With the permission of Donald Slavin, I am herewith forwarding his
Chemed-L post:
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2001 00:00:02 -0500
Sender: Chemistry Education Discussion List <CHEMED-L@MAILER.UWF.EDU>
From: Automatic digest processor <LISTSERV@MAILER.UWF.EDU>
Subject: CHEMED-L Digest - 7 Oct 2001 to 8 Oct 2001 (#2001-244)
To: Recipients of CHEMED-L digests <CHEMED-L@MAILER.UWF.EDU>
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 20:54:38 -0400
From: Donald Slavin <dslavin@CCP.CC.PA.US>
Subject: Re: WHY?
John Cooper . . . (see his PhysLrnR post "Re: Why.." of 8 Oct 2001
15:03:18 -0400) . . . is my kind of man, and I agree with him
completely.
We all know that students do not read and/or follow directions, but
administrators should know better.
I was Department Chair of Chemistry for 28 years. We have a very
large and busy department and there is plenty of work to do for the
chair without writing long involved reports for our administrators
which they apparently never read. Each year we had to write a very
long report about how we had or had not met our goals, what capital
items we purchased, who were our guest speakers, etc. etc.
All of this information was already available in various
administrative offices, but come hell-or-high-water we had to compile
it into one document. This document, once submitted, never again saw
the light of day as far as any of us could tell, and it did not seem
to have any bearing on budgets, promotions, or anything. In fact one
administrator actually told me that we had to write the report
because our chief academic officer liked to exert his authority over
department heads and this was one way of doing it.
Well two can play that game and I did. I began to list that we had
acquired such instrumentation as an infra-ray seismograph, a proton
electrodeposition chlorometer, and one year I listed a high
temperature cryogenic Avogadro photometer.
Along with legitimate speakers I listed Joseph Priestly, Victor
Grignard, Robert Boyle (to name a few). One year I inserted the line
(in German)"If you believe this you will believe anything." I was
never questioned, and nothing was omitted in the final report. I even
invented a fictitious person named Herr Professor Dr. Brau Tupple,
and to this very day he still receives mail, he has a mailbox, a gets
telephone calls, he is a regular speaker at the college, and he is
dearly loved by our chemistry faculty.
So we should not limit our discussion to students. Our peers and
super peers are also guilty.
Don Slavin
Donald G. Slavin
Professor of Chemistry
Community College of Philadelphia
Philadelphia, PA 19130