Category Archives: Healthy Health

Fall Semester 2012: Already Not Excellent

Posted on September 4, 2012 | 7 comments

I say this somewhat ironically–really, it’s too early to tell, especially since none of my classes meet until tomorrow.

But I decided to make up a “First Day of the Semester Rubric” as a way to introduce the concept of rubrics to students, and to begin talking about expectations (mine for me, theirs for me, mine for them, theirs for themselves, ours for the universe in general).

first-day rubric

And this is how the semester is already not excellent–I don’t have the full semester schedule for all my classes ready yet, and it won’t be ready for all of them by tomorrow.

But I do have a lot done, and, as per the rubric, I anticipate showing up early and being enthusiastic and focused for each of my four classes tomorrow.  I’ll report back and let you know how it went!

In the meantime, I’m relatively fired up and kinda sorta ready to go.

7 Comments

Posted in Burnout, Procrastination, Teaching, Work Life

Tagged

Professor is “Person of Interest” in Crime Against Civility

Posted on August 25, 2012 | 4 comments

My contract starts up again on Monday, and one of the things I’ll be working on before classes start is Xeroxing my yellow and red warning cards–if anyone’s late to class one time, it’s an automatic yellow card, no matter the reason. Late a second time? Red card.

Once you get a red card, you have two options: go talk to our Student Services Director, so he can either kick some serious ass, or do some problem solving. Option #2 means you go to our Roadrunner Café Lunch Ladies and you do

WHATEVER THEY TELL YOU TO.

You don’t get to come back to class until you have the signature from one of those folks.

The policy applies to me as much as my students, and it’s kept me on time, as much as it has my students. (Before motherhood, I swear I was NEVER late to class. But the last 7.5 years, I’ve felt so scrambled for time that I’m always thinking I can get just one more thing done before I walk over to class….)

Sure, it’s a little juvenile, which one of my consistently-tardy students complained, immediately, loudly, last fall when I introduced the cards. But, as another student said to him, “So get to class on time.”

What I like about this policy is that #1, it worked. #2, it was silly enough to bring some lightness to the subject. #3, it was so clear-cut that there wasn’t much fussing about it when someone was late. I think the idea began germinating when one of my colleagues said he has a cardboard box at the front of the room and anyone who was late had to bring a donation for the food pantry the next class period. I liked that, but then there’s a box to deal with, and worrying about students stealing ramen when I wasn’t looking. Warning cards seemed easier, and sillier. (And as we always used to say at Lake Benton Baptist Camp, soccer players have the best legs.)

All the best advice about handling classroom incivility involves making expectations clear and enforcing rules consistently.

The red card/yellow card (in addition to now implying that I perhaps watched more than three minutes of the Summer Olympics) allows me to be clear and consistent.

Do I wish, as a college professor, that I didn’t have to do anything like this, ever?

Sure. But if wishes were horses, I’d find them alarming and probably be allergic to them.

Part of what helps me love my job is that I try to teach the students I have, not the students I wish I had. And honestly? If I had the students I wish I had, I’d probably miss the ones I have now.

If I get out of teaching anytime soon, it won’t be because of my students.

We’ve seemed to have waves of tardiness at UW-Richland in the 20 years I’ve been there. Some semesters it’s an issue, most semesters not.

But I try not to blame students for this, not after I’ve made my expectations clear. I teach at a two-year campus, so I’m getting a lot of 18- and 19-year-old hooligan-wannabes, and my thinking is that they are JUST NOW absolutely responsible for themselves.

I’ve explored the issue of civility in the classroom a number of times in workshops that I facilitated, and that workshop is now available online, at the UW Colleges Virtual Teaching and Learning Center. It’s a narrated power point, and you can watch/listen any time you want, should you want to.

I try to emphasize the notion that if things are going badly in the classroom, it is, first and foremost, the professor’s job to figure out why. It behooves us, frankly, to look at ourselves as a “person of interest” in the case of crimes against civility.

These workshops have worked best in groups where faculty, staff, and students were present—otherwise, it’s too easy for one group to complain about the others. In groups with a cross-section, too, it becomes clear that there isn’t one right way to handle any of this. I would never say, for example, that everyone, or even anyone other than me, should use red warning cards as a way to curb tardiness. It works for me; it’s up to us to find what works for us.

I’m genuinely fond of students, and that comes across pretty consistently, but I’m still guilty of what they’d list as “bad professor behavior” sometimes–being too disorganized. It’s a relative thing, of course. I’m way more organized than some of my peers, and I’m not joking at all when I say I think there’s a lot of undiagnosed ADHD in academia.

But I’m more organized all the time, and one of the BIG crimes against civility I’ve been guilty of over the years–taking too long to return student work–is REMARKABLY improved (which is why I keep remarking on it–a fair number of the posts in my blog on procrastination have to do with this issue).

In fact, the fact that you can access a perfectly lovely version of the narrated power point on the VTLC site is proof I’m more organized. I offered to narrate it last spring so Jennifer Heinert, the current director of the VTLC, could make it part of an online workshop. I didn’t know at the time, but if you use a Mac to narrate a power point, the narration is likely to just cut out. Randomly. I didn’t have time to fix it last spring, but since Jennifer was getting good feedback on “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Civility and Responsibility in the Classroom,” I wanted to make it right, and I told her I’d fix it over the summer.

It took several tries of narrating test power points on the Mac before I finally Googled the issue and found out it was mostly the Mac. Then I had to line up a mic for my office PC. Then I had to copy/paste each slide into a new document, because the mix of ppt/pptx in the old one was making the whole thing freeze up in places.

So it wasn’t perfect last spring, in terms of content, and it’s still not. I wish it were even more of a scholarly project—hope someone else can move it in a more rigorous SoTL/Scholarship of Teaching and Learning direction. It was absolutely FLAWED last spring in terms of execution. Still, it did some good, and now it’s fired up and ready to go for the fall semester.

Thus, even though I do not technically, typically score high in conscientiousness self-assessments, I am capable of doggedly finishing a project.

In this case, it’s because I have immense respect for Jennifer Heinert, and the original UWC VTLC Director, Nancy Chick, and I’m thrilled to be a part of what is a really valuable resource for us in the UW Colleges (and elsewhere—it’s online! It’s free! It’s pretty-much open access! It might be a MOOC!)

But I was also determined to make it work better because civility in the classroom is so important, and if I can do anything to spark conversations that make civility more common, I’m on it.

[The original title of this blog was “Kids These Days,” but I changed it. Even ironically, I didn’t like adding to that chorus. It’s not that I think my students always behave in lovely ways. They don’t, and I call them on it. But “kids these days” not only makes me sound old and crabby even when I insist I’m trying to make a joke about it, it’s not “these days.” I was very squirrelly as a first-year college student, and that was nearly 35 years ago. I was so squirrelly that my son would probably rate it as “Volume A.”]

4 Comments

Posted in Burnout, Procrastination, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

Tagged

A Knottier Wretch Post: Mary and Martha and Rest Vs. Work

Posted on July 26, 2012 | 2 comments

Did you know that when you do an anagram of “Protestant Work Ethic,” you come up with “Procrastinate, Ewok!”

O.k., not really—it leaves a couple of letters unused and you have to throw in an extra “a.”

You do get “a thickset rotten prow” or “a sphincter totter wok” or “a thrice strew topknot,” however (all courtesy of a fun anagramming site, but you should also Google anagram). Overall, my general lack of anagramming skills is one of three or four things that would keep me from competing in an actual Scrabble tourney. But I really, really want to mess with that Protestant work ethos.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Mary and Martha this summer.

The basic story is in Luke 10: people are gathered at Mary and Martha and Lazarus’s house (L. will later be raised from the dead by Jesus), and Martha complains to Jesus that Mary isn’t helping, “Don’t you care that she’s left me to do all the work by myself?” There may well have been a lot of work—Jesus was traveling with a crowd of up to 70 disciples (not that they were all in that one house together), and this is a time and a place where hospitality was taken very seriously. And the house is identified as Martha’s in the story. She has a prominent role in the gospels. In this story she’s an antagonist, but then she’s the first, even before Peter, to identify Jesus as the Messiah.

In this particular story, instead of helping, Mary was sitting at Jesus’s feet & listening to him. Jesus apparently enjoys that, because he tells Martha she’s worried and distracted, and that (in the King James Version), “only one thing is needful.” That Mary’s listening is more important than Martha’s bustling.

A blog post I like, “Mary and Martha: A Story About God’s Radical Hospitality,” on the “Grace Rules” blog (not sure who the author is but it was written in response to a request from Julie Goss Clawson, a writer I enjoy a lot) deals with the M&M story and says, after quoting Jesus’s response to Martha, “At this point, someone usually teaches a lesson about how important it is not to get so busy that we forget to spend quiet, contemplative time with Jesus. And while I think that is a good lesson I have a feeling we may be missing the point of what Jesus is talking about.” “Grace Rules” outlines how subversive Jesus was being here, and I think that’s exactly right. He’s upending expectations about gender roles and hospitality and busy-ness and lots of other things in the mix.

I was wondering a while back who would spend more time on Facebook—Mary, Martha, or Lazarus? I said I was pretty sure Jesus would have friended all three of them. Here are some of the responses:
⋅ “I think it would have to be Lazarus, since he would get a second chance at it.”
⋅ “How much would Jesus love FB and Twitter?!”
⋅ “Mary wins out. . .her sensitive, caring, compassionate side means that she would answer even the wildest commentary the social network has to offer …. In other words, she would be a terrific online friend. Lazarus, I fear, will probably just sit at the gate of the city, dreaming of his ordeal, not wishing to share with anyone. He would not be a good friend.”

I thought Lazarus would have one of the all-time great status updates, post-resurrection, though, if he chose to post it, “I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!” or “Know how we all thought I was dead?”

We agreed that Martha would have short posts, things like “Just mopped again!” or slams, “Wish I had more time to spend on Facebook, but I have things to do, unlike some people I know.”

The thing is, of course, that sometimes, things just need to get done.

I also asked a more serious question this summer on Facebook—who’s your nominee for someone who does more than just “get a lot done,” someone who seems to get the right things done. I didn’t word it as clearly as I might have because there was a lot of confusion about whether I meant “do the right thing” as in a moral choice—but I mostly meant someone who isn’t just busy or efficient, but has real impact in important ways. I got several nominees, and I emailed those nominees to see if they could talk about HOW they do that (in my ongoing quest to figure out how to GET SHIT DONE). Three of them were nice enough to respond—

Michael Broh, a member of Spring Green’s Village Board and Production Manager at American Players Theatre, said, “I’m honored by the nomination, but I must decline. As far back as I can remember, I’ve believed myself to live in a subjective universe, one in which there is as little place for right as there is for wrong.

In terms of what drives me to make the decisions I do make, and when, I suppose it is a combination of self interest, and a feeble attempt to look beyond the immediate, and treat long term implications with equal importance.”

(I guess I’m not technically letting him decline since I’m mentioning him here—the nomination didn’t actually lead to anything other than a public compliment and a mention in an obscure blog, but it’s a sincere compliment, and he did say I could quote him.)

Melinda Van Slyke is the owner/operator of Heart of the Sky Fair Trade and a local Progressive activist. Here’s what she had to say:

“True story: One day at swimming lessons (I was probably 4 or 5 at the time) we were all lined up at the side of the pool with the instructions being to jump one by one into the arms of our awaiting swim teacher. The little boy in front of me would not jump in. He just stood there, refusing to jump in, knowing that he should, (in my little girl mind) holding up the show. I very calmly pushed him in and immediately jumped in right behind him.

So that’s the secret to my so-called success. Don’t over think it. Just jump in and do it. Don’t wait for other people to be ready and sure as hell don’t wait for permission. But I like to think that now instead of pushing people *out* of my way I push (encourage) them to get involved and do things that they haven’t done before and hopefully they realize that hey, that wasn’t so bad after all.”

This is a terrific description of her mode, except I see her more as “offering to push.” And as I was diving into collecting signatures for Walker’s recall, for example—I was grateful for the push.

The other person who answered the email was Jan Swenson, who’s so good at getting things done she made the news. Her response to the question of how she gets things done was this: “I do the right things politically when the need arises (i.e. when ‘my’ candidate needs support or when a governor needs to be recalled). Musically, I do concerts when there is a need to raise money for something I want to support or when I can help publicize community events. My last choral concert was to raise money for our local food pantries and for ‘4 Pete’s Sake.’ The concert before that was in memory of Mitch Feiner (one of our finest musicians!) and was a fundraiser for his 3 children’s college educations. As for volunteering in the community, I do that because I love APT and want to support them any way I can, and my volunteer work at the school in Arena is to help those kids continue their amazing reading program. They read so many books that the librarian can’t keep up with filing the books!”

Not one of them mentioned the sort of stillness and listening and contemplation we associate with Mary in the M&M story (because, of course, that’s not what I asked them about, and not what they were nominated for–each nominated by more than one of my Facebook friends). They all sound productive, they truly are productive in important ways, I’m pleased to be a part of the community they’re active in, pleased to benefit from the fact that they are, in KJV lingo, “cumbered with many things.” They’re inspiring, and if I can generalize, I would say that they’re describing the need for vision, courage, and responsiveness, all three of which I know I am capable of only if there’s rest and contemplation on my to do list somewhere.

The thing that I find most difficult in balancing my Mary side with my Martha side is knowing WHEN to focus on resting versus acting. In recent blogs, I’ve described my struggles with figuring out how to honor the Sabbath (“Day of Rest, My Ass”) and figuring out how to procrastinate at just the right time (but not all the time) and stay busy (but not be consumed with busy-ness) and how burning trash is one of my all-time favorite activities, apparently (“Summer Theologica”).

It’s a hard balance—knowing when to get busy, and knowing when to rest and listen.

Even Jesus struggled with it. In the later story about Mary and Martha, Jesus shows up at their house because their brother Lazarus has died. Both sisters tell him that if he’d come sooner, they know he could have healed Lazarus. This is when we get the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” You could say he’s weeping in disappointment because his good friends Mary and Martha don’t understand he’s capable of raising the dead (though to be fair to them, he had done that only one other time that we know of, and that was in a different gospel than the one they appear in, so they might not have heard about it). I’m sure I heard sermons like that—that his tears were tears of judgment. I don’t think so. You could also say, and these are the sermons I’ve heard most often, that he’s showing his human side and his love for his friends. That comes closer to feeling like the truth for me, but what if—what IF he’s crying not just out of sadness, but out of frustration with himself?

I have to think he was a good friend, and a good friend might well think here, “Oh my God, they’re right. So what if I can raise him from the dead? If I’d gotten here sooner, I wouldn’t have to, and they wouldn’t be so torn up….”

(It is possible that Jesus would NOT say “oh my God,” but would instead say, “Oh I’m God” or perhaps not take the Lord’s name in vain at all, since that is one of the Top Ten.)

Fortunately for me, since I’m a writer, writing about work qualifies as work, or I’d have to admit that all my time blogging is neither restful (especially not these last three posts–I kept thinking I was writing about Mary and Martha but finding I had too much to say about the points I thought were going to lead quickly to M&M) nor productive.

Even when writing feels like hard work, it doesn’t feel like work–partly because I do it pro bono most of the time.

It’s all the other things on my to do list (28 things on today’s list, 15 of which I’d hoped to have done before I hit the sack tonight, which doesn’t seem likely, although writing this blog is on the list so I can check that off at least) that feel like work that make me wonder:

If I’m allowing myself to indulge in a Mary moment, am I really resting and listening? Or am I just procrastinating the next needful Martha moment? Am I giving due diligence to the “incubation” stage of creativity? Or am I resisting every other everything that has to be achieved for successful creativity?

Let me just meditate on each moment of my answer to the above questions:

I

don’t

know.

2 Comments

Posted in Burnout, Creativity, God Stuff, Procrastination, Spring Green, Work Life

Tagged

Day of Rest, My Ass

Posted on July 22, 2012 | 2 comments

When I say Sunday dinner I mean lunch (although on other days, “dinner” means supper—I don’t know why) and I also mean hot meat of some sort. Today it was baked chicken, real mashed potatoes (skins-on), and three-bean salad (cheated on that—it came from a can).

In an alternate universe, this meal would have been served by me, wearing an apron, after a morning spent in church.

In this particular universe, there was no apron and no morning in church.

I never remember to put on an apron, and organized religion and I are spending some time apart. I am participating in what Wendell Berry’s character Jayber Crow called “disorganized religion,” which I typically call being a Zen Baptist.

What about you? Are you resting on this day of rest?

Some of the people who take the Bible most literally, who insist that Genesis is a literal description of creation (despite the fact that there are two creation stories in Genesis and a third in Proverbs 8), are adept at ignoring Genesis 2:2-3, when God rested and created the Sabbath—something Yahweh cared enough about, apparently, to put it on his Top Ten list, (this from Exodus 20)“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work….”

Of course, there are those who take this commandment very seriously, who won’t drive on the Sabbath, who work hard the day before to make food that can be eaten without work to prepare it. But that’s not what I grew up with, not my adult experience, although one of the reasons I love living in Spring Green is that I can function really well without driving anywhere. (Walking home from the bars is only a small part of that pleasure.)

It’s one of the more striking ironies of my life–any time I’ve belonged to a faith community, been an active participant in one, Sunday was anything BUT a day of rest.

Stretches when I’m in a wilderness time (which can be nasty and involve dehydration, or wonderful, like now), Sunday stands a much better chance of actually being a day of rest.

What do I mean by wilderness time? It’s a reference to Jesus’s time in the wilderness, first of all. Three of the four gospels tell the story of Jesus going into the desert, immediately after being baptized, to fast for 40 days and 40 nights. He’s tempted by Satan there (the best depiction of which I’ve ever seen occurs in the movie Jesus of Montreal, when the actor portraying Jesus in a suddenly-popular passion play has a lawyer telling him all the ways he could parlay this into fame and fortune).

If you focus on the gospels (as opposed to the epistles of the apostle Paul), one of the things that stands out is how often Jesus heads out on his own. My friend Tammy is the first person I recall hearing preach on this–she’s also the first person I remember pointing out to me that God pronounces he is “well pleased” with Jesus before Jesus has done anything we consider part of his work on Earth. Even after he begins that work, Jesus sneaks off a number of times, which should comfort both my slacker and my introvert friends.

I’m not saying that he was resting, exactly, as he was fasting and being tempted, but it was sort of a pause, an episode of time off the clock. His ministry won’t start until he leaves the desert, but it can’t start until he’s spent enough time in the desert.

Once his ministry starts, he somehow gets a reputation as a “wine-bibber and glutton,” which I grew up understanding was slander, that people were falsely accusing him of that. Really? I don’t know. I think Jesus had a prescription for chill pills, and knew when to take one.

Matthew 11 is a really interesting chapter. John the Baptist is in prison and sends his disciples to ask Jesus if he’s the Messiah (when John baptized Jesus, he didn’t seem to have any doubts about the matter). Jesus sends them back to John with a list of what he’s accomplished, a sort of short-form resume, “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Then he adds, bizarrely coming at the end of this list, “And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.”

He spends some time praising John the Baptist, and then does a little comparison/contrast:

“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another,
‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

(I personally prefer “winebibber” to “drunkard,” because it sounds like so much more fun.)

It’s not literal, of course, John did eat and drink (honey and locusts, at the very least), and we don’t have Biblical evidence of Jesus eating too much or getting tipsy, but we do have evidence he appreciated good wine. Otherwise why would his first miracle be turning water into, not just wine, but wine pronounced as good wine?

The chapter ends with verses I’m pleased to take literally (and poetically, which is why I quote the King James version here): “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Never, not once, has my participation in a faith community felt easy or light. It has felt terrific, and right, and sustaining, and wonderful at times (not so great at other times). But easy? Or light? Not that I’m remembering.

So was Jesus just being ironic there?

I don’t think so, although he says things other times that contradict this (“Take up your cross daily” comes to mind—I often feel that just getting out of bed is my cross).

As someone who is nearly always teetering on the edge of burnout, I want to cling to those verses, make them real.

The title of this blog, “Day of Rest, My Ass,” is a poem written by a character in an old novel draft of mine, written during my first sabbatical, in 2004. She’s a burned-out preacher trying to find her way by working at a church camp one summer.

I understand why Jesus blesses anyone who doesn’t take offense. He did and said so many things to upset the apple quo, and advocating rest, for me a lot of days, tops the list.

2 Comments

Posted in Burnout, Family, God Stuff, Spring Green, Work Life

Tagged , , , ,

Summer Theologica, Part I

Posted on July 15, 2012 | 1 comment

In an earlier version of the following poem, which I, ahem, can’t seem to find, there was a line that said, “Television, being neither action nor contemplation, must be sin.” I’ve been contemplating the notions of action and contemplation this week (not so much acting on either notion), so I thought of that now-homeless line.

There is a burning ban in Wisconsin now (I’m scared to use the barbecue grill even), and we haven’t had enough rain for a very long time (and not much rain in the forecast), so even if we still lived out in the country, which we don’t, we wouldn’t be burning trash. The images of cold and wet are comforting to me at the moment:

SUMMER THEOLOGICA

Burning trash is better on the other Solstice,

December, the colder the better,
And even wind is fine
With enough snow cover.
Deep dark. We pile in
Two months of cat food bags
And Pop Tart boxes, low APR deals
And wadded up rough drafts.

One big blue kitchen match or two
Scraped fast against the barrel,
Which once was painted bright blue,
And the flame touches,
Tickles, dances, overwhelms
The trash. The chemical residue
In the barrels sends up thick smoke, sky blue.

Transformed! Detritus of the modern life
Consumed by fire, condensed to steam
And ash. Another chance to start again,
Another slate scorched clean.

The fire keeps you warm.
On Christmas Eve once, I sang
“Away in a Manger” while burning trash,
cows actually lowing nearby.

Bits of paper rise in the night,
Against the starry sky it’s hard
To keep saying paper, fire, ash—
Orange lace makes more sense,
Flickering warm constellations
In a coldly growing universe.
Our dwindling friend, the past, is receding.
One gust and there’s a gray hole
Where the tiny fireworks had been.

But we keep up with trash better
Spring, fall, summer, letting it pile up
Only if there’s a burning ban, and this summer,
There’s way too much rain for that.

Loading the barrel raises a cloud
Of mosquitoes from the puddle inside.
Die, demons, die, I say,
Lighting it fast. But they’re so thick.
I want to wear a smudge pot
Round my neck, dip my clothes in Deet
And citronella oil, set myself on fire.
At least immolation wouldn’t itch.
At least not at first.

There is something holy about fire,
I think to myself, dancing on the squishy
Ground to dodge all the whiny
Little proboscises aimed at me.
All that was is less.
The volume visibly reduced.
Blue incense rising slowly toward heaven.
Here it is, God, what was, what we no longer want.

_________________

This poem is about so many things, and it used to be about so many more. (In that version I can’t find. I don’t think I burned it–I’m just not sure where it is.) There used to be a line in there from a friend who burned trash with me once and said, “I’m the worst person you know.”

There is redemption in burning trash. In getting caught up.

A couple of weeks ago there were three posts that people were sharing on Facebook, all related, I think, to burning trash—at least metaphorically.

First, there was this one, on the potential benefits of procrastination, called “Procrastination Rules.” The only point at which I disagreed was in the penultimate paragraph (most of which I did agree with), in which Frank Partnoy said, “If we aren’t working at all, we are being slothful. If we are working on something unimportant, we are showing bad judgment. But if we are working on something important, then does it really make sense to judge us negatively for not working on something less important? If we put off errands because we are trying to cure cancer, are we really procrastinating? And if that is the meaning of procrastination, why is it so bad?”

Terrific questions, but two other posts were flying around the same day that made it clear it’s not true that we’re being slothful “if we aren’t working at all.”

One was this one, “Why Killing Time Isn’t a Sin,” in which Leo Babauta says “Killing time isn’t a sin — it’s a misnomer. We’ve framed the question entirely wrong. It’s not a matter of “killing” time, but of enjoying it….Now we might spend this moment working if that work brings us joy. But we might also spend it relaxing, doing nothing, feeling the breeze on the nape of our neck, losing ourselves in conversation with a cherished friend, snuggling under the covers with a lover. This is life. A life of joy, of wonderfulness.”

What’s interesting to me is that this seems like neither action nor contemplation to me (I see contemplation as somewhat synonymous to meditation—something requiring focus and effort). This just seems like fun.

And fun, as an anti-dote, can be very powerful, as Tim Kreider points out in “The ‘Busy’ Trap.” I loved how forthrightly he said, “I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.” But beyond his terrific voice (I’m really enjoying his book, We Learn Nothing), he has some really important points.

“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

This is connected to what a lot of creativity researchers talk about in the steps, or stages of creativity (which I covered in my first blog, “Creativity: A Pumpkin Saga”):

“People who describe the stages or steps of creativity use some variation of the following list (much of which comes from an early researcher named Wallas, though he is rarely cited):
• Immersion (where you consider all the possibilities)
• Incubation (where you set your work aside and let your subconscious stew)
• Inspiration (when, like Archimedes, you have your “eureka!” moment—and bathrooms rank high statistically as places where we report getting inspired*, btw. But I shouldn’t say “we” because I would never report that, even if it were true, which of course it’s not)
• Verification (where someone whose judgment matters, for whatever reason, says, “Yes! Tastes great!” or “I’ll publish that!”).”

Procrastination gets you in trouble sometimes in relation to this list, because if you’re working with a deadline, and you spend too much time on the immersion stage, you might not have much time to leave for the incubation stage, and that might cut down on the likelihood of inspiration.

There’s a balance there–as in most things, as in the story of Mary and Martha (tune in tomorrow for that one), as in burning trash–you don’t want to put it off too long, because then you’ll have bags and bags of things to burn and it’ll take forever to get it done. But you don’t want to do it every day, because then you’ll have a tiny little boring fire that will be out before you have time to appreciate how wonderful the moment is, how beautiful the flames, how delicate the ashes are as they lift up and float away.

1 Comment

Posted in Burnout, Creativity, God Stuff, Poetry, Procrastination, Uncategorized, Work Life

Summer of my Relative Uselessness

Posted on July 5, 2012 | 2 comments

I’m somehow reminded of when the O.J. trial was on—I spent a lot of that summer on the couch, agreeing with whichever lawyer was speaking at the time. “It’s like they didn’t cancel LA Law after all,” I told my friends.

There’s no trial on this summer that I’m watching, and since we barely have broadcast TV, we’re not watching the lead-up to the Olympics and may not watch much of the Olympics. (Which I’m sure we can add to the list of ways I’m a horrible mother.) I’m also not watching soap operas, because the ones I loved the most are gone. I’ll admit it—I did get a little sad yesterday thinking I couldn’t turn on Guiding Light and find out if Jeffrey were going to make a surprise appearance at the Bauer barbecue and thus lead to yet another Josh and Reva breakup.

Regardless of how little TV I’m watching (other than all of Season 3 of Justified on my laptop through iTunes—just giggling a little here about the juxtaposition of Timothy Olyphant and lap)—regardless:

Between when the spring semester ended on May 24 and, well, any time now, I’ve been pretty useless.

I don’t want to say I’ve earned it, but I did have my gallbladder removed on May 29. Yes, they were able to do it laproscopically, and no, there weren’t any complications, but it took me every minute of three weeks to feel anything close to normal. So many people said they just “snapped right back” after gallbladder surgery. Apparently I’m not snappy. It took a solid month before my son pronounced me 99% recovered.

“Or maybe 98%,” he said. He made this observation after I’d apprehended a runaway grocery cart that was hurtling across the grocery store parking lot toward parked cars. The cart-herd had left it unattended while he moved some other carts back inside. My brain went kind of “phbbbbbbsplat” for a second or two, as I was thinking, “oh, that’s going to hit those cars,” and then, shifting into superhero mode, I scanned the parking lot, said to Wendell “let’s go!” and we ran with our cart after the runaway cart.

I grabbed it before it hit anything, and then pulled both carts back up to the store, where the clueless cart-herd was emerging. I started to say, “I just saved your ass,” but I stopped myself (Wendell tonight at dinner told nath and me that Callie, our kitten, was “pissed off because you’re not snuggling her enough.” I told him that’s another one of those words he shouldn’t use until he’s older, like when he gets his drivers license.)

“I just saved you,” I said to the cart-herd, and it seemed to dawn on him (or, as he’ll probably write in my composition class this fall, dong on him) what I’d saved him from. As we walked to our car, Wendell said, “That’s the first time I’ve seen you run since your operation.”

“I must be recovered,” I said.

“99% anyway,” he said. “Or maybe 98%.” He and nath have been watching Star Trek episodes & Spock is a big favorite.

It was a very dramatic moment.

And that’s pretty much it, in terms of what I’ve accomplished so far this summer.

O.k., not entirely true. I’ve read a lot. I found a lot of terrific apps for the iPad. I actually wrote a fair bit.

And just tonight, I finished transferring my TO DO list from paper to “Things,” which is both a web thingy and an app. It’s designed to work smoothly with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” religion (I read that book during my recovery stretch). I’m relatively excited about the possibility that these two things will help me be more productive. I would personally be more excited if he called it “Getting Shit Done,” but probably that would not be as broadly appealing.

Other than my gallbladder surgery, I think my summer of relative uselessness can be attributed to ongoing issues with burnout. I’m hoping that taking it pretty easy for a month let some of that heal up, too.

I am very, very grateful to have a job where I can take a month to recover from what is, by all accounts, relatively minor surgery.

(You don’t need to tell me how many things I could complain about with my particular job in my particular state at this particular point in history—-trust me. I’m not one of those people who say, “Can’t complain,” because I know I always could. About anything. I’m creative AND I’m a worst-case-scenario thinker. I could complain. But I don’t, not always.)

It isn’t true that professors “get summers off.” But it is true (especially if we’re not teaching, which I’m not, this summer) we have a big chunk of time to get a big chunk of things done, with a proportionally big chunk of autonomy to figure out how, precisely, to go about Getting Shit Done.

So we’ll see—will this summer of my relative uselessness morph into an incredibly productive stretch of time? Or will I spend ever more time finding addictive word game apps and and then finding ways to get the iPad away from my husband and son?

Tune in tomorrow, soap fans. Or next week—or whenever it is I get another blog posted.

(Also—if the title of this post rang any bells, you’ll be happy to know that Kristy McNichol is alive and well.)

2 Comments

Posted in Burnout, Creativity, Family, Procrastination, Teaching, Work Life

Tagged ,

Metaphors: A Semester

Posted on April 27, 2012 | 2 comments

1
damp pile of limp balloons

2
multiple balloons, inflated to bursting
in January
let go on schedule until March
then all at once
sputtering
zip zoom
flail
hanging suspended in April
flop

3
you know how the house in Up floated away?
like that
but no passengers

4
some old-school blown-up balloons
along with helium mylar
and one miniature hot-air contraption
elaborately connected
mostly self-propelled
landing gently
grades turned in

5
damp pile of limp balloons

2 Comments

Posted in Burnout, Poetry, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

The Moan Tax

Posted on April 25, 2012 | 10 comments

I pay for every blessing—don’t think I don’t.
Sure I’ve got a good job, but I work too hard,
And I’m lucky in love, but marriage takes work.
Don’t believe me? Listen to me piss and moan
About the house I have to clean, the food
I have to cook, the garden I have to weed,
My beautiful, rural commute ruined this week
with a spread-manure-fresh-dead-skunk reek.

I might be spoiled but at least I’m not content.

God forbid I should relax or take a break
Or cut back somewhere or say no to anything
Or take the risk of being seen as slacking
Or just enjoy the son I thought I couldn’t conceive.
I fight off jinxes with my constant, low-voltage rant,
Lest all my precious miseries be stripped from me.

_____

This is and isn’t me speaking. Happy Hump Day, everyone!

10 Comments

Posted in Burnout, Family, Poetry, Work Life

Tagged

Getting the Pay Raise You Deserve, Part III

Posted on April 12, 2012 | 17 comments

CREDO: ENOUGH

I don’t work too hard. I work hard

enough, having joined the small but growing worldwide Church of Enough, not to be confused with the service club called Just Enough, whose border blurs with the Club of Just Barely Enough, which is too similar, frankly, to the Club of Not Really Enough, aligned of course with the also growing club of Not Nearly Enough who might as well admit they’re paying members of the Piss Poor In Nearly Every Measurable Way Society. No, we’re the Church of Enough–not to be confused either, please, with those in the mildly amiable but really too puffed up Club of More Than Enough, who won’t admit this publicly but they share office space with the growing Crystal Cathedral of Too Much and a splinter group, the Cult of Much Too Much, who are Calvinistic in believing anyone without the proud banner MUCH TOO MUCH (a hand-tatted silky thing they work extra hours to buy), anyone who sleeps eight hours in a row, anyone who cares to whisper, “balance,” anyone who stares at a cobalt bottle in the afternoon light, anyone who smiles just must by definition belong to what they see as the biggest club of all, Just Not Enough.

Moderation in most things
is our creed. If we met
we’d chant it but we don’t
have meetings. To qualify
for membership you must
come to us having attended

enough meetings already.

A humble enough start
has bloomed like rust
in the machine
of the rest of our lives.
When progress grinds
to an ugly steaming stop
in our backyards
we’ll be there to sing songs
around the dying fire.
We will have progressed far
enough.

______________________________
I wrote this poem a very long time ago, maybe as many as 15 years ago, when I first read Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American. It became a signature piece for me at poetry readings for a while, although it still scares me to read it in public sometimes, since I assume someone is thinking and might say, “You could work a little harder, couldn’t you?”

But it’s an important end-piece for this particular series, and it’s important enough to me that my husband and I are going to be selling broadsides of it, with a gorgeous image he took of one of my cobalt blue bottles. (Contact me if you want one.)

As a friend of mine said, “It’s all about who’s in the lifeboat with us,” and as I added, “who’s down the hall in the nursing home.”

Are you with me? Want to come to my house when progress grinds to an ugly steaming stop? When that fire goes out, we’ll build a fire in our fire pit (which my husband and I made from the recycled drum of our front-loader washing machine) and drink some beers or possibly home-brewed hooch, which would both save us some cash and let me hark back to more of my Bullock heritage.

I’m saying it loud, saying it proud: Enough. Say it with me: Enough.

17 Comments

Posted in Burnout, Poetry, Searching, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

Tagged

Getting the Pay Raise You Deserve, Part II

Posted on April 10, 2012 | 15 comments

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
Raise your hourly wage by working fewer hours.

It’s kind of a punch line. Kind a punch in the gut, since it’s the only kind of raise we’re likely to get in the UW System any time soon.

I once told a high-octane-hard-working, salary-sensitive professor that my salary was probably higher than hers if we considered hourly wage. She wasn’t amused.

Amusing myself is one of my highest priorities in life, but I’m completely serious here.

It’s very, very hard to scale back, but some of us have to, if we haven’t already. We have to be able to specify, to quantify if possible (because numbers convey meaning sometimes better than anything else) where budget cuts have already impacted quality and where they’re impacting quality now.

I’d love to see someone set up a Wiki (I had the idea, so someone else can have the fun of implementing it—-it takes a lot of time for me to come up with all my good ideas. Plus I still sort of don’t get wikis) with these categories:

Maintaining Quality Where It Counts—what are all the wonderful & amazing things we’re doing for students even when our morale is low? How does our professional development make us better teachers? How is our service making things better? We have a ton of examples, all the time. We need to share them.

Impacting Quality Out of Necessity—where have we had to cut back?

And if we haven’t cut back, well—-we have to cut back.

Why? It might well have a positive impact on our quality of life, for one thing. Begin the slow process (for some of us) of healing from burnout. But also—if we can’t show how budget cuts are impacting quality, then we don’t have any evidence that they are. If we don’t have any evidence that they’re lowering quality, maybe they’re not. I absolutely believe they are, but if lowering quality were a crime, could we get a jury of 12 to convict budget cuts? Not based on what our detectives have brought us so far. If I’m the DA, I’m saying, “Get me more evidence!”

I’d love to see people report, as honestly and accurately as they can bear to, how many hours they’re working. (More on this in another blog—it’s a weird thing, trying to track your own hours.)

I’d love to see numbers and testimonials on how many faculty & teaching staff are taking on extra sections or part-time jobs or doing summer work outside academia. I’d love to see numbers and testimonials on how many faculty and teaching staff are spending more time preparing their own meals and growing their own food—not simply because it’s healthier and aesthetically more satisfying, but because of economic necessity. I’d love to see numbers and testimonials on how many faculty and teaching staff are seeking psychological counseling either as individuals because of stress and low morale, or as part of a couple, since we know money woes are a huge source of relationship strife. And if we are taking those hours spent on all those things out of our sleep time, or our family time, or our community time, or our girls’ night out time, or our rearranging the nutcracker collection time, anything other than work time—I think we need even more counseling.

Did the recent increases in class size impact what we did in the classroom? If not right away, has it now, several semesters in? And if it didn’t, why not? It takes extra hours to teach extra students well if we don’t cut back. Where did we subtract those hours?

What if, just as one example, we didn’t routinely look at every rough draft from every student? What if we had a certain number of slots available for one-on-one feedback, and it was up to students to sign up for those slots? It might actually teach them to get themselves organized and seek feedback early in the process (which is closer to what they’ll find in the world of work, right? If they want help, they’re not going to be able to wait around for a supervisor to ask them if they want help).

What if we offered, say, 10 opportunities for students to assess their reading comprehension through in-class essays or out-of-class exercises, but counted the grades for only 9? Only 8? 7? 6? That cuts down on the grading time, since we know a lot of students will do only what they have to. Is it actually our job to teach them dedication? Or do they have to come up with intrinsic motivation at some point? Are my UW-Richland students from Wisconsin noticing that my UW-Richland students from China, Vietnam, and Korea typically take advantage of EVERY SINGLE OPPORTUNITY to learn and improve?

Maybe both those what-ifs are bad ideas, so what if we routinely shared examples of how to cut back without seriously impacting student learning overall?

How many fewer students have we steered toward becoming education majors recently? How many students have we said the following to lately, “You know, you should think about becoming a professor.” (I used to say it to three or four students a year. I don’t say it any more.)

Here’s the crux of it all—there are people who will always misunderstand, resent, and misrepresent us, and they will use any attempt on our part to cut back as evidence that we’re overpaid and underworked. But guess what? If we do nothing, we’re status quo-ing, and they’ll keep saying we’re overpaid and underworked. If we somehow manage to work even more, they’ll say they knew we weren’t working hard enough. If we work less, they’ll say we’re even more overpaid and underworked, but that’s not very different, at all, from being simply overpaid and underworked, so I say we should go for it.

FIGHT GASLIGHTING WITH FACTS
Any time we feel the need to point out to someone the stagnancy of our salaries, we are bombarded with accusations of whining and reminders how lucky we are to have a job in the first place. Well, yes (see Part I —I get it. I really get it.), BUT—at some point it begins to feel like gaslighting:

“You think you have legitimate dissatisfaction with working conditions?” the bad boyfriend scoffs. “You must be imagining things.”

There’s so much fun going on with Wisconsin politics that it’s hard to keep track, but here’s an example from this week. One state senator, in justifying the repeal of our equal pay law, made two points—one possibly logical point that some pay inequity comes from women focusing on family matters (my own experience tells me there’s some truth to that—I know I worked fewer hours and got lower merit ratings when my son was first born and was very young), but undermines any credibility with this howler:

“You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious.”

Um, hello? Breadwinner in my family? Um, me? (And also, guy/their is a pronoun antecedent error, only excused if someone is trying for gender-neutral language, which I don’t suspect is the case here.)

The one not-quite-so-bleak spot in the Chronicle’s data for salary is that pay equity is pretty good male/female in the UW Colleges.

This state senator (whose name I don’t want to grace the pages of my blog) is one of many in Wisconsin’s Anti-Public-Worker Brigade (with typical accusations like “They’re the haves!” “Overworked!” “Underpaid!” “Bunch of slobs!”), and I don’t think we’re ever, ever going to change his mind. But there are other state senators, and other community members, who aren’t so firmly anti- and those are the people we should be communicating with.

If we’re able to quantify what we do, we need to communicate that. My own state representative sends me email updates periodically; I’m going to begin to respond with an email update of my own—wouldn’t it be lovely if there were a whole wiki I could send him the link to?

STREAMLINING
Next to worrying about what state legislators and angry taxpayers think of my work ethics, I worry what some of my colleagues will think. (And I’m not even a probationary faculty member trying to get tenure.) I’m working on abandoning the notion that I can actually control what people think about me, but until then, I do worry about certain colleagues’ impressions of me—-some of the ones who work 50-60 hours a week during the 9-month academic contract, and a breezy 30-40 hours a week during most of the summer. Some of these folks are not doing it solely out of devotion and drive—-some of them feel obliged to work that much. And some of them are either explicitly critical of colleagues who work less, or spend a lot of time sighing, moaning, and dropping little hint-bombs at colleagues who work less. Not all my super-hard-working-colleagues are like this, but enough.

Thus another cruxy bit—-a lot of time in academia, we are our own worst enemies.

I remember once a long time ago someone brought up the issue that in the UW Colleges, the fall semester was 15 weeks plus finals, but the spring semester was often longer. The proposal came up—-should we make both semesters equal? Should we make them both 15? Should we make them longer—both 16? Someone pointed out that every other UW campus had 15-week semesters (plus finals). You know what? There were people who argued for the longer semesters. The UW Colleges has ALWAYS had lower average salaries than the other campuses, and there were people wanting to make it official that we had longer contracts for less money. I couldn’t believe it. Ultimately the 15-week semester prevailed, but that mindset is responsible for all kinds of busy-making, crazy-making policies. We like to have a lot of people on a lot of committees. I get that—-I miss the days when we talked about faculty governance instead of shared governance and made sure there was a faculty majority an every committee.

But those were also the heydays of what I like to call the occupative-compulsive model, of ADD MORE HOURS TO YOUR WORK WEEK to accomplish this or that valid thing on top of every other valid thing you’re already doing. “Let’s work 16!” seems radically different to me than “Let’s play two!” but I think as long as salaries were high enough that a two-professor family could be firmly in the upper middle class, or a professor’s one salary could keep HER family solidly in the middle class, the occupative-compulsive model was perpetuate-able, if not sustainable. (Even so, the people who were best at that model were not the people I wanted to eat lunch with, not that they ever stopped working long enough to hang out with us slackers.)

Those days are gone. Gone, daddy gone.

I think we need to take a serious look at our committee structures and just slash and burn our way through them. One example—I love serving on our English Department’s Executive Committee, but doing the reading, traveling, and meeting that committee requires in January alone adds up to about 80 hours. That would be 10 days of 8-hour days. That would be two work weeks. (I’m walking through the math slowly in case the Washington Post guy is reading.) Right now we have 11 people on that committee (down from 13). I think we ought to lower it to 7. Or maybe 9. That would give two people 80 extra hours.

If we got serious about streamlining, we could simplify a lot of our lives. A lot. Really a lot.

We could help ourselves–we could invent an organization RIGHT NOW and call it the United Front for a Different Atmosphere. If I need to say no to something, but I’m having trouble saying no, another member of the organization could send an email on my behalf: “You’re receiving this email because ___________ needs to devote time to other activities rather than ______________. Sincerely, ____________, founding member of UFF DA.”

Again–I’m amusing myself in a way but also completely serious. I’d be more than happy to send an email on behalf of colleague who needs to say no, or who already said yes but hadn’t realized what a boondoggle she was saying yes to. Again–I think it could help a lot. Really a lot.

ANCHORING THE BOTTOM MIDDLE
Instead of being occupative-compulsive, I think we need to cultivate more of a M*A*S*H* mentality. When it comes to saving lives (teaching students), we’ll do triage and perform amazingly delicate surgery under horrific conditions. Over and over. Other than that, we’ll do just enough.

To that end, I’m beginning to sketch out a kind of work-rubric, with performance levels of “Excellent,” “Acceptable,” and “Unacceptable.” The categories would be things like Teaching, Service, and Professional Development. The sub-categories for teaching might be “Assessing/Responding/Returning Student Work,” “Course Design/Course Revision,” “Managing Class Time.”


For each sub-category and category, I want to clearly delineate what’s terrific and what’s good enough. I don’t want to be at the bottom-middle (barely acceptable) for everything, but I want to know where it is, and I want to give myself permission to be there for however many things needed.

Needed for what? Needed for me to feel as though my salary comes closer to matching the work I do. Just based on my own pride, I’d like to average out to “very good,” but my burnout tendencies flare up when I’m not realistic about the relationship between my ambitions and the number of hours I’m willing/able to work. So “very good” might be a stretch, but it feels like a manageable goal.

I want to delineate these things for myself in terms of what I expect from tenure-track faculty as well, and I want them to know I’m doing it. If I’m anchoring the bottom-middle, I can warn them when they’re about to sink lower, right?

PRIVATIZING
Finally, I wonder if we need to stop bemoaning the race to the bottom, in which state governments cut and cut and cut support for higher education. It might get better eventually, but I’m pretty pessimistic. (Probably because the church I grew up in tended to preach a pre-millenial version of the Second Coming of Christ, in which the world would just keep carrying itself toward hell in a hand-woven basket until Jesus decided to step in, not wearing soft rope-sandals this second time. I don’t believe that any more, but it’s pretty firmly burned in my synapses and thus hard to be perky about the future, but I can sing “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine” with a big smile on my face.)

Barring a turnaround in state support, we can look to models that are already in place. For example, the Richland County Campus Foundation is an amazing organization. UW-Richland is always trading places with one or two other UW Colleges campuses as the smallest campus, but our foundation is one of the largest. The benefits include ample scholarship opportunities for students and money to reimburse professional development activities. Thus, as a faculty member, I was reimbursed in full for a presentation I did last fall at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and learning—the total cost of which (travel, registration, etc.) was around $800. Same thing for my trip to Chicago this spring for the Associated Writing Programs conference.

What does that have to do with privatizing? These funds come from community members and alumni, not the state of Wisconsin pipeline. These funds come from people who believe in education, who believe in what we do, who trust that every dollar they spend on my professional development pays off in the classroom and the community.

I think we could learn from that model. I think we could do even more of it. If someone like Warren Buffet says he’s willing to pay more in taxes, I have some ideas for how he could spend his money (until such time as he’s asked to pay more in taxes).

And finally, sadly, some of us need to at least consider leaving academia. We need to work on our resumes and schedule some informational interviews. Some of us need to apply for jobs, and some of us need to accept the job offers we get. Some of the best and brightest of us need to not let the door hit us on the ass on our way out. That would be the ultimate in the privatization of public education—educators leaving for the private sector.

If we see dramatic brain drain, we’ll have even more examples of how budget cuts are impacting quality.

As for those of us who stay, everyone will be better of if we’re happy, healthy, good at what we do and getting better at it all the time. I don’t know about you, but down here in “Far Below the Median-Land,” I can’t be much of anything but burned out if I’m working more than about 40 hours a week during the school year. I can produce very good work at that rate. Anyone who wants my very best work needs to pay me more.

UPDATE: I forgot a step in that penultimate paragraph–some of us need to leave the UW System, some of us need to leave Wisconsin, some of us need to leave the country (Oh, Canada…) and THEN some of us need to at least consider leaving academia.

15 Comments

Posted in Burnout, Politics, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life