NaBloPoMo 25 -- dinner and big cats

NaBloPoMo 25 -- dinner and big cats

So I am at a friend's/adopted sister's for Thanksgiving. Me, her, and her husband. And the cats. One is rather large .. 27 lbs and about 3 feet long, not including his tail. The other is also not small, but only in a normal not-small-cat kind of way. He's also very orange. We've been talking about life, and teaching, and departmental politics. One of the nice things is that both of them are modernists who sometimes do American history. So they can offer sensible opinions of what normal methodology is for people in their fields. This has been really helpful, both in validating my feelings that all of the people in my department don't mean the same thing when we use the same words (for example, in my world, document analysis almost always requires a close reading of the text, as well as demonstrating an understanding of the context; in theirs, it's far more about context, and close readings are optional at best). It's also been very helpful for my understanding where some of my Americanist colleagues are coming from. Apparently, when Americanists go to conferences, they don't really quiz each other on the use of evidence the way medievalists often do. For me, this is a little weird. I mean, if I went to a panel on Merovingian bishops, I'd expect to hear references to Gregory or maybe Venantius, or... you get the idea. There's a general sort of corpus of narrative history that most of us are at least vaguely familiar with, and we examine the use of those sources as much as anything else, I think. But apparently, this isn't true in all subfields. This explains a lot to me about some of my department's dynamics. It also means I need to re-think some of the ways I teach the methods course, so that the students working with the Americanists will have a better idea of what they need to do on their theses...

ETA: It's interesting that my friend described my approach to what I think of as documents or sources as more akin to a literary approach to texts: very old-fashioned; something that might have been acceptable 40 years ago, but would never be published today. In fact, she intimated, it was like the approach of lit people, where everything is reduced to a text, and context occasionally is missed out. For my part, I said I thought that the other approach was clearly good for synthesis and focusing on context, but the actual primary source evidence seemed to be getting short shrift. In some ways, it seems to me that it's the difference between starting with the primary sources and working outward and starting with a question and the scholarship in working inward. There should be a conversation between the two, obviously, and I doubt I will ever be convinced that the old-fashioned approach is therefore less worthy (in part because I will still always have the attitude of someone who is expected to have more tools in her toolbox to start with, but is also big enough to allow for more tools). But it is probably good to get the perspective of someone else, because this really plays into ideas of academic rigor and assessment.

NaBloPoMo 23 -- Grading Jail

NaBloPoMo 23 -- Grading Jail

That's where I am. Forever. With a cranky cat. And a pleasant and sleepy cat. Guess which one is lurking over my grading! The weekend will be too short. Aargh!

NaBloPoMo 21 -- back home

NaBloPoMo 21 -- Home again

Hey all, I'm forgiving myself for the lack of blogging because I was at a conference. I was at the SEMA conference, enjoying myself with people I like. There were some great people there, and some good papers -- especially those I heard on Saturday morning, which included a very nicely put-together one on Hildemar of Corbie and the construction of monastic space and my favorite (and not because it was given by The Cranky Professor): one on Agobard of Lyons and the Magonians. It wasn't really about space aliens, which made it all the better because we got to talk about them anyway.

Given the subject of the conference, it wasn't surprising that there were lots of papers that referred to revenants, ghosts, and other such things. Nor was it a big shock that many discussions included references to the impending Zombie Apocalypse. I was polite, and did not correct the person who used I Am Legend as an example of a zombie story. People. Read the book before seeing the movie. There were also some papers that had some iffy bits, I think. I'm not convinced we should consider John Donne to be a Tudor writer. Really, I think he is much more representative of the unpleasant James Stuart and his religion than any of the Tudors... In fact, there were a couple of lit papers I heard that could have been much stronger had the authors been better versed in the history they used to attempt to contextualize their arguments.

It's a funny thing: most of my friends who are lit people are really pretty damned good with the history. Most of the historians I know who use literature are pretty good at using it, too -- although I will admit that most of us tend to rely on the safer historical interpretations. Because of that, I tend to think of all medievalists and classicists to be interdisciplinary types as a rule. This experience reminds me that interdisciplinarity is not merely about using each other's sources, but having a rather firmer understanding of and rooting in each other's disciplines. It also reminded me that honestly? periodization across the disciplines can be sort of difficult.

Anyway, it was a very great time, and my esteemed colleague from VA Tech and Modern Medieval put on a really good conference. There were blogger meetups without planning them, and I got to report some fun stuff back to a person who probably needs a new nickname, so that was nice.

Otherwise, my weekend also included some interesting prospects on the personal front...maybe. And I have now officially started to worry about my writing commitments.

NaBloPoMo 15 -- halfway done

NaBloPoMo 15 -- halfway done

You know, I haven't posted about X in a while. But you know, he is the best proof in the world that sometimes recognizing a bad marriage, or bad compatibility for marriage, is a good thing. We are so much better as friends than we were as spouses. I appreciate him far more as a friend, and he seems to notice far more about my moods than he did as a husband. I'm sorry it didn't work out, but very glad and very thankful that we still have a relationship that is well worth having. I'm also glad that he has a very cool fiance who likes me :-)

Sometimes, life can work out for the best.


All of this is to say that it is good when we are reminded of the things that *are* good in life.

I had two of those moments today, which was a completely depressing and infuriating day in several other ways. I left class disheartened because my students Just. Did. Not. Get. It. In a way that I could not have anticipated.

I mentioned this to a sort-of colleague I met on the staircase (sort-of, because he's another academic, a Political Scientist, but he doesn't teach at SLAC. He's the President's husband who sometimes works on campus). Anyway, I mentioned the thing -- the students really did not get that the Pact of Umar was not something everybody agreed to so that people of different religions could live together in respect and peace, even though they knew it was imposed on Christians after a conquest!.

And he said something that helped to crystallize the issue for me: "They don't understand power."

And so much fell into place for me. I really need to change some of my teaching, especially in those classes where I can because the outcomes are things like "gain multiple perspectives and demonstrate global awareness." It may just be a good idea to start off the class with a set of theoretical propositions and explanations. What happens in pre-20th C wars? What is slavery, really? How do different cultures define race and ethnicity?

hmmmm

NaBloPoMo 14 -- teaching reading

NaBloPoMo 14 -- teaching reading

(note: flashy auras happening, so spelling/typing likely to be affected)

Hmm. I'm teaching methodology and historiography next fall. Not my turn. Grrr. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to undoing some less-than-effective teaching. Some of that is down to me. I don't think it's that I've been doing things badly, but I haven't really seen what wasn't working as clearly or as soon as I'd like.

But I need to make some changes even sooner than fall. Next term, I'm going to have to start changing my assignments for reading and analyzing primary sources. I'd been focusing on getting students to talk about what sorts of evidence a text could provide, and put the text in context. Mostly, I can get them to talk about authorship and purpose, but more and more, the students aren't connecting those things to the text. There's no overall understanding. So starting next semester, the exercises will focus on context and really giving detailed discussions of how the document fits into the time period -- as well as some discussion of what's going on in them. And I will probably also have to get them to write out vocabulary lists, to be honest. I won't quiz them, but my students are not so good with words.


In the methods class -- and in my future upper-division classes -- I will be working more and more on getting them to read secondary works critically. I was trying to figure out when I learned to read articles, and I never was taught. But as an undergrad, we were assigned a lot of what were then DC Heath Readers (called Problems in European History). For those unfamiliar, the readers focused on a time period and/or series of major questions, and were made up of seminal and/or famous works (abridged) that addressed those things. We were never asked to compare the view of X versus Y, but we were asked to reiterate and discuss the various arguments. So I guess there was some sort of absorption of the ideas of argument and historiography without explication. Me, I'm going to be more explicit and those things are going to be integrated into every class I can manage, and if I can't get pre-assembled ones, I'll just choose articles myself. I'm also going to have to push the vocab skills and the "look up what you don't know/understand" skills. Most of my students simply don't look things up -- they just keep reading. I'm gong to have to tell them (many times) that I still run into references and allusions I don't get, and *i* look things up. And I will have to teach them to recognize the signposts of academic writing: fore example, when do quotes indicate a quote, and when do they (also) indicate an allusion to a larger idea? And what are hermeneutics?


However.... before doing that, I think I will ask you all to help me. Do you know of any similar collections or titles? Do you have ideas of controversies or subjects on which there are clearly very different interpretations that are also likely to be interested to undergrads? Leave recs in the comments, and I will put together one big "sources for teaching" post!

NaBloPoMo 2010 -12 -- migraines

NaBloPoMo 2010 -12 -- migraines

This is not my typical post. It's not about teaching or history or anything else like that. It is instead all about me. I'm blogging it because honestly, when you only have your own body to compare with, it's hard to know what is normal. So I suppose I might be some freak of nature and you will all run screaming the next time you see me. But probably not.

This odd thing happened to me at the therapist's the other day. She suggested that my brain sounded like it had some form of ADHD, but then retracted that when I pointed out that I can totally concentrate, sometimes almost obsessively, on one thing for literally hours on end, once I'm stuck in. This is so true that I can actually forget to drink or eat. But most of the time, my brain is spinning. I can feel myself trying to shove things aside till I'm in something like 'the zone.' I am not so much able to live in the moment, because there is always so much happening. My students have been known to tease me because I can be writing on the board and talking and, mid-sentence, tell a student to stop texting or sim, and then go back to the same idea. Or I can be mid-sentence and have an image flashing through my mind that takes me horribly off course, and sometime after a digression into why they should all see Casablanca or read the Bible, wend my way back to the topic we were discussing. It's less like being a butterfly than having a magpie in control... "Ooh! Shiny!" or like the dog in Up: "Squirrel!"

What does this have to do with migraines?

Well, I have them. They come in many flavors: the kind with kalleidoscopic vision and bright colors; the kind that feels like someone took a rubber mallet and hit the side of my head; the kind that feels like my head's in a vise... any or all of these can be accompanied by extreme pain and nausea, although fortunately as I get older, it's more nausea and nagging pain that drugs can dull to where it's bearable.

But there's another thing to my migraines. When I get them, I become incredibly sensitive. I've noticed it before, obviously -- these things have been plaguing me for 20 years. But this morning, as I lay in bed, not able to work because I couldn't see and sort of wanted to throw up, I realized that my migraines are like exaggerated versions of what my brain is always doing. Migraine brain is freaky, because so many things are going on, and it's like I can see them close up. My eyes are closed, but there are still the flashy lights of the aura. There are so many things happening -- there's the garbage truck coming down the street, and the signal at the next block has changed because someone is grinding his gears moving from first to second, the little cat is purring, and the big cat's fur is rustling on the pillowcase next to my head while he purrs in a different key. I can feel not only the sheets against my skin, but evey place that my skin touches my skin feels like it's almost burning, or electrified. Meanwhile, I'm noticing and trying to focus, but that only serves to make one thing louder -- everything else is going on. And of course I'm thinking thinky things, about writing this blog post and what I need to do at the office and whether I'll make it to my gym class and how loud everything is. At the same time, I feel entirely disconnected. That may be the sumatriptan, though :-)

I have no idea what migraines are like for anybody else, but for me, they are all about sensory overload. The pain and the nausea are in some ways merely secondary discomforts. I monitor the pain because they tell migraine sufferers to do so, just in case this time it's an aneurysm or stroke. The hard part is the being so conscious of everything -- and then the exhaustion later, both from the pain and, as I realized today, all of that processing.

And I think I know why I feel like I needed to write this down. I wonder if whatever it is that makes my brain susceptible to migraines is related to why I often feel assaulted by noise that other people might not notice, or why I sometimes have a hard time compartmentalizing and focusing. hmmmm. Anybody else out there have migraines and recognize any of this?

NaBloPoMo 10-- More teaching stuff

NaBloPoMo 10 -- More teaching stuff

Well, I just read one of the worst papers ever -- a primary source interpretation exercise. This is one of the things I have trouble dealing with. The paper was not simply bad because it lacked a thesis, or because the lack of thesis was not supported well, with, like, actual evidence. It was a bad paper because there was no evidence that the student had got past the lower stages of Bloom's taxonomy. By that I mean that the student had barely got past "identify". There was some attempt at paraphrasing the texts themselves, but no attempt (despite the instructions and the fact that, when we discuss texts in class, the first questions I ask are always the ones that establish a bit of context) to do anything more, and no attempt to establish context. Moreover, it's not clear that the student actually understood the context -- or the texts.

Now, apart from the fact that I really shouldn't have to deal with students who cannot do college-level work, it's clear that this is part of a bigger issue. It's not a new issue -- it's one that Sam Wineberg has written about many times -- reading like a historian is natural for some of us, but for most people, it's a learned skill. More to the point, I think it's a skill that requires a person to unlearn a lot before she learns it. It would help if I knew how students learned to read anything!

I've looked around for help on this, and honestly, although there are tons of books and aids to help students learn to write in the field, all of them expect a particular level of reading skills. Some of those skills are really not as clear as we might like them to be. So how do we teach our students to read primary sources? Do you have any ideas?

NaBloPoMo 2010 -9

NaBloPoMo 2010 -9 Thinking about what works

Lots going on today, mostly catching up and marking. Lots more to come. One of the very few benefits of being so behind on things this semester is that I'm starting to see some things that the students just don't get -- and also how I am and am not teaching those things. So, for example, I'm trying to get them to do primary source interpretations. For years, I've focused more and more on getting the students to show how a historian could use the information in a given document. Sometimes, this is pretty easy -- If I give the students a set of laws, then they can usually reach the conclusion that society X considered Y an important issue, and give examples of why. This year, I got some really good essays on Ancient Near Eastern societies, based on a couple of law codes, in which a coupe of students said that private property was one of the most important values of those societies -- and they used examples dealing with land, slaves, and women to demonstrate this.

But sometimes, they don't get it. Tonight, I realized that this might be because I'm choosing difficult documents, and perhaps also because what I haven't been teaching well is to contextualize the documents. So next semester, i'm going to change one of the written assignments to have the students place the document(s) in context and discuss authorship. Maybe that will make their final written assignment stronger.

In the meantime, as I mentioned the other day, my students aren't doing a great job with secondary literature. And I honestly don't think any of us are really teaching it. Academic writing is a big step up from textbook writing, even when the textbook is much more a monograph, like Innes' Introduction to Early Medieval Europe or James's Europe's Barbarians, both of which I have used. The students are reading for content, not argument. So I need to work on teaching that, too.

But for now, I need to go to bed.

NaBloPoMo 2010 -7

NaBloPoMo 2010 -7 -- where did my weekend go?

Well, I did do one thing I meant to do this weekend. Two things, really. I raked a lot of leaves. And that was just the front. Seriously, what possessed me to buy a house with so many maple trees around? And I proofread a chapter for a friend. That was fun -- it gave me an excuse to read history, for a change. Meanwhile, the evil little cat is trying to ruin my new sofa. AAARGH.

Also, I went for a nice long walk with a friend today, along with dogs. Dogs are fun, but I'm glad that I don't have one. Too much work. Somehow, the weekend got away from me and I got little done in the way of catching up.

Somehow, I think more happened, but I can't seem to remember. Still, words on blog is the point of all this. This week, maybe even words on paper!

NaBloPoMo 2010 -6

NaBloPoMo 2010 -6 Movie day

Despite having much to do, today was a good day for yard work and a matinee. saw RED, which was fun and funny. Lightweight entertainment provided by heavyweight actors. Tonight, an extra hour of sleep (or really, just the ability to get up at 8 and have it be back to being 7.

Hey -- it's a post, at least.

NaBloPoMo 2010 -- 5

NaBloPoMo 2010 -- 5 -- A little late

I wrote this in my head last night, and then never posted it. I think because I was trying to pay attention to the news. Or maybe a mystery on TV. Yesterday was fun -- unpacking feminist theory with my upper-division students. I saw in most of their faces the same looks I probably had at their ages -- "why do we have to know this? who cares? can't we just READ THE HISTORY??"

Except that the grown-up scholar me understands why. I still don't love theory much. I'm not a huge fan of historiography for its own sake. But, as one of my students said at the end of our hour together, "Some of that article makes more sense now."

Weirdly, from Scalzi a couple of weeks ago, to Barbara McManus and Jo Stanley yesterday, my teaching and scholarship -- and my life -- are moving more and more to questioning, critiquing, and challenging the dominant paradigms.

Thank you to my colleagues in the blogosphere and at Leeds (mostly, although some of you I see more at the zoo) and to the Tea Party for this. I think.

NaNoBloMo 2010 - 4 what is work?

NaNoBloMo 4 -- What is work?

Today, I went in to the office, and advised a student. For an hour. And then another one. And then I had lunch, quickly. And then I advised a couple more students. In between, I tidied my desk, marked a few quizzes, caught up on my email (sort of, I have 1003 emails in my box that I haven't even read but right now an organization for which I am an officer is having elections, and I have to keep up with the listserv), tried to ring LDW, read three newspaper articles, I took a couple ten-minute breaks (I've got leechblock set) and liked a few things on facebook, checked requirements for a couple of minors for tomorrow's advising, updated Blackboard with revisions for assignments (which required actually reading through some stuff) for the survey courses for the rest of semester. And then my day was over.

I know lots of us have days like this. The thing is, these days always make me feel as though I haven't got anything done. And yet, almost all of that is part of my job. That is, I am paid actual money (albeit not much) to do these things. Nevertheless, admin days and advising days never really feel like productive days. I think this is in part just me, but more, it's our training. Even though we know when we are students that our professors are working when they are talking to us, and that they write, and that they go to meetings -- and teach, obviously -- I'm not sure it ever sinks in properly how much time is sucked away by those things. The messages we get in grad school are to avoid meetings and anything that keeps us from researching and writing. Teaching, when we do it, is the price we pay to be in grad school. For some of us, teaching is in fact why we went to grad school. We wanted to teach. In some ways, that's probably a very good thing. But in others, at least in my case, it meant that i cultivated early a habit of placing my teaching and my students ahead of my research. Research was the price I paid to be allowed to teach.

It's taken me a long time to get to where I not only appreciate, but also enjoy, research. But like most faculty in the US, the primary focus of my position is teaching. This is a wonderful thing, and suits me. In fact, it's the job I would have wanted more than anything in grad school -- a position with minimal publication requirements, a (relatively) heavy teaching load, and (on paper) not too many service demands. And yet on days that I teach four classes (usually two lectures, two seminars, all different levels, usually 3 preps), I come home feeling as if I haven't accomplished much -- except on the really interesting and weird days where the students and I go unexpected places with fun and stimulating results. I can spend two hours in a meeting putting together a policy that will affect the next several student cohorts, or the way we spend money on technology, or facilitating a workshop for my colleagues, and at the end of the day, all I can see is the work, especially the scholarship, that I haven't got 'round to.

I'm sure some of it is conditioned. My professional journals tell me I should carve out time for my own work in the same way the rest of the media tell me I should be thinner. And maybe that's it. It's our work. It serves us, and us alone. We're paid to do it, but for those of us not in serious research-oriented institutions, it's something that is supposed to be fit into our schedules on top of the teaching and service, even when it makes up a significant part of the evaluation process. For me, no matter how many times I read that it's perfectly normal to get little research done during the year, I still feel like an underachiever, especially on days like today. One of the things that sometimes enhances the stress and the guilt is also a gendered issue. At SLACs like mine, I think female faculty are also expected to be more nurturing than the male faculty are. The guys I work with are by and large much better at putting their own work first and saying no to things than are my female colleagues. Either that or they just don't talk about it much. I know in my own case, there is a lot of baggage that comes with me putting my own work first. In fact, I'm working on a homework assignment for my therapist* -- I have to do three nice things for myself this week, things that make me feel like I am being taken care of. And there is a little voice in the back of my head that says that probably, she doesn't mean sitting and reading a journal or writing a review, although those are the things I plan on doing. And maybe buying a Sunday paper and letting myself read through all of it while drinking coffee. Why? I have too much work to to do, even though it's work that will feel like I got nothing done when it's finished!

Anyway, I have no great wisdom on this. In fact, I'd really just like to ask you all how pervasive this feeling is, and what you do to combat it.




















*yeah. Work-related stress.

NaNoBloMo 2010 -3

NaNoBloMo 3 -- I taught what today?

Today's classes included explanations of the following:

Arianism
Trinitarianism
orthodoxy
heresy
Hagia Sophia ➔ hagiography ➔ philo-sophy ➔philanthropy ➔Anglo-philia➔ bibliophilia

Carnivalesque and Bakhtin explained in part via Disney's Hunchback and how it worked with Hill's 'the world turned upside down' in reference to the idea of a pirate Utopia.

The last one kind of astounds me, given that I have no idea where I picked up anything about Bakhtin in the first place, let alone how to explain it to college undergraduates. But it was there in the article (well, the term 'carnivalesque' was, and I'm trying to get them to understand that they have to recognize allusions to scholarly arguments and theory in secondary sources, rather than simply reading at face value. But we unpacked phrases like "subverting the dominant structure," and I tried to explain things.

And the crickets chirped.

But this time, I asked if I needed to go over things a different way, and one of the students said, "I get it. I'm just thinking. This is ... deep. I didn't know that there was so much more to understanding something like this. " And heads nodded around the table.

So I took it further and said that it wasn't all that different from when I told them that they should all have a working knowledge of the Bible. And someone reminded me I'd also said they should be familiar with Shakespeare's major works. And then someone touched on Milton, and I pointed out that the Biblical allusions in Milton were pretty pervasive -- and that really, Pullman's His Dark Materials is far more interesting to people familiar with both Milton and the Bible (not to mention the history of the Reformation)...

I sometimes wonder what the hell it is I think I'm doing. But it's fun, whatever it is.

NaBloPoMo 2010 -2

NaNoBloMo 2010 -2

Day two of the whole "let's blog every day" thingy. I was going to write something in response to Notorious, PhD's really interesting post on teaching and sabbatical, but it's been a really busy day, and dammit, there are election returns coming in.

Too many bastards are winning. There are far too many people in office (I'm looking at YOU, Minority Whip Cantor, and YOU, WI MN Rep Michelle Bachman, and a bunch of others) who make me ill. This is not so much because of their politics, but because of the glee with which they refuse to answer questions and/or blatantly lie. I don't really trust most politicians, but today I realized that I am getting increasingly offended by unseemly behavior.

Otherwise, the day was eaten up by student advising, a medical-ish appointment that is part of my way of dealing with crap at work, and VOTING!

I don't really understand what is going on in this country. I understand the anger. In understand feeling betrayed. I don't understand how people can say that these things are down to the Democrats, or to liberals in general. Neither party has covered itself in glory in the past many years, but these bizarre beliefs that we are supposed to be a Christian nation, or that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire as planned will somehow mean raising taxes for people who make far less than $250k a year, or that corporations are people... that, I can't really understand.

UPDATE: Is anybody watching this crap with Boehner crying about his American dream?

NaNoBloMo 2010 -1

NaNoBloMo 2010 -1

So it's November, and I'm trying to get a bunch of things in order, so what better way to do it than to vow to blog daily for a month. Today's post will be somewhat random, and therefore bulleted...

• I'm planning to respond to a lot of interesting blog posts this month...
  
  
• Jason Isaacs is terribly attractive,even when playing the dreadfully unpleasant Lucius Malfoy. Gary Oldman is also strangely compelling. But did you ever think that just perhaps we might want to take Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix a little bit more in the way of an object lesson? Because really, every single death in the story is pretty much down to Harry and his amazing lack of self-reflection.
  
  
• Guy Halsall's blog is starting to annoy me, because he's writing really interesting stuff I don't have time to read
  
  
• You may also hear about my going to the gym. This is because I've been terrible about taking care of myself for the last year or so. And that is largely because there has been a lot of crap going on in my life, primarily professionally. That you won't be hearing about.
  
  
• Speaking of which, spinning classes are hard, but not as hard as yard work. I'd forgotten all about that aspect of home-owning
  
  
• again, or still, I'm amazed by how some faculty react when they hear the word "assessment" -- It's as if the word means, "we don't trust you to do your jobs and are going to scrutinize every little thing you do, and if it's not perfect, there will be Consequences!", when really, it mostly just means, "what is it that you want your students to learn, how can you tell if they are learning it, and what do you do if they aren't?" Instead of getting that it's perfectly ok to fail, and then fail better (as long as you document it), they instead talk about "gaming the system" -- even though the system is generally up to faculty to define. I mean really, it boggles the mind.
  
  
• Meanwhile, I'm going to be trying to post boring updates about my research projects, just to keep me honest.

and that is my first post of the month. Sorry it's a bit dull.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving (NaNoBloPo/NaSchoWriMo 25)

I'm not all that fond of talking about how thankful I am for stuff, because so often it sounds like a bunch of mealy-mouthed platitudes. And yeah, I'm happy to have a job I love (IN THIS ECONOMY -- that's for New Kid), health, yada, yada, yada. But those are just sort of normal things, aren't they?

But here's a thing. I'm single and my family are all thousands of miles away. When LDW and I were together, he was a couple of thousand miles in the opposite direction. Holidays have always felt a bit iffy and worrisome. Not Christmas so much -- I'm actually a bit better at ignoring Christmas, which I really only like when there are kids and lots of family, and then I sort of hate the stress that can come about with lots of family :-)

No, really, I used to have to start my mornings with my best friend and her mom, with whom I lived for a time, then off to my grandparents for dad-family breakfast, then off to the maternal family (two at one point, as my grandparents were divorced), then to the dad house for dinner in the afternoon, then back to the friend house for dessert and carol-singing. That's a lot of running around. Christmas with my married family, or my mom and sisters, can also be a joy -- there is always a tantrum and always some sort of tension because someone will inevitably be late, or stressed at having to be the one who had to drive, or whatever.

So yeah, holidays alone are not the worst thing in the world.

One of the cool things about SLAC is that holidays alone don't necessarily exist. Part of it is that I do have family of sorts about three hours away. So I've had two Thanksgivings with them. And one in fabulous European Capital with LDW (I'm still sorry about that roast ...). And this year, I'm staying in town and eating with friends. Feeling a little guilty about not going to the family, especially because we need to see each other, but happy to hang out with some of my favorite colleagues. The best thing of all of this is that I don't feel like I'm included out of charity. That's a nice feeling.

This year, I can't get back to the left coast till New Year's. The fabulous European Capital option no longer exists. But I have bunches of friends who will be around for the holiday season, and I have tons of people to visit on all the days before and after Christmas itself. For the first time, I haven't had time to think about what to do during break besides working, because I know I have stuff to do. Same for Spring Break. I should stay home and work, but there may be a chance of a camping trip in an as-yet undecided locale.

Naturally, my life decides to have a social aspect exactly when I should be working harder and producing more. Life's funny that way. I expect there's an appropriate Terry Pratchett quote, but I can't be arsed to look it up. I've got baking, laundry, and marking to do tomorrow before I go and eat turkey.

A sad truth of academia?

A sad truth of academia? (NaNoBloPo/NaSchoWriMo 23)

I have finished my teaching obligations for the week. I have finished my service obligations for the week. And all I can think is that I have several days in which I can actually get some damned work done. I have a big pile of marking to do -- essays for all classes, and catching up on all the online marking. The plus is that I will only have one set of papers to read the weekend before finals, and then the finals.

I am so looking forward to break, when I can ... ok, take a little break. I'm going home to visit The Kid and X and friends for five days, and there are a couple of parties and maybe some hiking, too. But mostly I will be looking forward to re-reading LDW's latest book, which I'm using for class, and at least one of his other books, and working on my damned book project (about which Superdean is nagging me) and also perhaps on my article for TenthMedieval. And going to the gym.

Maybe I'm just like this because I'm hopeless about time and balance. Maybe other academics spend their holidays actually having holidays. But I have this weird feeling that I'm not the only one who sees non-teaching time as a way to catch up.

On the other hand, I expect that it's a good thing that I've got to the point where I see these breaks now as real breaks, mental breaks, opportunities to do things I want to do, rather than as something I resent because I won't have a break. Still, I think I'd like to get more writing done in term time, and actually have a holiday, too.

An open letter to applicants

An open letter to applicants (NaNoBloPo/NaSchoWriMo 22)

ProfGrrrl posted the other day about hiring committees and it got me thinking. I'm on a search committee this year, and it's going to be interesting. Politics and an inside candidate. I hate inside candidates. I try to stay away from committees where there is one. I don't know that this is true, but I don't feel I can speak freely about the inside candidate, because there will always be people who simply expect that we are supposed to hire the person they know, regardless of the other candidates. Ugh.

But that's not what I wanted to say. Mostly, what I wanted to say, not very delicately, is:

Dear Applicant and Applicant's Advisor/Referee,

Are you taking the piss? Because if you are, you have wasted a bunch of people's time. If you are not, you are friggin' morons. What the *hell* did you think you were doing? Our position is pretty specific. There's a chance that we won't find anyone who meets all the criteria, but we have a good chance of meeting someone who comes close. But you... I do understand that you come from a big and reputable research university, but really, you aren't all that, let alone a bag of chips.

Let's start off with your cover letter:

Nowhere does your letter address your suitability for the job we advertised. It doesn't show that you have the first clue about SLAC, a campus that has not only undergrads, but also several specialized schools that have very special needs. Some of those needs were outlined in the ad, but strangely, you didn't think you needed to mention how your very fancy-pants dissertation addresses the 4-3 teaching load and the classes you would teach: classes that have NOTHING to do with your fancy-pants dissertation. Now, to be fair, you do mention your teaching. Sort of. You've taught a lot, mostly as a grad student, and it's hard to tell how many of your courses were as a GA and how many were independent. But that's OK. And incorporating your philosophy into your cover letter is not a bad idea, either. But seriously, it's better to give us a clear idea of what you actually do than it is to include posh phrases in Italian and French -- I suppose it's at least a blessing that the Greek was at least transliterated. However, when you mention that you try to impart X's ideas of Y, where Y is theory, then really, you come off as a pretentious little git who thinks he's not only the gods' gift to the students, but oh, so much better than the people you'll be working with. Either that or no one has ever explained that, in a department that's hiring two people and only has four full-time faculty, that there will be at least two non-specialists on the search committee.

Also, it's good to sign the cover letter and to make sure that, when you cut and paste from your teaching philosophy, you at least try to re-word the most outstandingly precious phrases. I'm just sayin'.


Of course, I can't blame you entirely. You've been allowed to do all your work at the same BigName institution, from when you walked in the door as a freshman. No wonder your letter is so much like the one your advisor wrote for you. You might lose hir, by the way. The letter zie sent was even more pretentious. David Lodge couldn't have made that one up. Bespeckled with the droppings of name and reference to theory, the letter told us far more about your advisor than it did about why you were a suitable candidate for our job. This was a letter all about how erudite your advisor is -- why surely, we should hire someone purely because you are clearly the genius sprung forth from hir loins. Your publishing career, based on the sheer brilliance of your thesis, so carefully directed by the advisor, will allow us to bask in the glow of your reflection. Oh -- by the way, I still can't tell exactly what the point of your thesis was, because you defined yourself entirely in terms of the scholarship of others, without so much showing your own contribution to your field. If you're going to focus on research you'll never have a chance to do or teach while at SLAC, at least let us know how tragic it will be five years down the road when you die under the crush of our loads and your own bitterness. Except it's unlikely we'll be interviewing you, because, well, there's nothing you've told us about yourself but that you would be the last person we'd want to teach our students, who really want us to focus on them and teach them without making them feel stupid.

And to you other advisors out there? Please, do think about it before sending us two candidates from your program. Or at least in some way acknowledge that you are sending two students who have the same committees, and that each of them has hir own strengths. Maybe even make sure that the applicant letters aren't based on the same template, and that your letters are not formatted and written to say almost the same things in the same order. It makes you look sloppy. It doesn't help the person whose name comes alphabetically second. It makes me wonder what you've taught them about dealing with other academics. Having said that, I do like your candidates, and part of it is that the package looks solid -- it's just that seeing the same package (more or less) twice really does weaken the impact.

And for the rest of you people: this is not a bad job. It is a job in a field with not nearly enough openings, and it is tenure-track. Some of you should have applied. And some of you? Really. If you can't be bothered to tell us how you can fill the job we advertised, rather than the job we need to fill, stop wasting my time.

Long Day

Long Day (NaNoBloPo/NaSchoWriMo 19)

I can't honestly think of anything substantial to say today, because my day just ended. Email, Doctor, tidying desk, lunch with guest speaker, guest speaker to class, office hours packed, more email and reading of Tacitus, grocery store, mad tidying of house, book club, now to clean up. Cannot wait for the weekend, except that I realized I have a meeting with my professional organization colleagues Saturday for between 4-6 hours, probably. Monday will start at 8 am and end at 10 pm, unless there is also beer. Thank goodness for Thanksgiving!

Something that struck me today

Something that struck me today (NaNoBloPo/NaSchoWriMo 18)

One of the things that struck me today has to do with faculty privilege and how weird some of it seems to me. It's about communicating one's availability. I was feeling really grumpy today about people who don't communicate or pay attention. I'm talking about basic communication, nothing really work related. Just that I have colleagues and co-workers and student workers who just don't make sense to me. Some do. One of my colleagues never fails to pop hir head in and say hi when zie notices I've come in, and always says goodbye at night if zie leaves before me. Another always asks if I want the coffee left on when zie leaves, and I always know when zie is not going to be in, because zie mentions zie will be gone to a conference, for example. Some of my colleagues post their office hours clearly, and leave their doors ajar. If they are friends, we sort of know each other's schedules, more or less. Most of the students who work for my colleagues in our building pop their heads in when arriving or leaving, even though they don't work for me, just to say hi or bye. A couple even ask if I have work, if they have nothing assigned to them.

But then there are people who just don't communicate. The reason I started thinking about this was that I was by myself in the building for part of the afternoon, save one student. I don't know when the student left, but it was dark when zie did, and zie left the building door open. At night, after dark, with one female faculty member by herself in a building on the periphery of campus and adjacent to a busy road with not only lots of foot traffic, but a main thoroughfare for Dabbaville's homeless. It annoyed me. Part of it was the apparent lack of consideration, but then I realized that my expectations of communication just don't hold true for everybody.

This has happened before. I have a couple of friends who understand entirely when I ask them to text when they get home, if we've been out late, or if they have gone somewhere lonely by themselves to run, or some such thing. And we do that. They don't laugh when I post to facebook about illness or going for a run, because they were raised to check in, or know that single people can end up in all kinds of trouble and not be missed. Friends who thought it was a little silly have become a bit more understanding after I passed out for no identifiable reason last year. But anyway, I just think it's good to have an idea of where the people you care about are supposed to be, in case they end up somewhere else. Not everybody feels that way, and that's fine.

That was my reaction today. I reminded myself that my colleagues don't all have the same idea about communicating their whereabouts. And most of them are faculty. Faculty don't have to account for their time and where they spend it, except when required to be in a certain place for a class or meeting. So why should they communicate their schedules?

And then, I realised that I just don't buy it -- or not completely. If I need to talk to Superdean, or the Provost, or the President of SLAC, I may not be able to, but someone will know where they are and when they will be available. I don't account for every minute of the day, but I put a schedule for the week on my door, so that if people are looking for me, they can at least see if I'm definitely supposed to be somewhere else. And normally I shoot an email to folks if I'm coming in after about 10 on a non-teaching day (I like to go to the gym in the mornings sometimes, and often work till 7 ish). Hey, I'm department chair and have 25 advisees: people occasionally look for me. And if I'm home or working in a coffee shop, it's likely I'm checking email, anyway. Why? because it seems to me that, despite the freedom we have as faculty, people still normally keep something resembling bankers' hours, and part of the job is to be available to students and colleagues.

I've worked on a flex schedule before, by the way. I've worked jobs where I had a home office and only had to see my boss once a week. But if he was looking for me, he could usually find me, even if sometimes I was at a conference call in my pajamas. I've worked for places where every minute was jealously guarded as well. There's a difference in those atmospheres. Working from home on salary feels different from punching a clock. I never felt that I was obligated to call my boss and ask him if I could go to the gym at lunch, and he didn't care, as long as my work was done, and I returned calls and emails in a timely manner. But if I knew I'd be out of cell phone or internet range for more than a couple of hours, I'd usually let people know, because it's best not to have customers calling the boss to complain that you didn't pick up on the second ring.

I guess my point is that we work in a world where lots of people are accountable for their time, and there are lots of good reasons to communicate where we are, if only for simple courtesy and to make sure that, if our students need to see us, someone knows what to tell them about how to get hold of us. I'm just not sure how not having to account for one's movements got to be a faculty privilege, nor how that privilege seems more and more to be something assumed by staff and students, as well. Seems a little weird to me.