March 28, 2007: Faculty and Staff Appreciation Dinner

Dr. Grace invited me to this dinner a few weeks ago. I wasn't sure what it was, but I agreed to go. It sounded fun and it was a free dinner. It was a blast. Turns out a student organization puts on this dinner every year to appreciate faculty and staff. We all got a beautiful wooden frame that said UMF on it and had the date. I was taking pictures anyway, so I was going to have something fun to put in my frame.


One side of our table, L to R: Grace, Rhonda, Mary


The other side of our table, L to R: Kristin, Beth, Theresa

Little did we know that it was going to be the award-winning table! Our department really hauled in the awards!

L to R, Dept. Chair Rod, Beth, Grace, Kristin, Mary


The Blues Sisters L to R: Mary, Grace, Rhonda (who's actually holding someone else's award)


Kathy (early childhood) received two awards and Ralph (technology integration for elementary education and department chair) won one, too.

April 4, 2007: The Home Stretch

I have another 8am breakfast at The Homestead. This time, Maggy, who's on the committee and in the Department, said she would pick me up and take me to breakfast. That was very nice. And breakfast was nice, too. This time it was Ralph Granger who is the technology integration person for elementary ed (and also Department Chair for elementary ed), Dan who is the instructor for content literacy who let me teach his class the day before, and Maggy and her husband.

Though I had worked on this third presentation the night before (and for several days before that, too), it wasn't finished. So when we got back to the building, I had to scurry. I got everything up and running and was adding slides to the Keynote presentation as people were entering! Talk about cutting it close!! I started on time, but everyone had seen those last slides being created. :-)

Fortunately for me, it was an audience of people who aren't researchers, so I didn't have to get too specific about the statistics and the pure quantitative research but instead could focus on what did the research really say and what are all the fun stories that go with it. Shwew! I had fun for the third time!

I met with someone from the library who gave me the official tour of the Curriculum Center. I'd been there before, but was still oodles to learn. Then off to lunch at The Granary for one last celebratory meal. Sheena, who is on the University Culture Committee with me was having lunch at the same place so she came over and wished me luck. I think the committee was impressed that I knew someone outside of the department. :-)

Then I had to hurry back and sneak back into my own life and hurry up to teach my own classes! And suddenly, it was all over. The 48 hours flew by. I had a blast.

April 3, 2007: A Full Day of Interviewing

8am I was supposed to have breakfast with the Dean. It was snowing, so MRM drove me to the restaurant. I was ready to leave in time to walk on my own and was actually looking forward to walking in the snow. But when she offered, I jumped at it. I decided it really would be better to not have to walk if I didn't have to. Then it turned out the paper didn't come and she wanted to go to Mickie's Hallmark and get a paper. So we went to Mickie's (they open at 6am just for their newspaper-buying customers) and walked around until it was time for my breakfast.

Breakfast with the Dean was really nice. Breakfast was yummy, too. She dropped me off at the Education Center and then drove away to find a parking place. Oooh, getting door-to-door service is very nice!

I got ready for my presentation to the class. This presentation is actually a teaching opportunity and the 2 student members of the search committee are students in the class. It turns out I could've taught anything I wanted related to technology integration, but since I knew the class was content literacy, I tried to find out what that was and then talk about integrating technology into content literacy. I had borrowed a classroom set of Palms from UNT and brought them with me after the February break and will take them back when I return in April. How handy that I have them! Guess what technology the content literacy class is going to learn about. ;-) The beauty of that presentation is, the Palms are so captivating, it will make me look good. AND, they really are a viable and powerful tool for use in content literacy. I had a blast! I used the document camera to show what was happening. I have taught using Palms a million times with only talking people through it, but if you can add a visual component, both auditory and visual learners will have better success. I knew we had a document camera, so I tried it out earlier in the week so I'd be familiar with it and then actually taught the class how to use it and made them brainstorm ways they could integrate it into their content area teaching.

After that, the 2 student members of the committee took me to lunch in the dining hall and then gave me a campus tour. They knew I'd been here for 3 months so they asked me what I wanted to see. I had a list: dorms, the fitness center, Preble Hall, and Roberts. They were all places I hadn't seen. It turns out the 2 students are both Resident Assistants (RAs) so they gave me a GREAT tour of dorms. We hit the other spots on my list and even went to the Media Center in the basement of Roberts. Neither of them had been to that place and were just as fascinated as I was.

I had a little break and then met with the Department Chair, the Director of the Teaching and Learning Cooperative, the Director of Field Services for the College of Education, the Provost, and the professor who teaches special education for Secondary/Middle Education Department. Shwew! Then I met with the Practicum team before going to dinner with the Department Chair and his wife, and 2 other members of the department (both of whom are on the committee).

Day 2 over and successful!

April 2, 2007: Monday night

Walking home tonight, I felt like Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Ahead of me was a lamppost with snow slowly falling in the lamplight. The snow was wet and heavy so it made nice big flakes but it also got me wet, so I was holding my umbrella, just like Mr. Tumnus when Lucy found him at the entrance to Narnia.

I got home around 10, after my "Make Your Vita Come Alive" presentation and dinner at The Granary with three members of the committee. MRM had already gone to bed, but when I came in the door I heard her yell, "Is that my roomie?" And next thing I knew, she was coming down the stairs asking how it went. What a great roommate! It was great to tell her all about the presentation (and since she had seen the rehearsal she knew what I was talking about). And since she's a librarian, she actually understood my Mr. Tumnus analogy, too.

April 2, 2007: Canadian Geese on their Way to Canada

I saw a Robin on Sunday but on Monday morning on the way to work . . . Canadian Geese! You always hear about their flying south for the winter, but guess what. They fly north for the summer! On Tuesday, MRM took Cassie and Bennie walking down by the river and she said there was a huge flock of them there. Later, she even heard them talking about it on the radio. Apparently, it was an exceptionally large flock (or several flocks). I only saw one, but that's all I needed.

April 2-4, 2007: On-Campus Interview

I wrote this when I couldn't get to the Internet and then forgot about it. Ooops. That's why this is out of order. But it's going to get worse before it gets better. I'm waaaaay behind in posting. So much has been happening. :-) So just believe the dates you see in the Title or in the posting and not what the date is that I wrote it. And there's no guarantee that everything will be in chronological order. Sorry!

April 2, 3, and 4 was the beginning of the 48-hour marathon on-campus interview. I've been teaching the classes this semester for Mike Muir who is on sabbatical. He has also been approved for a 3 year leave of absence (well, technically a 2 year leave of absence with a 1 year extension) starting in fall 2007. They announced the 3 year position and I applied for it. (They did a national search.) I made it to the first round and had a phone interview. Now I made it to the next round. I'm one of two candidates who were invited to campus for further interviewing. I'm very impressed with how hard they work to make sure that an internal candidate has no advantage over an external candidate. Our schedules were exactly the same including a campus tour (I actually wanted to have that since I've never had an official one) and an orientation visit with the committee chair when you first arrive on campus. I had to give 3 presentations, eat 6 meals with search committee members and others, and have 6 half-hour interviews with various folks. It was exhilarating and exhausting simultaneously.

Sunday night, MRM, RBF, and Creston came to the Education Center and let me practice my first presentation on them. My schedule said, "Make Your Vita Come Alive." Eeek! On Monday night I was to meet with the search committee and present my vita. (If a resume is the highlights of your education and work experience, a vita is the opposite. It's the comprehensive list of everything you've ever done.)

Having been on several these search committees, I know how brilliant this plan is. Typically, some committee members read vitas thoroughly and some don't, and different people read different sections they like best, and on top of that, by the time you're down to campus visits, all the vitas you've looked at start to blend together. So by having each candidate present their vita, everyone's on the same page. It's a great idea . . . for the committee. But for the candidate . . . it's daunting.

I was making a Keynote presentation (Keynote is a presentation software like PowerPoint only better), and found myself continually going back to my theresaoverall.org website to find out dates and URL's and other info. So I finally thought, "Why don't I just present from my own website?" So that's what I did. And what was fun about that was that the time invested in the presentation was actually also an investment in something that I wanted to do anyway! I could've ended up with a presentation that I would only use once in my life. Instead, I got to play with my website. :-)

Anyway, MRM, RBF, and Creston brought a pizza and I had a chance to make sure I could get the presentation technology to work and to see if it was possible to talk about myself without sounding conceited. I gave the three of them a copy of the ad that appeared on higheredjobs.com and said, "Let me know when I'm done if I addressed all the qualifications they're looking for." On top of that, I was so glad to have someone time it 'cuz I really didn't know how long it was going to take. I encouraged them to ask questions along the way and they did. It was actually very fun!

And when it was time to do it for real on Monday night, it was a breeze. And it was also fun all over again. :-)