Our Journey, Day 95

It's Day 95. I missed posting yesterday, due to being a bit under the weather. I had a really good conversation with my Book Club friends in the morning, but after that I was pretty wiped out and became a bit of a vegetable. After a lot of rest, I'm feeling reasonably good once again. But now that I've broken the ice of not posting a Journey entry every day, I may ease off that a bit and post slightly less frequently. There's still a lot of sturm und drang at Bemidji State, but I'm feeling less and less engaged in it. It brings me down, so I think I'll try to ignore it as much as possible. When you think about it, what could be worse motivation than being told your services are surplus to requirements but we're keeping you around for a year?

This morning I'm also having a bit of an emergency reorganization of my file system. I've been using iCloud (and paying $2.99 a month for extra space), but it's getting a bit flaky. Obsidian is less stable than I'd like it to be, which concerns me a lot because I've put a lot of important stuff in there! And it doesn't seem like I can easily recover these files. Apple has some extremely opaque system of how they manage cloud storage, which makes it difficult to pull content back to local once it's on iCloud. I really don't appreciate this attitude of "we're smarter so leave the driving to us". As far as I'm concerned, if my files are not 100% as available to me in the cloud as they are on my local drive, then the cloud has failed. So I'm beginning a process of switching to Dropbox, which I've also been paying for, but which seems to be a much more straightforward "remote hard drive" without all the stupid, opaque Apple "features" gumming up the works.

One of the things I need to work on, for my job applications, is a statement of my teaching philosophy. I've looked at other people's statements (they're often part of tenure and promotion applications), and I've got to say I have found them a bit off-putting. I don't really want to cite a bunch of studies, so I don't think I'm going to. I think I'll try to take a more practical approach and talk about the types of students I teach and what I think I can do for them. This varies, depending on who the students are and why they're in my classes. I'm not sure this is going to be the best way to present my ideas to a search committee. But I'm reminding myself that I'm selecting them as much as they're selecting me. If I try too hard to be somebody I'm not, then even if I get a job no one is going to end up happy.