04-AUG-B-4

THE ELDP WEEKEND, IN ASHBURN, VIRGINIA

AND TURNING IN PAPERS, STATISTICS EXAMS

AND “DEBATE” PROJECTS,

WITH A FOLLOW-UP HARD HOT RUN

IN THE ANNAPOLIS TEN MILER

August 29, 2004

I have just driven back from Annapolis after the hard hot and hilly Annapolis Ten Miler (ATM) which got me out of bed even earlier than the last two days in residence at Ashburn VA had done. I have been in my weekend “residence” period at the GWU Ashburn VA campus, when I was in class from dark to dark—an easier thing to say in mid-winter than these long summer evenings as the close of August nears. The back-to-school has had the start up of medical school classes this past week, and a number of the freshmen whom I had met as Operation Smile officers were now making the big transition down to being freshmen medical students. I invited them to come on over to my house, by way of my picking them up first thing this morning and going out to Annapolis, but they had already learned that they should not try to run ten miles with me, and the first week taught them that they have to hit the books early and often, so they called to back out.

The weekend at school for me was the time to turn in the multiple papers that I had written, including the research paper that I had put together on the attitudes and motivations of the all student group I had just brought with me to Haiti. Having turned in the dissertation length manuscript all prepared with the original data from the questionnaires, I then received the heaviest reading and writing schedule yet, with multiple books and reports and group and individual long papers to be written in what we call the “fall semester” of three course. As an unpleasant surprise, we were given a statistics exam for which no one had prepared, and had been repeatedly assured that it was a group cooperative effort. Everyone complained bitterly about the surprise individual exam that no one anticipated nor had anyone prepared for it, so they made the group effort count for much more than the individual exam. I did not do very well on the individual exam (but I was in the middle of everyone else, despite the leading scorer on the first exam) but then we got into our group project, and it turned into a fiasco! So, there was a not very good outcome from the weekend exams.

In contrast, we were assigned the topics of a debate, and I anchored the team that made the “Pro” case that the leadership set the culture that determined such policies as the “glass ceiling “ and other human phenomena in organizations. Then when it came time to rebut the other side, I was the solo representative of our team, and in a series of “zingers” smashed the opposing team, with the sympathies that they were transparently arguing against their own convictions in any case. We had some reasonable discussions about the first two of a series of books on which we were scheduled to report, and then had a dozen more added to us in a new technique known as “Blackboard” a web site in which the teacher assigns further reading and assignments to be looked up and the references for the list of readings that can be downloaded or printed. Still, we were sold a book of readings for $74.00 that must number into the thousands of pages, and we will have to create not only readings, discussions, and papers but poster presentations from this source by the next sessions.

In the middle of this, I had received several calls that I could not know about, since there is no cell phone use allowed in the sessions, and one of my callers had desperate and very needy reasons to call back, which I did in the narrow window between being finished last night with the course and the four thirty AM rising to get out to Annapolis in time to pick up my number and run the fun, but very hot and wet ATM.

I should have been shopping, filling in the major blanks in my Derwood décor, and also cleaning house, and gussying it up for the appearance of the professional photographers who will be here on September 1 to do the photo shoot that will wind up in DG Liu’s calendar and a fee remodeling or architectural magazines. I am also supposed to be putting together presentation for the students on the Haiti trip, Himalayan excursion and the other potential trips forthcoming next year, with a Power Point project and a special book due from me for the Taiwan repeat performance on an altogether new and different subject which I have not prepared and on which I am not at all enthusiastic.

To this mix, add the new information that I am suddenly to get the “on-line editing” of the chapters of the book I had pushed to completion four years ago—“Surgery and Healing in the Developing World. With the long time in which the publisher was out of contact and unresponsive to calls, letters and emails with each of their own addresses having changed, I then hear that I am to quickly get all the contributors to rapidly update their chapters to get it quickly revised for publication. It is disingenuous for them to suggest that I am the one holding it up, since when I looked on the web page, each of the chapters had been posted there only the day before, but many are missing and nearly ALL the authors are unreachable since the passage of so much time has had all the email addresses through which I had reached them bounce. One of them, the one who had been the earliest submission of a chapter denied having any knowledge of or any input into the book, despite my immediate response to him shoeing his chapter on the surgery of sepsis had been among the earliest completions—now so long ago he had forgotten! The hurry-up command is seen in the attached 04-AUG-B-3 chapter. Now, when I am in the thick of the fall blitz of travel and the ELDP commitments with other brand new presentations to prepare, I am forced to scramble into what I had pushed to completion four years ago with no progress despite repeated inquiries in that interval. Such is the hurry up and wait system I have learned for publishers generally, but at least there is some hope for this one seeing the light of day, unlike the other completed books which have completed all the labor intensive process, and at the final part that publisher was responsible for, they simply withdrew saying they no longer felt like printing the books, since they were dated now by the very delay they had imposed!

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