A very funny site…

A student passed this on to me because he thought it matched my sense of humor.  These desperational posters provide a much needed reality check for today’s preterpositively reinforced students.  A little taste:

Enjoy!

www.despair.com

The Craft of Research

I picked up the The Craft of Research (Booth, Colomb and Williams.  Chicago UP, st ed. 1995, 3rd ed. 2008) when I was a freshly minted assistant professor the first year of my first tenure track position.  It was  a lifeline!  I hadn’t been having too much success with placing the articles I had been writing–that’s overstating the case: I had no success at all.  My grad program’s strong point was not professional development nor developing writing skills.  The approach was sink or swim.  I managed to tread water through grad school, but I realized that I’d have to do better than that to get tenure.

After reading this book, I went back over an article I had been working on and rethought what I was doing.  I had some good things to say, but those good things got lost because I wasn’t making a strong case.  After following the guidelines laid out in COR, I started having a great deal more success in placing articles, but I also had a great sense of satisfaction that I was clarifying my own thoughts and ideas for myself, too.

I’ve been preaching the merits of this book’s approach to graduate students and undergraduates alike.  I still go back over the principles when I get in abind with something that I’m writing.  A very useful addition to any active scholar’s library.

Willa Cather on the writing habit

One of my favorite Cather books is The Professor’s House. Professor St. Peter is an excellent teacher and prize-winning scholar.  At one point, the narrator observes:

“On that perilous journey down through the human house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper. So when the lamp was empty–and that usually occurred when he was in the middle of a most important passage–he jammed an eyeshade on his forehead and worked by the glare of that tormenting pear-shaped bulb, sticking out of the wall on a short curved neck just about four feet above his table. It was hard on eyes even as good as his. But once at his desk, he didn’t dare quit it. He had found that you can train the mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain hours of the day.”

The best offense is a good defense…

If you haven’s seen Paul Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot, you should check it out. Silvia is a psychologist who studies emotion; he is also a productive scholar. His book is full of good advice on how to be more productive. To top it off, he has a great sense of humor. The book is a quick and useful read.

He writes:

“You must ruthlessly defend your writing time. Remember, you’re allocating time to write, not finding time to write. You decided that this is your time to write… Be forewarned that other people will not respect your commitment to your writing time… They’ll resent your inflexibility, call you rigid, and think that there’s some deeper reason why you won’t meet with them… How can you handle well-intentioned intruders?  Just say no–that phrase might not keep you drug free, Nancy Reagan to the contrary, but it works for protecting your writing time.”  (15-16)

Less than perfection is often excellent

Perfection is highly overrated. I’ve never been called an overachiever or a workaholic, and in my book, that’s okay.  I think G.K. Chesteron said (and he said a lot of things, so he probably said this or something close to it), “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing not well.”   Sometimes perfectionism is really just procrastination dressed up in respectable clothes.

This is true in all aspects of the academic life.  Sometimes you just have to let go of an essay and see what happens.   Sometimes you don’t need to read or read the minutes from that last committee meeting.  Sometimes you don’t need to plan a class down to the last second of the hour.    A large part of good time management is deciding how much is enough.

Planning for teaching is a great example.  When I first started teaching as an assistant professor, I dedicated hours and hours to preparing a one hour lecture/discussion class.  For the three hours I taught that course per week, I spent about ten or twelve hours preparing.  It was very frustrating since I would either rush through material just to fit in everything I had planned, or I would leave out things and feel that I had failed since I didn’t get to everything.  When I complained about my problem one day at the café, a colleague from another department said, “Listen, you’re doing too much.  Overpreparing is worse than underpreparing.  Don’t spend more than an hour preparing for an hour-long class.”  I followed her advice, and it was very liberating for both me and my students.  My teaching improved dramatically–students even commented on it on the course evaluations.  I kept forgetting that I was the expert, I knew this stuff, and as long as I had a basic structure to follow and had thought about techniques to convey the information, I didn’t have to try to “cram it all in.”

Schedule writing!

“The most unrealistic writing schedule is none at all. Don’t believe that somehow, miraculously, your article will get written in the next couple of months simply because you need it to be submitted.”

Wendy Laura Belcher. Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks.

If you haven’t done it yet, stop reading this blog and make out a writing schedule!  When can you allot time to writing?  The time is there, you don’t need to find it, you just need to decide how you’re going to use it.

Email arguments

Never get into a pissing match (excuse that phrase, but it is what it is) via email, either in academia or out. It’s a big time waster and never really resolves anything. This is a lesson I learned the hard way this semester. I spent hours writing and editing a series of emails that did nothing except cause hard feelings; several colleagues wasted as much time as I did, too. In spite of the pithy comments I made (there were some real zingers in them), I regretted the whole exchange after things had settled down.

Arguing (or debate)  is best done in person because it is more effective.  You can change tactics because of the give-and-take or even because of the other’s body language, or quite possibly because you realize you’re wrong.  It’s much easier to see the brink of no-return getting closer and to veer off or stop completely before falling over into the abyss of bitterness and recriminations.

I now see how those hours (literally hours) spent crafting my emails were lost; I could have been doing a lot more productive things instead of giving vent to my spleen.  Had I not emailed and just waited to talk, the matter would have been resolved in about twenty minutes.   Vanitas vanitatum!

Here is a site (among many) devoted to email etiquette.  Would that I had read it before sending my blistering e-missives.

Office hours

Office hours can be either a waste of time or a great opportunity, depending on how you approach the situation.  Generally speaking, most universities expect you to have half the number of office hours as you have contact hours with students in a semester.  So, if you’re teaching eight credit hours in a semester, you will have about 4 hours of scheduled time per week to meet with your students.   (I always cheat a bit, though–I schedule an hour less than I should, but add “and by appt.” to my list of office hours.)

Generally, I don’t get a lot of traffic during these times, except around test dates and final exams.  But you never know; I’ve had semesters when at least one or two students would stop by for almost all the posted hours.  To make good use of this time, I try not to count on this time for an activity that requires uninterrupted time or a great deal of concentration.  I’ve found this list of activities are great for office hours because I can start and stop them easily:

• Surf the web- I do a lot of web surfing during office hours, but try to keep focussed.  Since I teach languages, I’ll often use this time on YouTube looking for authentic language clips that I can integrate into my class planning, either to show students in class or to have them view as homework.
• Website maintenance- We use a proprietary software for the web-based of our courses, so “maintenance” is probably overstating the case.  But I do post things on my websites and tidy them up when I have this bit of time.
• Filing- I’m a pack rat, so there’s always something to be filed.
• Previewing textbooks- I’m always on the lookout for the next great thing in textbooks.  Office hours is a great time to look through the ones that have arrived recently.
• Email- Catching up and filing away.  I don’t write anything too involved, though.
• Making copies for classes- I get my weekly copying together for the next week and turn them in so that the student assistants can make the copies.
• Grade-  I mentioned before that I like to have about 50-60 minutes to grade tests and essays, but I use office hours to grade either short quizzes or multiple choice of fill-in-the-blank portions of tests.  If I get interrupted, it’s not had to get back into the rhythm of grading them.

End of the Semester

The end of the semester is once again upon us–except for those unfortunate enough to be teaching on the quarter system!  Unless you’re teaching in the summer, this is the time to get things packed up for summer vacation.  Here are some helpful hints toward a happy and productive summer.

• Clean out your office.  Take a few hours to disgorge all unneeded administrative and class related paperwork.  File things that need to be filed but haven’t been yet.  Just as importantly, go through your emails and organize them, too.  If you won’t be checking email much over the summer break, you may want to have an automated response to that effect for incoming mail.  You may also want to set up “rules” in your email program to automatically sort email as it comes in so that it will be easier to handle when you get around to checking it.
• Get ready for fall. Any last minute book orders for fall should be placed; if you’re teaching the same course in the fall that you’ve taught in the spring, it’s a good time to revise the syllabus while your mistakes and successes are still fresh in your mind.
• Make a plan–or plans. We all want our summers to be productive, but time slips away and before you know it, the fall grind has begun again.  Making a plan with concrete and realistic goals helps avoid losing that precious time.  Last summer I made three lists: research, teaching and home repair.  Each one had between three and five items that were specific and doable within the three month vacation time.  Some items were broken down into sub-items, but each had a deadline.  My research list, for instance, consisted of writing an article, finding sources for a book that is in the planning stages, and reading four novels that I should have read a long time ago but hadn’t.  I had word/time goals for each week for my article, for instance, and it helped keep me motivated (I finished the piece and it is now looking for a home).  Finding sources for the book project wasn’t time critical,  so I devoted an hour a week to finding things that might be related to the project, photocopying or printing them, and putting them in a file.   Reading the novels was easier, but I only read three–one per month.  I was okay with that since I achieved a 90% success rate on my goals.
• Let someone know how they can contact you. A running joke between the department’s secretary and me is that I say on my way out of the office, “Call  me on my cell if there’s a Spanish emergency.”  She hasn’t called me yet, but that doesn’t mean she might not have to.  Things come up during the summer, sometimes urgent things that need to get resolved ASAP.  I always let the chair and the secretary know that they can call me at home if something important comes up, and I also let them know when I’ll be out of town and not checking email.  I usually try to give them another way to contact me.

A Good Book

For some great tips and a general overview of time management for professors, you should check out Philip Wankat’s The Effective, Efficient Professor, available at Amazon.com or your favorite on-line bookstore.

Though oriented toward academics in the sciences and engineering, there is a lot of useful advice for humanist, and the bibliography is extensive.