Can a blog have an identity crisis?

Dr. Crazy's recent posts about the changing nature of her blog and whether it has jumped the shark inspired a whole lot of people, bloggers and anons, to come out of the woodwork and say "No, it hasn't, and we're glad you're here."

In the comments, though, a lot of bloggers who've been doing it for a while, including Flavia, profgrrrl, Historiann, New Kid, Notorious PhD, and itsprobablyphdme added  that they'd had the same feeling (and so did I). Our lives have changed, and the reasons we started blogging have probably changed, too, so why are we still doing this, and for whom? Historiann noted that everyone hits a wall from time to time.

I wonder if blogs that have been around for a few years, including this one, are thinking about these issues even if the bloggers didn't mention it over at Dr. Crazy's. In addition to the ones mentioned above, what about you,  Roxie?  Dame Eleanor? Heu Mihi? Dr. Virago? Bardiac? ADM? nicoleandmaggie? Dr. Koshary? profacero? Sisyphus?

Horace and Inktopia have already closed up shop recently, citing similar reasons.

For me, this is partly due to irritation: I'm sick of being lectured by those for whom the issues of tech in education are shiny new ideas. They want to Instruct me in new things like Twitter or how to use computers in the classroom, when I wrote about what they were saying years ago.

I've thought about this a lot recently and have considered going the "lightly pseudonymous" route of Roxie or Historiann or possibly moving and blogging under my real name.

But then I'd have to find evidence for all the claims I make on here instead of relying on personal stories (like vacuuming the cat). I'd have to pretend that idiotic ideas are good ones until I can find data to the contrary.

I would miss reporting on the details of my little writing triumphs and frustrations. I would miss the voice that I have here, which is not my professional voice. And I would have to be responsible and stop snarking about things like "let's kill all the libraries."

So is there such a thing as a blog identity crisis? Your thoughts?

On lectures: "I do not think that word means what you think it means"

Over at Hacked Education, there's another familiar "new! revolutionary!" idea about how the consummate evil known as "the lecture" can be banished to its rightful place in the netherworld of teaching:

It’ll mean that the university classroom can be “flipped” – with lectures pre-recorded and assigned as homework. Koller, who’s been flipping her classroom since well before Khan Academy popularized the term, says that universities have been reluctant to add “active learning” opportunities at expense of covering “the curriculum” via lecture.

I feel like my own recorded lecture here, or maybe I've just been writing this blog too long. To recap:

(1) "reluctant to add active learning"--seriously? And who defines "active learning"?

(2) "flipping the classroom" by assigning students to listen to an hour of lecture before they come to class: does that really happen? Do they listen or do they blow it off and then have the instructor repeat everything in class?

(3) and "cover the curriculum"? "Coverage" is a shunned term at Northern Clime, and I think we have to put 25 cents in a swear jar every time we use it.

How the haters define a lecture: recording an hour of cr@p that is a waste of time for students to learn all at once, when they could spend 10 hours "discovering" the principles for themselves outside of class because they would of course put in the 10 hours, since all students put in 3 hours for every hour of class time, just as the Education Fairy has always said they do.

How I define a lecture: an interesting talk (not an hour but maybe 20 minutes) on the subject that is intensely interactive, with student hands shooting up because they have questions and want to know more  as you talk.

You tell a story that weaves together concepts in an effective way, and, judging by their faces and reactions, you know what to emphasize, what to repeat, and what to leave for another time.  You can lecture on the same subject, but you never give the same lecture. Recording it would not be the same, since you tailor the lecture to the students.

A lecture puts everyone on the same page and in a similar frame of mind for the class activities that follow it. It demands participation. It asks questions. It engages students.  And they hear each others' questions, for isn't that why we're meeting in a classroom in the first place?

Food for thought: Have you ever had a student evaluation say "more and more group work, please, but no lectures"?

To quote Inigo Montoya, "I do not think that word means what you think it means." One of us is wrong, and frankly, I don't care if the educrats think it's me.

Robot grading

The interwebs are in an uproar over the latest annual software competition for machine-scoring essays.

See, for example, Jonathan Rees's take on this, the column at Inside Higher Ed, or Marc Bousquet's column, which has a beautiful explanation of a lit review that I want to stencil on the hands of all students:

That literature review in many circumstances will be comprehensive rather than merely representative. It functions as a warrant of originality in both professional and funding decisions (“We spent $5-million to study changes in two proteins that no other cancer researcher has studied,” or “No one else has satisfactorily explained Melville’s obsession with whale genitalia”). It offers a kind of professional bona fides (“I know what I’m talking about”). It maps the contribution in relation to other scholars. It describes the kind of contribution being made by the author.

Typically actual academic writers attempt to partly resolve an active debate between others, or answer a question that hasn’t been asked yet, what I describe to my students as “addressing either a bright spot of conflict in the map of the discourse, or a blank spot that’s been under explored.”

Bousquet's larger point is that if we want meaningful writing, we need to give meaningful assignments that matter to the students and make them feel as though they're part of a larger discourse community (agreed!).

But the best point I saw was the essay (in the comments section at IHE) that the machine graded as a "6" (perfect score). It makes no sense, but its grammatical structures are correct, and it must have hit some algorithmic high points for vocabulary and use of proper nouns. Sample quotation: "Teaching assistants are paid an excessive amount of money. The average teaching assistant makes six times as much money as college presidents." (I can't wait for this to be picked up and asserted as fact by certain higher ed-bashing news networks, by the way.)

A few thoughts:

1. If drill-and-kill grammar software never taught students how to make subjects and verbs agree, will the canned responses that the essay software have any better luck in helping students to write better?

2. A central tenet of writing pedagogy over the past 20+ years has been that writing is not so much a way of writing down what you think as it is a way of finding out what you think, especially through multiple drafts. That's something that most writers would say is true, too. Will students have a chance to find out what they think if they can write nonsense sentences and get a 6?

3. Where's the grading software that is going to spend half an hour going over an essay with a student as you sit face to face at a desk or on Skype, helping the student to understand how to work through an argument, sharpen the analysis, or even write a clear topic sentence?

4. This is the scary part: Will students write to the software and make everything correct but not bother to think about what they're really saying, if an absence of thought and fact garners them as much credit as actual thinking and supported arguments?

The perfect educational circuit of the future: student signs up for a MOOC course, interacts with other students for points toward a badge, consumes podcast lectures, takes online quizzes, and writes a content-free research paper graded by essay software that gives it a perfect score.

Still not an academic post: random bullets of Mad Men

After a hardworking but very discouraging week, I just don't want to think about academics. Here instead are some observations on this season of Mad Men. If you haven't seen it--spoilers ahead. If you're looking for a more academic blog post--look away, look away.

• Many internet words have been spilled on the issue of Don's birthday as celebrated with Megan's sexy song versus Don's actual birthday, with the consensus being that Dick Whitman is six months older than Don Draper. Say what? In an earlier season, when Don goes to the doctor and promises to cut down on smoking, the doctor tells him that he looks pretty young for a 45-year-old man (the real Don Draper's age). It emerges later in the episode that Dick Whitman is actually 36, and in the Korea flashbacks, the actor playing the real DD was older than Jon Hamm/Dick Whitman. In this season, has Don/Dick settled on his own real age (40) but the real Don's month and day of birth?
• Not one but two lovely moments of name-forgetting and remembering: neither Don nor Megan can remember the name of Ken Cosgrove's wife, and when Ken calls her by name, Megan blurts out "Cynthia" a few seconds later. There's another moment, though: when everyone at the dinner party is talking about the UTexas shootings, someone says that the shooter's name was "Charles Whitmore." "Whitman," Don corrects him quietly, and given that that's his real name and we saw him kill someone in a fever dream last week, he should know.
• Here is a question of vital importance: at what point did Dick/Don the "whorechild" and his mother come to the Whitman household? Last night he alluded to being raised in a brothel, yet every time we saw a flashback, he was on the family farm.
• Did anyone else think that the monstrous maple entertainment center--"Seven feet long! Wilt Chamberlain could fit in there!" Pete says proudly--when put in the center of the frame looked exactly like a coffin? Poor Pete, entombed in suburbia.
• Pete cranks down on the water valve, thinking that tightening down on the pressure will cure the problem--until it sprays out of control. Only Don knows how much tension should be applied and how to fix natural forces like water effectively (and look great while doing it, as anything that caused him to shed that jacket would have). I think we have a Symbolic Objects winner, ladies and gentlemen.
• After seeing Don humiliate himself so thoroughly last season, it was nice to see Don the Superman reemerge not once but twice: fixing the sink and declining the services of the brothel. All this AND wearing the hideous jacket that Megan wants him to wear: he really is a changed man, at least temporarily.
• Show of hands: who else wants to hear some of Ken Cosgrove's science fiction, which sounds to my inexpert ears perfectly pitched to the kind of scifi being published in the mid-1960s? Who else felt like writing after seeing him propped up in bed writing after what's her name Cynthia had gone to sleep?
• Historiann has a post (Mitt Romney, or Don Draper?) with clips, and in them, Don Draper looks like a baby compared to how he looks now. The presidency doesn't age a person nearly as fast as being in advertising, it seems.

Anything else?

If I were a rich (wo)man

Nicole and Maggie have a good post that is wonderful food for fantasy if you're tired of thinking about academe: What would you do if you didn't have to have a job?

I think I would be like the old joke about farmers:

Man from the state lottery to a farmer in the field: "You've just won a million dollars!  What are you going to do now?"
Farmer takes off his hat, scratches his head, and looks around the field: "Just keep farming till it's gone, I guess."

What I probably wouldn't do: buy a new house, a new car, or a trip to Disney World.

What would I do?

1. Pay off debts of all kinds.  Give some money to charity.
2. Buy myself out of teaching so that I can spend more time writing. I love to teach, but I could use a sabbatical.
3. Hire a research assistant.
4. Do all the travel I want to do. Go to archives. Never fill out another expense report again.
5. Get a 4G network plan for the iPad.
6. Travel somewhere that is not related to visiting family, going to conferences, or research. You know, like a vacation. I hear that people do that sometimes, but all my travel has been related to one of the above. First up: London.
7. And build a writing house.

Or, if I'm really rich: endow the Undine Chair of Spectacular Knowledge and make myself the first recipient. Do you really think that any university would refuse such an offer if enough cash were dangled before it?

I don't think I'd quit my job, but as the Undine Chair of Spectacular Knowledge, I'd be able to do more of what I love to do.

What would you do?

The Venn diagram of student musical knowledge

Profacero's post about "You Are My Sunshine"  made me think about "traditional American songs"--you know, the kind you learn in elementary school or through Wee Sing or maybe from your family.  

I asked my students about this the other day. Did they have to learn songs like "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean" and "The Erie Canal" and "Sweet Betsy from Pike" and "The Yellow Rose of Texas"? How about "America, the Beautiful" and all its verses, including the amazingly myopic verse about "Thine alabaster cities gleam/Undimmed by human tears"? Or Woody Guthrie's smart answer to it, "This Land is Your Land?" Or, yes, "Dixie," since that came up in a work we were reading? 

A few did, and most didn't.  Songs they know: "Amazing Grace" and maybe "This Land is Your Land."  Songs they don't: apparently a lot of the above, though a few knew them. 

It doesn't really matter, of course, although it's helpful if these songs come up in what we're reading. Mostly I'm just curious. I know a lot of old songs, including a few that my family sang that I've never heard anywhere else, so I don't expect them to know what I know. 

And they know a lot that I don't know. They all have different musical backgrounds, different interests, different kinds of expertise, some of which is a lot more advanced and useful than mine. 

I'd like someone to do one of those questionnaires about this, the kind that they do at the beginning of every school year--you know, the one that says that for first year students, vampire movie sequels have always been the hottest thing at the box office, or that they are too young to remember 9/11.

Sometimes I feel like an explorer trying to map out what they know so I can then find those intersecting points with what I know and make a connection or get them to see an allusion. It's a Venn diagram of what I can refer to in class with a reasonable expectation of being understood. 

#dayofhighered

Inside Higher Ed tells me that today is a #dayofhighered, which seems to mean writing a post about what we do all day, given that highly paid corporate types think we are all slackers.

Well, let's see. It varies from day to day, but it goes something like this:

Teaching day:
Get up at 5-6 a.m., get ready for work, and drive to campus. Think about current project and vow to write ideas down when you get to campus.
Get to campus. Fail to write down ideas.
Answer email throughout the day.
Prep class, meet with students, teach.
Schedule and plan committee meetings.
Prep some more.
12:00 Lunch at desk.
Teach some more (and repeat).
Read student drafts and write responses.
Attend committee meetings.
Answer email.
Look at Twitter. Become frantic wondering how all these people find time to write given that they are at conferences every week and tweeting every 20 minutes.
Attend presentation.
Fill out questionnaires and other random paperwork required by the administration.
Home at 7-8 p.m. Talk with family.
After that: Write if possible. Read books for class unless I fall asleep first.

Non-teaching day:
Get up at 5-6 a.m. Put on sweats and go to desk after breakfast.
Work on reading and writing.
Let cats in. Let cats out.
Write committee reports.
Let cats in. Let cats out.
Answer email.
12:00 lunch
Read books and articles for class.
Review manuscripts or grade papers.
Try to get out of the house while it is still daylight for a run/walk.
Cook dinner. Convince cats that they are not getting any part of the fish that you are cooking.
Talk to family.
After that: Write for a while when "second wind" kicks in at after 9 p.m., if it does, or read for class.
Sleep.

Weekend days: as above, with no teaching and lots of excitement along the lines of grocery shopping and picking up dry cleaning.

I'll bet your days are just as exciting, fellow slackers.

Is it education or is it training?

Dean Dad has a post up about an article at CHE about New Charter University, which offers courses on a new model. The model is sort of like an all-you-can-eat buffet crossed with a concierge service for doctors: all the courses you want to take for the low, low introductory price of $199 a month--or free, actually:

Anyone can create an account and start working through its self-paced online courses free of charge. Their progress gets recorded. If they decide to pay up and enroll, they get access to an adviser (who helps navigate the university) and course specialists (who can discuss the material). They also get to take proctored online tests for course credit.

As a business model for a business, this is pretty familiar to us all. Would it work for education?

My take is that it would work for training, which is what this really seems to be. To take one example of how this could work: say you want to work at a restaurant. Okay, you need to pass the state health test for food servers. You go online, read the manual about washing your hands and keeping hot foods hot, take the test, and then you are certified. You have been trained, but have you been educated?

This model offers the possibility of "course specialists who can discuss the material," but is that like a classroom discussion in which multiple viewpoints are brought out and examined, with teachers helping to guide the discussion? Or is it more like a student help tutorial, as in "I can't figure out problem #5; can you help me with that"?

I have only limited experience with any sort of model like this: A very long time ago, I was asked to grade an exam in my subject area for a student who had studied on her own but wanted to receive credit, which this exam would give. I don't remember the particulars, but it was a pass/fail essay exam arrangement and she would then be able to go on to later courses in a sequence, or something like that. I said "sure" (which you say a lot as an adjunct) and read the exams.

While they showed factual familiarity with the subject matter, enough familiarity that she would pass, there was not one idea in there that showed original thought or engagement with what she had studied. She was certainly smart enough, but what was lacking is what I'd call "leavening"--the kind of working through or chemical reaction needed to make flour rise, or the kind of nuanced thought that she could have learned by participating in class discussions under a live teacher. She got what she wanted, as did the administration, but I felt a little as though she'd been cheated out of an experience that could have done so much more for her--an experience that she didn't even know she had missed.

Reading WaPo: pull up a chair and have yourself a slice of outrageous misrepresentation

The article in the Washington Post: where to begin?

My first thought was "Is this WaPo or the Wall Street Journal, which regularly hates on higher education?"

Yes, the author has a lot of fancy pants titles and a big investment portfolio, but anybody who makes as many incorrect assertions and factual errors as he does deserves the title of being--well, let's say "misinformed."

• Those salaries? Not at my university, at least not in the humanities. Not even close.
• What is with the fallacious argument that professors "only" work when they are standing in front of a class? Has this person ever been a faculty member? As I've argued here before, that's like saying that a farmer only works for two weeks a year during harvest and has a cushy job the rest of the time.
• What's with the bait and switch about rising university costs being solely attributable to faculty salaries and rising compensation? WHAT rising compensation? We haven't had raises in years, and a lot of states have made faculty take furloughs.
• What about the part that athletics, administration, fancy new gyms, and the rest have played in rising costs, or the gutting of public universities, some of which are down some 60% in the amount of funding they get from the state?
• What about the rising prices for the various journal databases that we have to use to produce the research that will get us tenured, promoted, and possibly a raise, if there are ever raises again?
• This wouldn't have anything to do with deflecting attention from any company that the Washington Post owns, would it?

I have the feeling that the red flag of higher education bashing is once again being waved to deflect attention from the real issues: defunding of universities, rampant adjunctification and exploitation of the same, and the motives of extremely well-paid corporate types with academic connections who make fallacious arguments when they ought to know better.

Writing maxims and morals examined

If you are tired of posts about writing: click away, nothing to see here.

Some of these are maxims that I've tried to follow, but recently I had to throw them overboard because I wasn't getting any writing done.

1. Maxim: Write every day and get the words down. You can always edit them later.

Did it work? Sort of. I tried the Seinfeld chain, Pomodoro, and everything else that could make me write. I did write, and occasionally my brain even engaged. But I've found that there was no depth to the writing and that I had to rewrite every word, sometimes many times, before the sense of thing would emerge. I was trying for quantity, when what I needed was quality.

Moral: Write in haste and edit at leisure.

2. Maxim: Try writing on a bare screen (like 750words.com, notes in Evernote, etc.) and you'll have more ideas without the distractions of the other text.

Did it work? For some things, yes. But I wound up with a lot of disconnected passages that I had to rewrite, and I lost the sense of the manuscript as a whole. I was writing generalizations, not arguments.

Moral: That manuscript is not going away. Sooner or later you're going to have to look at it, so you might as well face it.

3. Maxim: Stop for the day when you know what you'll write the next day (the Hemingway technique). In this way you'll always have something to start with the next morning.

Did it work? Of all these techniques, this is the one that went the most disastrously wrong. Several days ago I stayed up writing and wrote down all the things I needed to do next, convinced I would get up and get at it the next morning. Need I tell you that I did not do this and that I couldn't face the writing for five days after that? And that the ideas that were once so fresh are now something I need to go back and reconstruct?

Moral: If you feel like writing, keep doing it. You can always sleep, but you can't always write.

4. Writing is a job, just like grading papers and prepping for class. Give yourself a couple of hours (or 20 minutes, or half an hour) each day and then quit.

Did it work? I said this to myself this morning in my best Boice/Silva vein, and I just didn't want to stop. My students aren't getting their papers back tomorrow, either.

Moral: Writing is exciting. It's discovery. If you're feeling that way about writing, the other stuff will get done in its own time.

Udemy and MOOCs: is this the future?

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries has been posting a lot lately about her participation in The Faculty Project, which seems to be part of Udemy.com, an online space for MOOCs (massive open online courses). I've been intrigued by this, since in addition to hating plagiarism, corruption in sports, online for-profit education, and Big Pharma, she's been as scathing about the use of technology in the classroom as she is about poor writing.

A lot of the courses at Udemy are how-to and technical courses that teach students how to program in Python, create games for the iPad, and so on. Soltan's course is on interpreting poetry, and since she analyzes a lot of poetry at University Diaries, this is a natural extension.

I keep seeing that the MOOC is the future of the university, if there IS a future for the university.

The New York Times tells me so, and who am I to argue with the New York Times?

Still, I'm curious:

• If you hate the idea of PowerPoint or technology in the classroom and also hate online courses, why would you participate in this?
• Is Udemy and its system of MOOCs something Soltan sees as a way to counter for-profit online education?
• Do the "best Professors from the world's leading Universities" (tm) get paid for participating in these, and do they have any responsibilities beyond recording lectures?
• Assessment right now is by computer-graded tests, and discussions are held in forums; the idea, according to the New York Times, is to get everyone to an "A+" level. How might this work in the humanities?
• When might Udemy decide that Udemy graduates or badgeholders who've taken a MOOC course would be "the best Professors from the world's leading Universities" and worthy to record courses, since the MOOC courses will not bear the name or logo of the university from which the current "best Professors" hail?
• Or are we in a beehive situation, where a select few prerecord wisdom for the MOOC worker bees and the bees can't hope to move from wisdom-ingesting to wisdom-dispensing?

Updated to add: Margaret Soltan graciously answers all these questions and more over at Inside Higher Ed: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-diaries/mooc-synthesizer-iii#dsq-form-area

More on creativity

A little Monday morning inspiration: The Wall Street Journal has a long article by Jonah Lehrer about creativity this week. A few snippets:

• Flashes of insight are real flashes: "Research led by Mark Beeman and John Kounios has identified where that flash probably came from. In the seconds before the insight appears, a brain area called the superior anterior temporal gyrus (aSTG) exhibits a sharp spike in activity. This region, located on the surface of the right hemisphere, excels at drawing together distantly related information, which is precisely what's needed when working on a hard creative problem."
• What helps? Surprisingly, comedy and alcohol: "And this is why relaxation helps: It isn't until we're soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we're able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain's right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those associations are often the source of the answer."
• Unfortunately, you need to do the slogging kind of work before that kind of creativity can descend: "There is nothing fun about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat and failure. It's the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. Nietzsche referred to this as the 'rejecting process,' noting that while creators like to brag about their big epiphanies, their everyday reality was much less romantic. 'All great artists and thinkers are great workers,' he wrote."
• When should we work and when should we take a shower or go for a walk? "The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions "feelings of knowing," and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don't require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we're getting "warmer" or not, without knowing the solution."
• Get more information. "Another kind of creative problem, though, is when you don't have the right kind of raw material kicking around in your head. If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed."

Update: This letter ("Persist"), via Notorious PhD, exactly describes the two kinds of creativity.

Update: If you haven't checked Dame Eleanor's writing inspiration posts yet, you should!

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means to me

An open letter to the interwebs, not to individuals. For the record, nobody said what's exactly in quotation marks, but it's an impression I've been getting.

Let me start with a premise: one of the fundamental principles of the humanities is that we can agree to disagree or even argue, but that we do so with a respect for the other person's expertise or body of knowledge. If we don't think the other person has much knowledge, we still try to understand his or her perspective and see it as an individual issue, not an indictment of the disciplinary specialty as a whole. That's one way that humanistic discourse differs from the mud-slinging invective that passes for political discourse in this country.

But.

If you tell me that you don't think it's important that students read, or that some of us teach, what might loosely be translated as "old s@#$% by a bunch of dead people" and that students ought to be held accountable only for what they can find and interrogate and theorize on YouTube and Facebook, I might have a problem with that.

If you tell me that exploring and learning about books from the 20th-century and back into the past is basically stick-a-fork-in-it done, and that learning about history and culture is passe, I might have a problem with that. I suspect that classics, medievalist, and early modernist scholars would have an even bigger problem with it.

Why can't we do both?

The thing is, there's space for all kinds of work in this discipline--YouTube and "old S@#$%," a.k.a. literature--so why would you say or imply that one has to replace the other? I respect what you do enough to know that there are many things about it that I don't know. We all have to assume this, or we could never have a functional discipline, let alone functional departments within a discipline. So can't you believe that there is some value in the "old S@#$%"--that is, show it some respect?

Dear interwebs, I may have misunderstood the import of what you were saying, and if so, I apologize. But do think about what I've said.

Placeholder post

Not a real post; just stopping by to say the tasks that shall not be named are eating me (or my time) alive right now but that I will post something soon.

Brain news: proving the attention span analogy

Time, which does think Americans are just stupid (whereas some politicos in this country are betting on the fact that we are stupid and proud of it), nevertheless proves my point about the Skinner box of email in this week's issue. Some fact nuggets from "Getting to No: The Science of Building Willpower":

• Kelly McGonigal: "Short bursts of dopamine that come from things like e-mail make it hard to focus on long-term goals."
• Addiction specialists doing brain scans of gamblers and non-gamblers found out that when there's a "near miss" on the slot machine screen (i.e., two cherries on one line and one cherry on the line down), non-gamblers' brains are all "eh, who cares" and see it as a loss, whereas gamblers' brains are on fire with "SO close!" and see it as a win.
• Replacing a habit is possible if you maintain the same trigger and reward system. When you get home from work, set your running shoes beside the door and go for a run instead of sitting on the couch. You can then reward yourself with tv or whatever. Soon you will not want to sit down and will totally want to run because of the reward, or so they say.
• Instead of getting up, thinking about the day's activities, racing out the door, and reading the always-depressing news online, we should "lie awake in bed, following our thoughts where they lead (with a pen and paper nearby to jot down any evanescent inspirations). We'd stand a little longer in the warm water of the shower . . . take some deep breaths" and drink some coffee, because "Caffeine increases the brain's level of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that promotes feelings of motivation and reward when we hit on a great idea."
• This bullet is for Sisyphus, who longed for M & M's: turns out your brain "needs a lot of glucose" and that test subjects who drank sugary sodas were able to defer rewards better than this who drank artificially sweetened ones, presumably since the glucose gave the test subjects better wherewithal to plan and use their willpower.
• The halo effect--when you go to the gym and figure, "aw, I deserve these fries after that workout"--is a real brain feature, as is the "what-the-hell" effect when you eat a little ice cream and decide that as long as you've broken a diet, you might as well eat the whole thing. I think this would apply to "I haven't written yet today, so it's a total loss and I might as well give up and not look at my work from yesterday."

In other brain-related news:

• Statins, which were recently touted by Big Pharma as something that ought to be given to everyone, regardless of age or heart condition, as a preventive measure are now found to lead to memory loss and confusion as well as diabetes and well-known side effects such as leg pains.
• Anticholinergic drugs, many of which are given to the elderly, may "cloud the brain": "The heart drug digoxin, the blood thinner warfarin, the painkiller codeine and prednisone are considered mild anticholinergics. Those with the most severe effects include Paxil, Benadryl, a drug for overactive bladder called oxybutynin, and the schizophrenia drug clozapine." Sometimes it's absolutely necessary for people to take these, but at the very least, say the authors, those taking these drugs should discuss the possible effects with their doctors.

The writing-related takeaway? Give your brain some rest, a warm shower, and some time to relax and be creative, preferably with caffeine.

Analogies

1. The Skinner box of the present is email. You press the bar, and out pops a new message; if it doesn't, you press it again, and again, and again. Doesn't matter if you don't want to act on the messages; the process is addicting. If you make a pact with yourself not to check email for a couple of days (a weekend or whatever), the first hour is hard, and the rest are easy. Unless I'm expecting to hear from the Nobel Prize committee-and I understand that they call you rather than emailing--there's nothing that can't wait for a while.

If you do walk away from the Skinner box for a while, you will become calmer and your concentration will be better.

If you walk away and only check email after a day or two, you will be surprised at how fast you can respond to everything. You'll reply and move on rather than looking at it, thinking about a message, signing out, logging in, thinking about it, etc. before replying.

If you have colleagues who like to send you reports or action items late on Friday, which (ahem!) might tend to make you feel martyred, as in "why should I spend my weekend responding to you?" pay attention next time to when Friday colleague gets back to you if you do respond over the weekend; 95% of the time it isn't till Monday, even if you spend Saturday in crafting your response. A slow learner, I finally realized that I don't have to respond until Monday, either. I also realized that Friday colleague doesn't necessarily expect me to respond over the weekend. What can I tell you? I'm a slow learner.

2. What you can do with this non-Skinner box time is write, especially once you realize that the world will still turn on its axis and that your colleagues are not necessarily waiting for you to respond.

3. Not to mix a metaphor, but the blogosphere is the cookie or the M & M that awaits you if you get your writing done. If you read blogs before your writing is done, they will not taste the same, because you will be consuming them with guilt sauce rather than "job well done!" sauce.

Writing inspiration link love

Some recent great posts that will definitely inspire you to write:

• The Grumpies (nicoleandmaggie) have a great post about hacking productivity, this time by writing a syllabus for yourself instead of your class.


• Tenured Radical, in another great post, says you can write during the semester, if you really want to, and I'm taking her advice to heart.
• Dame Eleanor Hull, in addition to convening a writing group, is posting fabulous writing inspiration every day to keep us going.
  
• Jonathan (the Prose Doctor) suggests switching topics if you're on a Seinfeld chain to avoid burnout.

If you'd like to clear your brain of writing and read a thought-provoking post on changing attitudes toward reproductive health, there's a great one (with comments) over at Historiann's.

Random bullets of writing

The number of days that you go without actually writing something on your project equals the number of hours (one hour for each skipped day) that it will take you to actually write something once you sit down to do it. Five days = five hours at the desk before my brain really engages.

Rewriting and even retyping what you have written is a good way to prime the pump for writing. You retype your own words, and the ideas start to change them as you write.

You might be in the midst of a writing project if every time someone gets introduced on Colbert, The Daily Show, or Fresh Air as "the author of a new book on X," you see it as a dog whistle-level reproach ("why is his book finished and mine not?") and inspiration ("someday that will be me, except without the fame").

Same conversation, many voices

Profgrrrl has a good post up about being no longer junior faculty technically but not feeling like "senior" faculty exactly, either. She's moving smoothly toward full but right now she isn't there: "And so I try to become both comfortable with being nothing or being in-between while motivating myself to move forward."

There's another conversation that people in this position sometimes have (and yes, I am keeping this hypothetical for now). It goes something like this:

Powers that Be: "Yay, you're an associate! How would you like to commit to an extended term of service on this project? It will look good when you go up for full."

You: "Sure! I'm on it!"

Time passes.

Powers that Be: "You did a great job with that term of service! How would you like to step in and do this one?"

You: "Will it help me with promotion?"

Powers that Be: "Maybe, but the thing is, we really, really need you to do it for the good of the department/college/university."

You: "Okay. It could be good experience."

Time passes.

Powers that Be: "How would you like to do this term of service/admin? You'd really be good at it."

You: "Do you think this will be helpful for promotion?"

Powers that Be: "We value research when we put someone up for promotion. That's just logical."

You: "No, I don't think so."

Time passes.

Powers that Be: "We'd like you to ---"

You: "I'm flattered and honored, but no. I'm working on my research."

As the chauffeur in Downton Abbey observes, "flattered is a word that posh people use when they're getting ready to say no," and I certainly want to be posh. But I am flattered, too, since PTB wouldn't ask if they didn't think I could do it.

But what's the dividing line here? You still need to do service. If you say no, you risk being seen as less competent than those who can get their research done and still do all the service stuff, although to be honest these people are more heard about than seen, like Bigfoot.

Yet it is crystal clear that with the best intentions in the world, and meaning no malice at all, the Powers that Be could flatter you into staying at one level forever instead of moving up to that big open meadow in the sky, where all the full professors do cool stuff.

[Edited to add: I swear this is my last post complaining about service. I want to talk about more exciting things, I promise!]

Harvard's new and startling teaching insights on teaching

Brace yourselves. At The Chronicle, "Harvard Seeks to Jolt University Teaching" is so revolutionary that you might fall off your chairs.

Insights:

"Faculty would need to provide timely and specific feedback, and move beyond lectures in which students can sit passively receiving information."

"The traditional lecture also fails at other educational goals: prodding students to make meaning from what they learn, to ask questions, extract knowledge, and apply it in a new context."

"Writing is often an effective pedagogical tool, too."

"Taking a test on something is a very effective way to learn about it."

Are you shocked and surprised yet?

Out in the educational blogosphere, we've been over (and over and over) these ideas, especially the whole "let's get rid of the lecture" idea that crops up as a brand spanking new insight every year or so. (And yet we're encouraged to do podcasts of our classes, which means capturing a lecture through visual or audio means.)

I'm of two minds about this article. On one hand, it's good that there's a conversation going on about effective teaching methods, especially in rescuing the much-maligned test as a teaching tool from the current disdain for it. On the other hand, there is not one single idea in the whole article that hasn't been discussed repeatedly and for years in other venues, which makes me think that nothing has changed.