Sylla-bliss

So it's finally done. The syllabus, that is. I give my syllabus out over the course of two days because, well, it's quite comprehensive, though not as comprehensive is it was last year. (Last fall's syllabus weighed in at a whopping 35 pages. No, that's not a typo.)

The first section contains the course description, the learning objectives, and all the boilerplate administrative stuff, which continues to grow. This semester, for the first time, I’ve had to include a clause notifying students that they cannot photograph or record any class sessions unless they have a documented disability that would be mitigated by having a recording. And of course, they must have my “express written consent.” I don’t teach when I’m drunk, but nonetheless, I’d like to avoid the kind of fame this guy has gotten.

The second section is a very detailed course schedule which is probably a bit too hand-holdy, especially considering where I teach. It includes one or two guiding questions for the day, what the student’s should have read, and the homework for the following class. It’s meant to be airtight because I have . . . shall I say inherently litigious students. Litigious and quite literal. Excellent students, yes. Better than any students I’ll likely have when I have a “real job,” yes. But also quite good at finding and exploiting loopholes. And man, do they care about their grades. Hence their adeptness at finding those loopholes, because it’s often easier than doing the actual work, and their workloads are insane. Understand that it’s not uncommon for an undergrad at my institution to have two majors, three or four minors, and still graduate in three years. We have very smart, very motivated students—many international—and they aren’t charged more if they take more than a full-time load. So, to save money, and to get back home more quickly, they’ll often take seven classes per semester. And my class is typically (read: always) at the bottom of their long list of priorities. So why title this post “Sylla-bliss” when all I’m doing is complaining?

Here’s the bliss. We discussed Toulmin arguments today and a full third of the class was able to identify warrants by the end of the discussion. A third. And these were pretty hard-to-identify warrants, too. I’m still amazed.

Edited to add: It appears that even five or six pages may be too long. One bloggy student says (not about my class; I just found this on Technorati):

There are two very simple reasons that I will fail this class. The first is that it is incredibly hard. We are all literally sitting there with no clue what's happening. Our syllabus is literally five or six pages long; so long in fact, that we had to sign a contract assuring our professor that we'd read it.

This is why AcadeMama might be right, though this student might object to a quiz, too. I quiz sounds like a great idea partly becuase I think having students sign a contract makes for an even more litigious atmosphere.

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Too cold to leave my daughter at daycare since, as I found out this morning, her daycare building doesn't have any heat. So back home we went to email my students, letting them know that their second class has been canceled.

Despite the guilt I feel about canceling class, it's nice to unexpectedly get to spend the day with one's own kid instead of with someone else's kids.

The Circadian Rhythms of Academic Life. Part I: The Academic Year

This is the first in a three-part series about the temporality of academic life. While I do believe certain kinds of academic exceptionalism can be dangerous—such as those that turn academic labor into something other than labor thus thwarting graduate students who are trying to unionize—there is one striking difference between our labor and some other kinds of labor: when we work. And when we work ultimately dictates both how we work and what activities we consider work. (See, for instance, Dr. Crazy’s “When Pleasure Becomes Work.”)
How do the academic year, the semester, and the day affect how we construct our work and our lives? How does it help to delimit the work we do?

Happy New Year

About two weeks ago, people all across the world, and Texas, counted the final seconds until the clock read 12:00 and the ball in Times Square dropped. The next morning was spent nursing hangovers or looking optimistically forward to that list of resolutions with the knowledge that “this will be the year that I’ll stick to them . . . or at least to the really important ones . . . at least until April.” The last week of December always brings the perfunctory “Have a great New Year’s” from sales clerks and gas station attendants; the first week in January is dedicated to asking and answering the ubiquitous “How was your New Year’s?” I have to admit that a lot of this is lost on me because my “new year” doesn’t start until the end of August. In fact, January is smack in the middle of my year, when it’s too late for resolutions. When I or my colleagues refer to “next year,” it’s understood that we mean sometime after 25 August, that date off on the horizon after that long expanse of time that we once called “summer break.”

The Truth About Breaks, Holidays, and Being “Off”

Summer vacation, winter and spring breaks are, for anyone in graduate school or in the professoriate, the most egregious misnomers. I know that when talk to my non-academically-scheduled friends about having to get final grades in on 15 May, it conjures up images of lazy summer days sipping drinks on the beach, wandering lonely as a cloudy, or perhaps lying on a hammock at William Duffy’s farm. Raise your hand if you are an academic and this describes your summer. Go ahead. I’m waiting. That’s what I thought. Summer is often the time to scrounge for scut work and to obsess about how many days you’ll have go without a stipend check. Or if you’re lucky, you get to teach . . . every day, for at least half of your “break,” in a room that’s not air conditioned.

As a grad student, what summer also does is give you enough lack of structure with which to hang yourself. You don’t have to be anywhere. Not on campus and certainly not at your desk reading and writing. (This may be one of the reasons that the average time to a PhD in English is 8.2 years; a very optimistic average in my program.)

Other jobs I’ve held during my years outside the university were very different. I always had to be there, somewhere in the claustrophobic triangle made up of my desk, the bathroom, and the water cooler. From 9-5, Monday through Friday, 50 weeks a year. You might as well work because, hey, what else are you going to do? (More on this in Part III: The Academic Day.) Even if you decided not to do anything all summer, say, take your private jet to Guadalajara and wile away the days drinking Dos Equis, would you have fun? Would you be relaxed? Or, would you be thinking about that unfinished chapter, a conversation with your advisor, all of those books and articles you’ve not yet read? Worse, what if your colleagues are holed up in their offices reading and writing while you’re lazing about the beach? You know they read and write more than you anyway. I’ll bet they’ll have written a monograph each before you even finish your second beer. And so it goes. Down time becomes time to think about what you should be doing.

If you are a junior faculty member, especially at an institution with a heavy teaching load, summers are spent, like grad students, working to supplement meager wages or, more likely, doing the research and writing that’s impossible to do “during the year.” In fact, for people whose job is research, the work is never really done; the shift is never over, the final product never rolls off the assembly line. Sure a widget gets finished, but there is another coming down the conveyer belt . . . at least there’d better be, and if there's not, that's another reason to worry. There is the new project, the ongoing project, the accepted-with-revisions project that needs to be revised, and of course, the future project. Rarely can we dust off our trousers and proclaim ourselves done. For me, this is one of the wonderful things about teaching. Things get done. Papers get graded, averages get tabulated and entered, the natural progression of the semester runs its course, and another herd of undergraduates ride off into the sunset. Until next semester.

How does the peculiar academic year affect the way you work?

Coming Attractions

The following preview is rated PG, though the posts themselves may be rated otherwise.

Coming this fall: Discover the romance, the passion, the adventure, of one graduate student’s academic travails. Set against the gritty backdrop of a university in a large rust belt city, watch as our hero tries to make his way through the dual labyrinths of the Professional and the Parental. Overworked and underpaid, witness the heartbreak as he tries to answer life’s most profound questions, such as, “When are you going to get a real job?” and “Who cares about literature, really?” Armed only with an arsenal of critical theory and more battered Penguin editions than anyone should be allowed to own, gasp as he winds his way toward the Dissertation. Experience the struggle as he and his wife try to raise their infant daughter to become a self-reliant woman. Hear the cries as the daughter begs, “No more Wollstonecraft and De Beauvoir. Read me Dr. Seuss, or at least Butler!”

Stupendous! Not a blog to be missed!
-- The New York Times

I haven’t laughed or cried so much since I saw Ishtar.
-- David Denby, The New Yorker

Who the hell reads Le Deuxieme Sex to an eight-month-old? I mean, seriously?
-- Le Monde

Opening Salvo; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blogs

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging over the past year or two, and after a lot of thought, I’ve decided to begin blogging myself. There are numerous reasons I’ve decided to throw my hat into the ring, many of which will surface over time, but I got the final push I needed at MLA.

In addition to hearing some very smart papers about blogging, I had the opportunity to talk to many bloggers who I respect immensely, including John Holbo, Scott Eric Kauffman, Dr. Crazy and Bitch PhD. (Though I spent far less time talking to Dr. C and Dr. B than I should have.) In our discussions, as we talked a little about blogging, I began to see more clearly what the possibilities of the medium might be, for me as an academic, a writer, and a potential member of a larger community. And it seems to me that this particular community is beginning to change.

In response to Scott’s post about his MLA paper at The Valve, Rich Puchalsky commented:

I’d guess that 80% of the current academics who are ever going to blog are already blogging. The rest of the change is going to be generational—an increasing percentage of new grad students blogging,a slow retirement of people whose non-blogging habits are set, a faster conversion of pseudonymous bloggers without tenure to named bloggers with tenure. Most people don’t have the narrative or descriptive writing skills to hold a mass blogging audience, and without that, I think that people tend to give up. Possibly, they burn out and give up even *with* that, but then they tend to come back.

To which Scott responded:

Rich, I don’t buy it. I can’t remember the number of people I talked to this past week who simply didn’t know--or entirely misunderstood--what academic blogging was all about. I think as more people realize its potential--I’ve half-written a post on this excellent, if specialized, blog--we’ll see more people jump into the game.

First, Rich may be right about the kind of writing that blogs require, at least if one wants an audience, which I do. There is a sense in which blogging is personal, a way to get things onto paper (or into pixels) that one might not ordinarily get on paper. But the point for me is to enter a conversation with people who are thinking about similar kinds of things. If someone blogs in the forest and no one is there to hear it, I don’t think it really makes a sound, nor does it make any sense—at least for me. Because I think Rich is right about the necessary “narrative and descriptive writing skills,” I’ve been reluctant to start blogging. Like writing an article, a conference paper, or a book (I would imagine), beginning to blog requires a bit of egotism, enough to really convince one’s self that one has something to say, that one can say it well, and that it will be interesting to at least a handful of others. One of the things I admire about the blogs I’ve been lurking around for the past year, is that the bloggers are interesting and do write in the ways that Rich describes.

Scott’s comment also makes sense to me. While I do think I have a sense of what academic blogging is all about, or at least what I want it to be all about for me, I really needed to work out for myself what the potential for blogging was, both professionally and personally. Dr. Crazy, ever the reflective blogger, has an excellent post, written in response to a question posed at an MLA blogging panel, about blogs “counting” toward academic credentialing. Dr. C writes, “I love that I have a public writing space that doesn't quite count.” And at a very basic level, that’s what I’m looking for—a space to write where the stakes aren’t absent (as in a personal diary), but where they’re different. I don’t have clear-cut goals for what I want this blog to be yet; I don’t want to limit the kinds of writing I do here from the outset, rather I want this to be an exploration of what kinds of writing are possible in this kind of space.