Classroom as airplane

Welcome to Air Literature, Flight 457, departing for nineteenth-century Boston. Our flying time today is estimated at 75 minutes. Flight attendants: please arm doors for departure.

Beneath your seat you will find in your backpack a book marked The Bostonians by Henry James. Please take it out and follow along as the crew members review the important safety instructions for this flight.

All seatbacks should be upright and tray tables should be down and in the locked position. You will also want paper and some kind of writing implement to be on your tray table at all times so that you can take notes on our flight.

Crew members will shortly be passing through the aisles to hand out an exciting QuizOpportunity so that you can gain more GradeMiles.

All portable electronic devices must be turned to the off position and must be stowed for the remainder of the flight unless you are directed to power them on by a member of the crew. Devices that transmit or receive a wireless signal may not be used on board at any time.

Passengers enrolled in our GradeMiles program will earn 25 participation points toward their GradeRewards card for today's flight.

[To student who stands up to wander out in the hallway for a drink of water]: Sir, you could wander away in a normal classroom, but didn't you hear that the flight attendants had armed the doors for departure?

We now invite you not to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight but to sit forward, listen, and discuss the book in front of you, since this powers the flight for us all.

Thank you for flying AirLiterature.

Random Bullets of Friday

• Over at The Chronicle, Thomas Hart Benton is right about "A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education." He cites lack of preparation, grade inflation, a culture that doesn't value education, etc., as things that people like Arum and Roska just might want to consider when they're thinking about why undergraduates aren't showing more improvement.
• In an online-learning related topic, Idaho has a plan for educational success:
• give high school students laptops;
• fire 750 teachers;
• increase class sizes;
• require that students take at least two online courses.
Because who needs a teacher when you have the Internet, right? Everything research studies have shown about online courses suggests that mature, motivated students succeed the best at them, and that describes teenagers well, don't you think? (I'm not throwing stones at teenagers, but "mature and motivated" doesn't describe me at 15--how about you?) Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna wants you to know that this has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the for-profit K-12 online learning companies that are heavy contributors to his political campaigns.
• 
  

Online teaching: thinking like a student

One thing that online teaching does better than just about anything else is force you to think like a student.

Say you're in a face-to-face classroom and you discover that you've dropped a week in making up your syllabus. I do this often enough that I should trademark it as "Undine-style teaching,™ now with the magical disappearing week," so this isn't exactly a hypothetical instance. What I do is announce it, thank the person who brought it to my attention, issue an updated syllabus, and move on.

Or you hand out an assignment, and, as you're talking the students through it, some hands shoot up and ask questions about something you hadn't even thought to put on the assignment, because it never occurred to you as an issue. I like to think that my assignments are pretty carefully laid out, but then I hear this: "Do you want paper clips or staples?" or "If I don't use the extra time to do X, can I have it as extra credit points?" I answer the questions, make a mental note to add that information next time, and, yes, move on.

And anyway, it's not always what you did or didn't say. You hand out a quiz, say "this is an open-book quiz," and, two minutes later, five students ask, "Is this an open-book quiz?"

But when you're teaching online, you have to think like a student and try even harder to anticipate these questions from the beginning not just of the class but of the semester. First of all, you're not supposed to change anything once an online class has started.

Second, I've been teaching long enough not to break the cardinal rule: never change a deadline date, because even if it's to their advantage and you make the date later, someone who wrote the paper early will always, always complain about it on the evaluations. I don't like to think what would happen if a date got changed in an online class, where some students like to print out all the course materials on the first day and ignore everything but the Discussion Board thereafter even though they're cautioned not to do this.

Although there's a space for students to ask me questions about the class, and they can email me with questions, it's better if I'm as clear as I can possibly be about what I expect from them. This is always a good policy, of course, but when you can't see them, and they can't see you, it's doubly important. You have to think like a student the whole time. No wonder online teaching takes so much time.

The Devil over the Right Shoulder

The Wisconsin news (see Dr. Crazy, who can write rationally about it) about the continuing war on education and the middle class would only lead me into another rant, so I am not going to write about it.

Instead, here's an update on what Mark Scroggins is calling "my writing life" over at his blog. Like him, I've finished a number of pieces that are now coming out, and I'm now looking at the big project.

The big project now sits before me, in all of its terrifying there-ness. It isn't complete, although I've published some pieces from it and have presented on others. I've gotten feedback from scholars and an editor I respect that it's good, even exciting. At those times I've felt buoyant and good about it.

But now I'm sitting at my desk with the devil over the right shoulder. The devil is asking whether it's worth doing at all, or at least whether it isn't two different projects. He's asking for more rationales and more research. He's asking whether every single claim is really true or whether I'm flourishing rhetorical capes to distract the attention of the bull/audience. More immediately, he's asking me how I plan to structure the opening arguments.

This devil over the right shoulder can be a great help, of course, in anticipating problems and making the project stronger. What's been the most help in answering the devil is approaching this through structure, or models, as Jonathan Mayhew recently suggested as "reading for structure" over at Stupid Motivational Tricks. Reading for structure is something I've done for years myself, and I've recommended it to students many times.

In this case, it means reading introductions and prefaces, lots of them, to recent scholarly books in the field and noting not only how the argument is structured and in what level of depth, but also the nuts and bolts: how long is the writer spending on the various parts? How is she/he making the claims? How much background and review of scholarship is there? What's the voice like in these pieces? How does the first sentence work? The first paragraph?

This could be seen as a distraction, but what has happened is that I end up making notes and putting pieces of my own project together as well as temporarily quashing the devil's objections.

What about the other shoulder? There's a devil on the left shoulder, too, saying, "C'mon, why don't you ditch this and write a blog post or something?"

Clutter-busting, academic style

Tenured Radical has a post up about a book, Clutter-Busting, that encourages getting rid of things, examining your emotional attachments to things, or something like that.

My clutter-busting moment came the other day when I was in the office, finished for the day but too lazy to head out for the library for an hour or so. Then my eyes fell on the filing cabinet in my office, which for some time has stood there as a Memorial Cabinet of Classes Past rather than as an actual, functioning space in which to, you know, file things.

Some background: I've recently reorganized the bookcases in my study at home so that I could actually find the books I needed and have arranged them according to a system more precise than the big books on the big shelves and the little books on the little shelves. This had an immediate effect: apparently I was catching sight of the disorder on that side of the room out of the corner of my eye, because once it was decluttered and organized, that side of the room felt peaceful and, strangely enough, the whole side of my body that normally faces that side of the room felt oddly relaxed.

Back to the Memorial Cabinet. In the past, when I've tried to clean this out, I've gone through every folder carefully, trying to see what might still be useful. But the advantage of having everything in a computer file is that you don't have to look at the paper. In the past, I've kept the paper versions because of the notes written on them, but really, if I haven't looked at them in the past two iterations of the class, what are the chances that they're really useful?

Instead of heaps of documents that might be useful, divided by class, author or subject matter, I had three heaps: Keep, Shred, and Toss.

So--class notes from 2005? Folder contents gone (into the recycler). The whole folder. All at once.

Never-picked-up student papers and exams? Gone (into the shredder).

Materials from a curriculum reform now implemented? Gone.

Stuff I apparently thought would be useful at some point but haven't looked at since 2007? Gone.

Old book catalogs (which were in the Memorial Cabinet for some reason now lost in the mists of time)? Gone.

The difference between this decluttering and others is that it wasn't a ritual memory tour through classes past, with meaningful pauses to consider the students and the work done, or a piece-by-piece consideration of whether something would work for classes in the future. Maybe there's still a place for that kind of reflection--I don't know--but the place, for now, is not in my no-longer Memorial Cabinet.

Oh, and 20 minutes later, having hauled these stacks of paper to their various bins, I was at the library, energized with all the decluttering.

Student Evaluations and Academic Rigor

Richard Arum, speaking in "A Lack of Rigor Leaves Students 'Adrift'" at npr.org:

According to the study, one possible reason for a decline in academic rigor and, consequentially, in writing and reasoning skills, is that the principal evaluation of faculty performance comes from student evaluations at the end of the semester. Those evaluations, Arum says, tend to coincide with the expected grade that the student thinks he or she will receive from the instructor.

"There's a huge incentive set up in the system [for] asking students very little, grading them easily, entertaining them, and your course evaluations will be high," Arum says.

I'm glad it's a real study, or we'd all be saying, "thank you, Captain Obvious."

Seriously, though, student evaluation numbers are the primary way in which a lot of us have our teaching evaluated. We (or our administrators) have canonized those numbers and granted them a lot more power than they had when student evaluations began back in the 1970s. Isn't it logical to assume that in situations where those numbers have the most power, the temptation will be the greatest to massage the assignments into something that's student-friendly or at least complaint-proof?

I'd like to see some study like the following: take instructors of comparable rank and teaching ability (as measured by observation, etc.) who are teaching similar kinds of content, maybe a large required course where the instructors don't have to use the same materials. Half of them don't have to have student evaluations at all, or maybe they have evaluations that are locked away for the period of the experiment so that administrators can't see them. Follow both groups for 5 years or so, judging teaching in one group solely by observations, self-report, and review of course materials. At the end of that time, see if there's a demonstrable difference in student learning and academic rigor.

I know this probably couldn't be done (and isn't a scientific design, of course), but if we're going to "assess outcomes," shouldn't we also be assessing one of the primary if not the only means by which we evaluate teachers?

That's one small step for MLA, one giant leap for MLA-citers

Update on the quandary about using MLA format to cite from the Kindle (from The Chronicle):

Ms. Feal says the MLA is considering whether to "accommodate" location numbers on the Kindle.

Finally! And may I also say "thanks"?

But wait--there's more!

According to the commenters, the newest software for Kindle can display the real page numbers, too: http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/kindle-books-get-page-numbers-and-social-features/?src=busln

This feature isn't available yet for those using the Kindle app on computers or iPads, apparently. Also, you Nook users must be laughing up your sleeves at the rest of us, because apparently the Nook already has page numbers.

Still, all those Kindle books need to be retrofitted in some way so that the page numbers show, and it's likely that they'll convert Eat Pray Love or Tom Clancy before the critical study that I was thinking about buying today before the "citing locations" problem made me put it back on the virtual shelf.

This still doesn't get past the "it's harder to annotate an e-book" issue, because, well, it just is harder (says the person who has downloaded every imaginable type of book and .pdf reader). But it does start to tip the scales when the choice is "instantaneous download" versus "this book will ship in 6-8 weeks."

NYT: "Online Courses, Still Lacking That Third Dimension"

"Online Courses, Still Lacking That Third Dimension" (at the New York Times) considers the question of online courses with a fair amount of balance. Again, for the record: I am not categorically opposed to online courses and in fact teach some. I am opposed to approaches that don't consider their strengths and weaknesses.

Some thoughts:

1. Bill Gates wants "at least one great course online for each subject rather than lots of mediocre courses."

Who decides, Bill, and what are the standards? Video lectures by dynamic Ivy League lecturers? Interactive razzamatazz? How does the value of "great" comport with student (and administrator) pressure to make courses easier? Or wouldn't this be a concern since without teachers who have to fear being fired because of the immortal "course was to hard" and "to much writting" comments on evaluations, the course content would be immune from being watered down?

2. Food for thought: Like M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon has worked hard to make its courses available for free on the web, a laudable goal, if an expensive one. These are "automated courses" without instructors. CM doesn't give credit itself for these courses but will send completed student materials to another institution so that that institution can give credit.

Maybe this works well for science courses; I can't judge. But the message is that automated courses are good enough for other schools, but not good enough for Carnegie Mellon, which prefers, as the article puts it "humanoid instructors."

3. I think this person is onto something:

Wendy Brown, the Heller professor of political science at the Berkeley campus, spoke witheringly of the idea at a campus forum in October: “What is sacrificed when classrooms disappear, the place where good teachers do not merely ‘deliver content’ to students but wake them up, throw them on their feet and pull the chair away? Where ideas can become intoxicating, where an instructor’s ardor for a subject or a dimension of the world can be contagious? Where scientific, literary, ethical or political passions are ignited?”

4. Why is it that people seem keen to get 3-D on their television sets despite the funny glasses but would rather go 2-D when it comes to education?

Do Android Students Dream of Electric Blackboard Sheep?

Sharon Marshall's "More Face-to-Face, Less Screen-to-Screen" at the Chronicle really resonated with me and with things I've written on this blog. I found myself wanting to yell, "Preach it!" at statements like this one:

I posted assignments online, and students uploaded their papers from their computers. I experimented with the paperless option, which meant downloading student essays, saving them in a file, using the track-changes tool to give feedback, and then e-mailing the papers back to students. It took many hours, and now that I have learned that reading on a computer screen can be about 25-percent slower than reading on paper, I understand why.

In our discussions, instead of writing their first thoughts about a topic in their notebooks, they recorded those thoughts in a dialogue box online. In the old days, we would read those thoughts aloud from the notebooks. But being citizens of Blackboard meant that—in class or not—we were able to view all of the other responses and papers and give peer feedback online.

"Citizens of Blackboard"--exactly right. Although we're all "citizens," we governors of the electronic CMS states know that the work of government eats great, uncompensated buckets of our time and is even messier than making laws or sausage. (Check out, for example, this hilarious account in the Chronicle forums of creating quizzes in Blackboard.)

Right on schedule, someone in the comments writes that no, no, no, technology is not the problem; it's just that Marshall is not a digital native, don't you see? Android Students love technology. They love Blackboard and Big Brother. Two plus two equals five. (Okay, I made that last part up.)

Can't we say that both things are true?

Here is what you get less of, good and bad, in a techno-enhanced classroom:

• Paper. Eco-friendly? You bet, as long as you're not counting the electricity and gadgets.
  
• Voice conversation.
• Eye contact.
• Immediate, spontaneous responses to what others have written, which helps to foster ideas and get class discussion going.
  

Here is what you get more of, good and bad, in a techno-enhanced classroom:

• Writing.
• Written conversational responses, especially by those known in classes everywhere as "the quiet ones."
• Time spent (by the teacher) on managing the gadgetry and listening to complaints when the gadgetry doesn't work.
  

Here is what I would like to see: more acknowledgment from techno-enthusiasts in positions of administrative power that those who see two sides to this issue are not Deadwood Bumps in the Shining Path of Educational Progress.

Historiann and Benjamin Franklin

Historiann has a terrific article about blogging and especially pseudonymous blogging up at Common-place. If you go to read it, as you should, you'll find out find out why we are like Benjamin Franklin's Silence Dogood and other good ideas.

I was especially struck by this:

Pseudonymity can work in the service of community-building in the blogosphere. . . . Although I'm not fully pseudonymous, my commenters are overwhelmingly pseudonymous. Nevertheless, regular readers and commenters probably recognize the commenters who appear most frequently because most of them have individual personality traits or interests that remain fairly stable. That is, they fully inhabit the names or roles they've chosen to play on my blog, and their pseudonymity, as well as the role I play as Historiann, is key to the kind of supportive community I wanted to build.

Supportive. Community-building. Can you see why I like this idea? Even though Historiann, like Roxie's World, is a "lightly pseudonymous blog," Historiann herself gets why some of us are, or are trying to be, pseudonymous.

That's important, because every so often, "real" bloggers who publish under their own names will write something like "why don't you man up and write under your real name?" (And yes, I used "man up" deliberately.)

I've thought about this a lot lately, because after listening to Moose at MLA, I was ready to stand up and say, "I'm a blogger, too"--sort of like an "I am Spartacus" moment. That feeling dissipated as I listened to the other speakers talk about the disadvantages, and I went back into my pseudonymous cave.

There was a lot more to this post about why I'm staying pseudonymous as long as I can, but really, Historiann explained it all. How about you?

Update: See also posts by ADM, Dr. Crazy, Comrade PhysioProf, and Prone to Laughter and their links.

Personal productivity insights

• "And now for something completely different" really works. If you're going to take a break for lunch, take a break. Don't keep trying to read journal articles; read a different book or a magazine, something that's not related. Or take a couple of minutes and write a blog post :). When you get back to work, you'll then be refreshed by more than the food.
• Love your tools. If you are a faux-organized type like me--that is, you are not naturally organized but have learned a lot of strategies for simulating organization--you probably have learned to love lists, Excel, timers, and everything like that. As long as the strategies don't overwhelm the task, these kinds of devices can energize you about working on your project because you want to fill in the slots or check off the boxes.
• Only look at everything once. Back in the olden days when I was learning to bake, my mother told me that a friend of hers had a rule: "Only touch everything once." That means that if you get something out and use it, put it in the sink or dishwasher. Put away the ingredients after you've used them. I think that was what she meant, anyway. But this rule applies to other things, too, including email. For example, in my online classes, I was logging in a few times a day just to see how the discussion was going, but I wasn't commenting or grading. I've done this with blogs in face-to-face classes, too--spent time reading them and then had to read them again to comment or grade. That's a waste of time. My new rule for myself is that if I log in, I have to be doing something active: commenting or grading or responding to student emails.
• Take a lesson from Amy Chua. No, not a parenting lesson; I have no comment about that, nor do I know anything about Ms. Chua except what I read in the WSJ article. But it's clear that she didn't get where she is by reading fluffy lifestyle pieces in magazines about people like herself or made-for-the-talk-show-circuit books by people like herself. In fact, I'm betting the only such book she's ever read is her own. It's not her fault if she makes a ton of money trading on people's gullibility; it's my own fault for being stupid enough to pay attention to stuff of this kind in the first place. Amy Chua's lesson-by-example for me is simple: "If you want to be productive, don't read my book, and ignore the massive publicity machine surrounding me and other celebrities/controversies enjoying 15 minutes of fame." In other words, unless something is either entertaining (hello, bloggers!), useful (again--hello, bloggers!), or both, I'm going to chuck it. That's how this week's Time magazine, which I subscribed to reluctantly after Newsweek stopped having any actual content, got thrown in the trash. [Edited to add: Well, the recycling bin, but that doesn't have the same drama quotient as "trash."]

Writing essay tests helps students learn? Do tell.

From the New York Times comes this late-breaking news: "To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test.":

Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.

The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.

One of those methods — repeatedly studying the material — is familiar to legions of students who cram before exams. The other — having students draw detailed diagrams documenting what they are learning — is prized by many teachers because it forces students to make connections among facts.

These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do.

What helped most with retention of material was writing essay tests--"retrieval" exams that tested the amount of information students were able to recall when they wrote about the subject.

The researchers speculate that this effect occurs because the mind creates information storage systems as writing occurs, or something like that. The analogy that immediately sprang to mind for me was a medieval system of memory retrieval, although oddly enough the memory mapping techniques now taught in schools didn't result in better retention.

So now let me say that again, slowly:

Writing an essay about a subject helped students remember specific information.

Writing. Not shiny edu-gadgets beloved of administrators, although you all know I love gadgets.

Specific information. Not the touchy-feely "fluff" that budget-cutters apparently think the humanities teach.

Let's pair this information with the widely-reported study that Historiann posted about the other day, the one that's being reported in the news as "college students don't know nuthin' about nuthin'" but that, as she correctly notes, shows this:

Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.

Could someone beyond an obscure pseudonymous blogger put this 2 + 2 together, please, and let the legislators know about it?

MLA 2011 and the Great Twitter Debate

First, go read the great post and comments over at Roxie's World about the role of Twittering at the recent MLA. Go ahead; take your time. You'll be glad you did.

It seems to me that Twitter does three things really well.

1. In normal times (i.e., not during a convention) it points you to other media and allows the Twitterer to promote him or herself in a gentle way: "Go read my blog post! My article! This link!"
   
2. In normal times, it conveys external news along with approval/disapproval/excitement about something that's currently happening: "Go read this article! Can you believe that a politician said this?"
   
3. In conference times, it's a way of collectively live-blogging a session that conveys some of the excitement and ideas of the session.
   

The debate over Twitter is about the last one of these. There's too much to condense, but here are some of the questions raised, with apologies in advance for overstating some complex issues:

1. Did the preponderance of tweets from digital humanities sessions create a sense that those were more exciting sessions that the ones that didn't get covered?
2. Did the fact that the tweeted sessions seemed to dominate the news coverage skew the sense of what was happening elsewhere at the convention?
3. Are some sessions just more tweetable than others, or do people at the untweeted sessions need to get with the program and (there are hints of this among the comments) be less stodgy?
   
4. Alternately, you know those bumper stickers that say "Hang up and drive"? There are some comments that suggest that tweeters put the computer away and just listen.
5. Finally (and this is a contentious one), does the tweeted/nontweeted session divide create another category of insiders and outsiders?
   

As someone who was there, went to sessions, and read the Twitter stream, I'm of several minds about this. On one hand, it was exciting to see commentary going on in real time, although I wondered in some of those sessions whether the presenters were disturbed by seeing people staring at laptop screens instead of at the front of the room--and whether others in the row were disturbed by the clack of keys. (Probably not.) It was also exciting to see accounts of presentations I didn't get to see because of commitments elsewhere.

On the other hand, in some sessions, the papers were so amazing and complex (yet eminently listenable) that I could barely take adequate notes on them; a tweet couldn't possibly have done them justice. This is not to say that papers that can be tweeted are too simple; I'm just agreeing with Roxie's typist's point:"Still, I admit to thinking that some of what is untweeted is really untweetable -- Certain kinds of presentations, certain modes of argument simply don't lend themselves to that kind of quick and dirty distillation, and I don't think that's bad." Sometimes, you're just sitting there in an intellectually stimulating stream of good ideas, and you just have to let your mind go with them.

So: Twitter at MLA-- yea or nay? It depends. It was great for what it did, but I don't think we can ignore the reservations that Roxie's World has specified, and I don't think the answer is necessarily "more Twitter for all!" To pull out one of my hoary old blog mantras, one technology or medium isn't going to work for everything, and expecting it to be useful in all situations (like those of the complex listen-only papers) is to strain it beyond what it can usefully do.

And anyway, you know that someone will sooner or later tweet a message to announce where the full version of those listen-only papers has been published. That's the power of Twitter.

Random bullets of back in the saddle again

I'm back at work (classes) but still in high spirits because of MLA, so here are some random bullets.

• The first thing I have to remember is that the reduced teaching load for this semester is a gift. It is not an invitation to spend exactly the same amount of time on fewer classes, even if the classes that you have are higher in enrollment. This week I spent all my time on teaching. I need to remember the "fewer classes = less time" rule and change how I spend my time before the papers start rolling in.
  
• In this teaching delirium, I had devised a plan that would have me on campus even more days than before for an extra-duty assignment. When I mentioned this plan to a Sane Person, the Sane Person said nothing and just lifted one eyebrow. Sane Person was right! I rearranged the schedule so that I will now be on campus less and complete the extra duty assignment much more effectively.
• Paying attention to news controversies (like the WSJ one about how to be the mother of perfect children; you know the one I'm talking about) and reading comment threads is a complete waste of time regardless of the train-wreck fascination that they can hold. I'm going to reinstitute my personal ban on those.
  
• About those controversies: I've found myself even paying attention to the stupid ones, like the astrology one and the "Two spaces after a period" one over at Slate. (The parenting one is stupid, too, but disturbing.) If you learned to touch type with two spaces, you'll type two spaces, and if you didn't, you won't, and in either case, Replace All will make everything right in the manuscript. Let's move on.
  

Random Bullets of MLA 2011: the Fabulous, the Good, and the Okay

First, the fabulous:

• MLA Gods: Putting MLA in Los Angeles, home of palm trees and sunshine, when lots of us are struggling through an epic winter? Genius.
• Getting a hotel for us that was way beyond our humble expectations (remember, we're the people who will stay in dorms to save money)? Genius.
• Also genius: wifi, wifi, everywhere, although I had to get the SuperSecret MLA code for the JW Marriott lobby, which probably wasn't supposed to be secret but that I didn't get, from a kindly fellow MLA person tapping away on his computer.
• Yes, Virginia, there are kindly fellow MLA people, lots of them. They live in the hearts of academics even when you think that all anyone does is nametag-surf. I even saw people smiling on occasion and being helpful to people that they didn't seem to know, although MLAers usually roam only in packs or herds of the like-minded, for protection. Could the sunshine have been beaming down benevolence rays?
• Seeing spotlights in the sky and hearing the roar of the crowd at the Staples Center one night. No, it wasn't for a group of MLA bigwigs on the red carpet, but it was still exciting.
• Excellent panels, of which I want to single out Moose's talk on Thursday night, which was, well, fabulous--funny, organized, and right on point. You can read it at her place, so I won't talk more about it, but everyone loved it. I went to a lot of the "archives" panels, too, which were also excellent. There's a genuine excitement about the new ways we can "do" literary and other kinds of studies, and we heard about a lot of smart and interesting approaches. Don't forget, there's more of this going on today.
• Lots of good meetings with people and talks with old friends over meals.
• Seeing more people than I thought I even knew.

The Good:

• Lots and lots of places to eat close by, if you didn't want to seek out esoteric food.
• Did I mention the weather?

The Okay:

• Not a lot of places to get a quick sandwich or bagel, unless you wanted to join the long black-clad lines at Starbucks. Sometimes you just want to eat and get to the next session, but unless you could live on coffee or pastries (both of which I hate), you were out of luck.
• I have to confess that after a couple of the "hard times" panels, I heard some audience members say, "I can't take another one of these"--"these" being the panels on the grim news of the profession.

MLA, MLA everywhere

Is it just because I'm going to MLA this year that I'm noticing so many posts about it? Anyway, here are some posts:

• Moose at Roxie's World is going to be speaking in a blogging session, Session 150. I want to go to that session.
  
• Dr. Crazy makes some good points about the new family-friendly timing, namely that it's not so family friendly if you have kids in school. So far, I've been really happy that MLA isn't ruining Christmas as it usually does (Stress over MLA & presentations + an introvert's tendency to dread going to conferences = not fun times), but I can see her point.
• Sisyphus, on the other hand, figures that the timing is perfect.
• Meanwhile, back at the IHE ranch, Melissa Nicholas has found a way to make MLA job interview candidates stress out about whether they have the right clothing (a suit) to wear or not. She means well, but as one of the commenters said, the time to tell everyone this was about a month ago, not two days before the convention when all you can do is worry that you have the wrong clothes.
  
• For the record, I have been on and chaired several hiring committees, and I could not begin to tell you what anyone wore. What they said--yes. Whether they were prepared for the interview--yes. Whether they had exciting ideas for classes to teach--yes. Whether they wore a suit? Not at all, although I don't think anyone had a suit with a skirt. However, the IHE post did make me feel as though I ought to do an emergency shoe shopping trip tomorrow, since I understand that snow boots are not much worn in Los Angeles.
  
• The Little Professor will back me up on the "don't worry about the suit" idea. Actually, I am backing her up, since she posted about it first.
• Although she's writing about the OAH, Tenured Radical has a great post up about how to knock the softball interview question "tell us about your dissertation" out of the park.
  

And I know it's a big step, but since my paper is already in the hands of the respondent, I'm going to go computer-free at MLA (well, except for the iPad).

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to everyone! How about some bullets of twenty-eleven?

• Yes, we have to make the changeover from "two thousand and x" some time, so why not this year?
• It was heavenly not to wake up and head out to the airport the day after Christmas for MLA.
• On the other hand, that means that the new semester is coming up at the speed of light.
• And so is MLA. Where'd I put that nametag, again?
  

As I was out walking just now in the very cold winter twilight, I started thinking about resolutions for this year and was wondering this: is a resolution the same as a goal? I think of resolutions as not having an end point--something like "write more"--as opposed to goals, which are more like "write x amount each day," or "exercise more" as opposed to "lose ten pounds."

Anyway, here's what I want to remember for 2011:

• Curiosity and excitement about a project are your friends. Don't try to push them away by limiting the amount you want to do in favor of what you "ought" to do.
  
• That goes double for listening to budget doom-and-gloom from colleagues or the internets. Can you do one single thing to help the situation? If not, stop listening and just check in once in a while rather than following each twist and turn of the drama.
  
• Learn more. Write down what you learn, especially if you're piecing together something you found in an archive. You think you'll remember it. You won't.

Holiday hiatus

Time to take a break from the internets, ignore some emails, get some things done (though that'll be tough with no library, as Dame Eleanor points out), and make some cookies. Lots of cookies.

I can't do better for holiday wishes than the poem over at Roxie's World, but Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays, everyone!

Random bullets of December

• I'm in the midst of a much-put-off task (work-related but not writing-related) that apparently I will do anything to avoid, including eating cookies, shoveling the driveway, and scouring the internet for amusement.
  
• Said scouring includes visiting blogs in search of amusement (thank you all!), but it doesn't seem fair to expect amusement and not give any back. However, this post can't really count as amusement until you get to the video below.
  
• Today's excitement includes finding a rebate card with some money left on it and buying two more Kindle books for the iPad. Free books! Score! Well, they seem to be free because I never remember to take the rebate card when I actually want to buy something.
  
• I've been reading a lot more for pleasure and semi-work since I got the iPad--that is, I get things that are maybe background or history for what I'm doing. So far, on any given day, I have a book going in the Kindle app and one in the Google Books app, and it's great to switch back and forth. If the sky ever clears up, I'm going to try out the Star Walk app I bought. You hold the iPad up to the sky, and it shows you the constellations and so on that you're looking at in whatever direction you point the iPad.
  
• One of the desk copies I ordered is apparently now only print-on-demand from a major publisher. "We'll get it out to you right away," Publisher said a month ago. Didn't happen, so I bought a used copy. It was under $10, and it's easier to get that way than to try to contact the publisher and hope someone's going to respond in the next few weeks. At what point do you figure it's easier to pay money than to fight with the publisher about a desk copy? I don't know the tipping point, but I'm not going to stand on principle in that situation. They may owe me a book, but my time is worth something, isn't it? Especially when I could be eating or shoveling or reading blog posts?
• Dean Dad writes about community colleges in California that are considering refusing to allow students to take the same class an infinite number of times (say, more than 5), since those who take a class for the third or fourth or fifth time are less likely to pass than those who retake it only once.
  
• Just in case you're not one of the millions of people who saw this already, here's a video of dancing in an Antwerp train station that made me smile.
  

On Writing: Lessons Learned

Reverb10 now has a prompt I can answer, about lessons learned this year. Dr. Crazy has an introspective and interesting post up about this; she says that seeing happiness as a state of being that happens to you rather than as something you create is a trap (I'm paraphrasing).

I'd like to apply this to the process of writing. These aren't new lessons, but they're ones that seem to be more true this year than ever before.

1. Assess, reflect, and forget about it. If you're a person for whom any kind of deadline (writing deadline, going to a party--doesn't matter; both are firm dates and hence deadlines) makes you feel trapped, you spend a lot of pointless time fretting about the deadline coming up without necessarily doing anything about it. If you're not that kind of person, you say, "well, just put it out of your mind, then!" but if you are, you know that's not easy to do. If you have multiple deadlines, you fret about them all and accomplish nothing.

Here's what I learned that makes this more tolerable: if you know deep down that you have to write something, you will. You've done it before, and you will do it again. It's not easy or comfortable, but you will do it.

Silvia says that this knowledge comes from writing every day, and that may be part of it, although in looking over my work log for this past year, I don't write new material every day. But I now can scope out certain kinds of projects more accurately than before and estimate about how long the reading and writing will take and when I really need to start working. So: assess the problem, think about the time you have and the time you need, and let it go. You may still go through the "dither and blather" process, but it's a more time-limited process than before.

2. Every day in every way, the writing gets better and better (with apologies to Émile Coué). I'm learning this somewhat in creating the class. Every day something else occurs to me that didn't occur to me before, and I can't wait to write that down. I wrote a couple of things this year for which the process felt a little like a forced march, but the thing is, once something was written down, I knew I could make it better the next day. I know--this is the oldest precept in the writer's handbook, but I never really felt it before.

3. Give yourself what you need to succeed. I don't mean time, although that's important. I mean the little rituals and objects that make you want to write. For example, a few weeks ago I ran out of a certain kind of writing notebook that I use to keep track of progress when I'm working. It's apparently a habit with me to write things in this kind of notebook, since when I start to write I look around so I can make a notation in the book. Since I wasn't exactly out of paper (you pen and paper addicts--you know what I'm talking about!), I tried writing in another kind of notebook, and it just didn't work. Why not? Paper is paper, right? It's a stupid ritual, right? Stupid or not, it helps, so after arguing with my rational self for a while I went out and bought more of those notebooks so I could get back in a routine.

To get back to Dr. Crazy's idea about being active, I think that's the overall lesson here. Other people can tell you their systems (or why would we buy Boice's and Silvia's books?), but the key to all this is developing your own system. Maybe it's a writing log or another kind of log (I love me some Excel spreadsheets!), or maybe it's keeping a writing journal, or maybe it's keeping a to-do list.

A lot of bloggers have written about liking to cross things off their to-do lists (I do, too), but if you think about it, the system, however you define it, is really the carrot instead of the stick when you're talking about writing. Well, okay, the end product is the carrot, too, but it's really the feeling of being done that drives us on, and it's the systems we devise (the intermediate carrots) that get us there.