Hat trick

I've always thought the hockey term "hat trick" to mean a player scored three goals is a neat term, and I feel as if I get to do the happy dance for scoring one this week.

The first one was yesterday in class, when I casually asked my students before class started what they thought about the assignment that was due. (For the record, I had asked them to take a careful look at the way the introductions were written in papers they had chosen on their own to read.) I had rather expected them to grimace; historically, most of the papers students have critiqued have had pretty miserable introductions, so the students feel as if they are the ones who have failed.

Instead, one of them said, essentially, that he hadn't really thought much before about how the papers he's read are written, but thinking in terms of my guidelines made him see how much sense my thinking makes. Another student (whose experience with the assignment turned out to be much more frustrating than the first's) agreed: my thinking that papers need to be "designed," not just "written" really seemed to make sense to her, too.

The second happened shortly after I reached the office today. I have been trying—unsuccessfully—for several years now to convince our professional organization to streamline their guidelines for formatting references for papers in their publications; their excuses for not changing it are as frustrating to me as their confusing, inconsistent format.

When the university started making EndNote, a reference manager software, available a couple of years ago, I redoubled my efforts to make the changes in the format because the existing one simply couldn't be tamed enough to function with the software. To exacerbate the issue, the professional organization started using an online library that costs more than its previous system, but it has the advantage that it automatically dumps all the pertinent information from the website into EndNote.

If you're following this, the professional organization makes its publications available to members and schools through a website that dumps information into EndNote, which the university makes available to students for free, but the students can't use the software because the organization's format is too complex to translate. Boggles my mind.

However, I started around the beginning of the semester to see whether our campus thesis clerks would accept a streamlined version of the format for our students to use in their theses and dissertations—which would enable them to use the power of the online library and the bibliographic software to manage the references in their academic works. You've guessed by now: I met with a couple of them for over an hour this afternoon, and they were not only willing to listen to me but enthusiastic about the possibility of making this happen.

I pretty much bounced from the library (where I met with the thesis clerks) back to my office, and I was pretty cheerful about dispensing with my job tasks for the rest of the afternoon.

Then as I grabbed my goods to leave, one of the professors waved at me from outside our outer office doors, which had already gone into automagic lock mode. I teased her at first, then opened the door since I was headed out anyway. She said she had tried to catch me earlier in the day to show me a homework assignment she had returned earlier in the afternoon.

Since a fairly large number of our senior students had also attended the conference in Italy, the professor's "make up" assignment had required them to attend at least one professional presentation and write a summary and commentary on it. (I don't know whether they all had to attend the same session or not.) She said some of the students happily commented that they found the presentation interesting and helpful, although several considered it long, boring, and not well-developed.

The one that Ding had wanted me to see: "I'll bet if this guy had to take DJ's class, he'd be able to write a better paper!"

Hat trick!