routine before the wild flurry of travel begins, so I thought this would be as good a time as any to do a data dump of my travel schedule.

9-10 February: Darwin Day, Moscow, Idaho/Pullman, Washington
11 February: Florida? (I’ve got it marked in my calendar; if you’re the organizer, contact me soon to work out details!)
16-18 February: UNLV, Las Vegas
1-4 March: Council for Secular Humanism, Orlando, Florida
12 March: South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD
15 March: Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Calgary
24 March: REASON RALLY, Washington DC
25-26 March: American Atheists National Convention, Washington DC
30-31 March: Origins Conference, Morris, MN (Local! Yay! Also featuring Neil Shubin)
7 April: University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah
13-15 April: Global Atheist Convention, Melbourne, Australia
21 April: NECSS, New York
28 April: Atheistfest, Madison, Wisconsin
18-19 May: Imagine No Religion 2, Kamloops, BC, Canada
25-27 May: European Atheist Convention, Cologne, Germany

There are still a few things to work out; I reserved a few days for Florida there and then somehow lost track of the organizer and other information, so help, tell me what I’m doing! I’ve also had a few feelers from Iceland to take a detour on the way back from Germany, I’ll get back to you soon and see what we can do. There’s also one more invitation pending some negotiation, but otherwise I’m booked up solidly so far.

Maybe I’ll see a few of you around! If I’m looking a bit haggard, don’t ask, or I’ll just wave this schedule at you.

Today is the first day of classes for the spring term

All you professors out there know the existential dread associated with the start of a new term — you’ve only just now cleared away most of the accumulated drudgery of the last term, and now here comes a new one, with all of the work associated with that. And you’re sitting there now with your sets of syllabi, each with dates locked in that represent fresh inundations of exams to grade and papers to read. You’re standing on the shore looking out at the maelstrom, bracing yourself to swim into the heart of it, where you will be buffeted and swirled about and at the end of it, spat out onto another shore to face another in the next term.

And my special horror is that I’m teaching a brand new course this term: 3 new lectures to develop each week, mad scrambling in between to grasp the new ideas in the scientific literature. It’s madness. What was I thinking when I agreed to this? Was I strung out on reefer? Blasé in decadent insolence, my mind half-lost in absinthe-fueled dreams? Or manic on meth, so confident in my drug-induced megalomania that I casually agreed to conquer everything? I’m going to be a gibbering wreck come May and sweet relief.

Oh, well. I’ve survived 37 semesters like this one so far; I’ll make it through another one.

Probably.

I think. It could be the psychosis talking.

Collaborators!

We’re on our way to Minneapolis this morning to conspire with a Skepchick, Kammy, on our plans for Convergence. It’s true: not only does it take 6 months of preparation to organize a kick-ass party at a SF convention, but FtB and Skepchicks are deeply in cahoots. You might really want to be in Bloomington in July for this one.

If you have event suggestions, too, they’re welcome. What do you want to see FtB and the Skepchicks do that would draw you out here (we already have 3 days of panels on science and skepticism, so don’t bother telling us to do that!)

All right, get off the net all of you

It’s Christmas eve! Spend some time with friends and family!

My wife and I just had a lovely dinner with the kids at an Indian restaurant in Madison (Maharaja, highly recommended), and now my daughter has fixed us all glasses of potent glögg…after which we’ll pass out somewhere. Don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing! Go do it instead!

Raising money for SSA

I’m appearing on another of these blogtv thingies this weekend — Saturday at 10pm Central.

On Saturday 10 December, SkepticTV goes live for a whole 12 hours, to raise money for the Secular Student Alliance.

STARTING TIMES:
8pm European Central Time
7pm Greenwich Mean Time
2pm Eastern Standard Time (USA)
1pm Central
12 Noon Mountain Time
11am Pacific Standard Time
Sunday 5am Eastern Standard Time (Australia)

We’ll be joined by a great many guests including PZ Myers, the League of Reason, The Jinn and Tonic Show, Trolling With Logic (and special guests Damon Fowler and Joe Zamecki), as well as some of YouTube’s finest. There will even a sneak preview of Holy Hallucinations 29 by TheLivingDinosaur, but only if you help us raise a lot of money!

Where: http://www.blogtv.com/people/skeptictv

We also have an eBay auction, where items will be going up during the show. Please check our page regularly:
http://www.ebay.com/

Our star lot is this pencil sketch of Charles Darwin, kindly donated by IncredibleMouse5:
http://www.incrediblemouse.com/charles_darwin_drawing

Our FirstGiving page for donations within the US:
http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/skeptictv/skeptictv12hourforthessa

Donations from outside the US should go directly to the SSA:
https://www.secularstudents.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1

I’m done, almost!

Oh, man. I just finished my last lecture for this semester — this was a rough term, and I feel like I just barely dragged myself over the finish line. The big strain came from the fact that I revamped everything: I completely changed the content of my neurobiology course, with a new textbook, a new emphasis, and a different direction for the labs, and some stuff worked and some stuff failed catastrophically (the last few weeks of the lab in particular were a disaster). I offer this course again in two years, and I think I can fix the bad parts by then. I also patched up a lot of material in my Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development course; not so much changes in lecture content, but stretching to reach out and get the students interacting more. That worked entirely — I got some significant improvements in average exam scores which I will take complete credit for, although it could just be that our incoming freshman class was full of geniuses this year. I also got much more disciplined in the writing course, and imposed a whole series of step-by-step deadlines on the big term paper. It required a bit more effort during the term, but the payoff is now — I’m not getting any papers dumped cold on my desk for grading, they’ve all been fussed over already.

It’s tiring, though. Show business is hard work; getting up and doing 4 or 5 lectures a week (and about half of them new) is exhausting. It would be much easier to just write this stuff. Why didn’t anyone tell me that a career in science involved so much singing and dancing?

My neuro students are all done with their bloggery now, and here’s the final list of neurobiology weblogs I forced them to start. Some might fade away after this, others may move on to new sites, some might keep going. However it works out, this can be my little public monument to Fall 2011. Stop by and congratulate them on surviving a whole semester with Old Man Myers.

Next: I’ve got final exams to give, a nice break to catch up on deadlines, and lots of preparation for next term to do. Spring will be worse, with an all-new, starting from scratch course in cancer biology to teach.

For now, I’m going into seclusion for a bit to wrap up some extracurricular writing that must get done right now. It’s not much of a celebration yet.

(Also on FtB)

I’m done, almost!

Oh, man. I just finished my last lecture for this semester — this was a rough term, and I feel like I just barely dragged myself over the finish line. The big strain came from the fact that I revamped everything: I completely changed the content of my neurobiology course, with a new textbook, a new emphasis, and a different direction for the labs, and some stuff worked and some stuff failed catastrophically (the last few weeks of the lab in particular were a disaster). I offer this course again in two years, and I think I can fix the bad parts by then. I also patched up a lot of material in my Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development course; not so much changes in lecture content, but stretching to reach out and get the students interacting more. That worked entirely — I got some significant improvements in average exam scores which I will take complete credit for, although it could just be that our incoming freshman class was full of geniuses this year. I also got much more disciplined in the writing course, and imposed a whole series of step-by-step deadlines on the big term paper. It required a bit more effort during the term, but the payoff is now — I’m not getting any papers dumped cold on my desk for grading, they’ve all been fussed over already.

It’s tiring, though. Show business is hard work; getting up and doing 4 or 5 lectures a week (and about half of them new) is exhausting. It would be much easier to just write this stuff. Why didn’t anyone tell me that a career in science involved so much singing and dancing?

My neuro students are all done with their bloggery now, and here’s the final list of neurobiology weblogs I forced them to start. Some might fade away after this, others may move on to new sites, some might keep going. However it works out, this can be my little public monument to Fall 2011. Stop by and congratulate them on surviving a whole semester with Old Man Myers.

Next: I’ve got final exams to give, a nice break to catch up on deadlines, and lots of preparation for next term to do. Spring will be worse, with an all-new, starting from scratch course in cancer biology to teach.

For now, I’m going into seclusion for a bit to wrap up some extracurricular writing that must get done right now. It’s not much of a celebration yet.

(Also on Sb)