Suicide Prevention - Getting Help

There were a lot of absences from my most recent exams. Mostly people were sick, although someone did admit to sleeping in (although that was a result of a different problem). So I had to deal with a lot of emails, explaining over and over again exactly what the procedure is when you miss an exam--even though the syllabus has all of that information there. It got to the point where, out of frustration, I just stopped checking my email over the weekend.

When I went back to my email, there were almost two dozen more messages to slog through. One of them, however, was different. It was from the parent of one of my students, explaining how their child had tried to commit suicide. It was quite a sinking feeling to read this email, even though the person didn't succeed. I want to raise awareness about the issue, and the resources that are available to help.

• I Need Help Right Now -- call 780-492-HELP (780-492-4357)
  
  
• SU Peer Support Centre -- "Peer support services for students, or anyone who needs someone to talk to, in-person or over-the-phone"
  
  
• University Wellness Services - Mental Health Centre -- has psychological and psychiatric services available
  
  
• Suicide Awareness & Prevention -- includes risk factors, warning signs, and how you can help

The Electronic Grades

Last term, I submitted my final grades on paper, just like I've done since the first class I taught in 1994. Some things have changed (we're using letter grades now, not the 9-point system, and the format of the forms changed in the 2000s, wooo!), but the process is still the same: I have to take the grades from my spreadsheet file and write them down, one by one, on pieces of paper which I have to physically hand in. It's bizarre to consider that, for courses that have multiple choice exams, the marks live in a digital world from the point that they're scanned onwards. Well, up until the time I have to write them down on paper.

Finally, at long last, we're moving into the 21st century. Starting March 12, instructors can (must!) enter final grades electronically. No more paper forms, no more writing things down. And no more transcription errors. There was this one time that I mis-copied a grade over. From that person's grade down, almost everyone was assigned an incorrect grade. There is a way to fix that--Change of Grade forms--but it was a nightmare for everyone involved. (I was told that this happens often, but that didn't make me feel any better.)

That's not to say that errors won't happen--not all UofA computer systems sort student names the same way. Test scoring, for example, puts Da Silva before D'Allaird, for example. This is opposite to how Microsoft Excel (and the rest of the universe) works. Some advice: if your name has a space, an apostrophe, or a hyphen in it, check your marks very carefully. Even capitals in the middle of the name can throw off the sort.

From the information given so far, it looks like I can click to enter each individual mark or, thankfully, upload a spreadsheet file. The system even allows marks to be imported from Moodle's gradebook. Unfortunately, I think we're still not allowed to post final grades on Moodle. Still, students should notice that final grades will be available on Bear Tracks sooner than before. It's nice to be in the 21st century.

Why aren't you studying?

The BitLocker

On January 5, 2012, the UofA announced new information security policies for the campus in order to comply with Alberta Government requirements that all organizations adopt standard information security controls. As noted on the UofA’s Colloquy Blog, staff are legally required to secure sensitive information. (Yes, I have “sensitive information:” spreadsheets with students’ ID numbers and marks. Potentially, emails are also sensitive information.)

Importantly, this policy is not limited to University-owned laptops (from the memo sent out by the Vice-Provost, Information Technology):

Personally owned and other external laptops storing University personal and/or sensitive information must also undergo disk encryption according to the standard.

That’s right--by UofA policy, I must not only secure, but encrypt my own laptop. This fact has royally pissed off a lot of faculty.

The “disk encryption standard,” according to the Laptop Security and Encryption Standard and Guidelines on the VPIT’s website says:

a) Laptops and other mobile computing devices must run a current, fully patched, and modern operating system at all times.
b) Users must store documents on laptops in a single specific area only (such as a home folder or directory).
c) The contents of the disk storage area specified in b) must be securely encrypted.
d) Laptops and other mobile computing devices must be configured to ask for a password after any period of inactivity, including after resuming from suspend/standby/sleep/hibernate status and on operating system start-up.

Let’s see, a) check, b) check, c) um, no, d) check. Sigh, I guess I have to encrypt my laptop.

The University Encryption Standards and Instructions on the VPIT’s website states:

The University advises that BitLocker must be configured to use the “TPM + PIN” authentication method.

Unfortunately, BitLocker is only available in Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate--and I’m only running Professional. Because it’s a personal laptop, I can’t buy Win7 Enterprise, so I had to upgrade to Ultimate. Naturally, the Bookstore was out of copies of the Win7 Ultimate upgrade disks when the policy came out. Once again, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Eventually, they got copies in, so I was good to go.

Encrypting my 500 GB drive took a while; I let the process run while I marked exams. It finally finished, so I rebooted and...error messages everywhere, apps crashing, WTF? My system runs the OS off an SSD and all my data is on a separate, larger hard drive. BitLocker was supposed to pop up a password request during the boot process, but it didn’t because my system--a high-end Dell XPS, only about a year old--doesn’t have a TPM chip. For that, you have to buy Dell’s business-oriented (and very expensive) Latitude line.

It was possible to “unlock” my data drive, but only after bootup was complete, which is too late to get all my apps running properly--they already started up and crashed. Nothing in Microsoft’s documentation makes this clear. Grr!!

I removed BitLocker’s encryption. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to downgrade to Win7Pro, so I’m stuck with Win7Ultimate. I wasted hours of time and a hundred bucks and still don’t have anything encrypted. I'm still going to encrypt my computer, but with some other disk encryption software. Thanks for nothing, Microsoft. Nice job, UofA policy.

Why aren’t you studying?

The Open Comments: 4

It's that time of term again: I'm marking midterms. So I'm going to open this post up to your comments. Can you hear me okay in class? I SAID, CAN YOU HEAR ME OKAY IN CLASS!?

What about those double screens in the classrooms? Are they driving you crazy? (Do you try to concentrate on one, but then keep sneaking a look at the other one, just to see if you missed something?)

Why aren't you studying?

The Green and Gold Week

With the actual Winter Term Reading Week coming up, here's an update on the proposed Fall Term Reading Week. It now has the name "Green and Gold Week" attached (or, maybe, "Co-curricular Week"). The final documentation was supposed to go to University Governance last month. A recent email was sent around listing some of the main points in the proposal:

The break will take place in conjunction with Remembrance Day (November 11th).

To achieve the break, two instructional days will be dropped and classes will begin one day earlier (normally on the Tuesday after Labour Day).

Winter Term will also drop two instructional days, to ensure consistency between the terms. The timing of these days is subject to discussions with the Office of the Registrar.

The break will [...] be filled with academic and non-academic programming.

The exam schedule and date of the end of classes should not change.

I'm not crazy about losing instructional days. That will mean cutting out lecture material, which is always agonizingly hard to do.

During Reading Week, I'm not usually around--not even for office hours. (I'm not going to spend more time commuting than I am helping students. Oh, and also: no students show up to office hours during Reading Week.)

What would you do during a Green and Gold Week? Attend some of the academic and/or non-academic programming? Catch up on studying? Catch up on sleep?

Why aren't you studying?

The Bookstore

I've had some problems with the Bookstore in the past, but those were issues with the price of textbooks. This year, I had a whole new set of problems.

As you may have read, the UofA changed how it deals with copyright; the deadline for the old regime expiring was August 31, 2011. This change has meant a great upheaval in how instructors prepare coursepacks. Previously, we'd submit a list of readings to SUBPrint, and they would handle the copyright side of things via the UofA's agreement with the licensing agency Access Copyright. But as of September 1, 2011, that agreement no longer holds; SUBPrint now has to contact each individual rightsholder and negotiate an agreement with them. This is probably just as much fun as it sounds. Yeesh!

I submitted my PSYCO 494 coursepacks for Fall, 2011 in early August, and I was warned by SUBPrint that they couldn't simply print off more coursepacks if more students were allowed into my class in September. OK, fine. I asked if it would be a good idea if I also submitted my PSYCO 365 coursepacks for Winter, 2012 before the August 31 deadline. The response was a very desperate, pleading, "YES!" I'd used this coursepack before and hadn't planned on making any major changes to it, so I submitted it, feeling very pleased with myself for being so darn clever. How many coursepacks did I need? Well, the class is capped at 125, so that's exactly how many copies SUBPrint made, and sent them off to the Bookstore.

September came and I ended up with 29 students in PSYCO 494, just one shy of the cap of 30. Whew. Fast forward to January, 2012. The Department bumped enrollment in PSYCO 365 from 125 to 130, but I was confident there would be enough coursepacks; I knew there would be at least 5 students from last year selling their old coursepacks. So I was a bit concerned to hear from an increasing chorus of students that they could not find the coursepack at the Bookstore.

As I was off campus, I called the Bookstore and asked how many copies they had. The nice person who answered the phone went type-type-type and answered "there are 65 left." What the...? Why can't anyone find them? "Hmm," I hmmed to the nice person, "would you mind seeing how many there are actually out on the shelf?" She went away and I waited and waited. And waited. On hold, I killed time by checking my email. She finally came back, sheepishly admitting that there were no coursepacks to be found. As I was waiting, I'd gotten an email from a student who was told by a Bookstore manager that they had "run out" and that the instructor should "get more copies printed." What the...? That's exactly what I couldn't do. And what happened to the ones that were printed off over the summer?

Dialling the phone like a mad-phone-dialling person, I left messages for the SUBPrint manager and Bookstore manager. An agonizing few hours later I got a response: the coursepacks had been located. Where were they? In a box. On the floor. Outside the manager's office.

This ridiculous episode has shaken my confidence in the Bookstore--to the point of me really not trusting them at all any more. There are consistent problems every term getting enough copies of textbooks in (most recently, it happened once in Fall, 2011 term and again this Winter, 2012 term); they usually blame the publisher for shorting their orders. Although I suppose that might happen, I don't know why the Bookstore isn't wising up to this, if it keeps happening.

There apparently is a new director at the Bookstore. Maybe things will improve. I've been told by one of the Bookstore managers that:

"Under our new director, the Bookstore is working on several course material improvements including an enhanced web-based ordering service."

Oh yeah, the crappy web-based ordering service. Don't even get me started on that. My confidence is at a low ebb already.

What problems have you had with the Bookstore?

Why aren't you studying?

Loepelmann's Law

It's one of those weeks. I've been clobbered by a nasty cold, my car had a near-death experience (good-bye old clutch, I'll miss you--good times!), and all this talk of budget cuts has me anxiously looking over my shoulder even though my current contract goes until 2013.

*sigh*

I talk about a number of scientific laws in my classes (oy, there are some crappy web pages out there that fail spectacularly at differentiating between a law and a theory--sorry, Wikipedia, no love for you this time). These include Weber's Law, Fechner's Law, and Stevens's Law. (Haven't gotten around to adding Fitts's Law but that's another show.) These ones stick out in my mind because they're so, well...memorable. That's because they've got the names of the people who discovered them in the name of the law itself.

It seems that people who discover new things get those things named after them. I call this "Loepelmann's Law."

Thank you and good night.

(BTW, if you want to have a mathematical theorem named after you--only £15--check out TheoryMine.)

Why aren't you studying?