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Jul. 22nd, 2013 08:13 pmI have now been to my last Faculty Affairs office retreat, and I'm glad this was the last one, because it was nowhere near as useful as the others have been. If this is how they're going to go from now on, I won't miss them.
Last year somebody went to a leadership class and came back with a Communication Skills Diagnostic, which promptly got integrated into last year's retreat and was interesting as a one-off concept. This year they brought it back (which I think was unnecessary) and made it the focus of the retreat (which I think was thoroughly unnecessary), and it didn't do anything useful other than make us all argue about whether being Planners is a reflection of who we are, or a reflection of who we have to be in order to do our jobs. So we argued about that for a good chunk of the morning and didn't arrive at any useful conclusions, nor did we come up with any useful ways to apply the results to anything else. At least after that we all went to the annual summer outing at the Dean's house and there was way too much food and a pool to dip feet (and toddlers, of which there were five or six, and teenagers, of which there were four or five) in, and that was nice.
I may be being overly harsh on the retreat, since today started at 4:30 this morning when Lily suddenly developed a burning need to wake me up, get scritched, settle down for three minutes, jump off the bed, come back again five minutes later and start all over again. She nearly got flying lessons, except that I couldn't move that way because the left side of my neck and my left shoulder are locked up with muscle spasms. So they're sore, and they wake me up when I want to roll over, and then Lily won't let me go back to sleep, and then I get up and go off to the retreat and it takes me an hour and a quarter to get from Brighton to Cambridge. So I might have started off on the wrong foot just a bit.
I'm still happy with the weather. Right now I wish I could bottle the breeze and sell it in Mississippi or someplace where a cool breeze doesn't happen in the summer. (I'd say Saharan Africa, except I don't want to get into the whole question of taxes on international sales.) Failing that, I think I'll merely meander into the other room and enjoy the breeze in there.
Last year somebody went to a leadership class and came back with a Communication Skills Diagnostic, which promptly got integrated into last year's retreat and was interesting as a one-off concept. This year they brought it back (which I think was unnecessary) and made it the focus of the retreat (which I think was thoroughly unnecessary), and it didn't do anything useful other than make us all argue about whether being Planners is a reflection of who we are, or a reflection of who we have to be in order to do our jobs. So we argued about that for a good chunk of the morning and didn't arrive at any useful conclusions, nor did we come up with any useful ways to apply the results to anything else. At least after that we all went to the annual summer outing at the Dean's house and there was way too much food and a pool to dip feet (and toddlers, of which there were five or six, and teenagers, of which there were four or five) in, and that was nice.
I may be being overly harsh on the retreat, since today started at 4:30 this morning when Lily suddenly developed a burning need to wake me up, get scritched, settle down for three minutes, jump off the bed, come back again five minutes later and start all over again. She nearly got flying lessons, except that I couldn't move that way because the left side of my neck and my left shoulder are locked up with muscle spasms. So they're sore, and they wake me up when I want to roll over, and then Lily won't let me go back to sleep, and then I get up and go off to the retreat and it takes me an hour and a quarter to get from Brighton to Cambridge. So I might have started off on the wrong foot just a bit.
I'm still happy with the weather. Right now I wish I could bottle the breeze and sell it in Mississippi or someplace where a cool breeze doesn't happen in the summer. (I'd say Saharan Africa, except I don't want to get into the whole question of taxes on international sales.) Failing that, I think I'll merely meander into the other room and enjoy the breeze in there.
