Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

I became an Associate Professor of the Practice in January 2024. This means academic year (AY) 24–25 was the first time I had to negotiate the service requests and demands of an associate professor. Now that the academic year is over and I spent the last semester digesting the repercussions of those negotiations, I thought I’d write a blog post about it. My hope is that this blog post can serve as a case study on how workload changes when you become an associate. [ Also posted on Medium. ] First, my experience may not be yours, but I think sharing it would be useful to others. It gives you, my reader, a visceral sense of what could happen. Moreover, this blog post is a way for me to better process what happened. It also provides future me with a snapshot of what that first year was like and helps me better imagine the trade-offs and repercussions of my decisions. So this blog post is unlikely to be for everyone, dear reader. But for some of you, let me provide a bit more of a vivid vis...

So, first, I wrote about my general philosophy and mechanics of using my calendar for time management . Then, I introduced the idea of adding a one-hour, daily buffer event to allow some slack in my schedule . In the third post of this series, I discussed the usefulness of color to help visually see what kind of time commitments I have in a given week . For my final post of this series, I will give you my potentially oddest tactic: updating the calendar as time passes to reflect what actually happened. You can actually see it in the screenshot I shared in the last post about color . Updating my calendar as I go helps me mindfully notice where I spend my time so I can proactively alter course as needed while also serving as a quasi-log to better understand how I’m spending my time when I pause for a deeper historical reflection. [ Also posted on medium. ] To show more what I mean, here is a recent week before it actually happened. Note I have my calendars start on Mondays since the wee...

I thought I’d go back to the SIGCSE TS theme for this blog post, but with one of my conference reflections. Though it’s not really one of my classic reflections since this was my first hybrid conference ever, and I was also creating the hybrid experience! I also attended the hybrid Learning@Scale and ICER conferences as an online attendee. Hopefully, I’ll find time to write reflections for those too. But first, SIGCSE TS 2022 because it’s better late than never! [Also posted on  medium .] What Happened Responsibility mainly drove the sessions I attended rather than interest. During the pre-symposium on Wednesday, I attended an all-morning Peer Teaching Summit that I helped organize. The focus is on facilitating discussion among college teachers about undergrad teaching assistants (UTAs). We also had UTAs present to contribute. During the symposium, I was a panelist on “Technology we can’t live without! (Covid-19 edition).” I attended one special session as an attendee just out of ...

As I said in an earlier post, I’ve decided to forgo new year’s resolutions this year and try The Theme System from CGP Grey and Myke Hurley . You can get an overview from CGP Grey’s video . This post is to discuss my theme and a quantified self deep dive. The deep dive is into some of my personal data as my first steps toward my theme. [Also posted on  medium .] Theme: Being Well-Rested My semester’s theme is “Being Well-Rested.” Despite being long, this theme resonates with me and has a bunch of stuff behind it. So bear with me. The biggest thing impacting this semester is this spring semester is going to be rough. It is my first time teaching entirely online from start to finish because I was on parental leave last fall. Technically I taught online when Covid-19 hit us mid-Spring 2020, but while I did work right up to my baby’s birth, I wasn’t the main person running things for most of the online part of Spring 2020. I made decisions on the transition, finished the teaching mat...