Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Photocopying exams

 This blog post is part of a series designed to give some of the backstory for an upcoming post.

When I arrived at the cavernous room in the basement to photocopy my final exams, someone was using all the machines. She told me she'd be using them for a few hours. She was the administrative assistant for a professor in the physics department.

We started chatting, and I mentioned that I was in the math department. She said that the last time she was in the photocopy room, she was shocked to find a young assistant professor of mathematics copying his own exams. "That's not right," she said.

I replied, "In the math department, even very senior faculty, such as myself, have to photocopy our own exams." From what she said next, it was clear that she (still) thought I was a secretary, copying someone else's exams. I tried a few more times with no success, and eventually I gave up trying to convince her that I was faculty.