I have my own domain name, because I am tired of having ads on this site. I want it to be a new spell … I should perhaps have gotten a new identity, but I got a domain name.
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This, of course, is why I am fixated on the question of curriculum. What I learned in school, both college and graduate school, was to keep coming up with jewel-like papers in fields and on topics unfamiliar to me. A huge collection on a broad spectrum. Then you write a dissertation in yet another largely new field. Then start working as a professor in another field again, and in a place where the ideal specialty would have been something other than what you’d settled on. The general lesson, the practice taught, was not to specialize but to flit about, and to have the object upon which you are concentrating yanked away again and again. “No, you must do this now.” “No, you must be that now.” “Be grateful that you are at least allowed to be, and do THIS now.”
Still, it is fun to explore and I am cross-disciplinary. I would just like to have more time to spend on MY combination of interests instead of the university’s idea of my combination of interests. Our guest this weekend works really hard because in his job, at an R1, he gets to use his judgment; I remember someone saying long ago, “we have to get you out of all this drudgery.”
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Yet I am changed, which is why I have the new URL, and I am trying to imitate our guest by doing as I see fit.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 