The end of the school year always brings conflicting emotions for me. On one hand, it's great to be wrapping things up, the weather is in that perfect not-too-hot, not-too-cold spot, and (mostly) all I have to look forward to now is three months of (mostly) not working.* I'm excited to have some time away from my teaching job, for which I'm not able to take any vacation days at all and can only take sick days if I'm able to make up the work I miss by working nights and weekends, for nine months of the year.
It's usually once I start thinking about all the awesome things I'm going to do over the summer that I start feeling guilty for not working. Especially now that Lindsey works at a "real" job, it's weird to have the entire summer "to myself" when everyone else is at their job, (supposedly) working away. I've lost track of the number of times over the last decade that others have explained at length to me exactly how I've got it better than them, able to just not work three months of the year. The implication is twofold: 1) they're jealous of my long "vacation," and 2) they simultaneously think that taking such a long vacation is lazy, slothful, and that somehow I don't work as hard as they do. It's number two that, in my weaker moments, makes me feel a bit like shit. So I decided that during my lunch break today (literally the first lunch break I've had, honestly, since October when my boss took me to lunch to talk about...work) I would figure out if I actually work less than Hypothetical Jealous/Contemptuous Joe Schmoe.
I'm working on the assumption that during a year of perfect attendance, Joe works 48 weeks out of the year, for forty hours a week. Joe takes his four weeks of vacation. This totals out to 1,920 hours of work a year. If Joe is an absolute maniac and takes no vacation, he works 2,080 hours a year.
After almost ten years of working as a university instructor/teacher/professor, I estimate that I average about 60 hours a week per work during the school year. This includes about 50-55 hours per week plus 5-10 hours per weekend. At my current job, this amounts to 60 hours a week for 30 weeks, or 1,800 hours. When you add to that the (unpaid) 15 hours average per week I do the rest of the year (during Christmas break, spring break, and summer break), you add another 330 hours to that to come up with 2,130 hours.
So. Mathematically at least, I have nothing to feel bad about.
Anyway, this was an interesting little experiment to me, and I wasn't at all assured of the result as it came out before I started.
Because this is going on the internet now, I suppose I'm obligated to add a little note to say I don't mean this as a complaint; clearly, there are more lucrative and, frankly, easier-to-get jobs than a tenure track professor in the humanities in 2014, and if I was dissatisfied or wanted to be doing something else instead, I sure as hell would be. Instead, this is my way of responding to all those "Oh, so you don't work all summer" sneers.
Yes, actually I do work (a bit) all summer, and even if I didn't, I still likely work about as much as you do. So pffffffftthhhhhht.
Back to grading.
* And, notably, not getting paid. So, you could say that in addition to working as much or more as "full-year" employees, I only get paid for 75% of my work. Yes, now that I'm tenure track I make a decent amount of money (an amount that is, by my standards, extraordinary), but no, we don't get paid "extra" over nine months to be compensated for the three months we get "off."
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
May 30, 2014
It's Almost Summer
I can tell because I was looking over the notes I'd taken on a student's presentation yesterday and partway down the page I'd apparently just written "Human hive-mind hobo Jesus, mass hallucination, robo-priestess."
It's like Anthony Kiedis took over my body for an instant.
It's like Anthony Kiedis took over my body for an instant.
May 29, 2014
What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate
This post originally appeared in Recomposing the Pines on 5/2/14:
So, when I started this new blog, I was really excited by the prospect of being able to write publicly and semi-officially (though not too officially) about teaching, researching, and so on, in the hope that what I had to say would both help other people who might be wrestling with the same or similar problems and encourage other people to suggest solutions for me.
Well, for the last four months, apparently I haven't actually had anything to say. Well, that's not true. Let's just say instead that expecting to be able to blog about academia regularly while also taking on a load of committee service work, teaching four classes a term, and trying to get an entirely new minor program off the ground in my first two terms as a faculty member was a fool's errand.
My workload is a bit lighter now, but I'm not going to guarantee it's going to stay that way for long. In the meantime, though, I wanted to write briefly about one of the biggest stumbling blocks I've hit in my first few terms here; again, both in the hope that it might be helpful for potential readers to read and in the hope that someone out there might have some solutions of their own that can help me reframe and better understand the issue(s) I'm facing.
So, I'm currently teaching a lot of different courses. In two terms, I've introduced six entirely new courses, and next term (starting in a few weeks!) I'm going to introduce three more classes, for a total of nine new classes in my first year. Logistically, this is a ridiculous amount of work to juggle, but thematically, it's pretty coherent. At least in my head it is.
All my courses, however they are listed in the catalogue, are under the aegis of "the humanities," and this, combined with the specificity of my own training and research experience, means that all the courses have some elements in common. Students read stuff, and write stuff. They work in groups to discuss the issues that arise in the processes of reading and writing. They make arguments, and (hopefully) back those arguments up with evidence, source synthesis, and critical thinking. Whether we're reading novels or poetry or comic books, playing video games, or watching documentaries, our approach to the material is, generally speaking, a pretty straightforward literary analysis one. This is, at least for now, a limitation of my training, but also an expression of my belief that literary analysis gives one the tools to basically and fundamentally analyze and question all works that fall under the rubric of what I call "culturally expressive media." People write novels, film movies, and make video games to be expressions of their personal and cultural experience of the world (sometimes more intentionally than others). By studying these works through this lens, I believe we can simultaneously better understand the creators' cultural situations and how various media can implicitly and explicitly make arguments, while interrogating our own assumptions about society, or what-have-you.
Pretty straightforward cultural-studies-literary-analysis-humanities-type stuff, right?
Well, it's totally not working. Which is weird, because it worked before.
I find that my students are asking variations of "Why do we have to do this?" much more frequently than they ever did at WSU and I'm finding it much harder to convince them (on average) to become invested in what they see as squishy, non-objective, non-quantifiable work beyond the level of "If I don't work sort of hard, I'll get a bad grade and hurt my GPA."
Now, the problem certainly isn't that I'm incapable of addressing the value of the humanities in today's university environment. In fact, sometimes that seems like all I do. Sometimes it feels like 90% of my job is to explain to other people why my job is important. So, I've gotten pretty good at it.
I also realize that when you're teaching at a technical institute, you're going to get a certain kind of student, to whom learning about the cultural significance of The Illiad might pale in comparison to things they do in their other classes, like build robots (no, seriously, they do).
But. I guess it's difficult for me to understand precisely how a student goes from thinking one of those things is preferable to the other to thinking that one is useful and the other one is pointless. I can throw all the statistics I want in the face of many of my students, proving that graduates with humanities knowledge are going to further down their career path than those who don't have it, and thus make more money in the long term. That employers look for critical thinking skills and cultural awareness in addition to your "piece of paper." That many of the professional associations that eagerly await our graduates to fill their open positions specifically contact us regularly to make sure that their future hirees are getting an appropriate education in ethics, logic, critical thinking, and global citizenship. And, yes, that there's really not that big of a gap in employment between those who have humanities degrees and those who have science degrees.
None of it seems to make any difference, though. Which leads me to believe that there may well be a profound shift occurring right now, not just away from liberal arts education, but from education in general. The kind of "education" many of my students seem to want to get at this school is actually what we'd call "vocational training" if there wasn't such a stigma attached to that term. And that's fine, I guess: college has become such an expensive, loophole-ridden process while simultaneously becoming so necessary for employment that it's easy to see why students want to know what they're paying for before they pay for it, and a $70,000/year job at the end of four years is a lot better return on your investment (that lands you in massive debt) than "being a better person" or "understanding other cultures."
So I get it. But, I think there are a lot of hidden costs to replacing universities with huge job-training factories, and if we continue to go down that road as a culture, I think there are a lot of potential dangers specifically in continuing to call what we're doing "education." Because I believe education should extend beyond just job training, regardless of whether students can immediately see the value in more learning more ephemeral subjects and skills or not. And I think every students who can afford it will reap the vast benefits of this broader kind of education throughout the rest of their lives whether they go on to manage a McDonald's or work as the CEO of a corporation, or do anything in between.
But when I say these things to many of my students, they just roll their eyes and settle in to suffer through 10 of their 30 hours of (30 hours in-class, our of four years of school!) of humanities education.
So, I guess my question is: with so little time in the classroom, how do we convince students that there is more to education than just skill-based training and certification? How do we convince students that sometimes it's worthwhile to invest money in something other than getting more money?
I have a lot reasons that I could share convincingly with, say, the audience of The Chronicle, but I don't have any reasons that 18 year-olds who have already chained themselves to massive, possible lifelong debt, want to hear.
So, when I started this new blog, I was really excited by the prospect of being able to write publicly and semi-officially (though not too officially) about teaching, researching, and so on, in the hope that what I had to say would both help other people who might be wrestling with the same or similar problems and encourage other people to suggest solutions for me.
Well, for the last four months, apparently I haven't actually had anything to say. Well, that's not true. Let's just say instead that expecting to be able to blog about academia regularly while also taking on a load of committee service work, teaching four classes a term, and trying to get an entirely new minor program off the ground in my first two terms as a faculty member was a fool's errand.
My workload is a bit lighter now, but I'm not going to guarantee it's going to stay that way for long. In the meantime, though, I wanted to write briefly about one of the biggest stumbling blocks I've hit in my first few terms here; again, both in the hope that it might be helpful for potential readers to read and in the hope that someone out there might have some solutions of their own that can help me reframe and better understand the issue(s) I'm facing.
So, I'm currently teaching a lot of different courses. In two terms, I've introduced six entirely new courses, and next term (starting in a few weeks!) I'm going to introduce three more classes, for a total of nine new classes in my first year. Logistically, this is a ridiculous amount of work to juggle, but thematically, it's pretty coherent. At least in my head it is.
All my courses, however they are listed in the catalogue, are under the aegis of "the humanities," and this, combined with the specificity of my own training and research experience, means that all the courses have some elements in common. Students read stuff, and write stuff. They work in groups to discuss the issues that arise in the processes of reading and writing. They make arguments, and (hopefully) back those arguments up with evidence, source synthesis, and critical thinking. Whether we're reading novels or poetry or comic books, playing video games, or watching documentaries, our approach to the material is, generally speaking, a pretty straightforward literary analysis one. This is, at least for now, a limitation of my training, but also an expression of my belief that literary analysis gives one the tools to basically and fundamentally analyze and question all works that fall under the rubric of what I call "culturally expressive media." People write novels, film movies, and make video games to be expressions of their personal and cultural experience of the world (sometimes more intentionally than others). By studying these works through this lens, I believe we can simultaneously better understand the creators' cultural situations and how various media can implicitly and explicitly make arguments, while interrogating our own assumptions about society, or what-have-you.
Pretty straightforward cultural-studies-literary-analysis-humanities-type stuff, right?
Well, it's totally not working. Which is weird, because it worked before.
I find that my students are asking variations of "Why do we have to do this?" much more frequently than they ever did at WSU and I'm finding it much harder to convince them (on average) to become invested in what they see as squishy, non-objective, non-quantifiable work beyond the level of "If I don't work sort of hard, I'll get a bad grade and hurt my GPA."
Now, the problem certainly isn't that I'm incapable of addressing the value of the humanities in today's university environment. In fact, sometimes that seems like all I do. Sometimes it feels like 90% of my job is to explain to other people why my job is important. So, I've gotten pretty good at it.
I also realize that when you're teaching at a technical institute, you're going to get a certain kind of student, to whom learning about the cultural significance of The Illiad might pale in comparison to things they do in their other classes, like build robots (no, seriously, they do).
But. I guess it's difficult for me to understand precisely how a student goes from thinking one of those things is preferable to the other to thinking that one is useful and the other one is pointless. I can throw all the statistics I want in the face of many of my students, proving that graduates with humanities knowledge are going to further down their career path than those who don't have it, and thus make more money in the long term. That employers look for critical thinking skills and cultural awareness in addition to your "piece of paper." That many of the professional associations that eagerly await our graduates to fill their open positions specifically contact us regularly to make sure that their future hirees are getting an appropriate education in ethics, logic, critical thinking, and global citizenship. And, yes, that there's really not that big of a gap in employment between those who have humanities degrees and those who have science degrees.
None of it seems to make any difference, though. Which leads me to believe that there may well be a profound shift occurring right now, not just away from liberal arts education, but from education in general. The kind of "education" many of my students seem to want to get at this school is actually what we'd call "vocational training" if there wasn't such a stigma attached to that term. And that's fine, I guess: college has become such an expensive, loophole-ridden process while simultaneously becoming so necessary for employment that it's easy to see why students want to know what they're paying for before they pay for it, and a $70,000/year job at the end of four years is a lot better return on your investment (that lands you in massive debt) than "being a better person" or "understanding other cultures."
So I get it. But, I think there are a lot of hidden costs to replacing universities with huge job-training factories, and if we continue to go down that road as a culture, I think there are a lot of potential dangers specifically in continuing to call what we're doing "education." Because I believe education should extend beyond just job training, regardless of whether students can immediately see the value in more learning more ephemeral subjects and skills or not. And I think every students who can afford it will reap the vast benefits of this broader kind of education throughout the rest of their lives whether they go on to manage a McDonald's or work as the CEO of a corporation, or do anything in between.
But when I say these things to many of my students, they just roll their eyes and settle in to suffer through 10 of their 30 hours of (30 hours in-class, our of four years of school!) of humanities education.
So, I guess my question is: with so little time in the classroom, how do we convince students that there is more to education than just skill-based training and certification? How do we convince students that sometimes it's worthwhile to invest money in something other than getting more money?
I have a lot reasons that I could share convincingly with, say, the audience of The Chronicle, but I don't have any reasons that 18 year-olds who have already chained themselves to massive, possible lifelong debt, want to hear.
Social Media Might Just Be Impossible To Teach (For Me)
This post was originally published in Recomposing the Pines on 4/1/14:
I've taught a few variations now on a class that I'm currently calling "Digital Diversity." It's a class that I really enjoy teaching, and that focuses on a topic very close to my heart: discussing all of the insidious and wonderful little ways that our day-to-day lives are tied seemingly inextricably to the internet and computing technology nowadays.
Though most of my classes get a better reception the more times I teach them (which I like to think indicates my ability to adjust and improve according to feedback and more pedagogical reflection) or at the very least balance out at a pretty acceptable level of success, Digital Diversity has been pretty distinctly and obviously less successful each time I've taught it. I've been trying to figure out why for a long time, in the process pouring a lot of thought and extra work into solving the problem (including writing a few more blog posts about it, which are currently sitting at the top of my "Drafts" folder), and I haven't come to any solid conclusions or discovered any obvious solutions yet. However, stumbling across an old email this morning might have helped me understand what's going on a little bit better.
The email in question was from an old colleague of mine and it popped up in gmail as one of the results of a totally unrelated search, a weird quirk in the search algorithm. It was a reminder about a project said colleague was working on as part of a class we were taking together. The colleague was interested in studying Twitter, and so, for one particular week of the seminar, she was requesting that we all install the Twitter app on our phones, enable all notifications, and then be prepared to discuss the experience of being "always-on" through the app when class reconvened.
That's it. Today, a discussion about how annoying Twitter notifications are is like a discussion about how annoying it is when the weather calls for sun and it starts raining. Everyone gets it. It's hardly a topic that needs the environment of a graduate-level seminar in cultural studies to happen. But I distinctly remember being extremely interested in the topic from an academic standpoint when this seminar was going on. I remember my colleagues and the professor being extremely interested. And I remember the discussion being engaging and enlightening. That seminar took place maybe six years ago. In the last six years, social networking over the internet has become so tightly integrated into most of our lives that to speak of it analytically, critically, is, for want of a better word, passé.
I was a graduate student in an environment in which talking about the politics of identity creation on Facebook, on Twitter, and so on, was a burgeoning topic of interest and (apparently) intense importance, at least in the discourses of cultural and media studies. And I was learning about these subjects through research and dissertation work as they were being spoken about and written about in that same way. And I was learning to teach about these subjects as they were being spoken about and written about in that same way.
Flashforward to six years later, and it's beginning to feel like my pedagogical approach is flawed. I learned (in part) how to teach while working under the assumption that these technologies and our applications of them were exceptional and that they should be presented, discussed, and deconstructed as such. In 2014, there is nothing more reflexive (or at least, so it seems) to college-age students than using Facebook and Twitter as one of their main ways (if not their primary way) of interacting with the world outside themselves socioculturally. In my class, when I want them to think about whether or not Facebook's interface inherently and importantly limits their ability to express themselves to their friends in ways that might not exist in face-to-face conversation or conversation over the telephone, they are bored.
This is, of course, nobody's fault, but I'm not sure how to overcome the difficulty nonetheless. Every time I change the course, I update readings, I change assignments, I alter notes, I approach subjects from different angles. On a day-to-day basis I read at least 2-3 articles regarding technology use and its effects on our culture, not just to "stay current" but because it's what I'm interested in as a person, not just as a teacher. It's not as if I'm coming to class with anecdotes about Friendster and screenshots of my old GeoCities page (don't try to find it; you can't). But I wonder if there's a chronological or maybe even generational gap that's effecting my pedagogy here: to me, even fifty years from now, a lot of these technologies and our applications of them will always be a) fascinating and b) worthy of critique, because I remember what it was like when they first came into being, how dramatically things changed. It's possible that all the research, revision, and pedagogy workshops in the world aren't going to be able to close that gap between me and students who take classes like Digital Diversity.
Thoughts?
I've taught a few variations now on a class that I'm currently calling "Digital Diversity." It's a class that I really enjoy teaching, and that focuses on a topic very close to my heart: discussing all of the insidious and wonderful little ways that our day-to-day lives are tied seemingly inextricably to the internet and computing technology nowadays.
Though most of my classes get a better reception the more times I teach them (which I like to think indicates my ability to adjust and improve according to feedback and more pedagogical reflection) or at the very least balance out at a pretty acceptable level of success, Digital Diversity has been pretty distinctly and obviously less successful each time I've taught it. I've been trying to figure out why for a long time, in the process pouring a lot of thought and extra work into solving the problem (including writing a few more blog posts about it, which are currently sitting at the top of my "Drafts" folder), and I haven't come to any solid conclusions or discovered any obvious solutions yet. However, stumbling across an old email this morning might have helped me understand what's going on a little bit better.
The email in question was from an old colleague of mine and it popped up in gmail as one of the results of a totally unrelated search, a weird quirk in the search algorithm. It was a reminder about a project said colleague was working on as part of a class we were taking together. The colleague was interested in studying Twitter, and so, for one particular week of the seminar, she was requesting that we all install the Twitter app on our phones, enable all notifications, and then be prepared to discuss the experience of being "always-on" through the app when class reconvened.
That's it. Today, a discussion about how annoying Twitter notifications are is like a discussion about how annoying it is when the weather calls for sun and it starts raining. Everyone gets it. It's hardly a topic that needs the environment of a graduate-level seminar in cultural studies to happen. But I distinctly remember being extremely interested in the topic from an academic standpoint when this seminar was going on. I remember my colleagues and the professor being extremely interested. And I remember the discussion being engaging and enlightening. That seminar took place maybe six years ago. In the last six years, social networking over the internet has become so tightly integrated into most of our lives that to speak of it analytically, critically, is, for want of a better word, passé.
I was a graduate student in an environment in which talking about the politics of identity creation on Facebook, on Twitter, and so on, was a burgeoning topic of interest and (apparently) intense importance, at least in the discourses of cultural and media studies. And I was learning about these subjects through research and dissertation work as they were being spoken about and written about in that same way. And I was learning to teach about these subjects as they were being spoken about and written about in that same way.
Flashforward to six years later, and it's beginning to feel like my pedagogical approach is flawed. I learned (in part) how to teach while working under the assumption that these technologies and our applications of them were exceptional and that they should be presented, discussed, and deconstructed as such. In 2014, there is nothing more reflexive (or at least, so it seems) to college-age students than using Facebook and Twitter as one of their main ways (if not their primary way) of interacting with the world outside themselves socioculturally. In my class, when I want them to think about whether or not Facebook's interface inherently and importantly limits their ability to express themselves to their friends in ways that might not exist in face-to-face conversation or conversation over the telephone, they are bored.
This is, of course, nobody's fault, but I'm not sure how to overcome the difficulty nonetheless. Every time I change the course, I update readings, I change assignments, I alter notes, I approach subjects from different angles. On a day-to-day basis I read at least 2-3 articles regarding technology use and its effects on our culture, not just to "stay current" but because it's what I'm interested in as a person, not just as a teacher. It's not as if I'm coming to class with anecdotes about Friendster and screenshots of my old GeoCities page (don't try to find it; you can't). But I wonder if there's a chronological or maybe even generational gap that's effecting my pedagogy here: to me, even fifty years from now, a lot of these technologies and our applications of them will always be a) fascinating and b) worthy of critique, because I remember what it was like when they first came into being, how dramatically things changed. It's possible that all the research, revision, and pedagogy workshops in the world aren't going to be able to close that gap between me and students who take classes like Digital Diversity.
Thoughts?
So, Getting Used To Working At A Teaching School Is Weird, But Good.
This post was originally published in Recomposing the Pines on 11/21/13:
I want to start this post by mentioning some things that I like. I'm going to do this because after that, I'm going to talk about how I don't like some of them as much as I like others, or, at least, how some have become more important to me than others, their value more obvious, and I don't want to give the impression that I dislike the less-liked things...I just like them less than maybe I once did.
When I switched my undergraduate major from Computer Science to English Literature way back in 2001 (or maybe 2002), I did it because over the first 2.5 or so years of college, I'd realized that I fundamentally, absolutely loved the lifestyle higher education allowed me to have. I was perfectly happy working 12 hours a day if that work was reading, learning, questioning, writing, exploring, and if that time was spent with and around others who also valued those activities. I was happy enough with this lifestyle and wanted to live it badly enough to give up a major that would have easily (in the early 2000s) landed me a job right out of college that would have paid significantly more from the onset than my current tenure track job will ever pay even at the full Professor level.*
My enthusiasm for this lifestyle has waxed rather than waned over the years. It's become less and less financially practical to actually make a living by working in higher education as an actual educator (it's another story if you want to be an administrator), but that continues to not really matter much to me. I still love writing, I still love reading. During my time at WSU, where I was required to teach courses while pursuing my graduate degrees in order to receive funding, I even discovered that I actually really like teaching, something I would never have imagined about myself back in the KSU days, when I was just desperately looking for an excuse to stay enmeshed in the intellectual environment of a large public university after getting my bachelor's degree. That said, some of my favorite memories of my graduate career involve participating in great seminar discussions after wading through hundreds of pages of theory, and condensing that theory and tweaking it to plot and write up a dissertation that I thoroughly enjoyed and am (mostly) proud of. So, by the time I received my Ph.D, I had, usefully, realized that I loved both teaching and researching.
Interestingly, my new job wants me to do one of these and not the other. It's 2013, so I'm pretty sure you can guess which is which.
When I first learned this, during a post-interview phone call with my then-potential employer, my heart sank a little. Taking a job where I taught a heavy course load and wasn't expected to engage in research (read: "We won't give you time or money to do any research"), seemed utterly depressing to me. I loved the research I was doing, and couldn't imagine giving it up to "just" teach more classes.
Well, as you can probably guess, this is the part where I decide that I don't like some things as much as others: flash forward about seven months, and I feel completely different about the whole teaching vs. research thing. I realize that my opinion isn't for everybody, and I'm not writing it here to force it on anyone else, but just to share my own experience. So.
Working at a teaching-oriented university is awesome.
See, the always-underlying issue I had with the work I was doing before was that it was pulling me in two opposing directions basically constantly. I love teaching and I love doing research, but when you're doing both at the same time, you're always doing both to about half of your ability. Or, at least that's how I've always felt. When I was able to just sit and read and write for a week, I was able to create some of my best-ever work. When I was able to just focus on lesson planning and teaching for a week, I was able to teach some of my best-ever classes. Out of eight years of work at WSU, how many times did I get these "one-only" opportunities? Maybe 2-3 times apiece. That's not an indictment of any particular person or department or policy, just an observation of how the general expectations that come down from on high at a huge public research university force you to mix, mingle, and often ultimately shortchange your priorities.
Here, it's easy: I work on teaching all the time, except for when there's a committee meeting or another service-related opportunity, and then I put the teaching aside for an hour and focus on that. The transition back is much easier, because helping to guide the course of a small department has a lot in common with teaching (and learning). Research, though it can certainly inform one's teaching, doesn't have a lot in common with pedagogy itself. Unless, I suppose, you are researching pedagogy. Which I was not.
So, practically speaking, my job's not nearly as confusing. I'm switching gears much less often, and though I work just as hard and often get just as tired, I'm not burdened with that feeling of being stretched too thin, of knowing I could teach better if I didn't have to attend my fourth conference of the year or knowing that I could really knock this article out of the park if I didn't have to teach three classes this semester, and so on.
Existentially, focusing just on teaching is a lot nicer, too. This is what's really surprised me, and what's possibly going to piss off some of the gentle readers out there. Surprisingly, "service" is no longer a bad word to me. Once, it was that pesky thing that you half-assed on your CV, the grad student equivalent of putting Who's Who Of American High School Students on your college application. Now, it's things that I do naturally every day as a result of being part of a small department, in a small town, with a recognizable and manageable community of students and faculty and administrators.
Because this is such a small school and the only thing that's more important on faculty evaluations than "service" is teaching, there's (generally speaking, at least) a positive attitude toward university- and department-related activities built into the way most people approach their work here. And this is great for me. Since I started in September, I've already made progress on helping to introduce a new academic program to the school, created six new courses that should all be seeing the light of day over the next 2 years or so, made inroads toward getting placed on two faculty committees whose work I think of as very important to the university and community at large, and met informally with a large number of faculty members to discuss how we can improve our Humanities offerings to more directly suit their programs' needs. I have a lot more time to meet with students individually, I've talked to every member of my department at length, both about work and more mundane things, and I'm setting up one-on-one, face-to-face meetings with the Provost and President of the university to discuss my thoughts on revamping the Humanities offerings and general education requirements.
I don't list all of those things to brag, but to make the points that a) I'm doing lots of things that are going to (hopefully) be directly valuable to the university and its student population and b) all of these things are way more meaningful to me than getting another article published in some obscure journal after months of toiling away alone in my office.
I once read an article (and I really wish I could remember where, because it would help this post out a lot) that suggested, pretty compellingly, that requirements for "research" in the humanities was something colleges and universities just sort of started requiring middle-level faculty to engage in before they could qualify for tenure for the sole reason that there wasn't much else for them to do besides teach classes. In larger universities, departments got so big that there was really no meaningful way to include all faculty in the processes of governance and upper-level decision-making, so they were, essentially, given something else to do instead to hide the fact that the system had become too cumbersome to care about their input anymore. Now, I don't know how accurate that is (like I said, the article was pretty convincing, but I also didn't follow up by investigating its claims in detail or anything), but it rings fairly true based on my own experience.
Like I said at the onset, I love doing research and writing articles, and writing my dissertation is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done academically. But it's hard to regularly put so much time and effort into publications that are likely to only be read by a few people who are already hanging out in the same echo chamber as you, especially when the time spent writing could be applied to teaching or to working to make a positive change in your immediate department or university. Research is great, but if given the choice between working on an essay of mine for an hour or serving on a committee that's working toward a positive infrastructural change at my university for an hour, I'll always choose the latter. It's more immediate, and to me, more ultimately meaningful.
Certainly, when you write to publish, you're learning a lot about your field and then you're "creating new knowledge." But I can still do that by reading a bunch of books before choosing one for a class (which I do every semester) and then discussing that text in class, requiring my students (and thus myself) to critically think about the material in it for a couple of weeks. I can blog, tweet, talk to my colleagues, and engage in other forms of meaning-making based off of the things I'm reading and the concepts I'm pondering, all without having to resort to the draconian and ultimately somewhat hollow experience of hurling myself into the maw of academic publishing again and again. I haven't written any new article material yet this year and I don't really plan to, but I don't feel dumber as a result. I feel both smarter and more like my energies and talents are being applied to tasks that have a more immediate benefit both for me and for the rest of the university.
Of course, I don't mean this as a condemnation of humanities research or anything dramatic like that; it's just that it's been striking to me to realize how much more focused and simultaneously more relevant and productive I feel without having to worry about it as much anymore. I've been surprised at how hollow it seems (again, just to me) now that I have an actually well-defined and relatively powerful role to play in a small department that's excited about my input in a way that a larger department just couldn't be. It's a combination of factors that obviously isn't available to everyone who is in this line of work, and even if it was, I imagine a lot of people wouldn't want it. But it's working out really well for me by allowing me to stop focusing on the things that I've been told Matter Greatly and focus instead on things that matter to me intrinsically.
* At least two friends of mine who majored in CS around this time immediately started jobs with six-figure salaries after receiving their B.S.
I want to start this post by mentioning some things that I like. I'm going to do this because after that, I'm going to talk about how I don't like some of them as much as I like others, or, at least, how some have become more important to me than others, their value more obvious, and I don't want to give the impression that I dislike the less-liked things...I just like them less than maybe I once did.
When I switched my undergraduate major from Computer Science to English Literature way back in 2001 (or maybe 2002), I did it because over the first 2.5 or so years of college, I'd realized that I fundamentally, absolutely loved the lifestyle higher education allowed me to have. I was perfectly happy working 12 hours a day if that work was reading, learning, questioning, writing, exploring, and if that time was spent with and around others who also valued those activities. I was happy enough with this lifestyle and wanted to live it badly enough to give up a major that would have easily (in the early 2000s) landed me a job right out of college that would have paid significantly more from the onset than my current tenure track job will ever pay even at the full Professor level.*
My enthusiasm for this lifestyle has waxed rather than waned over the years. It's become less and less financially practical to actually make a living by working in higher education as an actual educator (it's another story if you want to be an administrator), but that continues to not really matter much to me. I still love writing, I still love reading. During my time at WSU, where I was required to teach courses while pursuing my graduate degrees in order to receive funding, I even discovered that I actually really like teaching, something I would never have imagined about myself back in the KSU days, when I was just desperately looking for an excuse to stay enmeshed in the intellectual environment of a large public university after getting my bachelor's degree. That said, some of my favorite memories of my graduate career involve participating in great seminar discussions after wading through hundreds of pages of theory, and condensing that theory and tweaking it to plot and write up a dissertation that I thoroughly enjoyed and am (mostly) proud of. So, by the time I received my Ph.D, I had, usefully, realized that I loved both teaching and researching.
Interestingly, my new job wants me to do one of these and not the other. It's 2013, so I'm pretty sure you can guess which is which.
When I first learned this, during a post-interview phone call with my then-potential employer, my heart sank a little. Taking a job where I taught a heavy course load and wasn't expected to engage in research (read: "We won't give you time or money to do any research"), seemed utterly depressing to me. I loved the research I was doing, and couldn't imagine giving it up to "just" teach more classes.
Well, as you can probably guess, this is the part where I decide that I don't like some things as much as others: flash forward about seven months, and I feel completely different about the whole teaching vs. research thing. I realize that my opinion isn't for everybody, and I'm not writing it here to force it on anyone else, but just to share my own experience. So.
Working at a teaching-oriented university is awesome.
See, the always-underlying issue I had with the work I was doing before was that it was pulling me in two opposing directions basically constantly. I love teaching and I love doing research, but when you're doing both at the same time, you're always doing both to about half of your ability. Or, at least that's how I've always felt. When I was able to just sit and read and write for a week, I was able to create some of my best-ever work. When I was able to just focus on lesson planning and teaching for a week, I was able to teach some of my best-ever classes. Out of eight years of work at WSU, how many times did I get these "one-only" opportunities? Maybe 2-3 times apiece. That's not an indictment of any particular person or department or policy, just an observation of how the general expectations that come down from on high at a huge public research university force you to mix, mingle, and often ultimately shortchange your priorities.
Here, it's easy: I work on teaching all the time, except for when there's a committee meeting or another service-related opportunity, and then I put the teaching aside for an hour and focus on that. The transition back is much easier, because helping to guide the course of a small department has a lot in common with teaching (and learning). Research, though it can certainly inform one's teaching, doesn't have a lot in common with pedagogy itself. Unless, I suppose, you are researching pedagogy. Which I was not.
So, practically speaking, my job's not nearly as confusing. I'm switching gears much less often, and though I work just as hard and often get just as tired, I'm not burdened with that feeling of being stretched too thin, of knowing I could teach better if I didn't have to attend my fourth conference of the year or knowing that I could really knock this article out of the park if I didn't have to teach three classes this semester, and so on.
Existentially, focusing just on teaching is a lot nicer, too. This is what's really surprised me, and what's possibly going to piss off some of the gentle readers out there. Surprisingly, "service" is no longer a bad word to me. Once, it was that pesky thing that you half-assed on your CV, the grad student equivalent of putting Who's Who Of American High School Students on your college application. Now, it's things that I do naturally every day as a result of being part of a small department, in a small town, with a recognizable and manageable community of students and faculty and administrators.
Because this is such a small school and the only thing that's more important on faculty evaluations than "service" is teaching, there's (generally speaking, at least) a positive attitude toward university- and department-related activities built into the way most people approach their work here. And this is great for me. Since I started in September, I've already made progress on helping to introduce a new academic program to the school, created six new courses that should all be seeing the light of day over the next 2 years or so, made inroads toward getting placed on two faculty committees whose work I think of as very important to the university and community at large, and met informally with a large number of faculty members to discuss how we can improve our Humanities offerings to more directly suit their programs' needs. I have a lot more time to meet with students individually, I've talked to every member of my department at length, both about work and more mundane things, and I'm setting up one-on-one, face-to-face meetings with the Provost and President of the university to discuss my thoughts on revamping the Humanities offerings and general education requirements.
I don't list all of those things to brag, but to make the points that a) I'm doing lots of things that are going to (hopefully) be directly valuable to the university and its student population and b) all of these things are way more meaningful to me than getting another article published in some obscure journal after months of toiling away alone in my office.
I once read an article (and I really wish I could remember where, because it would help this post out a lot) that suggested, pretty compellingly, that requirements for "research" in the humanities was something colleges and universities just sort of started requiring middle-level faculty to engage in before they could qualify for tenure for the sole reason that there wasn't much else for them to do besides teach classes. In larger universities, departments got so big that there was really no meaningful way to include all faculty in the processes of governance and upper-level decision-making, so they were, essentially, given something else to do instead to hide the fact that the system had become too cumbersome to care about their input anymore. Now, I don't know how accurate that is (like I said, the article was pretty convincing, but I also didn't follow up by investigating its claims in detail or anything), but it rings fairly true based on my own experience.
Like I said at the onset, I love doing research and writing articles, and writing my dissertation is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done academically. But it's hard to regularly put so much time and effort into publications that are likely to only be read by a few people who are already hanging out in the same echo chamber as you, especially when the time spent writing could be applied to teaching or to working to make a positive change in your immediate department or university. Research is great, but if given the choice between working on an essay of mine for an hour or serving on a committee that's working toward a positive infrastructural change at my university for an hour, I'll always choose the latter. It's more immediate, and to me, more ultimately meaningful.
Certainly, when you write to publish, you're learning a lot about your field and then you're "creating new knowledge." But I can still do that by reading a bunch of books before choosing one for a class (which I do every semester) and then discussing that text in class, requiring my students (and thus myself) to critically think about the material in it for a couple of weeks. I can blog, tweet, talk to my colleagues, and engage in other forms of meaning-making based off of the things I'm reading and the concepts I'm pondering, all without having to resort to the draconian and ultimately somewhat hollow experience of hurling myself into the maw of academic publishing again and again. I haven't written any new article material yet this year and I don't really plan to, but I don't feel dumber as a result. I feel both smarter and more like my energies and talents are being applied to tasks that have a more immediate benefit both for me and for the rest of the university.
Of course, I don't mean this as a condemnation of humanities research or anything dramatic like that; it's just that it's been striking to me to realize how much more focused and simultaneously more relevant and productive I feel without having to worry about it as much anymore. I've been surprised at how hollow it seems (again, just to me) now that I have an actually well-defined and relatively powerful role to play in a small department that's excited about my input in a way that a larger department just couldn't be. It's a combination of factors that obviously isn't available to everyone who is in this line of work, and even if it was, I imagine a lot of people wouldn't want it. But it's working out really well for me by allowing me to stop focusing on the things that I've been told Matter Greatly and focus instead on things that matter to me intrinsically.
* At least two friends of mine who majored in CS around this time immediately started jobs with six-figure salaries after receiving their B.S.
Nov 19, 2013
Low-Attendance Classes Are Awesome. I Think.
Note: This was posted on Recomposing the Pines on 11/18.
This is something I think about and talk about face-to-face, in meatspace, with friends and colleagues a lot. But I've always been hesitant to post about it on the internet in fear that it will get a lot of those knee-jerk, judgmental responses the internet is so famous for. I've had a few good discussion arise from my blog posts lately, though, and very few heads have been bitten off. So I thought I'd try.
I take attendance when it's required that I do so by the school. Insofar as I'm allowed to formulate my own attendance policy, I have none. I make it clear to my students up front that a big portion of my class is discussion, participating and "meaning-making" in the classroom, on a day-to-day basis. If they choose not to show up for this, I don't directly penalize them, because I believe (and have seen after teaching over 1,000 students) that they are indirectly penalized and almost entirely across the board perform worse than students who have perfect or near-perfect attendance and participation.
For better or worse, this is generally my approach to teaching at a university: you, the student, are (nominally, at least) an adult, and you're free to make your decisions about attending class, about doing the work, about putting in the time, etc. I make my expectations clear up front, I make myself readily available to you if you want to do the work but don't maybe know how to do the work. Even if you don't know how to correctly want to do the work, I'm willing to help. But I'm hesitant to force students to put in a good effort because then it won't be a good effort...at least that's how it seems to me. This has been my approach for a long time, and I'm mostly happy with it, though sometimes I feel bad about not being more prescriptive, as in "Student A wouldn't have failed if I'd have forced him to turn in more drafts of his essay!" But that brings it's own set of problems, I suppose.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to get at is that I find myself frequently happy when I have a low-attendance day or week in class rather than frustrated (which seems to be the "normal" faculty reaction to such things). I think it's because it reinforces the implicit assumptions I'm making in my attendance policy as I've described it above: if the students who show up are choosing to show up, and their motivation for showing up is interest, if not in the subject matter then at least in GPA-based success, then a low-attendance day actually raises the percentage of interested students in the classroom.
As someone whose courses are dialogically-based 95% of the time, I'm all in favor of smaller class sizes as a rule, but even courses with a twenty-student cap are typically going to have around ten students who would just barely not rather be dead than be in my classroom. On the other hand, every single class session I've had where there were 30-40 students enrolled and only 3-4 showed up (something that happens depressingly frequently) have been absolutely brilliant class sessions.
There's a part of my brain that feels like I should feel guilty for thinking this, but I can't tell if it's a logical part, or the part that occasionally insists that we should give a trophy to every child, even if they come in last place, because trophies make people feel good and sad people are sad.
This is something I think about and talk about face-to-face, in meatspace, with friends and colleagues a lot. But I've always been hesitant to post about it on the internet in fear that it will get a lot of those knee-jerk, judgmental responses the internet is so famous for. I've had a few good discussion arise from my blog posts lately, though, and very few heads have been bitten off. So I thought I'd try.
I take attendance when it's required that I do so by the school. Insofar as I'm allowed to formulate my own attendance policy, I have none. I make it clear to my students up front that a big portion of my class is discussion, participating and "meaning-making" in the classroom, on a day-to-day basis. If they choose not to show up for this, I don't directly penalize them, because I believe (and have seen after teaching over 1,000 students) that they are indirectly penalized and almost entirely across the board perform worse than students who have perfect or near-perfect attendance and participation.
 |
| Pudding, meat, etc. |
Anyway, the point I'm trying to get at is that I find myself frequently happy when I have a low-attendance day or week in class rather than frustrated (which seems to be the "normal" faculty reaction to such things). I think it's because it reinforces the implicit assumptions I'm making in my attendance policy as I've described it above: if the students who show up are choosing to show up, and their motivation for showing up is interest, if not in the subject matter then at least in GPA-based success, then a low-attendance day actually raises the percentage of interested students in the classroom.
As someone whose courses are dialogically-based 95% of the time, I'm all in favor of smaller class sizes as a rule, but even courses with a twenty-student cap are typically going to have around ten students who would just barely not rather be dead than be in my classroom. On the other hand, every single class session I've had where there were 30-40 students enrolled and only 3-4 showed up (something that happens depressingly frequently) have been absolutely brilliant class sessions.
There's a part of my brain that feels like I should feel guilty for thinking this, but I can't tell if it's a logical part, or the part that occasionally insists that we should give a trophy to every child, even if they come in last place, because trophies make people feel good and sad people are sad.
Oct 14, 2013
How (Not) To Talk About Digital Culture In A Classroom Full Of Teenagers
So I'm having a fascinating/frustrating issue with one of my classes at the moment. The course is titled "Digital Diversity," and it's a course I've kind of ported over to Oregon Tech from a 400-level DTC course I taught at WSU. The premise is that it's basically (as I say in meetings) "a cultural studies approach to the internet": in this version of the class, we look at how the internet and "always-on" technology is effecting our personal sense of identity and the ways we interact with others. Later on in the course, we move on to talking about internet access issues (often occurring along class/race lines), the ways social media is changing the face of political activism, and how old cultural/race/gender biases persist in virtual communities.
But none of that matters because we can't seem to stop talking about the robot apocalypse.
Well, that's not entirely true. What's really happening is that I've been trying to use Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together, which I really like, to introduce some perspective on how dramatically our modes of socializing and professionalizing and pretty-much-any-other-izing have changed in the last decade or two. It's a really good book, from my perspective, and Turkle, who's been writing about these issues almost longer than I've been alive, uses a lot of direct interviews to make her point that there's a serious gap between the most recent adult generation in this country and us older folks in terms of how invested people are in their technology and how thoroughly it permeates their everyday lives.
Anyway, the students (in general, at least) just aren't digging it. Their responses generally fall into one of three camps: 1) The people Turkle interviews are extreme examples of tech use and therefore she's not honestly portraying our culture in general, and/or 2) Technology is just going to become more and more widespread, there's nothing we can do to stop it, so why question it? and/or 3) It's just Facebook, why bother talking about it?
Ugh:
1) The way this concern is usually, actually phrased is "The people Turkle interviews (game addicts, online bullies, pretty normal-seeming teenagers) aren't normal people. If she interviewed normal people, it wouldn't seem like technology was so bad." Well, there's a shitload of problems with this statement, but let's just deal with the top layer. First off, any course that features, at its core, the goal of helping students develop critical thinking skills obviously has more work to do when students are making this kind of comment, wherein "normal" pretty obviously means "the way I am." Second, at least two thirds of these "normal" students, who don't have any "issues" with technology, can't seem to pull their faces out of their phones long enough to pay attention when I'm lecturing about the technology overuse that's apparently only an issue for complete, unhinged maniacs. Wait, what? Third, in my generally limited experience of the world, the people Turkle is interviewing are "normal," inasmuch as anyone is. Rest homes use robots to cheer up old people now. People are intrigued by the idea of having a lifelike but ultimately mechanical significant other so they don't have to navigate the "messy" parts of a human-on-human relationship. People are so addicted to the haptic feedback their phone gives them that they're feeling phantom vibrations in their pants whenever the phone isn't there. I think we're well past the point where claiming that a life dramatically mediated by technology is something only lunatics experience. To me, Turkle's book didn't talk about some weird robot sex utopia that won't ever exist anywhere; it talked about what was happening in my classroom while I was trying to talk to my students about the book. The question, of course, is do the students just not see the degree to which they're immersed in technology and thus perceive others who are, for all intents and purposes, just like them as non-"normal" somehow? Or am I just generationally biased?
2) This and 3) are sort of one of a piece. The whole "These things are happening, and we can't stop them!" thing is frustrating, but it's also a difficult thing to confront productively. It shows a sort of misapprehension of what the entire course is about, which might be (and probably is) a reflection of my not teaching it perfectly as much as it is a reflection of the students not "getting it." We're certainly not going to stop American culture from traveling down the path Turkle charts by bursting out of the classroom armed with Knowledge and Resolve; nor should we. The purpose of the class, the purpose of criticizing something, isn't to pass a verdict on whether or not it should exist, whether it should happen to the utmost extreme (robot sex!) or be erased from the face of existence (EMP explosion!), but rather to question the direction of our cultural momentum so that we, as individuals, can respond to it more intelligently and constructively, rather than getting swept along with the larger momentum unquestioningly. Yet it's hard to get the students to understand that criticism doesn't equal dismissal or rejection. Maybe equating those things is just a teenager thing. I can't remember.
3) I've had trouble with this one ever since I started teaching media other than just books. Students, somehow, are programmed at an early age (apparently) with the idea that taking an old book by a dead white guy and scrutinizing the everloving fuck out of each word in it is just a Thing You Do. Expect them to do this with video games, or films, or god forbid, smartphone apps and they lose their goddamn minds. Again, this isn't necessarily anyone's fault, but it's hard for me to figure out how to teach critical thinking about these forms of expression. There's no way to force them up to the high-culture level of literature in a few weeks of class, and yet everything that's not worthy of this sort of highbrow consideration is "just a game" or "just an app." As if something that mediates your relationships with other people and takes up 5 hours of your day is "just" anything. Hmph.
Sorry if this post comes off as overly pissy; it shouldn't. I'm not mad at anyone, I'm just having a hard time, as usual, getting students to believe that the culture they currently live in is just as interesting and worthy of study as the cultures that existed centuries ago.
But none of that matters because we can't seem to stop talking about the robot apocalypse.
Well, that's not entirely true. What's really happening is that I've been trying to use Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together, which I really like, to introduce some perspective on how dramatically our modes of socializing and professionalizing and pretty-much-any-other-izing have changed in the last decade or two. It's a really good book, from my perspective, and Turkle, who's been writing about these issues almost longer than I've been alive, uses a lot of direct interviews to make her point that there's a serious gap between the most recent adult generation in this country and us older folks in terms of how invested people are in their technology and how thoroughly it permeates their everyday lives.
 |
| Seriously you guys, it's pretty good. |
Ugh:
1) The way this concern is usually, actually phrased is "The people Turkle interviews (game addicts, online bullies, pretty normal-seeming teenagers) aren't normal people. If she interviewed normal people, it wouldn't seem like technology was so bad." Well, there's a shitload of problems with this statement, but let's just deal with the top layer. First off, any course that features, at its core, the goal of helping students develop critical thinking skills obviously has more work to do when students are making this kind of comment, wherein "normal" pretty obviously means "the way I am." Second, at least two thirds of these "normal" students, who don't have any "issues" with technology, can't seem to pull their faces out of their phones long enough to pay attention when I'm lecturing about the technology overuse that's apparently only an issue for complete, unhinged maniacs. Wait, what? Third, in my generally limited experience of the world, the people Turkle is interviewing are "normal," inasmuch as anyone is. Rest homes use robots to cheer up old people now. People are intrigued by the idea of having a lifelike but ultimately mechanical significant other so they don't have to navigate the "messy" parts of a human-on-human relationship. People are so addicted to the haptic feedback their phone gives them that they're feeling phantom vibrations in their pants whenever the phone isn't there. I think we're well past the point where claiming that a life dramatically mediated by technology is something only lunatics experience. To me, Turkle's book didn't talk about some weird robot sex utopia that won't ever exist anywhere; it talked about what was happening in my classroom while I was trying to talk to my students about the book. The question, of course, is do the students just not see the degree to which they're immersed in technology and thus perceive others who are, for all intents and purposes, just like them as non-"normal" somehow? Or am I just generationally biased?
3) I've had trouble with this one ever since I started teaching media other than just books. Students, somehow, are programmed at an early age (apparently) with the idea that taking an old book by a dead white guy and scrutinizing the everloving fuck out of each word in it is just a Thing You Do. Expect them to do this with video games, or films, or god forbid, smartphone apps and they lose their goddamn minds. Again, this isn't necessarily anyone's fault, but it's hard for me to figure out how to teach critical thinking about these forms of expression. There's no way to force them up to the high-culture level of literature in a few weeks of class, and yet everything that's not worthy of this sort of highbrow consideration is "just a game" or "just an app." As if something that mediates your relationships with other people and takes up 5 hours of your day is "just" anything. Hmph.
May 8, 2013
The End Of An Ear*
Hey guess what? It's another post that's not about Phish! That's two in a row!**
Hey, I got a real job (is the slightly less important announcement I came in here originally to make)!
Yeah, the impossible has happened.*** I got a tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor of the Humanities at the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls. Like, they met me in person and afterward had me sign a piece of paper and everything, so I know for sure that they don't just accidentally think that I'm someone else cooler and better looking and then will be surprised/disappointed/less attracted to me than they expected when I show up in September and start teaching the hell out of students.
This is the part in the blog post where I feel this weird, public-blog-y obligation to now go back and explain everything that's happened in the last four or so months, and so much has actually happened that my natural response to said urge is to just brain-lock and shove the post under the virtual bed with the virtual toe of my virtual sock until next week, when I'll try to write The Post To End All Posts again. This time, though, I'm just going to push through that whole tangle of mind-shit and keep writing.
Blah, blah, blah, blahdy, blahdy, blog.
It's just like old times in here all of a sudden, ain't it?
Speaking of old times, I actually spent a bit of time today in between sessions of working on an essay I'm trying to get published reading through lots of my old posts from 2008. And oh shit, are there lots of old posts from 2008. In August of that year alone, I had 114 posts. Just to remind you, there are only 31 days in August.
It was a fascinating little aside, though; sort of like one of those weird info-benders where you click on one link in a Wikipedia article you opened out of purely professional interest and suddenly three hours, two bags of tortilla chips and one cigar later you realize you've somehow gone from "post-structuralism" to the page for Van Halen's album "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" and there's nothing in-between in your memory except for the cerebral equivalent of those ghostly fire-tire-tracks the DeLorean leaves behind when it travels through time. Except this wasn't Wikipedia. It was my actual past life.****
It was actually a really fascinating trip. Often, when Lindsey and I talk about life (That's what couples do, right? That and the sexy-thing?), I realize I'm saying a lot of things about my mid-20s that characterize them as this difficult but heroic struggle to find out who I was so I could grow to be more calm and more content and Go Out And Get What I Really Wanted. Sometimes this makes me self-conscious because that's exactly how I remember things, but talking about it makes me sound (in my mind) like I'm making a spirit quest out of a life that's really been more like a walk to the grocery. Rereading some of the blog entries I wrote during the summer and fall of 2008, a period of time that would have been very harrowing and challenging because of the number of big changes I was experiencing even if I hadn't been batshit crazy at the time, I realized that this actually was what had happened. 2008 and early 2009 were really the tail end of about 4-5 years of at times aimless, at times purposeful soul-searching (and job-searching) and reading through the entries I made in this blog over the course of those four months or so, I could actually see myself changing from someone whose perspective I barely recognize now to someone who would clearly become me, now, five or so years later. It was a little haunting, actually, but also fascinating in the sense that my words from the time did such a better job of explaining what it was like for me then than my words now explaining my now-memories of then could ever do.
In fact, it struck me in the process of reading how sort-of amazing it is that I blogged so frequently during the five years of what I like to think of as my "second album" or "sophomore slump" phase. At the time, I did it to keep my sanity in a delicate balance; looking back, though, I also seem to have made an enormously detailed nearly day-to-day chronicle of surviving my mid-twenties. And at this point in my life, that's a really cool artifact to have. In fact, I'd love for Lindsey and any interested friends I've made since that time who didn't know me then to go back through and read what I wrote back then (of course no one would ever do this because it would be hideous boring to them, I'm sure). It's often self-indulgent, but it's also sometimes really insightful and interesting in a way that I'm sad to say I might be too self-conscious to be today, and it shows where I've come from and how far I've come since then while still being, clearly, me. I like the idea of there being a record of that part of my life recorded in the medium that I feel most comfortable expressing myself in. Even as an avid and sometimes even rabid blog user over the years, I've still always been a bit self-deprecating about my blogging and frequently poo-poo'd the idea of blogging in general; however, after this afternoon it strikes me now that if someone happened to be looking back fifty years from now, wondering (for whatever reason) who I was and what I was about, this blog would honestly not be a terrible place to start.
So maybe I'll start blogging more again. Maybe for no other reason than to be able to pull this page up five years into my life in Klamath Falls and laugh at how stupid I sound, not expecting at all to live in a ranch house with three dogs and five kids, or be homeless and half-frozen to death after it turned out that Lindsey was a fucking FemBot all along and was only waiting until I was at my highest before razing the house and all my clothes and my The Captain and Tennille records around me with her eye-lasers.
Or maybe I'll start working on my academic website again tomorrow morning and forget about the blog for another three months. Who knows?
Either way, it's been a fun trip, and still is.
Now, enjoy some footnotes!
*Or "era," if you prefer. I don't.
**This part of the post no longer makes sense, as I've moved all my Phish-posts over to Skyballs and Saxscraper, but I'm leaving it in because typing all this was obviously way easier than using the backspace key.
***Yes, despite constantly applying for long-term jobs in academia for the last two years, I was always just sort of living on the assumption that it would never work out and eventually I'd be forced to give up and embark on a career building beans or slashing pylons or something.
****For some damn reason, Wikipedia lists this album as "hard rock." If any Van Halen album is "hard rock," then let's just all agree to start referring to Katy Perry's second album as "glockenspiel-driven proto-roots-rap," okay?
Hey, I got a real job (is the slightly less important announcement I came in here originally to make)!
Yeah, the impossible has happened.*** I got a tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor of the Humanities at the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls. Like, they met me in person and afterward had me sign a piece of paper and everything, so I know for sure that they don't just accidentally think that I'm someone else cooler and better looking and then will be surprised/disappointed/less attracted to me than they expected when I show up in September and start teaching the hell out of students.
This is the part in the blog post where I feel this weird, public-blog-y obligation to now go back and explain everything that's happened in the last four or so months, and so much has actually happened that my natural response to said urge is to just brain-lock and shove the post under the virtual bed with the virtual toe of my virtual sock until next week, when I'll try to write The Post To End All Posts again. This time, though, I'm just going to push through that whole tangle of mind-shit and keep writing.
Blah, blah, blah, blahdy, blahdy, blog.
It's just like old times in here all of a sudden, ain't it?
Speaking of old times, I actually spent a bit of time today in between sessions of working on an essay I'm trying to get published reading through lots of my old posts from 2008. And oh shit, are there lots of old posts from 2008. In August of that year alone, I had 114 posts. Just to remind you, there are only 31 days in August.
It was a fascinating little aside, though; sort of like one of those weird info-benders where you click on one link in a Wikipedia article you opened out of purely professional interest and suddenly three hours, two bags of tortilla chips and one cigar later you realize you've somehow gone from "post-structuralism" to the page for Van Halen's album "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" and there's nothing in-between in your memory except for the cerebral equivalent of those ghostly fire-tire-tracks the DeLorean leaves behind when it travels through time. Except this wasn't Wikipedia. It was my actual past life.****
It was actually a really fascinating trip. Often, when Lindsey and I talk about life (That's what couples do, right? That and the sexy-thing?), I realize I'm saying a lot of things about my mid-20s that characterize them as this difficult but heroic struggle to find out who I was so I could grow to be more calm and more content and Go Out And Get What I Really Wanted. Sometimes this makes me self-conscious because that's exactly how I remember things, but talking about it makes me sound (in my mind) like I'm making a spirit quest out of a life that's really been more like a walk to the grocery. Rereading some of the blog entries I wrote during the summer and fall of 2008, a period of time that would have been very harrowing and challenging because of the number of big changes I was experiencing even if I hadn't been batshit crazy at the time, I realized that this actually was what had happened. 2008 and early 2009 were really the tail end of about 4-5 years of at times aimless, at times purposeful soul-searching (and job-searching) and reading through the entries I made in this blog over the course of those four months or so, I could actually see myself changing from someone whose perspective I barely recognize now to someone who would clearly become me, now, five or so years later. It was a little haunting, actually, but also fascinating in the sense that my words from the time did such a better job of explaining what it was like for me then than my words now explaining my now-memories of then could ever do.
In fact, it struck me in the process of reading how sort-of amazing it is that I blogged so frequently during the five years of what I like to think of as my "second album" or "sophomore slump" phase. At the time, I did it to keep my sanity in a delicate balance; looking back, though, I also seem to have made an enormously detailed nearly day-to-day chronicle of surviving my mid-twenties. And at this point in my life, that's a really cool artifact to have. In fact, I'd love for Lindsey and any interested friends I've made since that time who didn't know me then to go back through and read what I wrote back then (of course no one would ever do this because it would be hideous boring to them, I'm sure). It's often self-indulgent, but it's also sometimes really insightful and interesting in a way that I'm sad to say I might be too self-conscious to be today, and it shows where I've come from and how far I've come since then while still being, clearly, me. I like the idea of there being a record of that part of my life recorded in the medium that I feel most comfortable expressing myself in. Even as an avid and sometimes even rabid blog user over the years, I've still always been a bit self-deprecating about my blogging and frequently poo-poo'd the idea of blogging in general; however, after this afternoon it strikes me now that if someone happened to be looking back fifty years from now, wondering (for whatever reason) who I was and what I was about, this blog would honestly not be a terrible place to start.
So maybe I'll start blogging more again. Maybe for no other reason than to be able to pull this page up five years into my life in Klamath Falls and laugh at how stupid I sound, not expecting at all to live in a ranch house with three dogs and five kids, or be homeless and half-frozen to death after it turned out that Lindsey was a fucking FemBot all along and was only waiting until I was at my highest before razing the house and all my clothes and my The Captain and Tennille records around me with her eye-lasers.
Or maybe I'll start working on my academic website again tomorrow morning and forget about the blog for another three months. Who knows?
Either way, it's been a fun trip, and still is.
Now, enjoy some footnotes!
*Or "era," if you prefer. I don't.
**This part of the post no longer makes sense, as I've moved all my Phish-posts over to Skyballs and Saxscraper, but I'm leaving it in because typing all this was obviously way easier than using the backspace key.
***Yes, despite constantly applying for long-term jobs in academia for the last two years, I was always just sort of living on the assumption that it would never work out and eventually I'd be forced to give up and embark on a career building beans or slashing pylons or something.
****For some damn reason, Wikipedia lists this album as "hard rock." If any Van Halen album is "hard rock," then let's just all agree to start referring to Katy Perry's second album as "glockenspiel-driven proto-roots-rap," okay?
May 7, 2013
In Which I Argue Against That Article About Hating Grad School That Everyone Loves
First, for your perusal (and potential embittered vindication): said article.
I've seen this article and the various responses it's spawned making the rounds lately on Facebook, and as a former graduate student in the humanities, I felt compelled to respond. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that between the time that I began drafting my response and now, I actually got a tenure-track job in the humanities and will be an Assistant Professor come fall. However, the meat of what I want to say has been in my head since before I even knew about my campus interview and my point(s) of contention with Schuman's article remains largely unaltered by my personal good fortune.
For me, said article presents one particular (and highly subjective) set of expectations about the grad school experience and how oneself should be as a grad student; Schuman's is a viewpoint that I disagree wholeheartedly with while realizing that many people (including many of my colleagues) have ended up in grad school precisely because they believe now (or believed at one point) what she seems to have believed before her recent disillusionment. I don't write to disabuse anyone of their particular notion of grad school or of their own grad studentdom; as I'm well aware, many of us only survive the grad school process (especially the doctoral program process) by clinging desperately to our ideas of ourselves as Graduate Students and not questioning them too much. I write, instead, because my experience of grad school in the humanities was almost entirely positive, and I'd like to think that even bitter, bitter Schuman would prefer that more students have experiences like mine than like hers in the future. In short, I find her point of view overly critical, one-sided, and as such, unhelpful, and I'd like to think that mine might work as a counterpoint that could help someone, somewhere, someday, and thus validate my hope that my experience is worth sharing for a few paragraphs on a stupid blog that hardly update anymore.
I'm going to attack this thing a bit systematically, because I don't want to miss anything. First, there's the probably-trolling title and subtitles ("There are no academic jobs and getting a Ph.D. will turn you into a horrible person" or "Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor," take your pick). Well, here's a counter-troll: I received my literature Ph.D. in May of 2012, and it did not make me an emotional trainwreck; in fact, grad school was the first time in my life that I felt challenged enough and had enough of a sense of purpose and sense of self to not be an emotional trainwreck. In many ways, beginning grad school was actually the culmination of a long, slow climb out of a lot of issues with depression and aimlessness that I've had since I was a young kid. It was hard academically, and in the sense that it required me to do a lot of soul-searching and self-evaluation that I might have not been motivated to do otherwise. But that was good for me. Oh, right, and on top of all that, grad school actually did make me a professor.
Next: I'm not sure if Schuman's opening paragraph is still trolling or not. Beginning grad school in any discipline with the apparent end goal of getting "a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired" is pretty naively utopian. Let's just say that if you're interested in pursuing a literature Ph.D. only because, basically, you don't want to work hard or you only want to work nine months of the year, then you're barking up the wrong tree right off the bat (how's that for portmantidiom?). How you could not realize this right away is absolutely baffling to me, which is why I choose to assume that Schuman's being a bit tongue-in-cheek here. Just like you shouldn't decide to become a doctor because you like riding in an ambulance and wearing scrubs, you shouldn't decide to become a teacher because you want summers off. If you need me to explain why that's dumb, I'd be happy to devote another post to it later this week.
The "two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning" line admittedly hits a bit closer to home, but this is one of the major points that I wanted to wrestle with anyway. I spent the first three years of my undergrad as a computer science major. I had started college with the twin beliefs that a) more education is just plain good for you in the old, liberal-arts sense and b) you still needed to be able to do something semi-practical by the time you graduated so you could get a job. I chose computer science because I liked computers, but I took as many electives as I could on the side, just because they were interesting. In practice, though, a) worked out quite well while b) did not. I struggled with computer science, not because it was a difficult major (though it was) but because I couldn't make myself care about the material. By the end of the second year, every single class period was spent in agony, waiting for the clock to strike the end of the hour so I could leave, say, Data Structures and head across campus to The Short Story. By the end of my third year, I'd changed my major to Literature and I fucking loved it. Of course, the obvious downside to a Bachelor's degree in English surfaced when I graduated and ended up spending two years working at gas stations, restaurants, and shopping malls. I had changed my major originally with the idea that I might someday become a college professor in mind, and of course I knew that that required graduate school, and yet I had absolutely no desire to attend a graduate school that would require me to pay tuition. Even with the specter of future decades of menial service jobs looming before me, I couldn't bring myself to accept a graduate student position that would require me to go into debt. I didn't want to have that sort of debt hanging over my head, and, more importantly, I didn't want graduate school to be framed throughout my entire experience of it as a gamble that I needed to win in the end (i.e. get a "real job") or else spend god knows how paying back loans while working at McDonald's.
So, for two years I mucked around doing various minimum-wage jobs until I got an offer from Washington State University, whose English department would pay my tuition for two years while I got my M.A. degree as long as I taught freshman composition classes for them. Tuition paid, and just for doing what I wanted to be trained to be able to do anyway?! It was a no-brainer. A few days later, I was packing up my things and preparing for a long cross-country drive to Washington state, and the rest is history.
As a result of this opportunity, I was able to not only go to grad school for almost-free, I got on-the-job training and was (in theory, at least) more hireable out the door as a result. If after getting my M.A. I didn't get a job, so what? I wouldn't be any worse off than I'd been before, and I'd have a graduate degree to show for it. As it was, I went on to get a Ph.D. at the same school with the same deal, and then got a job, but the point of all my blabbering here is that I'd decided from the start that if I wasn't able to get into a school that would pay my way in exchange for teaching or research work, then I just wouldn't go to grad school at all. It was important to me to be able to treat grad school as its own valuable, meaningful opportunity, and not just a means to an end or a long-odds gamble on some future money. At WSU I did real work in both research and teaching while fulfilling my degree requirements and if anyone ever had the nerve to insinuate that what I did for my eight years there wasn't a "real job" because I was a grad student, I'd probably dropkick them in the face and then calmly explain why they couldn't be more wrong. It seems to me from Schuman's article that she only perceived of grad school as means to an end, and then when that end wasn't reached, she took it out on the experience of grad school retroactively.
I didn't by any means get paid a massive amount for my graduate school stipend, but it was enough to get through the year on as long as I spent carefully. So, yeah, I did research for most summers, but I got to make my own schedule for the most part and I wasn't really "unpaid" in the sense that it was explained up-front that I would only get paid for nine months of the year. Easy math (even for English majors!) said, then, that I save a quarter of everything I made and set it aside for the summer. Voila! No longer "unpaid" research! It also helped that the research I was doing was, by and large, seriously fascinating. For my M.A. thesis, I regurgitated a bunch of information about Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" because I thought grad school was about impressing imagined muckety-mucks who wagged their fingers at me from the top of the Ivory Tower in my nightmares, and it was miserable. When I came back for the Ph.D., I sat down and literally (like, in a list!) identified all the things that made me unhappy about the research I'd done thus far and found a way to reinvent my work so that I was doing something I truly enjoyed. Subjecting Kafka to first-order logic sounds fucking horrible to me. I'm sure to someone out there, it would be endlessly fascinating, but it's one of those topics that, at least at first blush has the ring of "I chose this to impress my committee" rather than "I chose this because I love thinking about it and talking about it and teaching about it." Why would anyone set themselves up to do that much work on an become that immersed in something that they don't really care about? Obviously, it didn't make Schulman happy. My research was based on finding similarities between a few of the things that were important to me (hiking, video games, and geocaching), and then figuring out how the theorizations of writers like Heidegger, Tuan, and de Certeau might help explain how those practices were just as worth talking about in academia as Chaucer and Shakespeare and the global literature author-du-jour and "the long eighteenth century." And it was a blast. I spent as much time hiking, blogging, taking pictures and playing Minecraft for my research as I did writing. And at the end I still had a 300 page dissertation to show for it, which I'm now in the process of turning into a book manuscript. Because it was fun. Not because someone was forcing me to do it. There are much easier jobs than this one. Why the hell would you choose to do this one if you're just going to do what you think you have to do?
One thing I agree with Schuman on is the idea that getting a job after graduate school is, generally speaking, not really related to how "right" you do things. The application and interview process for academic jobs was/is pretty much the most depressing, harrowing, agency-less process I've ever been through in my life. But, throughout the two years I was on the market, I kept two things in mind. First, that I had begun and had always continued graduate school as its own experience/reward. I came out of my Ph.D. program (as a result of preplanning) in no debt, and with tons of experience in writing, publishing, and teaching that I hadn't had before I started. I'd had a great time, and it had made me a better and happier person in so many ways than I'd been before I started in 2005. That was enough for me. If I didn't get The Job and had to end up working for a publisher or teaching at a community college to make ends meet, so what? I'd had a great time and gotten to do what many, many people haven't been lucky enough to get to do already. Demanding more seemed (and still seems) ungrateful.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, I really don't understand how getting a job in academia is any harder than getting a job anywhere else right now. To hem and haw and hand-wring and so on because you spent six years (or however long) preparing to get a job that doesn't now exist sounds (again) like you made a bad gamble, setting aside years of your life for some imagined payoff down the line, especially now when you can no longer claim that six years ago "things were better" with the job market (both in academia and in general). People at various levels of education and with all sorts of types of specific training are jobless and even homeless all over the country; do we really have to keep pretending like the employment situation in academia is a special, extra-horrible case?*
Perhaps the most troubling part of the original article for me is this: "During graduate school, you will be broken down and reconfigured in the image of the academy. By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.)" I never believed any of these things, and I firmly believe it's because of the attitude I had toward grad school, which I described above. Ultimately, for me, grad school was a job. Admittedly, it was a job that paid less than most, required more hours than most, and, at times, seemed more thankless than most...but it was still just a job. I was willing to continue to do it in spite of these poor(ish) conditions because I thought the trade-off was worth it in the name of getting to do a job that actually meant something to me. And it was worth it. As a result, it was never in danger of consuming my identity, of usurping the other values and activities and relationships and facets of my personality that I valued before I began and that I still value now. I have known and know people who react to grad school in the way that Schuman describes, and I can't help but think that to react to a job in such a way must indicate an intense, perhaps repressed need to make a significant change to one's view of oneself, and that that fetishization (Aha! Grad school word!) of the grad school experience that results is meant to be the catalyst for that change. When the end result is "failure" (i.e., not getting a tenure track job) that shatters this new self-image and results in embitterment. But "the system" or "The Man" or grad school isn't to blame for this disappointment: none of those things are ever going to transform you into a special, magical (and possibly holier-than-thou) butterfly. Only you can do that.
In the end, I know that I, to some degree at least, got lucky. I got lucky to get into WSU in the first place, then I got lucky again to be allowed to come back. Then I got lucky to get a postdoc position, and again to get a faculty position. Of course, it wasn't just luck; I also worked really damn hard throughout all of that in pursuit of those opportunities. But it likely wouldn't be too far off base to say that all my hard work had very little to do with where I actually ended up, and that's a depressing thought. It's also, I think, the main thing that Schuman and I can both agree on. It's unfortunate that taking the "right" track through academia doesn't automatically result in a tenure-track job, yes, but show me a place and time where everyone always gets what they earn and I'll invent a time machine and move there. The trick for me was (and I mean this in the hippiest way possible) to enjoy the journey and worry as little as possible about the destination. I didn't have a backup plan going into graduate school because I waited until I didn't need one. My research wasn't drudgery because I wasn't willing to let it be. Grad school didn't consume my life because I entered grad school so that I could have a life, and live in a place where I could be myself, before, during, and then after I learned what that actually meant.
When I read pieces like the one that Schuman wrote, they don't make me happy that I "figured it out" (or whatever I did). They don't make me feel like I won and others lost. They make me sad that there's no way to explain my experience to more people, so that others can get what I got out of the grad school experience. It was really the best 6 years of my life, but it didn't just magically happen that way; I made it that way. I have a suspicion that when it turns out to be the worst 6 years of your life, the same thing is still true.
* I'm talking generally here. The treatment of adjuncts, especially in the humanities, as a form of cheap, easily disposable labor is a trend that definitely needs to be talked about and, hopefully, stopped.
I've seen this article and the various responses it's spawned making the rounds lately on Facebook, and as a former graduate student in the humanities, I felt compelled to respond. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that between the time that I began drafting my response and now, I actually got a tenure-track job in the humanities and will be an Assistant Professor come fall. However, the meat of what I want to say has been in my head since before I even knew about my campus interview and my point(s) of contention with Schuman's article remains largely unaltered by my personal good fortune.
For me, said article presents one particular (and highly subjective) set of expectations about the grad school experience and how oneself should be as a grad student; Schuman's is a viewpoint that I disagree wholeheartedly with while realizing that many people (including many of my colleagues) have ended up in grad school precisely because they believe now (or believed at one point) what she seems to have believed before her recent disillusionment. I don't write to disabuse anyone of their particular notion of grad school or of their own grad studentdom; as I'm well aware, many of us only survive the grad school process (especially the doctoral program process) by clinging desperately to our ideas of ourselves as Graduate Students and not questioning them too much. I write, instead, because my experience of grad school in the humanities was almost entirely positive, and I'd like to think that even bitter, bitter Schuman would prefer that more students have experiences like mine than like hers in the future. In short, I find her point of view overly critical, one-sided, and as such, unhelpful, and I'd like to think that mine might work as a counterpoint that could help someone, somewhere, someday, and thus validate my hope that my experience is worth sharing for a few paragraphs on a stupid blog that hardly update anymore.
I'm going to attack this thing a bit systematically, because I don't want to miss anything. First, there's the probably-trolling title and subtitles ("There are no academic jobs and getting a Ph.D. will turn you into a horrible person" or "Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor," take your pick). Well, here's a counter-troll: I received my literature Ph.D. in May of 2012, and it did not make me an emotional trainwreck; in fact, grad school was the first time in my life that I felt challenged enough and had enough of a sense of purpose and sense of self to not be an emotional trainwreck. In many ways, beginning grad school was actually the culmination of a long, slow climb out of a lot of issues with depression and aimlessness that I've had since I was a young kid. It was hard academically, and in the sense that it required me to do a lot of soul-searching and self-evaluation that I might have not been motivated to do otherwise. But that was good for me. Oh, right, and on top of all that, grad school actually did make me a professor.
Next: I'm not sure if Schuman's opening paragraph is still trolling or not. Beginning grad school in any discipline with the apparent end goal of getting "a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired" is pretty naively utopian. Let's just say that if you're interested in pursuing a literature Ph.D. only because, basically, you don't want to work hard or you only want to work nine months of the year, then you're barking up the wrong tree right off the bat (how's that for portmantidiom?). How you could not realize this right away is absolutely baffling to me, which is why I choose to assume that Schuman's being a bit tongue-in-cheek here. Just like you shouldn't decide to become a doctor because you like riding in an ambulance and wearing scrubs, you shouldn't decide to become a teacher because you want summers off. If you need me to explain why that's dumb, I'd be happy to devote another post to it later this week.
The "two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning" line admittedly hits a bit closer to home, but this is one of the major points that I wanted to wrestle with anyway. I spent the first three years of my undergrad as a computer science major. I had started college with the twin beliefs that a) more education is just plain good for you in the old, liberal-arts sense and b) you still needed to be able to do something semi-practical by the time you graduated so you could get a job. I chose computer science because I liked computers, but I took as many electives as I could on the side, just because they were interesting. In practice, though, a) worked out quite well while b) did not. I struggled with computer science, not because it was a difficult major (though it was) but because I couldn't make myself care about the material. By the end of the second year, every single class period was spent in agony, waiting for the clock to strike the end of the hour so I could leave, say, Data Structures and head across campus to The Short Story. By the end of my third year, I'd changed my major to Literature and I fucking loved it. Of course, the obvious downside to a Bachelor's degree in English surfaced when I graduated and ended up spending two years working at gas stations, restaurants, and shopping malls. I had changed my major originally with the idea that I might someday become a college professor in mind, and of course I knew that that required graduate school, and yet I had absolutely no desire to attend a graduate school that would require me to pay tuition. Even with the specter of future decades of menial service jobs looming before me, I couldn't bring myself to accept a graduate student position that would require me to go into debt. I didn't want to have that sort of debt hanging over my head, and, more importantly, I didn't want graduate school to be framed throughout my entire experience of it as a gamble that I needed to win in the end (i.e. get a "real job") or else spend god knows how paying back loans while working at McDonald's.
So, for two years I mucked around doing various minimum-wage jobs until I got an offer from Washington State University, whose English department would pay my tuition for two years while I got my M.A. degree as long as I taught freshman composition classes for them. Tuition paid, and just for doing what I wanted to be trained to be able to do anyway?! It was a no-brainer. A few days later, I was packing up my things and preparing for a long cross-country drive to Washington state, and the rest is history.
As a result of this opportunity, I was able to not only go to grad school for almost-free, I got on-the-job training and was (in theory, at least) more hireable out the door as a result. If after getting my M.A. I didn't get a job, so what? I wouldn't be any worse off than I'd been before, and I'd have a graduate degree to show for it. As it was, I went on to get a Ph.D. at the same school with the same deal, and then got a job, but the point of all my blabbering here is that I'd decided from the start that if I wasn't able to get into a school that would pay my way in exchange for teaching or research work, then I just wouldn't go to grad school at all. It was important to me to be able to treat grad school as its own valuable, meaningful opportunity, and not just a means to an end or a long-odds gamble on some future money. At WSU I did real work in both research and teaching while fulfilling my degree requirements and if anyone ever had the nerve to insinuate that what I did for my eight years there wasn't a "real job" because I was a grad student, I'd probably dropkick them in the face and then calmly explain why they couldn't be more wrong. It seems to me from Schuman's article that she only perceived of grad school as means to an end, and then when that end wasn't reached, she took it out on the experience of grad school retroactively.
I didn't by any means get paid a massive amount for my graduate school stipend, but it was enough to get through the year on as long as I spent carefully. So, yeah, I did research for most summers, but I got to make my own schedule for the most part and I wasn't really "unpaid" in the sense that it was explained up-front that I would only get paid for nine months of the year. Easy math (even for English majors!) said, then, that I save a quarter of everything I made and set it aside for the summer. Voila! No longer "unpaid" research! It also helped that the research I was doing was, by and large, seriously fascinating. For my M.A. thesis, I regurgitated a bunch of information about Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" because I thought grad school was about impressing imagined muckety-mucks who wagged their fingers at me from the top of the Ivory Tower in my nightmares, and it was miserable. When I came back for the Ph.D., I sat down and literally (like, in a list!) identified all the things that made me unhappy about the research I'd done thus far and found a way to reinvent my work so that I was doing something I truly enjoyed. Subjecting Kafka to first-order logic sounds fucking horrible to me. I'm sure to someone out there, it would be endlessly fascinating, but it's one of those topics that, at least at first blush has the ring of "I chose this to impress my committee" rather than "I chose this because I love thinking about it and talking about it and teaching about it." Why would anyone set themselves up to do that much work on an become that immersed in something that they don't really care about? Obviously, it didn't make Schulman happy. My research was based on finding similarities between a few of the things that were important to me (hiking, video games, and geocaching), and then figuring out how the theorizations of writers like Heidegger, Tuan, and de Certeau might help explain how those practices were just as worth talking about in academia as Chaucer and Shakespeare and the global literature author-du-jour and "the long eighteenth century." And it was a blast. I spent as much time hiking, blogging, taking pictures and playing Minecraft for my research as I did writing. And at the end I still had a 300 page dissertation to show for it, which I'm now in the process of turning into a book manuscript. Because it was fun. Not because someone was forcing me to do it. There are much easier jobs than this one. Why the hell would you choose to do this one if you're just going to do what you think you have to do?
One thing I agree with Schuman on is the idea that getting a job after graduate school is, generally speaking, not really related to how "right" you do things. The application and interview process for academic jobs was/is pretty much the most depressing, harrowing, agency-less process I've ever been through in my life. But, throughout the two years I was on the market, I kept two things in mind. First, that I had begun and had always continued graduate school as its own experience/reward. I came out of my Ph.D. program (as a result of preplanning) in no debt, and with tons of experience in writing, publishing, and teaching that I hadn't had before I started. I'd had a great time, and it had made me a better and happier person in so many ways than I'd been before I started in 2005. That was enough for me. If I didn't get The Job and had to end up working for a publisher or teaching at a community college to make ends meet, so what? I'd had a great time and gotten to do what many, many people haven't been lucky enough to get to do already. Demanding more seemed (and still seems) ungrateful.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, I really don't understand how getting a job in academia is any harder than getting a job anywhere else right now. To hem and haw and hand-wring and so on because you spent six years (or however long) preparing to get a job that doesn't now exist sounds (again) like you made a bad gamble, setting aside years of your life for some imagined payoff down the line, especially now when you can no longer claim that six years ago "things were better" with the job market (both in academia and in general). People at various levels of education and with all sorts of types of specific training are jobless and even homeless all over the country; do we really have to keep pretending like the employment situation in academia is a special, extra-horrible case?*
Perhaps the most troubling part of the original article for me is this: "During graduate school, you will be broken down and reconfigured in the image of the academy. By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.)" I never believed any of these things, and I firmly believe it's because of the attitude I had toward grad school, which I described above. Ultimately, for me, grad school was a job. Admittedly, it was a job that paid less than most, required more hours than most, and, at times, seemed more thankless than most...but it was still just a job. I was willing to continue to do it in spite of these poor(ish) conditions because I thought the trade-off was worth it in the name of getting to do a job that actually meant something to me. And it was worth it. As a result, it was never in danger of consuming my identity, of usurping the other values and activities and relationships and facets of my personality that I valued before I began and that I still value now. I have known and know people who react to grad school in the way that Schuman describes, and I can't help but think that to react to a job in such a way must indicate an intense, perhaps repressed need to make a significant change to one's view of oneself, and that that fetishization (Aha! Grad school word!) of the grad school experience that results is meant to be the catalyst for that change. When the end result is "failure" (i.e., not getting a tenure track job) that shatters this new self-image and results in embitterment. But "the system" or "The Man" or grad school isn't to blame for this disappointment: none of those things are ever going to transform you into a special, magical (and possibly holier-than-thou) butterfly. Only you can do that.
In the end, I know that I, to some degree at least, got lucky. I got lucky to get into WSU in the first place, then I got lucky again to be allowed to come back. Then I got lucky to get a postdoc position, and again to get a faculty position. Of course, it wasn't just luck; I also worked really damn hard throughout all of that in pursuit of those opportunities. But it likely wouldn't be too far off base to say that all my hard work had very little to do with where I actually ended up, and that's a depressing thought. It's also, I think, the main thing that Schuman and I can both agree on. It's unfortunate that taking the "right" track through academia doesn't automatically result in a tenure-track job, yes, but show me a place and time where everyone always gets what they earn and I'll invent a time machine and move there. The trick for me was (and I mean this in the hippiest way possible) to enjoy the journey and worry as little as possible about the destination. I didn't have a backup plan going into graduate school because I waited until I didn't need one. My research wasn't drudgery because I wasn't willing to let it be. Grad school didn't consume my life because I entered grad school so that I could have a life, and live in a place where I could be myself, before, during, and then after I learned what that actually meant.
When I read pieces like the one that Schuman wrote, they don't make me happy that I "figured it out" (or whatever I did). They don't make me feel like I won and others lost. They make me sad that there's no way to explain my experience to more people, so that others can get what I got out of the grad school experience. It was really the best 6 years of my life, but it didn't just magically happen that way; I made it that way. I have a suspicion that when it turns out to be the worst 6 years of your life, the same thing is still true.
* I'm talking generally here. The treatment of adjuncts, especially in the humanities, as a form of cheap, easily disposable labor is a trend that definitely needs to be talked about and, hopefully, stopped.
Jan 27, 2013
Some Thoughts on Higher Education as Customer Service
So, the other day on Facebook, I posted this: "One of the many strange, frustrating tendencies that seem to have emerged among the last two years' worth of WSU students that I'd never experienced before them: when I assign a presentation or some other project that requires them to read the Course Calendar and choose a day and reading to present on, often at least 50% of the class will email me and just ask me to pick a day for them."
One of the comments I got almost immediately was from a former student, who said "I'm interested to know what you think motivates it? I don't think it's laziness, maybe indecisiveness?" My response, of course, was to devote way too much thought to answering his question and then write way too much about it in my blog...
My first semester at WSU, before I started teaching, I was required to take a seminar which was meant to serve as teacher training, among other things. The professor who taught this Methodology of Composition seminar talked a lot about how we should be kind and considerate and understanding toward our students, but that we should try to be aware of and should avoid encouraging what he called "the customer-service model of education." Basically, his argument was that an ever-increasing number of students come into college perceiving the entire college experience as, essentially, a monetary transaction: they give the university money, the university gives them a degree in return, and they then use that degree to make yet more money working somewhere else. College, for these students, was (we were told) merely one link in a chain of investments, and as such these students would be inclined to see you, as their English 101 instructor, as a small cog in the degree vending machine. If you reinforced this inclination by being too considerate of their needs (moreso than a supervisor or professor might be, more like how a waitress or customer service representative might be), then you ran the risk of them approaching their education (or at least your class as a small part of it) with a "the customer is always right" attitude and an expectation that you would reciprocate.
At the time, eight years ago, there seemed to me to be an obvious response to this: these students were clearly misunderstanding The Point of College, and there was no way I was going to approach teaching my courses as if I was trying to earn a tip from my "customers." At the time, eight years ago, I was sure that I was right, that college was really A Lofty Pursuit of Knowledge and Betterment and these potential students were wrong. Now, I'm not so sure anymore.
It turns out, a lot of students really only do come to college to get a degree so that they can get a particular job. They could care less about liberal arts requirements, on-campus cultural events, visiting speakers, foreign film festivals, and everything else. When I request that they "expand upon" a point in the third paragraph of their paper, they aren't interested in reading up any further on Michael Pollan's research on nutrition and culture for the mere sake of learning more; they want to know exactly how many more sentences they have to add in order to make sure that their GPA gets the boost it needs from my class.
Sure, I like the idea that I can be that Hollywood-movie-style teacher that is just so damn good at his job and so inspiring that he can turn this type of student into a wide-eyed academic that reads Joyce in his/her spare time, and cries when they hear Blake recited aloud, but there's a reason that that type of thing happens in movies: because it's an idealized view of real life. Well, that's not entirely true: very occasionally, something like this does happen to a student of mine, but when it does, it's just as much because of them and their interests, needs, personality, etc. as it is because of some Dead Poets Society vibe I might or might not be throwing off through my teaching. Some students are still open to the idea of college as a privilege to be taken advantage of and appreciated, as a place of potential growth where you can do and learn amazing things for four years because you're very very lucky to be living in a very particular place at a very particular time and with enough money in your pocket. It does seem to me that over the last eight years the number of these students have massively decreased, though, to be replaced by a lot of people who are just here to get their piece of paper and get out.
Do the members of the latter group treat me like a waiter or a customer service representative? Do they do things like emailing me and demanding that I pick their presentation date for them? Yeah, pretty frequently, but I'm sure that I exacerbate the problem by planning classes in which I make students responsible for their own successes and failures and require them to actually act like adults even when they're only (gasp!) 17.
But, I guess the reason that I'm writing all this is really because in thinking about the reasons why students might insist that I pick a presentation date for them, I'm realizing that I sympathize with them more than I expected to. Who can blame students for thinking about jobs before Aristotelian debates and slam poetry in our current economic climate? Who can blame students for feeling like a number (and responding in kind) when they attend a university with 30,000 students and the only teacher who actually knows their name for the entire four years is their English 101 teacher? And though I'm loathe to admit it, in my case at least, their English 101 teacher is currently teaching 166 students, and doing a job that takes at minimum 60 hours a week to complete in the most slapdash way possible while only getting paid for 27 of those hours, which means I'm often not exactly free to take the time and make the effort to make any of those individual students feel like I've done more than blasted through their papers at the last minute before collapsing into bed four hours before I have to teach again. I find that I'm coming to believe that the customer-service-mentality kids haven't decided to treat the university system like a Starbucks because they're all assholes who should know better. They've decided to treat the university system like a Starbucks because that's how the university system presents itself nowadays, probably because administrators and other higher-ups in universities make a hell of a lot more money that way than if they portray their schools as elite hidey-holes for people who like to not get paid that much to think all day long.
I'd have to say, then, that my bet would be that the kids demanding that I pick their presentation date for them aren't being lazy, or stupid, or purposely obtuse; rather, they just interpret any stutter, any uncertainty, any confusion in the running of the machinery of (in this case) Humanities 101 as an obvious failure on my part to give them the tools to smoothly navigate the diploma vending machine. I wouldn't doubt that the possibility that choosing a particular topic for their presentation, based on what they might be interested in or what they might be intrigued to learn more about never occurred to them; again, not because they're idiots, but because that's not what they're here for. Which sucks, because on a personal level, that is what I'm here for. But, when I look at the situation in high ed more generally, can I really blame them for prizing the product over the process?
One of the comments I got almost immediately was from a former student, who said "I'm interested to know what you think motivates it? I don't think it's laziness, maybe indecisiveness?" My response, of course, was to devote way too much thought to answering his question and then write way too much about it in my blog...
My first semester at WSU, before I started teaching, I was required to take a seminar which was meant to serve as teacher training, among other things. The professor who taught this Methodology of Composition seminar talked a lot about how we should be kind and considerate and understanding toward our students, but that we should try to be aware of and should avoid encouraging what he called "the customer-service model of education." Basically, his argument was that an ever-increasing number of students come into college perceiving the entire college experience as, essentially, a monetary transaction: they give the university money, the university gives them a degree in return, and they then use that degree to make yet more money working somewhere else. College, for these students, was (we were told) merely one link in a chain of investments, and as such these students would be inclined to see you, as their English 101 instructor, as a small cog in the degree vending machine. If you reinforced this inclination by being too considerate of their needs (moreso than a supervisor or professor might be, more like how a waitress or customer service representative might be), then you ran the risk of them approaching their education (or at least your class as a small part of it) with a "the customer is always right" attitude and an expectation that you would reciprocate.
At the time, eight years ago, there seemed to me to be an obvious response to this: these students were clearly misunderstanding The Point of College, and there was no way I was going to approach teaching my courses as if I was trying to earn a tip from my "customers." At the time, eight years ago, I was sure that I was right, that college was really A Lofty Pursuit of Knowledge and Betterment and these potential students were wrong. Now, I'm not so sure anymore.
It turns out, a lot of students really only do come to college to get a degree so that they can get a particular job. They could care less about liberal arts requirements, on-campus cultural events, visiting speakers, foreign film festivals, and everything else. When I request that they "expand upon" a point in the third paragraph of their paper, they aren't interested in reading up any further on Michael Pollan's research on nutrition and culture for the mere sake of learning more; they want to know exactly how many more sentences they have to add in order to make sure that their GPA gets the boost it needs from my class.
Sure, I like the idea that I can be that Hollywood-movie-style teacher that is just so damn good at his job and so inspiring that he can turn this type of student into a wide-eyed academic that reads Joyce in his/her spare time, and cries when they hear Blake recited aloud, but there's a reason that that type of thing happens in movies: because it's an idealized view of real life. Well, that's not entirely true: very occasionally, something like this does happen to a student of mine, but when it does, it's just as much because of them and their interests, needs, personality, etc. as it is because of some Dead Poets Society vibe I might or might not be throwing off through my teaching. Some students are still open to the idea of college as a privilege to be taken advantage of and appreciated, as a place of potential growth where you can do and learn amazing things for four years because you're very very lucky to be living in a very particular place at a very particular time and with enough money in your pocket. It does seem to me that over the last eight years the number of these students have massively decreased, though, to be replaced by a lot of people who are just here to get their piece of paper and get out.
Do the members of the latter group treat me like a waiter or a customer service representative? Do they do things like emailing me and demanding that I pick their presentation date for them? Yeah, pretty frequently, but I'm sure that I exacerbate the problem by planning classes in which I make students responsible for their own successes and failures and require them to actually act like adults even when they're only (gasp!) 17.
But, I guess the reason that I'm writing all this is really because in thinking about the reasons why students might insist that I pick a presentation date for them, I'm realizing that I sympathize with them more than I expected to. Who can blame students for thinking about jobs before Aristotelian debates and slam poetry in our current economic climate? Who can blame students for feeling like a number (and responding in kind) when they attend a university with 30,000 students and the only teacher who actually knows their name for the entire four years is their English 101 teacher? And though I'm loathe to admit it, in my case at least, their English 101 teacher is currently teaching 166 students, and doing a job that takes at minimum 60 hours a week to complete in the most slapdash way possible while only getting paid for 27 of those hours, which means I'm often not exactly free to take the time and make the effort to make any of those individual students feel like I've done more than blasted through their papers at the last minute before collapsing into bed four hours before I have to teach again. I find that I'm coming to believe that the customer-service-mentality kids haven't decided to treat the university system like a Starbucks because they're all assholes who should know better. They've decided to treat the university system like a Starbucks because that's how the university system presents itself nowadays, probably because administrators and other higher-ups in universities make a hell of a lot more money that way than if they portray their schools as elite hidey-holes for people who like to not get paid that much to think all day long.
I'd have to say, then, that my bet would be that the kids demanding that I pick their presentation date for them aren't being lazy, or stupid, or purposely obtuse; rather, they just interpret any stutter, any uncertainty, any confusion in the running of the machinery of (in this case) Humanities 101 as an obvious failure on my part to give them the tools to smoothly navigate the diploma vending machine. I wouldn't doubt that the possibility that choosing a particular topic for their presentation, based on what they might be interested in or what they might be intrigued to learn more about never occurred to them; again, not because they're idiots, but because that's not what they're here for. Which sucks, because on a personal level, that is what I'm here for. But, when I look at the situation in high ed more generally, can I really blame them for prizing the product over the process?
Jan 10, 2013
Got No Sun-Time When She's Gone: Some Thoughts on Higher Education, Time Management, and The Descent Into Madness
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| This. This is what should be on my car. |
I got into education (and, specifically, English Literature) for all the usual humanity-y, hippie-y reasons, but also because I've always found the clock-in, clock-out, 9-to-5-job life horrifically crushing and depressing, and I liked the idea that a teacher/professor was able to make their own hours, to a degree. Now as anyone who works in higher ed knows, "make their own hours" usually ends up translating to "works 70 hours a week and gets paid for half of that." Seriously, most weeks I work somewhere between 55-70 hours (and sometimes well more than that!) and I get paid for 27.5 hours of that. The rest is work that isn't required, but that you're expected to do (by your department, your advisors, colleagues, and/or the field at large, depending on who you are, what you do, and where you work). The result is, by the standards of the workaday world (who likes to pick on people who "make their own hours" as people who don't actually work all that hard), I work full weeks and somewhere between 15-30 hours of overtime per week, just to make about $18,000 a year. Oh, and last summer I worked at least 40 hours a week every week but two, which I took off for my only vacation of the year, and I got paid for five weeks of that summer work, total.
This post isn't a complaint, though...or at least, if it is, the complaint is implicit in what I actually want to talk about. Seriously, the entire higher education system is absurdly fucked up and deserves a lot of serious critique and reform in a lot of areas including the way adjuncts and instructors are treated at most universities, but that's a rant for another day (maybe tomorrow?).
I love my job. I'm happy to do it. So happy, in fact, that I'll accept $18,000 a year to work for 3000 hours (that equates to a little under 66% of minimum wage, in case you were wondering). But so will a lot of other people, which is why I have absolutely no job security and my entire future goes up in the air every 8 months or so. I love my job so much that it's beginning to occur to me (thanks, in part to reading some of this blog over the last few days) that I could probably stand to love it a little less.
I'm a hard worker; Protestant work ethic and Midwest blue-collar and all that. When it comes to teaching and researching, I daresay that I'm a good worker. And yet, after eight years, my job continues to ask more and more of me, and I find that I can't afford to always say "yes" anymore. There are too many other things to do, too many other facets of life to experience, and, frankly, I really don't think anyone at my current job is going to care and nobody interviewing me for future jobs is going to notice if I only work, say, 45-50 hours of my 27.5 hour weeks from now on. I don't want to let my students or my colleagues down, but I suspect I've only ever avoided that by letting my friends, family, and myself down instead, by not making time for anything else but melting into an exhausted puddle in front of a stupid TV show at 10pm, after wrapping up my workday that started at 7am...for the fifth or sixth day in a row.
I talked about this issue with Lindsey a few nights ago and she suggested that I stop taking on so many projects, stop saying "yes" to everything. It was a good suggestion, but I've never been a "yes" man, really. I've turned down a lot of projects in the last six or so years, and never once have I regretted it, despite the fact that many of those projects went on to be quite successful. Generally if I take extra classes or grading jobs, it's not, honestly, out of the goodness of my heart, but because I need the money to get by. When someone offers me a place in a new project, or any other new responsibility, I find myself immediately weighing it against what I already have to do, and against what little free, "me" time I have. Sometimes the project is worth the sacrifice, sometimes not, but I've never felt compelled to accept something just to beef up my CV or pad my cover letter. If it's not something I can actually throw myself into and honestly care about (for whatever reason), then I don't bother.
I don't think my problem is that I take on too much. Rather, I think that I belabor what I do take on, often past the point of usefulness. The downside of all that touchy-feely, make-your-own-hours stuff that makes academia so great is the lack of concrete feedback on the work you're doing. How much class preparation is necessary? How many hours a night should you spend making lecture notes? How long should you spend commenting on student papers? These things, at some point, need to be broken down into a machinistic process, or else they get out of control. I once knew an MA student who spent an hour commenting on each of her students' papers. She had fifty students, and they each wrote six papers that semester. That's 300 hours in fifteen weeks just spent on grading. She was also teaching two classes and taking three graduate seminars. She wasn't especially off her rocker (any more than any of us are), she just couldn't bring herself to invest less than that in her students, and there's no mechanism in place (officially or unofficially) to tell someone when to stop grading, when to stop planning...you do it all by feel, and when something doesn't work out, it's all too easy to assume it's because you didn't work hard (read: long) enough.
After eight years of teaching, I have a fairly good handle on how hard to work on my classes. Sure, my students (some of them, anyway) deserve a lot of effort, and I'm willing to give that to them. But, as I've come to realize, they also deserve the energy and attentiveness that comes from being an instructor who's functioning on more than three hours of sleep, who is especially excited to talk about the reading on, say, Ed Abbey today because he just spent the weekend in the mountains, backpacking and reading Desert Solitaire. It's really not just Work Really Hard, but rather Work Hard combined with a bit of Don't Be Insane.
I have a lot more trouble, though, with the research/professionalization end of the spectrum. Last year I applied for nearly 100 jobs (out of fear of ending up unemployed the day after graduation). These are academic jobs, mind you, that require, generally, a whole portfolio's worth of documents to be mailed. Not only did this almost break me financially, I almost didn't finish my dissertation on time as a result. This year, I'm sending out far less (around 40 or 50), but the downside is that I'm much less likely to actually get interviews. Similarly, from about 2007 to 2010, I regularly sent out articles for potential publication (usually around three a year) and tried to attend 4 conferences a year, at least. Since then, the dissertation and the ensuing job search and increased class load has made that more or less impossible...but if I had the time I'd probably still be at it. There are so many avenues in this job where a "throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" approach works that it's hard to not just adopt that attitude. The more article proposals I send out, the better chance I have of getting published. The more job applications I send out, the more likely it is that I'll get hired. The more conferences I attend, the more likely I'll be to be seen as a member of "the conversation." The problem is, there are no real rules on how many of these things, how much, you really should or can do beyond your own common sense. And when you begin to be driven by a fear of pending unemployment, when you can't afford clothes that aren't used and your girlfriend can't pay for her asthma medication, common sense starts to fly out the window.
All that said, I'm taking another stab at the whole damn thing. This semester, I teach three classes, back-to-back-to-back, until noon on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For the rest of the day, until 6:30pm at the absolute latest, I will be preparing for the next class period and doing other teaching-related work. Tuesdays and Thursdays, during normal work hours (9-6 or 10-7) I will be doing research-related work. If there is any overflow, I'll be dealing with it for a few hours on Saturday, but otherwise, I'm going to try to take weekends off. I am going to live like a human being, and, if my career refuses to allow me to do that, well, then I'll just find a new one. I want to do this for the rest of my life, but I don't want it to be the rest of my life.
Jan 31, 2012
how we once are
this semester, i'm team-teaching a 300-level undergrad course in 20th and 21st century literature with my dissertation director. while "team-teaching" might make it sound like we take turns tagging each other "in" during the class period or like there's a family double dare-esque exchange of flags or some other sort of physical comedy involved, it (unfortunately) actually just means that one week i teach the class, and the next week he teaches it. so pretty much every other week i get to sit in the back row of a sixty-student undergrad lit seminar and just observe the goings-on.
this course is basically the analogue of the KSU courses that i found so engrossing in, say, 2000 and 2001 that i decided to change my major to english (from computer science), therefore in large part making me the me that you know and anonymously read the blog of (and love) today. when the aforementioned diss director announced to the class today, in reference to eliot's the waste land something along the lines of "most of you will hate it, and that's fine, but a few of you might become obsessed with it", he was describing me a decade ago, when i had been in those students' place (the waste land wasn't necessarily my watershed text/epiphany moment as i didn't really have one, but i was pretty obsessed with it, and still am). my work was suddenly jumping out and grabbing me in a way that i didn't think work could.
so being a fly on the wall now is pretty fascinating, especially in that large of a class. i walk over to the classroom twice a week, bright and too-early in the morning, with just my pen and a pad of paper and the class text (no laptops allowed, so it's just like in the old days), and i sit there for an hour and a half and i listen as our entire class tries to tease meaning out of primary texts. somehow the earnestness of this has gotten lost for me in a lot of ways after years of reading and studying abstract critical theory...theory's important and enjoyable in its own right, for sure, but the higher up you get in english studies, context seems to outweigh text. so, it's fun to go back and just look at a poem, or a short story, and say (aware of, but otherwise removed slightly from all the -isms) "what does this do to you when you read it?" i mean, that's how i got here in the first place, through the appeal of answering that question, and then following the progression of questions that the answer raised in turn, and so on, and so forth.
during class, i often find myself wanting to raise my hand, just to have a conversation with these students who all seem so very invested in the idea that studying the text for the sake of studying the text is important. teaching literature to a roomful of english majors has a very satisfyingly reinforcing quality to it: nobody asks "well, why does it matter what this poem means?" or "who cares that eliot was writing right after the first world war?" it's a given that in that room, at that time, those questions matter. after what seems like a never-ending process of having to justify the worth of my field (generally) and my research (specifically) to everyone in the universe, it's sort of amazing to suddenly find myself in a room where sixty people have just decided to read, say, sassoon's war poetry and are ready to spend the next 90 minutes telling you what they fucking think, man.
that's not to say, of course, that it's unimportant to question the validity of english studies, etc. but at some point, self-critique becomes self-flagellation, and the innocence (in a professional sense, at least) of the students in this class is a nice contrast to that old cycle.
it makes me more aware than ever that i enjoy reading a lot and enjoy writing even more. i enjoy talking about both of those things with other people who do them, and i absolutely don't mind getting paid a barely-living wage to do so, if that's what it takes. i enjoy getting paid to fly to conferences and present my research, and it's sort of amazing that i've essentially gotten paid to have a year off to write a book, let alone the fact that i've gotten to go to school for free, more or less, for six years now in a beautiful part of the country and in a great department with great faculty (and staff). i'm here because i'm convinced it matters, even if it just matters to me, and i definitely consider myself lucky...sitting and watching classes like the one i was describing above just reminds me even more of the truth of that. so many grad students (and faculty) i've known over the years don't seem to feel this way about this job at all*. instead, they're hostile, exasperated, uninterested beyond what the job requires of them. it makes me wonder why they don't just do something else. this isn't a career for going through the motions. not when you have students like these.
*this isn't a passive-aggressive gesture at anyone in particular. it's just a general statement made from a bit over a decade of experience in various english departments.
this course is basically the analogue of the KSU courses that i found so engrossing in, say, 2000 and 2001 that i decided to change my major to english (from computer science), therefore in large part making me the me that you know and anonymously read the blog of (and love) today. when the aforementioned diss director announced to the class today, in reference to eliot's the waste land something along the lines of "most of you will hate it, and that's fine, but a few of you might become obsessed with it", he was describing me a decade ago, when i had been in those students' place (the waste land wasn't necessarily my watershed text/epiphany moment as i didn't really have one, but i was pretty obsessed with it, and still am). my work was suddenly jumping out and grabbing me in a way that i didn't think work could.
so being a fly on the wall now is pretty fascinating, especially in that large of a class. i walk over to the classroom twice a week, bright and too-early in the morning, with just my pen and a pad of paper and the class text (no laptops allowed, so it's just like in the old days), and i sit there for an hour and a half and i listen as our entire class tries to tease meaning out of primary texts. somehow the earnestness of this has gotten lost for me in a lot of ways after years of reading and studying abstract critical theory...theory's important and enjoyable in its own right, for sure, but the higher up you get in english studies, context seems to outweigh text. so, it's fun to go back and just look at a poem, or a short story, and say (aware of, but otherwise removed slightly from all the -isms) "what does this do to you when you read it?" i mean, that's how i got here in the first place, through the appeal of answering that question, and then following the progression of questions that the answer raised in turn, and so on, and so forth.
during class, i often find myself wanting to raise my hand, just to have a conversation with these students who all seem so very invested in the idea that studying the text for the sake of studying the text is important. teaching literature to a roomful of english majors has a very satisfyingly reinforcing quality to it: nobody asks "well, why does it matter what this poem means?" or "who cares that eliot was writing right after the first world war?" it's a given that in that room, at that time, those questions matter. after what seems like a never-ending process of having to justify the worth of my field (generally) and my research (specifically) to everyone in the universe, it's sort of amazing to suddenly find myself in a room where sixty people have just decided to read, say, sassoon's war poetry and are ready to spend the next 90 minutes telling you what they fucking think, man.
that's not to say, of course, that it's unimportant to question the validity of english studies, etc. but at some point, self-critique becomes self-flagellation, and the innocence (in a professional sense, at least) of the students in this class is a nice contrast to that old cycle.
it makes me more aware than ever that i enjoy reading a lot and enjoy writing even more. i enjoy talking about both of those things with other people who do them, and i absolutely don't mind getting paid a barely-living wage to do so, if that's what it takes. i enjoy getting paid to fly to conferences and present my research, and it's sort of amazing that i've essentially gotten paid to have a year off to write a book, let alone the fact that i've gotten to go to school for free, more or less, for six years now in a beautiful part of the country and in a great department with great faculty (and staff). i'm here because i'm convinced it matters, even if it just matters to me, and i definitely consider myself lucky...sitting and watching classes like the one i was describing above just reminds me even more of the truth of that. so many grad students (and faculty) i've known over the years don't seem to feel this way about this job at all*. instead, they're hostile, exasperated, uninterested beyond what the job requires of them. it makes me wonder why they don't just do something else. this isn't a career for going through the motions. not when you have students like these.
*this isn't a passive-aggressive gesture at anyone in particular. it's just a general statement made from a bit over a decade of experience in various english departments.
Feb 2, 2010
teaching and learning
so i'm teaching a sort-of lit class for the first time this semester. and it's been great so far. i got to choose the books, and as per the class requirements, they all had to be books published recently. so i picked a lot of books that i simultaneously thought were interesting to talk about based on their own literary merits and were interesting in a cultural context. now not only do i have a class where we can talk about characterization, plot, setting, ethos, believability, immersion, etc., but also race/class/gender/place AND technology, apocalypse, wilderness, conservation, zombies, home, and all that jazz. so. it's a pretty thematically dense discussion class. and it's so fucking fun my eyes want to pop out. of course, they also want to pop out because it's at 9am and i have to get here three days a week before 7am to get prepped for class (they have to submit questions online every morning and i have to be able to read them all and draw up a class plan around them before class starts that day).
anyway, i'm having a lot of fun, and the students in class who enjoy talking and discussing seem to be enjoying themselves. now that i'm over the initial shock of the joy of teaching something i'm actually directly invested in (teaching comp is fun, but it has nothing to do with what i care about directly, and requires that i have an entire "comp" section in my brain that i switch over to each monday, wednesday, and friday), i'm starting to get that nagging doubt in the back of my head that i get every time i remember that nothing in life is perfect. maybe this is just my latent comp pedagogy reflex taking over my brain, but my fear is that i'm not actually teaching these students anything.
granted, the only real goal of this class as it was explained to me was to talk about reading and talk about how it is relevant and important in today's society (BOOOOOOOM!). and i feel like i'm definitely doing that. i guess i'm so used to the lecture model, the skill-teaching model of a class that i feel like a failure just going in, talking about reading, and enjoying myself. it feels too easy. at times, when i'm being easier on myself, i feel like maybe the learning that's taking place in a class like this is really just less tangible that it might be in a comp class (and that's less than it might be in a science class, and so on). i mean, i'm running this class pretty similarly to some of the seminars i've taken in grad school, and i learned more from the discussions in those classes than i have at pretty much any other time in my life (at least in a school environment).
i certainly lecture from time to time briefly about certain character archetypes, or certain literary techniques, and those kinds of things. but these students are all experienced readers. they infer these things if you hint at them. they don't need to learn what the hero's quest is. they can see it, and talk about it, and understand its value and also the value in deviating if you're a writer. i also have lots of small checks built into the class to make sure they're keeping up on the reading and paying attention in class (and two big checks in the form of a midterm and a final). but it's just strange. i've never taught a class like this, and it's odd to have a class that puts most of its value in discussion rather than lecture and regurgitation/revision. it's odd to think that students will come out of this class having read 8 new books, and that's (largely) it. when teaching comp 101 (and even 201), we sort of have this idea impressed upon us that we're the gateway to our students' ability to write at a college level, which in turn is the gateway to the rest of their entire future success. of course, that's aggrandizing and a little ridiculous in some ways, but i guess what i'm getting at is that with the impression we're giving as budding comp teachers, it's easy to convince yourself that you're doing god's work if you have an off day. there's not a lot of room for crisis of purpose. that's not the case anymore.
that said, we're finishing up talking about Snow Crash tomorrow and we'll be moving on to neil gaiman's American Gods on friday. can't wait.
anyway, i'm having a lot of fun, and the students in class who enjoy talking and discussing seem to be enjoying themselves. now that i'm over the initial shock of the joy of teaching something i'm actually directly invested in (teaching comp is fun, but it has nothing to do with what i care about directly, and requires that i have an entire "comp" section in my brain that i switch over to each monday, wednesday, and friday), i'm starting to get that nagging doubt in the back of my head that i get every time i remember that nothing in life is perfect. maybe this is just my latent comp pedagogy reflex taking over my brain, but my fear is that i'm not actually teaching these students anything.
granted, the only real goal of this class as it was explained to me was to talk about reading and talk about how it is relevant and important in today's society (BOOOOOOOM!). and i feel like i'm definitely doing that. i guess i'm so used to the lecture model, the skill-teaching model of a class that i feel like a failure just going in, talking about reading, and enjoying myself. it feels too easy. at times, when i'm being easier on myself, i feel like maybe the learning that's taking place in a class like this is really just less tangible that it might be in a comp class (and that's less than it might be in a science class, and so on). i mean, i'm running this class pretty similarly to some of the seminars i've taken in grad school, and i learned more from the discussions in those classes than i have at pretty much any other time in my life (at least in a school environment).
i certainly lecture from time to time briefly about certain character archetypes, or certain literary techniques, and those kinds of things. but these students are all experienced readers. they infer these things if you hint at them. they don't need to learn what the hero's quest is. they can see it, and talk about it, and understand its value and also the value in deviating if you're a writer. i also have lots of small checks built into the class to make sure they're keeping up on the reading and paying attention in class (and two big checks in the form of a midterm and a final). but it's just strange. i've never taught a class like this, and it's odd to have a class that puts most of its value in discussion rather than lecture and regurgitation/revision. it's odd to think that students will come out of this class having read 8 new books, and that's (largely) it. when teaching comp 101 (and even 201), we sort of have this idea impressed upon us that we're the gateway to our students' ability to write at a college level, which in turn is the gateway to the rest of their entire future success. of course, that's aggrandizing and a little ridiculous in some ways, but i guess what i'm getting at is that with the impression we're giving as budding comp teachers, it's easy to convince yourself that you're doing god's work if you have an off day. there's not a lot of room for crisis of purpose. that's not the case anymore.
that said, we're finishing up talking about Snow Crash tomorrow and we'll be moving on to neil gaiman's American Gods on friday. can't wait.
Dec 9, 2009
end of more teaching
today is a weird day: the last day of teaching for me for the semester. usually (and especially my first few semesters of teaching) the last day is sort of momentous. i usually feel (even if my students don't, and most could probably likely care less) like we've all sort of come through this long, complicated, unique journey together and it feels sort of awesome to me to reach the end of it. it helps too that all my classes thus far have been portfolio-based, so even the students who participate the least and miss tons of classes or whatever still end up turning in a hefty, significantly involved packet of papers they've written. it's a nice sort of landmark moment in a way and (i'd like to think) even for them it's sort of an encapsulation of everything that they've gone through to get to the end of the class.
as such, usually at the end of a class, as i leave the classroom for the last time, it's a little hard not to reflect a bit on what i've learned and how things have gone. this probably hearkens back to the first time i finished teaching a class for the semester, in 402 bryan hall, and after i turned the lights off i just stood there in the room for about five minutes, just amazed that i'd actually survived. increasingly, though, and especially today, my inclination was to just speed out of the room and get back to my office to start working on the newest project, or paper, or whatever. and, i'll be honest, i find that depressing.
one of the best things about my "year off" two years ago teaching just comp as an instructor here as WSU was the fact that i actually got to experience teaching. it wasn't something that i had to muscle through while taking seminars and worrying about publication and dissertations and theses and, you know, real-life stuff like relationships and making time to cook food. all throughout my master's program, i had enjoyed teaching, but i was also acutely aware that every moment i spent on teaching was a moment taken away from time i could have been working on my own papers. so it was a really great experience to be able to just teach and know that giving a student an extra ten minutes was just cutting into my TV-watching time (which is, obviously, a pretty easy decision to make if you like your job, which i do) and nothing else. i felt the same way about my summer class this past summer...i had some trouble fitting 15 weeks of class into six weeks for sure, but teaching that class was fucking fun. those experiences gave me the evidence to be able to honestly say that yes, i like teaching and i'm extremely lucky to be able to do it as a job. i could not have said that during my master's program. i never had a chance to think about it.
now, as much as i'm loving the ph.d experience, my one great regret is the backstep i've taken from teaching-as-profession back to student-first-work-second. i'm really looking forward to this changing next semester when i have a little bit more time in general. not less work, of course, but at least more freedom to shift that workload around more.
as such, usually at the end of a class, as i leave the classroom for the last time, it's a little hard not to reflect a bit on what i've learned and how things have gone. this probably hearkens back to the first time i finished teaching a class for the semester, in 402 bryan hall, and after i turned the lights off i just stood there in the room for about five minutes, just amazed that i'd actually survived. increasingly, though, and especially today, my inclination was to just speed out of the room and get back to my office to start working on the newest project, or paper, or whatever. and, i'll be honest, i find that depressing.
one of the best things about my "year off" two years ago teaching just comp as an instructor here as WSU was the fact that i actually got to experience teaching. it wasn't something that i had to muscle through while taking seminars and worrying about publication and dissertations and theses and, you know, real-life stuff like relationships and making time to cook food. all throughout my master's program, i had enjoyed teaching, but i was also acutely aware that every moment i spent on teaching was a moment taken away from time i could have been working on my own papers. so it was a really great experience to be able to just teach and know that giving a student an extra ten minutes was just cutting into my TV-watching time (which is, obviously, a pretty easy decision to make if you like your job, which i do) and nothing else. i felt the same way about my summer class this past summer...i had some trouble fitting 15 weeks of class into six weeks for sure, but teaching that class was fucking fun. those experiences gave me the evidence to be able to honestly say that yes, i like teaching and i'm extremely lucky to be able to do it as a job. i could not have said that during my master's program. i never had a chance to think about it.
now, as much as i'm loving the ph.d experience, my one great regret is the backstep i've taken from teaching-as-profession back to student-first-work-second. i'm really looking forward to this changing next semester when i have a little bit more time in general. not less work, of course, but at least more freedom to shift that workload around more.
Nov 24, 2009
reading NOOOOOOOOOOW!!!
i'm finally teaching a lit class (sort of) in the spring. it's a reading/discussion based class, and the curriculum seems pretty open (basically i have to use books published after my students were born, so post-1990ish). anyway, i've tried to sprinkle the reading list with a lot of things that will inspire talk about some of (what i see as being) the prominent cultural concerns of the last two decades, like:
1. globalization (and what this does to our ideas of place, race, class, gender, etc.)
2. apocalypse and environment
3. the intarwebs
yes, that's a really freaking broad list, but the way i understand this class, i'm not supposed to be lecturing, but mostly just facilitating discussion; so i want to start broad and only narrow down when/if necessary.
anyway, i just sent my booklist off, so here's what we're going to be reading:
1. globalization (and what this does to our ideas of place, race, class, gender, etc.)
2. apocalypse and environment
3. the intarwebs
yes, that's a really freaking broad list, but the way i understand this class, i'm not supposed to be lecturing, but mostly just facilitating discussion; so i want to start broad and only narrow down when/if necessary.
anyway, i just sent my booklist off, so here's what we're going to be reading:
Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (Novel)
Neil Gaiman, American Gods, (Novel)
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (Novel)
Peter Chilson, Disturbance-Loving Species (Short stories)
Frank Miller, 300 (Graphic novel and film)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Novel and film)
Max Brooks, World War Z (Novel)
John Krakauer, Into the Wild (Novel and film)
Note: The film version of The Road may be cut from the schedule due to time constraints and depending on when it becomes available on DVD.
Note 2: I'm really pumped about using WWZ to talk about politics and cultural assumptions, etc. And also zombies.
I'm really excited to teach the class, though at the same time I had to sort of throw this booklist together when in reality there were about 20 more books I wanted to read before choosing which ones I wanted to teach. Apparently they usually offer the class in the fall only, which would have given me the entire summer to decide on books, but instead I got about two weeks. So I'm hoping my choices will work out. I'm just glad to actually be teaching about books. more on this later.
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