Category Archives: Teaching

Getting Off On Not Putting Off (Procrastination, Part 2)

Posted on January 2, 2012 | 2 comments

There really is something graceful and flirty and coy about procrastination—a way of dancing with time, coming in close, and backing away. The inner weasel frolicking in the deadline woods.

 

And there is also something desperate and shame-inducing and crazy-making about procrastination.

 

The image I have of myself a lot of times is not the clichéd “flying by the seat of my pants” (because I don’t actually know how to picture that, other than some kind of Tin Tin caper in which a giant hook grabs my belt loop and I fly through the air, papers trailing after me). Instead, I picture myself trying to cross a rising stream on slippery rocks that are spaced just far enough apart I have to leap a little each time. Sometimes the rocks turn out to be giant turtles that are rising and submerging randomly. And then sometimes it’s snowing. There is peril involved and palpable relief when I meet a deadline.

 

It’s an exhausting way to live, panicking and somehow succeeding and sucking up the adrenaline rush and then crashing. I think part of my chronic tendency toward burnout comes from depleting my adrenaline stores. The book Tired of Being Tired claims that adrenal burnout is what results, and that our bodies replace adrenaline with cortisol (which does all kinds of toxic things) after a while. I don’t know enough to evaluate the science in that book, but at least on a metaphorical level, it made a lot of sense to me.

 

But I had a lot of years of not being comfortable with how much I procrastinated before I started seeing any real changes. I can’t really account for why all the efforts finally kicked in Fall 2010 semester, and I can’t really account for why I’ve been able to maintain. All I know is what I’ve done, and what I’m going to keep doing.

 

More than 15 years ago, I read Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now by Jane Burka and Lenora Yen. This book helped a lot, even though it didn’t help me grade papers faster when I first read it. It did help me start to recognize that something’s going on if I’m procrastinating really badly or consistently, so I’ve been able to analyze the causes over the years and say no to some things.

 

In terms of student papers, the progress began (slowly) in Fall 2007 when I was in therapy and trying to figure out how to stop feeling overwhelmed all the time. Being behind at work was a big part of why I felt overwhelmed, and being behind in grading was a big part of that. So I started brainstorming all the reasons I don’t like grading student papers, and tried to figure out if I could change any of those things (writing better assignments helps some).

 

Then I started keeping track on an Excel spreadsheet of all the assignments I was grading—when they came in and when I returned them. I’d always told students I thought it was important to return things “within a couple of weeks,” but I doubt if my average was ever “within.”  It was typically on the other side of that, the fat side. Fall 07, my mean was 16. Sheesh.  Just to be glaringly, mathematically obvious, if that was the AVERAGE, then there were times I took longer than two and a half weeks. Sheesh. The standard deviation was 7.94, so not only was it taking me a long time, I was wildly inconsistent.  2008 was better, with averages around 10 and 11 days, and then I didn’t keep very good records for a few semesters.

 

More information helps account for the change that was coming—I took a survey in April of 2008 and asked my UW Colleges English Department colleagues about how long it took them to return student work. It bothered me to see myself at the slowest end of the scale. I had assumed (based on no evidence whatsoever) I was sort of the slowest of the middle of the pack. I could maybe have waved to the middle of the pack from where I was, but I was bringing up the rear. In a Scooby Doo episode, I’d have been the first one picked off.

 

And then, Fall 2010, everything came together. My mean, my straight average, for how long it took me to return student work, was 5.28 days and the standard deviation was way down, 3.59. Spring 2011 was good, but not as great—my mean was 7.25 (an increase for which I totally blame Scott Walker). I had a good summer semester, and then this past fall I was below 7 again: the mean was 6.0872, the median was 6, the most often occurring number was 7, and the standard deviation was 3.2186.

 

What accounts for what I was suddenly capable of Fall 2010 and after? Here’s the best list I can come up with.

 

Life Changes:

×        I turned 45 and just felt tired of having the same problems. I wanted to at least have different problems.

×        I’ve been diagnosed as an adult with A.D.D. I’m ambivalent about the diagnosis, except that it has helped me understand a little better what comes to me naturally and what strategies I need to adopt to compensate. A.D.D. is supposed to fade with age, and it feels to me as though I am generally less distractible. (This is something akin to saying that the ocean is a little dryer some days, however.)

×        I also started swimming two times a week. I had more energy for EVERYTHING.

 

Logistics:

×        My son was a little older, needing me in different ways. My husband and I started taking turns reading to him at bedtime, whereas for his first five years, I was almost always the one getting him to sleep. That gave me an extra hour at night, or an earlier bedtime so I could get up earlier to grade.

×        My teaching schedule changed. I began teaching a late class, 3:30 to 4:45. This made it easier to have a grading block on campus.

 

Behavior Mod:

×        I set up good rewards for myself and actually had the discipline to WAIT for them (can’t explain why I had the discipline last fall—I haven’t had it before).

 

The Glorious Glory of an Excel Spreadsheet:

Keeping track of assignments on an Excel spreadsheet was a lucky stroke of accidental genius on my part. Record keeping is crucial—instead of some vague sense of how well I’m doing, I have really precise numbers. Somehow just seeing the assignments that are coming next also helps me get to work on the current numbers—I know I’m not going to get a break, that if I’m procrastinating, I’m just delaying the inevitables.

I also pledged to go public with my numbers. This REALLY helps. I tell students how well (or poorly) I’m doing, and I even post the spreadsheet itself on D2L for them a couple times a semester. Ultimately, of course, I’m trying to return student work faster because students will learn more and feel less how-did-I-do? anxiety over the course of the semester. However.  I somehow really get off on driving those numbers down. And I seem to have a lot of friends, family, and colleagues who understand how hard this is for me and give me lots of positive reinforcement when I post good numbers.

 

Being organized doesn’t come as naturally to me as some things, but I’m learning, and I’m happy to say that if you’re interested in procrastinating less, it is possible to make progress. I have some thoughts on the spiritual dimensions of procrastination and I plan to write about them. Soonish.  For now, I’ll just finish with this quote from Pema Chodron: “It’s painful when you see how in spite of everything you continue in your neurosis; sometimes it has to wear itself out like an old shoe.” For some reasons I can understand and articulate, and some reasons I can’t understand or articulate, my procrastination is wearing itself out. I look forward to donating it to Goodwill sometime soon.

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Posted in Procrastination, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

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Honoring my Inner Weasel (Procrastination, Part I)

Posted on December 28, 2011 | 5 comments

Other than wetting my pants when I was three (because I never wanted to stop playing to go inside to pee) or having my father threaten to throw away every single toy on the floor (because I never wanted to stop doing anything to clean my room), the first time I remember getting in trouble for procrastinating was in the third grade.

I was bored in math class. This would become a recurring issue for me in school—I was bored in _________ class. It’s not that I’m a genius or anything, but I was always bright and quick in school-matters and I still bore easily. Fortunately, I have also always been able to compensate for my tendency toward boredom with a vast capability to amuse myself.

To make math more fun, I would wait to start a math worksheet until the teacher started collecting worksheets from other kids. This was very dramatic! I was probably doing a play-by-play in my head as I did it—“only one row left to collect! I have three problems left to do! Will I finish in time?” No. I did not finish in time. Ever. So the teacher called my parents, got invited to dinner, and I was told that we were going to have a conversation about how I was doing in school.

The teacher was a genius in this case. I don’t know if she knew exactly what I was up to, but she knew I could do the math and that I wanted to please my parents. Nancy Germann, even after a lot of other teachers in high school, then college and two rounds of grad school, is so firmly planted in my mind as a great teacher, maybe the best I ever had.

Leading up to the dinner, I completely panicked and scrambled for a way to show them all I wasn’t stupid (though of course no one had suggested I was). I ended up making a book out of construction paper with poems that were highly plagiarized versions of Beatles songs and Hallmark cards. I still have it somewhere because she gave it back, knowing we’d want to keep it. I remember Mrs. Germann coming for dinner, but I don’t actually remember ever talking about my performance in school. The problem with the unfinished worksheets went away. I don’t remember ever getting in trouble again with that particular teacher. This did NOT turn me into a diligent student who always followed directions, however. It simply turned me into a savvy student who never got caught not following directions promptly.

Three years later in the sixth grade, someone noticed my reading skills were advanced and set up a program where I could read at my own pace through some eighth grade readers. It might have worked if they’d let me pick my own books from the library—I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and David Copperfield just for fun about that time. But in that reader (from the 1960s somewhere, with two-color illustrations), I made very slow progress. I think I read three of the stories the whole year.

I think that’s always been part of the appeal of procrastination for me. It’s sort of like disobedience, but not glaringly obvious—the directions get followed eventually. It’s a handy way to combine my basic contrary nature with my strong urge to be a good Baptist girl (when I’m 90, there’ll still be a part of me trying to be a good Baptist girl and fucking it up. Oh, please—I’m 90. I can swear if I want.).

But one of the main reasons I procrastinate is just constitutional—it’s part of who I am. I don’t know if this part can change, the response that is so automatic it’s nearly primal. My mother had two weeks of false labor before I was born, for example. Upon setting a goal or being given a task, my first thought is always “How long can I wait to do that?”

I have gotten better over the years at estimating how long something will take me, and I’m relatively good at meeting firm deadlines because I work backwards from the deadline, using my time estimate. Very recently I’ve begun the brilliant practice of giving myself a cushion of time in addition to how long I think something will take, in case something goes wrong. Brilliant.

If deadlines are mushy at all, though, I still really struggle with not procrastinating.

I define procrastination as doing things in the wrong order such that undone things cause anxiety and other diminished results for myself or other people. I want to clarify that sometimes we call something procrastination when it’s simply a matter of time management. We can’t do every task we need to do immediately upon learning of the task—it’s not possible. For me, it’s procrastination when there’s something I could do, and should do, but don’t.

Returning student work promptly is something I’ve struggled with my entire professional life. When spring semester 2012 begins, I’ll be beginning my 25th year teaching college students. Somehow early on, I got it in my head that as long as students got papers back within two weeks, that was o.k. It’s not o.k.—it’s much too long. But the thing is, there’s never been a clear-cut penalty for me for taking that long or even longer to return student work. Because I did other things well in the classroom and put helpful comments on papers, and never asked students to turn in a new assignment before they’d gotten the previous one back, I almost never got negative comments on my student evaluations about taking too long to return work. Students learn less when too much time has elapsed between the effort of the assignment and the feedback, but that’s hard to measure, and since my students always seemed to be learning A LOT, it was something that made me feel kind of bad, but feeling kind of bad wasn’t much of a motivator to procrastinate less. This hearkens back to my third grade adventure—becoming savvy enough to not get caught following directions promptly.

I thus honor my inner weasel.

I’ve told students for years that I’m a recovering procrastinator, but until recently, there was precious little evidence that I was in recovery at all.

I’m happy to report, however, that Fall 11 was the third full semester in a row that I’ve been able to return student work faster than I ever have in my professional life—my overall average is under a week.

Tomorrow (or maybe the next day, depending) I’ll report on those exact numbers and describe how I got to this point in my recovery. But right now I want to watch a Rom-Com, and maybe take a nap.

There is something graceful and flirty and coy about procrastination—a way of dancing with time, coming in close, and backing away. The inner weasel frolicking in the deadline woods. Two lovers teasing each other by delaying the inevitable. Right. Well, anyway. Until tomorrow.

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Posted in Procrastination, Teaching, Uncategorized

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NO ONE CAN STOP US (a rock anthem call and response)

Posted on December 12, 2011 | 4 comments

I’ve read the following (poem? secular liturgy? homage to Springsteen?) in public two different times–once at a gathering of arts educators in Stevens Point, and once at the final Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars event attended by the UW Colleges shining star in the constellation of the Scholarship of Teaching and learning (we’re all hoping she’ll shine so brightly at Vanderbilt we’ll still be able to poach her light).

It will be the final piece in a chapbook of poems called Each Other’s Anodyne. Since my husband and I are self-publishing it, I can only say that it may well come out in 2012. In that chapbook, I’m trying to represent the full spectrum of what it’s like to teach–the good, the bad, the horribly ugly and the merely pitiful. I have lots of experience with the full range of emotional and spiritual responses to slogging away for 20 years with a four-four teaching load, and I am NOT happy about the current relationship between government and public education. But I wanted to end the collection on a hopeful note because honestly, if I can’t approach this profession hopefully, I think it’s time to move on.

I recommend reading this out loud in a group of teachers.  It feels  really, really good. Maybe especially on a Monday, and definitely as we enter that final push of trying to get a semester delivered.

NO ONE CAN STOP US (a rock anthem call and response)

When the quiet student
In the back row asks a question,
And it’s a good question,
A really good one,
And another student answers
With evidence and insight,
String that bead on your rosary.
Add transcendence to your resume.

We need to learn to treasure
How we live our lives as teachers,
How we succeed, and it’s mostly
Moment by moment.

Moment by moment,
Student by student,
This is what matters.
Teaching’s important.
No one can stop us.

The non-trad who stayed up all night
With a sick kid and a laptop.
The five-year-old cutie with red hair
And freckles, and more issues than freckles.
The hormone-driven, pimple-ridden,
Horny jerk who somehow found the nerve to say
“I loved that essay question.”
Shot by shot, our movie of the week,
In which we’re the inspiring teachers,
Shows our focus, our composition,
The structure of our concern, proceed
Student by student.

Moment by moment,
Student by student,
This is what matters.
Teaching’s important.
No one can stop us.

We have to feed our families.
We hope to retire before death.
We wonder if Canada would be better.
(If Canada would even let us in.)
But that moment when the soft white
Compact fluorescent light bulb comes on,
When someone learns something,
We know, as surely as we know how hard we work,
This is what matters.

Moment by moment,
Student by student,
This is what matters.
Teaching’s important.
No one can stop us.

Firefighters risk their lives
And lead parades with bagpipes.
Some activists lie down in front of tanks.
My cousin Rob stared down,
Survived, unspeakable things in Iraq.
All around us are dramatic
Examples of heroism and sacrifice.

Have you ever seen a statue
Of a teacher? Me neither.
But we know, we all know
Teaching’s important.

Moment by moment,
Student by student,
This is what matters.
Teaching’s important.
No one can stop us.

No government,
No governor,
No budget cut,
No bad idea
Can keep a really determined teacher
From jumping right into the mosh pit,
From coming on down to the altar,
From pulling up her own bootstraps,
From cutting down on the average
Number of disconnects
Between what he knows in his head
And what he does with his time.
No one can stop us from teaching.
No one can stop us from loving what we do.
No one can touch what we know in our hearts—
However much they meddle and undermine
And underfund and criticize, we know,
If they don’t, that no one can stop us.

Moment by moment,
Student by student,
This is what matters.
Teaching’s important.
No one can stop us.

(repeat as needed)

I’m making this public in hopes that it will spread some hope. Share it however you like, even set it to music if you want, but please keep my name attached to it, and don’t revise it without checking with me. And if it starts raking in the cash, of course I want my share. At that point I could retire from teaching and become the next Parker Palmer (whom I adore), spreading wisdom about teaching without having to teach to feed my family.

[NOTE: because I am in Wisconsin in a trouble time, I want to point out that this poem was composed last summer when I was not on contract, and I am posting this from my car, poaching Wi-Fi from a local eatery.]

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Posted in Politics, Teaching, Uncategorized