Expert Loneliness

Posted on November 1, 2007 | Leave a comment

“To evaluate a work of art is, among other things, to estimate its potential value for others; but while our ability to make that estimation correctly certainly increases in time with all our general and specific knowledge, it also decreases in time as we become less and less like anyone else, and thus less able to predict anyone else’s response on the basis of our own.”
–from Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory by Barbara Hernstein Smith:

At a certain phase during research, you feel the joy of special knowledge–of realizing that no one has ever looked at the material quite this way. You see something different, and you value that seeing deeply.

But being an expert can also isolate you. I remember one day when The Future Mister Doctor Jones came home from work, I was all excited about seeing a certain poet’s knees on video. And it was impossible to explain.

Leave a comment

Posted in Process

Time Sheets for Graduate Students: Assets and Liabilities

Posted on October 25, 2007 | 2 comments

At different times in my graduate school career, I have kept a record of how many hours I’ve worked. The record looks something like this, penciled into a calendar box:

Thursday, October 18
Spanish—1 hour
Typing Notes (on 2 articles)—1 hour
Grading—3 hours

Last week, I was despairing over my inability to work. Then, this week, it occurred to me to count up the total hours I’d logged: 27. I compared it with my total hours two weeks ago: 27.5. What a relief—I didn’t stop working, even though I wasn’t feeling emotionally tough.

My friend The Future Doctor Gale got herself into trouble with time sheets. She made herself sign in and out of her office, and tried to force herself to work eight hours a day. This led to a lot of anxiety and guilt over “missed” work. Her acupuncturist advised her to let herself work a maximum five hours per day instead, and that system is working wonders for her quality of life and productivity level.

I know that a maximum would never work for me—I excel at quitting work early. But I don’t set a minimum either.

No matter how you approach the working week, it’s not good to be too rigid with yourself. In the last three weeks, I’ve worked between 2.5 – 9.5 hours per day. But for me, it’s very reassuring to be able to look back and see that mostly I’ve worked between 4-6 hours per day. Then I can’t make up mean lies about what a lazy good-for-nothing I am.

Note: If you can work 8 hours a day, day after day, week after week, you need to write me and explain your process. Because everything I’ve learned about process in graduate school has proved that 5 is a much more sustainable number

2 Comments

Posted in Guilt, Process, Strategy

Teaching Nightmare

Posted on October 24, 2007 | Leave a comment

My students just turned in their first paper of the semester, and they are so clueless. How I wish I could laugh heartily at the mistakes and outlandish statements in student compositions, the way Anne of Green Gables does. Instead, I get mad. Real mad. First at the students, and then at myself.

To prepare the students to write this paper, they wrote no less than nine informal papers. After they turned in each response, I e-mailed them personally with comments explaining how to do better on the final paper. They were given two reading quizzes on their textbook. In addition to making the assignment instructions available on-line, I gave the students two other step-by-step instruction sheets to writing and revising—specific to this paper. I gave them a full class period to work on revision. We analyzed not just any examples in class, but examples from the students’ own writing. We graded a sample paper together in class.

I know this italics overload, but I have had it up to here. I delayed the due date of the first paper because I wanted them to be really ready! I knew they were in trouble as the due date approached, and I warned them in shriller and shriller voices that they needed to follow the assignment instructions very carefully.

The class average is a 65. One student received a grade of 20%. Two students that I met with to discuss early drafts both received a D. One student who went to the Undergraduate Writing Center twice received an F.

A friend of mine, The Future Doctor Moulder, told me that confusion is productive for the students, and they aren’t supposed to get it right away. (Those are her italics this time.) I don’t know. Before I taught, I always thought I was a naturally talented instructor. I never dreamed my darkest hours as a graduate student would involve doubting my ability to teach.

Leave a comment

Posted in Teaching

Secret Goals

Posted on October 18, 2007 | 1 comment

Unrealistic expectations are public enemy #1 for dissertators. What brilliant mind can withstand 6-10 years of daily failure?

In my experience, setting realistic goals cannot happen in a vacuum. The advice of a dissertation support group, adviser, or friend can help the deflated graduate student pat her herself on the back and take a well-deserved bubble bath.

Receiving precious help does no good, however, if you develop secret goals. Last week, I told my Dissertation Support Group member The Future Doctor Gale that I wanted to read one book and write a draft of a grant application, in addition to preparing for a translation exam. She said that I had ambitious goals, and warned me that they might be too much for a single week. I ignored her advice and made extra, secret goals. I planned to type up a towering pile of notes, organize my desk, and clean out my in-box.

Not too surprisingly, I didn’t accomplish my secret goals or my stated goals. Plus, I felt panicked and miserable. I’m all for dreams and imagination and positive thinking. But indulging in secret fantasies about turning out a perfect chapter in one draft that wins a major award and results in universities offering you jobs before you even apply is going to turn you into the sad, miserable failure that you never had to be.

1 Comment

Posted in Guilt, Strategy

The Joy of the Irrelevant

Posted on October 11, 2007 | Leave a comment

One of the best things I did this week was stop reading a book that had been on my to-do list for years.

Normally I have a hard time reading a book any way except from start to finish, but this book was just not interesting. I had trouble concentrating on it, and I kept rolling my eyes at the jargon the author was using. It finally dawned on me that it wasn’t interesting to me because it was irrelevant to my project.

My friend The Future Doctor Gale asked me this afternoon as we left a meeting, “Should I go to the talk by the very famous man in my department that everyone else will be going to?” Her gut was telling her that she wouldn’t get much from the talk, but the imagined presence of so many of her colleagues, and the prestige of the speaker, made her doubt herself.

So often in our careers, which run on self-discipline, we get caught up in shoulds and oughts and plans made so long ago they are no longer useful. Today, shove a “should” off your to-do list. Not just for now—this is something that you are never going to do. It feels awesome.

Leave a comment

Posted in Guilt, Strategy

Keys to Victory

Posted on September 7, 2007 | Leave a comment

In honor of football season, which fills the Future Doctor Jones family with glee, I present, in tribute to the corny wordplay of sportscasters everywhere, one of my personal keys to diploma-tic victory:

*The Monthly Plan*

Like a good offense, this plan must be built for flexibility. While it would be wildly unrealistic to expect the plan to go perfectly in actual game-time, it should still get you further down the field.

I was feeling a little hopeless earlier today at the thought of doing a lot of secondary research for my dissertation—reading that will be useful in an important, but indirect way. Last time this kind of reading was on my agenda, I didn’t work on my dissertation for nearly four months.

This time, I have a plan:
Step 1: find precisely twelve books / articles that are most crucial
Step 2: read those books and write brief responses
Step 3: finish reading those books and / or begin revising Chapter 1 in four weeks

The plan has to be specific—the vague “doing more reading” fails to achieve even a backyard touchdown. The plan has to be ambitious. Winners expect greatness. (Winners read three books a week.) And there has to be a second option. Even if I completely mess up the reading part, I will still lengthen my dissertation in four weeks. The line-men of insecurity seem to grow smaller before my very eyes. I’m thinking like a champion. I’m moving down the field.

Leave a comment

Posted in Strategy

The Importance of Naming

Posted on August 17, 2007 | Leave a comment

I used to make a draft, have someone edit it, re-write it, and call it done—a word I don’t believe I’ve heard in the three years since I got my master’s degree.

The forty-five pages I just wrote don’t contain a thesis. Their structure is skeletal. I quote huge blocks of text every other page with a vague sense of urgency that’s never fully explained. If one of my students turned in a four-page version of what I’ve written, I would give them a “No grade. We need to talk.”

My hero of dissertation writing, Joan Bolker, author of Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day, says to call what I just wrote a “zero draft.” That two months of work equals zero makes me want to smash a calculator. My friend The Future Doctor Anderson calls it “seeds.” That name is downright scary to me—is this monster just a tiny piece of potential about to grow exponentially into a Godzilla-size disaster?

My mother says that before you decide what to name your baby, you’re supposed to yell its potential name out the back door. If you’ve found a good name, it won’t sound stupid. When writing to my advisers, I called these pages my “description of research” draft. It fails my mother’s test—but the awkwardness of the title befits the inelegant thing I produced.

I wish I could’ve written something that seemed to me like a “first draft,” which was my goal for the summer. Still, when I consider my pages in light of their new name, they look a lot less like failure. They are chock-full of descriptions that couldn’t have been written without copious research. It’s true that I can’t imagine the number of pages between me and that beautiful mythical done. But “Description of Research” is still a long way from not-yet-begun.

Leave a comment

Posted in Dissertation Drafts, Strategy

Just Keep Asking the Question If You Don’t Like The Answer

Posted on August 14, 2007 | Leave a comment

Still dwelling on the hours of work lost due to tonsillitis, I mentioned my frustration to my therapist. She asked me a hard question. “What can you accomplish by thinking about this?”

All my life, I have tried to learn from bad experiences. I ruminated on relationships-gone-wrong until I felt I could be a better, stronger, more confident girlfriend the next time around. I analyzed myself until I could explain any irrational behavior. I examined each hour of Spider Solitaire-playing to try to determine how I could be a more productive writer. And now I was trying in some demented way to figure out how to prevent illnesses.

I thought it was good to try to understand my work habits and become consistent. But the fact is, sometimes I write at a desk of chaos, and sometimes I don’t feel right until everything is in its place. Often staying in a routine keeps me focused, and sometimes I am extra-productive when breaking a routine.

My therapist said something that probably shocked me more than it will shock you. She said, “everyone wastes time.” Now, this statement is obviously true. But I haven’t been working my way towards a Ph.D. as if I knew that everyone wastes time. I’ve been on a quest for infinite efficiency.

I’ve worried so much about how to be more productive that now it’s time to worry about worrying about being productive. (That’s what we do in academia, right?) In order to stop wasting time worrying about wasting time, I have to accept that I will never work with perfect efficiency. Never ever.

I keep fighting the urge to end this post with some hunky-dory message like, “I’ll never be perfect, but I’ll always keep learning how to be better.” No. Maybe I’ll waste less time at age 47 than age 27 or maybe I won’t. I just hope at 47, I’ll do less worrying about worrying about worrying about wasting time, and really enjoy Spider Solitaire, dammit.

Leave a comment

Posted in Guilt, Process

Even My Tonsils Feel Guilty

Posted on August 3, 2007 | 1 comment

The Future Mr. Doctor Jones pointed out that I become angry when I am sick. If attitude and stress contribute to healthfulness, then feeling upset about one’s sickness isn’t a great idea. But this time, I can’t help being anxious—tonsillitis has kept me from working for two whole weeks.

I purposely didn’t make much money this summer, reserving most of my time for my dissertation. So my finances weren’t in great condition, and the five doctor visits plus the multiple purchases of drugs, soup, and DVD rentals didn’t help. But the part that makes me want to curse the universe is the fear that after this summer, when my teaching appointment and computer lab staffing job begin, it will be months before I have a whole day to write my dissertation—let alone two weeks.

My parents are probably the people to blame for the guilt and anger I feel when I become ill. My mom never gets sick, which she attributes to washing her hands. (I wash my hands, too, Mom—I swear!) My dad does get sick—with nasty colds and sore throats, aching bones, sprained ankles, and, more seriously, with Parkinson’s Disease—but he’s never stopped working (at least not for an entire day) due to illness. He’s been farming all his life. While some things can be put off, others can’t—such as planting, harvesting, baling hay, and feeding animals.

Unlike farmers, academics have the luxury of taking time off when we’re ill, at least sometimes (in the middle of summer, for instance). No corporate policy dictates that we get sick less than four days per year. So why can’t I congratulate myself on a profession well-chosen, sit back with my ice cream and let the DVDs spin?

Because sometimes, when I am perfectly healthy, I still don’t work like I think I should. Therefore anytime I’m not working, I question my own motives. Sick, or lazy? Legitimately drained, or just lacking inner resources? Unlike my parents, I don’t work every day. And unlike them, I don’t think that a person should have to work every day—I believe in weekends, vacations, and playing hooky. But that’s the belief that makes the grey area that makes the second-guessing that makes the stress that lives in the head that The Future Doctor Jones built.

1 Comment

Posted in Guilt