Category Archives: Uncategorized

Be There Now (Day of Higher Ed)

Posted on April 2, 2012 | 7 comments

What if my life never changed for the better?

That’s what I thought about driving to work this morning.

I’m a worst-case-scenario kinda gal, so I won’t usually take the time to imagine what if my life never changed for the worse–I spend lots of time imagining variations on bad things & I think a great deal of my happiness in life is attributable to being pleasantly surprised that the worst thing doesn’t always happen.

So this morning’s commute was kind of a a more-upbeat variant on a worst-case-scenario–a status quo scenario. What if things stay pretty much the same instead of all the improvements I’m constantly longing for? What if, instead of healing from my shoulder and foot injuries, I’m just kind of in pain? What if I don’t get in better shape/eat better/lose weight? What if we don’t add a room to the house or build a garage? What if I never figure out how to be a tidy homemaker? What if I continue to teach four sections a semester until I retire? What if I’m not able to retire for a very long time? What if I never publish a book?

Some days, of course, that would have been a formula for depressing myself (some days most formulas accomplish that).  But today, it felt so good, I decided I’m doing it for at least this week, at least when I’m driving. What if?

I actually don’t think my shoulder and foot pain are permanent, but if they were, they’re manageable. If I don’t get any healthier, I’ll be courting cardiac problems in my 60s (or sooner), or diabetes in my 50s (almost there)–those two just based on my genetic history. Whatever role good cardiac health plays in staving off mild cognitive impairment, if I don’t have good cardiac health, it might mean losing access to my best mind sooner, again, given my genetic heritage. And whatever other health problems I end up with, if I don’t start out healthy, I’ll be less likely to heal well.

This is a pretty close transcript to what I was thinking this morning in the car. You know what’s great about it? Absolutely nothing in that paragraph about being fat or losing weight. Same thing in the car–at some point I thought, “Oh, and I guess I’d weigh less if I did get healthier….” This is pretty huge for me (pun not initially intended but then what the hell). I’m lucky–my husband loves me & finds me attractive no matter what size I am. I’m pretty confident in my ability to work a crowd, no matter what size I am. Not to say I don’t care at all–I am an American woman after all. But it turns out not to be very high on the list, which felt great.

I did spend some time thinking about my son. If I’m not active, I’m not teaching him to be active. If I’m not eating right, he’s not learning to eat right. If I’m self-medicating with food, he’ll learn to do that, too. Same with keeping my house a little neater–he’s not learning to pick up after himself if I’m not showing him. So some of the things I’d like to change have to do with parenting well.

Then what about the job thang? I’ve been teaching at UW-Richland for 20 years now, and I am wondering how much longer I want to do that, but in some ways, I don’t see a path away from what I’m doing, which makes me feel trapped (which, according to Martha Beck, is why I eat when I’m not hungry).  But what if this is it?  That’s my task this week–what’s great about this life I’m in? What’s great about this job I have?

Obviously, part of what I’m trying to do is focus on my blessings, and I absolutely understand I have a lot to be thankful for. Sure, I wish I got paid more to do my job (or actually, I’d like to get paid more to do slightly less), but I know I’m lucky to have a job. And here are the parts I love about this job:

I really love students. All kinds. I just love taking them seriously and pushing them gently and watching them learn.

Here’s a brief conversation I had this morning with a student who’d signed up for a one-on-one conference with me later in the week, to go over her rough draft.

Me:  So did you find a source yet?”

Her: No–I’m going to look tonight, but I haven’t found one yet.

Me: Why don’t you send me an email sometime this afternoon & tell me what search terms you’re using, and I can give you some feedback on that first, so when you do sit down to look, it’ll be more productive.

Her: O.k., I’ll do that.

Just a basic pretty boring conversation, but she seemed really pleased at the end, and helping students learn to figure out the right search terms is actually one of my favorite things to do. I talk to them about doing searches in online databases and “going fishing,” where we’re first just trying to figure out what the Library of Congress subject headings would be for any given subject (which I’m now able to explain to students by saying “They’re like hashtags!” This is how I figured out hashtags, btw–“They’re like Library of Congress subject headings!). I confess to students that I can often figure this out by imagining how old white guys in suits would describe something.

Even when they frustrate me, I tend to enjoy students. I love watching them really get into a lecture. I love watching them try to stay awake when the lecture’s not quite doing it for them (if there are more than one or two of those any given lecture, I figure it’s the lecture’s fault).

I love trying to analyze what’s working and what’s not and trying to improve.

I love having a flexible schedule. For example, in honor of Day of Higher Ed, (which responded to an op-ed in The Washington Post that essentially said professors are overpaid and underworked–read Aeron Haynie’s response & others & you’ll know my response) here’s what today looks like:

5:00 out of bed

5:15 reading Walter Isaacson’s bio of Steve Jobs (tons of connections to my creativity research), having coffee, then getting ready for work

7:15 hit the road (a little later than I’m comfortable with!)

7:50 at UW-Richland, heading for class.

10:00 a.m. Approx. 10-15 min. Facebook break (I didn’t keep exact track this morning, although I usually do–I’ll count it as a 20 min break, just to be sure).

10:20 Heading back to class

11:30 Lunch at the Roadrunner Cafe!

12:00 Multi-tasking–a little bit of Facebook, but mostly “Inside Higher Ed” blogs and then writing this blog.

3:20 Back to class

I’ll be working until 5:30 or so, with maybe another 10-20 minute Facebook break in there. (I’ll subtract 30 minutes total as “Facebook Break,” just to make sure, even though some of my time on f.b. is work-related). I don’t count those breaks as work hours, so I’ll end up clocking in at 8:20 (I keep track although no one else does). If I’d worked through lunch and not taken any Facebook breaks, I’d have worked 9 hours and 20 minutes, or thereabouts.

Today’s a very heavy class-time day–225 minutes in class–all four sections–but outside of class, here’s what I’m doing: writing, developing a rubric to use online, on our “course delivery platform,” planning my schedule for the week, answering emails, sending an agenda for a meeting on Wednesday, setting up a blog for the committee that’s meeting on Wednesday, class prep for this afternoon’s class and Wednesday’s classes, posting an online grade update for students in my composition classes and sending an email reminding them the drop deadline is Friday (I’ll do that for my other classes later today or tomorrow), checking email and responding (including emailing my dean and chair about using letters of recommendation they wrote for a sabbatical proposal in my fundraising letter to support my own sabbatical), grading an essay that got turned in two weeks late, meeting with a student to go over his rough draft, and…I’m not sure what else.  I’ll post an update.

I don’t teach at all on Tuesdays or Thursdays, so I use those days for checking email and responding, grading, class prep, writing, reading, committee work, etc. I also volunteer at my son’s school on Tuesday mornings–I figure since I’m not commuting, I have an extra hour and ten minutes, but volunteering counts as discipline-related community service, in any case.  I don’t always get 8 hours of work in on Tuesdays, but I still average at least 40 hours a week during my 9-month pay period (though I might need  to count the hours of the week right before and the week right after to hit the numbers exactly–I don’t necessarily work 40 hour weeks every week of the nine months–I’m keeping track of these hours on Excel this semester for the  first time, so I’ll have LOADS of great stats soon). A lot of Mondays and Wednesdays I clock 9 or 10 hour days, and I regularly work at least four hours Saturdays or Sundays (sometimes both).

Back to the question of what if nothing ever changed–I’m feeling o.k. about where I am in my career right now, not just because I get a good enough salary  (these things are all relative) for working hard on average 40-45 hours a week for 9 months of the year (I’ll post about summers some other time, but let me just say that I don’t get paid in the summer, so as far as I’m concerned, all my hours then are pro bono.)

If nothing ever changes with my job and I’m teaching four sections a semester until I retire or die–it’s a pretty good gig. Everything I spent time on today is fulfilling to me in one way or another.  And then during lunch, a former student told me that she was answering security questions online for some thing or other and the question came up: Favorite teacher? And she said my name is what came to mind.  I told her how cool it was to hear that, given my status-quo-scenario musing.

So in addition to having students I enjoy, I get to eat lunch with a former student who still appreciates what I was able to do a very long time ago, when I wasn’t nearly as good at what I do as I am now. Pretty cool.

UPDATE: Talked to an advisee about whether or not she should drop a class and what she needed to bring on Thursday for her advising appointment to talk about fall classes. Will also be grading a second essay that was turned in two weeks late (they lose 5% per business day it’s late, and two weeks is the absolute cut-off, but some points are better than none).

 

Found & forwarded an old power point lecture & list of sources for a colleague who’s working on a workshop related to civility in the classroom.

LATER UPDATE: The student didn’t email me her search terms. I was actually disappointed.

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Posted in Family, Searching, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

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On Being David Crosby’s Higher Power

Posted on March 31, 2012 | 1 comment

“If you’re into spiritual practice, you make a space where every day you can make contact with your higher self, whatever you call it – God, dog. I call it Marnie.” David Crosby

 

It makes me like him even more, of course,

That in addition to donating sperm

To help make a lesbian rocker baby dream

Come true (and all his sweet harmonies of course),

He also calls his higher power by my name.

If my name were plainer, I might not even care.

But I once claimed a psychic link with William Hurt–

Marlee sounds like Marnie and we had the same

basic region of problem–she’s deaf, I’ve got hearing aids….

The Quaker in me, the Transcendentalist,

The yin-yang Zen Baptist me that flushed

Original sin clean off my “Here’s What I Believe” list,

I think we all could be each other’s higher power.

But once a Woodstock legend says you’re his,

I think you had better start to act like it.

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Clitter Clatter Clutter Time

Posted on March 24, 2012 | 4 comments

Here’s the thing–I just don’t deal very well with reality. The whole 24 hours in a day concept? Sure, I’ll tell you with a straight face that I get it, but then you should ask me what I anticipate getting done in the next 24 hours. Or, I might have that covered, but if you multiply it at all, say, times two (as in a weekend), and ask me what I think is going to happen, if I’m honest at all about the list in my head (or the one on paper, or in my laptop), we’ll stand there realizing I’m in cloud cuckoo land.

In some ways, my husband helps me notice reality (in other ways not so much). He did me the hugest favor when we were first living together. I have what is officially diagnosed as “mild to moderate hearing loss,” and although I’ve known about it since I was five, I was never told I needed hearing aids. I missed a lot, and in conversation, people would often say, “Did you hear what I just said?” and I would always, ALWAYS say yes, because it’s embarrassing to miss what people are saying, and it’s exhausting to attend carefully to what people are saying when you have even mild to moderate hearing loss, and I wasn’t raised to show my weaknesses. (In general, I think I was raised to be honest, but nevermind about that.) Nath was the first person in my life, ever, who added a second question to “Did you hear what I just said?” If you know nath, this won’t surprise you. He said, “All right, so what did I just say?” At that point, I might be honest and say “no, I didn’t hear you,” but I was just as likely to take one last stab at it and say, “You said, ‘the broccoli is on the air conditioner?'” It was hilarious in one way, because he wouldn’t have said anything about broccoli or an air conditioner, but embarrassing and frustrating (for both of us) in every other way. So I got hearing aids.

So what I need, and nath can’t be this person for me, is someone who can help me with the math and ask me the second question when it comes to scheduling my time–not just, “What’s on your to do list?” but also “is your to do list in any way realistic given that you have neither clones nor droids nor parallel universes that might help you in the next 24 hours?” Obviously, it would be best if I could ask myself that question, and I try, but as I mentioned earlier, I don’t always deal with reality well.

I like to say that my life goal is “sustainable chaos,” which I imagine as just enough stuff going on and lying around that life feels vibrant and alive but not overwhelming. It’s a skinny-minny line between “sustainable” and “horrific,” however. At least in my experience. I want my house to look like a professorial version of Mary Engelbreit-land, but it’s really easy to go from that over into my own private episode of Hoarders.

As I mentioned in a previous “inner weasel” post, I tend to try to do too much. It’s sort of a 21st century virus, I think, though it certainly was catching in the late 20th century. It’s what we say to each other all the time, right? “I’m behind at work,” “I’m too busy,” or “I don’t know how some people manage to get enough sleep.”

And as I’ve mentioned so far in several posts (sensing a theme here, or a chronic, nagging complaint I really should see someone about), I tend to suffer from burnout.

So this post from Nadia Bolz-Weber, one of my spiritual heroes, came at the perfect time. “The Spiritual Practice of Saying No” is pretty mind-boggling to me. She has a terrific list of good reasons to say no, and concludes with the following:

“Women especially get the message that they are not allowed to say no and if they do say no they should feel really bad about it. This is a lie.

My friend Sara told me that when I write an email or letter telling someone no, to write it, walk away for 20 minutes, then come back and take out all the apologies because they make me “sound like a girl”.

Now I try and say no graciously and with some humility but without apology.

Certainly we should all say yes to some things that are inconvenient or not on the top of our list of how we’d like to spend our time. I’m not talking about trying to pawn off narcissism as a virtue. I’m just suggesting that sometimes we say yes for really stupid reasons and then spend our time or energy on things that rob us from being able to say yes to things that are actually ours to do and care about.

Lastly, if you need to say no, you do NOT need to try and borrow the authority to do so from the person you are saying no to. Would it be ok if I need to say no? Oh I’m so sorry. I hope that’s ok. Are you ok with that?

Yikes. Stop it. (note to self)”

This really resonated with me. The following phrase occurred to me at work a few weeks ago, which I haven’t used yet in seriousness, but am holding in my head as a kind of talisman for when someone asks me to do something and doesn’t take no for an answer: “Please use this as an example of how budget cuts are beginning to affect quality.” It’s not a bad point, really, and in some cases it’s true, but why do I feel the need to have a sentence like that in my head? (I mean, other than amusing myself and a few others.) Because somewhere deep inside me I believe that no matter how hard I work, no matter how much I do, I’m not doing enough to justify my existence on the planet.

That’s pretty wacked out.

I actually read “The Spiritual Practice of Saying No” after I’d read “The Spiritual Practice of Saying Yes.”

Here’s what resonated with me in that post:

“Any Pastor or leader of an organization that requires a great deal of volunteerism to function can attest to how frustrating our culture of selfishness can be. The people who are inclined to say yes to everything do all the work and then burn out and become resentful about the people who are inclined to say no to everything. It’s as though the world is divided into martyrs and slackers.”

I can see my life as plotted out on a roller-coaster graph careening between martyr and slacker. I don’t seem to get moderation, though I have long pointed out that “moderation in all things” is not a very moderate statement, and that “moderation in most things” makes more sense as a moderate motto.

Honestly, this is a big part of why organized religion and I are spending some time apart at the moment. I don’t seem to know how to be a part of a faith community without volunteering too much, too soon, and burning out. The last faith community I was part of got some good stuff from me, and I got some good stuff too, but at the end, I was so burned out that I ended up responding to some social missteps by pretty much cutting all ties. I felt as though I were Jonah, vomited out by the whale. Headed in the right direction, sure, but YUCK.

Bolz-Weber concludes, “Some of us need to know how to say no to what is not really ours to do. And some of us need to know how to say yes to what might be ours to do, we just don’t feel like doing it. And most of us are both of these people.”

I am both those people, all the time pretty much. So. How do I figure out what is mine to do? And what is not? Until such time as I can answer those questions, I think I will continue to have problems over-packing to the point of not being able to zip the second-hand kid’s backpack on rollers I bought to use for my classes since my shoulder is so messed up I can’t carry bags any more. I would worry even more about looking utterly uncool and middle aged if I hadn’t recently seen this video of George Clooney in which he uses the roller to pull his backpack. Just one more reason to love the man.

(And yes, I do realize that by adding George Clooney to this post, I’ve cluttered it up, but THAT’S what I mean by sustainable chaos–I did, in fact, say no to including every single thing I thought of while writing this, but I said yes to George Clooney. In that sense, I know one thing that is mine to do. When it comes to Clooney, I will always, always say yes.)

UPDATE: It has occurred to me that I injured my shoulder by trying to do too much in the pool, exacerbated the injuring by doing a weight-lifting routine I wasn’t really ready for, and made everything worse by carrying really, really heavy bags on the same side as the injured shoulder. Lovely as a metaphor, really a drag as reality. So I’m just going to meditate on that pain for a few years.

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

Honoring My Inner Weasel, Part III

Posted on March 23, 2012 | 3 comments

As failures go, this one’s not catastrophic. Not so much crash and burn as bump and simmer. No cause for flailing and wailing–but maybe a little hand flutter and throat clearing would be in order.

I just posted an Excel spreadsheet for all my students to see, showing how promptly I’m returning student work this semester. After three semesters of being right around or below an average of a week, I’m currently returning student written work, on average, 9.7 days after they’ve turned it in. For my ENG 102 (Advanced Composition) classes, the longer essays are taking me 10.25 days.

There are seven full weeks of the semester to go, and then finals, so if I’m on top of things, the numbers should be below 7 by the end of the semester.

But I’m disappointed.

And not giving up! This failure to meet my goals (I wanted to be under 7) comes along with some other failures (subject for future blog posts, thank you very much, but I don’t want to depress myself by listing all my failures here).

There are some basic reasons the numbers are worse this semester. I have a lot more students, for one thing, and I decided to start using D2L rubrics (D2L is our “course delivery platform” for the UW Colleges–online resources for me & my students) for ENG 102 papers. I also decided to start doing reading quizzes regularly for the first time in ENG 102, and I’m doing those as D2L Quizzes. I’m also doing D2L quizzes for my literature class (did I mention I’ve used D2L quizzes only a little previously, and never where students were required to use them?) and I’m asking my creative writing students to turn in portfolios online so I can grade them digitally, which in turn motivated me to turn my regular rubric into an Excel spreadsheet so the math gets done automatically and I can post it on D2L with the commented-on digital copy of their portfolio….

As always, there was some procrastination involved. But not as much as there would have been in the past. For example, being able to post feedback for each student online means that I was motivated to finish grading assignments in all three classes at the beginning of spring break, rather than waiting until the end. If I’d been grading paper copies, and couldn’t return them until March 26, I would probably be grading this weekend instead of last weekend. (Not that students were checking their campus email during spring break, but they might have–they could have, in any case.)

But I’m realizing that one of my biggest problems is not so much procrastination as trying to do too many things. Here’s what I’d like to do each and every semester:

  • Teach well.
  • Revise my courses (heavily) in terms of reading and assignments.
  • Do a decent amount of committee work (my share or perhaps slightly more or less, depending on a number of factors).
  • Write a lot of poetry.
  • Send a lot of poems out to magazines.
  • Reassemble my poems into chapbooks and full-length manuscripts and submit to multiple publishers.
  • Write fiction. Submit to publishers.
  • Write plays. Ask for feedback.
  • Revise what I’ve written.
  • Do scholarly work on creativity.
  • Work on a chapter for a scholarly book on creativity.
  • Raise funds for a sabbatical (well, that’s not EVERY semester).
  • Spend as much time as possible with my son.
  • Spend as much time as possible with my husband.
  • Spend as much time as possible with my parents.
  • Maintain friendships.
  • Volunteer in my community.
  • (Insert 75 things I’m sure I’ve forgotten to list, HERE).
  • Be a mellow, laid-back person.
  • Get a good night’s sleep regularly.
  • Work an average of 40 hours a week during my contract period.

What’s crazy is how much of that I try to do. What’s amazing is how much I end up getting done.  But here’s the thing–I’m pretty tired of feeling like no matter how much I work, I’m always behind and there’s always more to do.

So.  The math is pretty easy in this case. Doesn’t even need a spreadsheet. There are 24 hours in every day. There are nine months in my work contract. The work contract thing has been true for me for 20+ years. The 24 hour thing has been true a very long time.

So, the answer is simple, right? I need to set my priorities and be firm about them and not apologize. Unfortunately, there’s not a spreadsheet that can show me how to do that.

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

God of Monday Morning

Posted on February 20, 2012 | 3 comments

GOD OF MONDAY MORNING

God of running just a little late,
Of the scraping of windshields, another month at least—
Of I cannot wear the shoes that are perfect for this outfit
(the shoe repair I paid good money for didn’t last)—
God of where the hell did the weekend go?
Those hours that stretched so wide and open Friday night—
They dried up and blew away, went down the drain—
I must not have planned each hour exactly right—
I had some fun, I got a few things done
And yet I start the work week just as behind
As ever, always, apparently eternally I am—
Compared to everyone else’s current shitstorm
I know I’m lucky. I know I’m whining and
I do praise God that some days, this is as bad as it gets.
And yet, dear God, what if this is as good as it gets?

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Posted in God Stuff, Uncategorized, Work Life

Really Kind of Pitiful Follow-Up Sonnet Also Dedicated to DJs

Posted on February 9, 2012 | 2 comments

for Jonathan & Kitty

I whined about driving west, just missing you,
Except I don’t know if you know about
The poem I wrote because I posted it
In an email form which maybe didn’t get through,
Or maybe you already read it on the air,
Or made fun of me when I couldn’t hear
(Because, as I pointed out, I lose your signal
On my way to work). I know I sound pitiful.
Poets are used to rejection. But somehow this
Has come to matter more, or at least as much,
Or almost as much. It matters, at least.
I no longer care about swag. Well, maybe a shirt.
What I want is to be Triple M’s poet laureate.
Or, failing that, could you play a request?

Wouldn’t it be great if Triple M had a poet laureate? I would completely take requests. Need an ode to Mumford and Sons? I’m your girl. Or maybe what you’re wanting is a  heartfelt request that Springsteen bring his tour to Madison, the heart of a recent populist uprising (in ballad form, perhaps, something that could be sung to the tune of one of his laments).

Or I could do a haiku on the signs of spring:

poor willow catkins
swaying in the winter breeze
cold squirts of mustard

Or maybe not. I’m not very good at haiku.

But what about this? A sonnet report of stuff for sale along Highway 14? Today for example, there was

A big RV by the trailer park in Lone Rock,
A whole grain bin (in parts) at the Co-Op
And one of those cursed locations where no one
Will ever make a business run….

Or wildlife reports–how many sandhill cranes I’ve seen recently, or roadkill counts, or what various herds of cows are up to.

P.S. I’ve repeated the last line of my first pitiful sonnet as the first line of this pitiful one, which means I’m plunging into what is known as a crown of sonnets. I can’t stop myself once I’ve started these, so you’ll get at least five more sonnets, no matter what.

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I Can’t Get No Satisficing

Posted on January 30, 2012 | 3 comments

 

What would you do if I gave you a handful of dry lentils?

 

Ping them at me from across the room? Hm. Well. Not very nice, but relatively creative, I have to admit.

 

Here’s what most of my creative writing students tend to do: use them to spell words and use them to make pictures.

 

Of the more surprising uses of lentils: Motoya put them in a cool plastic pencil box and used them as a music-maker. Ji Hyun stuck them to a brick wall using hand sanitizer as a very temporary adhesive. Jesse brushed one lentil off a desk. Then he brushed a whole pile off and said, “Lemmings.”

 

No one’s made soup—there isn’t time when we use them in class. I give each student a handful and say, “Do something with these and then we’ll come around and you can show us what you’ve done.”

 

There are a ton of divergent thinking tests available online, and some of them may seem familiar—they’re often used to illustrate problem solving. The one you’re most likely to have seen before involves connecting nine dots (in three rows of three) using four straight lines. This web page shows how to do it, using ladybugs! This page from University of Indiana professor Curtis Bonk has a great summary of different types of tests as well as some background and larger issues to consider.

 

My interest in divergent thinking can be traced to a workshop with the California writer Al Young, who was a guest writer at the University of Montana when I was there. At some point, expressing disgust with the efforts of those of us in the workshop, he said something to the effect of, “Typical creative writing grad students. All about writing and not about creative.”

 

The prevailing attitude at the time (and this was twenty years ago, mind you) was that issues related to craft could be taught, but we were on our own for creativity and if we didn’t have it, there wasn’t anything anyone could do to teach it.

 

I don’t think that’s true. I think we can learn to be more creative, and I think we can teach our students to be more creative.

 

This is important particularly where I teach—the University of Wisconsin Richland, a very small two-year campus in the very large University of Wisconsin System. I don’t get many English majors, let alone creative writing majors. In a class of 20, I might have five who plan to take more creative writing classes, who want to be published writers. Twenty years of teaching creative writing at this campus to these students have convinced me that teaching students to be more creative is as ever bit as valuable as teaching them to craft better stories, poems, essays, and plays.

 

And ultimately, if the writers learn to be more creative, they might actually stand a chance of writing something huge—something that is polished as far as craft goes, but does something new, something no one has seen before.

 

I’ve been asking my students to work on creativity exercises for several years now. The lentil fun is aimed at lowering what are called our “associative borders.” In a book called The Medici Effect: What Elephants & Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation, Frans Johansson talks about how creative thinkers are more flexible about their associations—that someone with rigid associative borders is more likely to see a problem in a fixed way, and a small range of possible solutions. Someone with lower associative borders tends to see problems and solutions from many different angles.

 

If you look back at an earlier post of mine (“Creativity: A Pumpkin Saga”), for example, my associative borders were lower when it came to pumpkin—I was willing to see more than jack-o’-lantern or pie (o.k., so pumpkin lasagna didn’t turn out to be a genius idea, but Johansson quotes Linus Pauling who said “The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas”).

 

This past week, I started a new semester of creative writing with a group of mostly new students (two have taken other creative writing classes with me). We started on the first day with a classic divergent thinking test. I told them to list everything they could think of that was blue.  I gave them about four minutes.

 

When they were done, I talked about how a creativity researcher would score their results. First, there’s the matter of fluency—how long is your list? How many blue things did you come up with? About a third of the class had more than fifteen, but one student had more than 20.  The next thing to consider is flexibility—how many different categories of things did you think of that are blue? If you had 15 things that are just items around the house, that’s not as creative as five household items, five plants, and five puns (blew, bleu, blue as in sad, blue as in balls, blue as in music). Then there’s elaboration—did you go into detail on any of them?  And finally originality—did you come up with one that no one else came up with?

Several students came up with original offerings—blue things I’ve never heard mentioned (and I’ve done this particular test pretty regularly, although I alternate it with red, since red can also be read). Jeff mentioned Kelvin 10,000 headlights. (I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to a whole semester of automotive imagery—I anticipate much jealousy from the I’d-Be-a-Working-Stiff-if-I-Didn’t-Write-Fiction guys. Seriously.) Rain said “crab blood” and then elaborated, “Well, actually, only horseshoe crab blood.” Both of those examples seem to me to rely a great deal on those students’ personal expertise, which is a really important goal during creative writing.  It’s one of the two truisms of creative writing, right?  Write what you know.  (The other being “show—don’t tell.”) The third original offering seems to me to be a great example of a student with terrific observational skills. Joe said, “blue lines on a sheet of paper.” (Note the elaboration, as well.) Think of all the students who’ve done this exercise, all the times I’ve played along, and none of us noticed what was RIGHT THERE in front of us, not until Joe came along.

 

My hypothesis is that if students work on creative writing exercises at various points during the semester and then evaluate their writing based on the categories of fluency, originality, flexibility, and elaboration, they will become more creative in general, and more creative as writers.

 

I’ll be gathering data this semester (and many, many other semesters) to test that hypothesis, but one leading creativity researcher, Mark Runco, suggests that I’m on the right track. He describes something called “displaced practice” as being “quite effective.” This is when people “work on creative thinking exercises, but then turn to something else, and later again return to creative thinking exercises…. Eventually after gradual fading, the individuals will learn to think divergently and originally on their own, even with entirely ill-defined tasks and without explicit instructions.”

 

If I think back to the assignments I was given when I was a creative writing student, I think “entirely ill-defined tasks” without “explicit instructions” are pretty accurate descriptors. Maybe after they finish with my classes my students will do well with those kinds of assignments. But it’s obviously important outside academia because that’s what we face in our lives all the time—goals and problems and issues and situations where we know we need to do something, but we don’t know what to do or where to start, and there’s no one giving us a detailed assignment sheet or rubric.

 

One final quote from Mark Runco gives us a concrete place to start. When we’re staring at problems, we may try to solve them too quickly. Why? Runco says that “Some people may be more comfortable with closure….They are uncomfortable with the uncertainty that is a part of not having a solution ready at hand. This may lead them to satisficing, which is the tendency to take the first adequate solution that comes to mind (rather than postponing judgments and considering a wider range of options).” I hold out great hope that, if nothing else, teaching students about the basic categories of scoring a divergent thinking test will help them develop the habit of finding that wider range—of not settling for satisficing.

 

 

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The Hill Where I Lose You–a poem for Jonathan & Kitty

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 3 comments

A standard-issue Wisconsin limestone bluff—
Dramatic, beautiful, and mostly in the way.
In the winter it grows these glaciers, and they’re tough—
They don’t completely melt until May
Most years. It’s where I lose your signal, just when
I need it most, commuting to Richland Center
For work. Oh sure, I could log on once I’m there,
But there’s this chasm where I lose what I intend,
For I am often addle-pated, all aflutter in the face
Of the ordinary stresses of an ordinary day….
I don’t know what I’m thinking you can do.
Would one a them HD radios do any good?
Do you have one lying around you could send?
Just know I’m driving west and missing you.

 

 

 

I truly love the radio station 1055 Triple M out of Madison. I’ve listened to Jonathan & Kitty for a lotta lotta years. I wish I could listen all the way to work. But I can’t. I have all the sad for this.

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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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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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