The Scorecard: Admin 1, Writing O

Some days are like that. You start with deadline-driven admin or service tasks and by the time you look up, 12 or 14 or so bleary-eyed hours later, you wonder, "Did I have writing to do today?"

That's not accurate. I did eat lunch and dinner. I did watch an hour of House of Cards with Spouse. I did go out for a run/walk late in the afternoon. I could have done some writing instead of eating or run/walking or watching House of Cards. 

But maybe if I put it all away now, I can make that score Admin 1, Writing 1/4. It's worth a shot, even if it's just revising a page.

Teddy Roosevelt was famously productive. He could start a meeting at 12:20 and end it at 12:25. He'd keep reading while his appointment for that time walked across the room. This is the man who thought he ought to go back to law school because being Vice President wasn't taking up his time.

But I may need more Francis Underwood evil genius than TR energy.

This is me tapping my Sentinel class ring on the wood of my desk and getting back to the real work of writing.

On writing: if it quacks like a book . . .

I'm going through the manuscript and writing short pieces and making edits.  The notes and citations are for another day and another headache, but so far, this is quacking like a book.

Some chapters haven't been touched for a while.  This means that, absent a writing group, I get to look at them with a more impartial eye. My reactions are ranging from "I have to fix this" to "hey, I've read worse" to "okay, this is pretty cool."

One time I read about an irritable projectionist who, when the sprockets wouldn't line up or there was a break in the film he was showing, would simply tear out big handfuls of film and splice the rest together. He didn't care if the film made sense.  I now get where he was coming from.

Pieces I thought were necessary and left to be written later--well, I'm not so sure I need some of them now.  This doesn't have to be the world's last book, or my last book, either.  It's like saving leftover pie crust for tarts: there'll be a use for it somewhere.

I took about 6,000 words out of a chapter today. It was on additional works by an author, and I didn't need them, but--. No buts about it. It's all just more pie crust for another time.

There's still at least an hour of work time left if I get at it now.

Follow your bliss? What if it doesn't follow you back?

Over at the Chronicle, Julie Miller Vick and Jennifer Furlong say something that has long needed to be said: "You don't have to love your job."  This isn't another post by a teacher moaning about hating teaching but a statement that having a job is important, and in many cases, distinct from loving a job.

Sometimes the two go together, and that's fortunate.

But since I am not an optimist by nature, hearing people quote Joseph Campbell's "Follow your bliss," translated into "Do what you love and the money will follow," always seemed beyond daft to me.  It also seemed like advice that privileged people would give to other, younger privileged people, which is the unspoken codicil to this particular phrase.

"What if it doesn't?" was always my immediate question.  Since I didn't want to (choose your own silly 1960s cliche here) harsh someone's mellow or surround them with a cloud of negativity or bring them down or kill their buzz, I usually wouldn't say it.

One time, I did. It's long enough ago that this student has faded into generic student-dom, so here is what happened.

I was talking with a student who was, as the Academic Excellence office would say, not making good choices for a path to success. Translation: she was smart enough to do the work, though not a standout, but she rarely did the work. As a result, her grades were low to middling.

She announced to me that she would get a Ph.D. and be a professor in English.

I tried to explain about the scarcity of jobs, the competitive nature of graduate programs, the hard work and determination needed to keep up with a program, the debt load, and all the rest.  "Are you sure that is what you want to do?" I asked.  "Aren't there other possibilities that would be more--" and I can't recall the word I used, but it was some way of saying "realistic" that wouldn't be insulting.

She shrugged. "No. I guess I'll just have to follow my bliss and it will work out."

What can you say after that? 

This is the power of positive thinking writ large. "Your only limits are your imagination." "If you dream it, you can do it." Remember The Secret?


What Vick and Furlong are doing is making it all right to say "But what if it doesn't follow you back?"

Mid-career academics: Just tired or over it?

Last week I had lunch with the Colleague from Another Place Who Keeps Me Sane (Colleague for short). We got to talking about how hard it has been to get motivated and keep working longer and longer hours during the Endless Gray Winter--and ours isn't bad compared to some places this year.

"Maybe we're just tired," I said, talking about the possibility of yet another conference with lots of tedious travel, costly out-of-pocket expenses that won't be reimbursed, anxiety about writing yet another paper, time taken away from other projects, and all the rest.

"Or maybe we're just over it," Colleague said. "Maybe we've just done that and want to do something else for a change."

I've been having this conversation a lot with mid-career academics, especially those who are at full rather than associate.  They still love teaching and research, and they're still good at it, but they want to do something else.  If they write criticism, maybe they want to write something different, nonfiction or a biography. Or maybe they want to work more in administration, or write fiction, or work harder for social change within the academic or local community. 

Let me be clear: this isn't a complaint, because I know how lucky we are to have a career in academics and how many adjuncts (of which I was one) would kill to have this job. Reading the blog posts where we're invited--nay, enthusiastically encouraged--to die or quit or retire keeps that very firmly in one's mind.

And I'm not quite at the "over it" stage. I have a lot of academic goals I haven't met yet and am faithfully working away at them.

But I wonder this: at what point does the tipping point for creative reinvention of one's career take place? When do academics start thinking about extending or shifting what they do, even if they love the basic parts of their jobs? After 10 years? 15? 20? After a promotion?

Eight years of blogging

No retrospective, no words of wisdom, because I'm trying to get stuff done--but I couldn't let the day pass without noting, for the first time, a blogiversary. Happy blogosphere to all!

Quilted writing

I've been reading Claire Potter's posts about writing in chunks, a method that makes a lot of sense. The manuscript I'm working on finishing is complete in some ways but has gaps with placeholders like "write up  review of criticism on this" or "expand on this reading" or "write about this one work." These are all texts I've read, so it's more a matter of "reread and write" than doing something entirely new.

When I open up the chapters, filling in the gaps seems overwhelming.  But if I think of this as a quilt where I need to finish just one square a day, maybe it'll be easier.  Needlework isn't my forte at all--I recently hemmed some gray pants with light blue thread because it was the only kind in the house--but I can visualize a quilt even if I can't make one.

The same holds true for the chapters.  When I look at them in Word, or even in print, I throw up my hands and am afraid to start.  But if I put them in Scrivener, where it's easy to see the tiny pieces separately, that works. That's not unnerving.

One quilt square a day, one patch of writing a day.  Surely I can do this.

Credit for MOOCs? Only for "non-elite institutions"

If this doesn't make you wince, read it again.  Yes, we knew a while back that there'd be no credit for you in a MOOC if you're part of the elite cadre that's producing them.

But let Caroline Hoxby, cited at MOOC.com, spell it out for you. MOOC-consuming institutions are, well, how to put it?  (Here's the working paper.)

• They are like Mickey D's (I'm paraphrasing) in that they sell "current educational services for current payments,”  unlike the "venture capitalists" of elite institutions that  "invest massively in each student" and reap the benefits of--knowing that they've helped to further human knowledge?  Don't be ridiculous: they'll reap the real benefits in donations from their rich, grateful alumni.
• And since these non-elites are effectively training academies (paraphrasing again) rather than actual universities like Stanford and Duke, MOOCs can replace them: "they may provide viable substitutes for [non-selective post-secondary education] courses that are already effectively summarized by certificates.”  

Hoxby is right about one thing, the very thing that bloggers have been writing about for the past three years: why would students at high-status institutions pay expensive tuition for credits from their own institution if they can get credit for the course through a MOOC for free?  I won't keep you in suspense: they wouldn't.

If highly selective schools start accepting MOOCs for credit, and students stop paying, the institutions may no longer be able to financially support the effort to create the courses in the first place. This is just one of the reasons Hoxby argues that these institutions should not consider accepting MOOCs for credit, even those MOOCs they develop themselves.

So developing MOOCs is effectively like elite institutions eating their own seed corn, which I think Jonathan Rees pointed out some years back.

One thing the summary of the report, at least, doesn't seem a bit concerned about that humanities faculty at places like Amherst were thoughtful enough to consider: what happens to the non-elites once the elites have had their MOOCs inserted into their curricula?

Actually, I'm being unfair to Hoxby. She's really just laying out the economic reality that we're all going to have to deal with sooner or later.  Once MOOCs get their hands--tentacles?--into non-elites and things get worse, as they will, what she tells us will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Writing in public

I've been intrigued by Claire Potter/Tenured Radical's two posts about writing in public and Historiann's recent roundup mentioning Matthew Pratt Gutterl's new blog.

Like the other posts, TR's "Re-thinking the Place of Writing in our Lives" has a lot good suggestions, several of which made me think about how they could be implemented.

• Is it possible to write in the office? Yes, and I love the idea that supportive colleagues would establish quiet times (or, better still, set up quiet rooms/cubicles) on campus.  There are two things that make this tricky. First, at any given time, I have about 20 books open, out of maybe 200 that I rotate in and out of my study at home, and I use them when I'm writing. Second, they're at home rather than in my office, and it's not practical to lug them back and forth.  

Although I work from notes and electronic sources, too, the books have become--maybe from habit--a visual stimulus to thought.  They are visual placeholders.  Sometimes I'm looking away from the screen and thinking of something, and the cover of one of the books will remind me, or I 'll read to get the focus back.

There's also the writing habit that goes with certain spaces.  The office seems to trigger the desire to do a lot of necessary teaching and administrative tasks, whereas home is for writing. 

Perhaps this is more habit than necessity, though. Maybe the books and the division of spaces between work and writing are like a turtle shell, in that they make me feel surrounded and protected by the resources I need to work.  Maybe a little more public writing would help to erase the dependence on that shell.

• Short-form writing? Also a good idea, and I'm doing some of it, although it counts for nothing at P and T time.

• Have a conversation about why books are the gold standard in the humanities? The MLA has been weighing in on this for at least 20 years, most seriously 12 years ago with Stephen Greenblatt's statement. We can keep having this conversation, and things may be changing, but in talking to academics in the humanities, I don't hear about there being much change in this.

• Too much service as an escape, in a way, from publishing, since the rewards are immediate? It's true that this can eat up your time.  One of the hardest lessons I've learned is that this kind of work eats up mental space as well as physical time. Read an email on the weekend or over a break, and even if you don't answer it, your brain will be busy trying to think up a solution.  
• Train yourself not to read email on the weekend or group them all to answer at one time.
• If the break is longer, don't read the email but send a polite reply saying that you'll respond once you get back from a conference, semester break, or whatever.  A lot of times, people don't expect an immediate reply; they're just lobbing their thoughts onto your desk so that they don't have to look at them any more.  You are not obliged to respond right way.

Random bullets of a new week

• Today is Martin Luther King Day.  Among other things we need to remember on this day is that the whole controversy over establishing it, more than 30 years ago, is a reminder of just why we need to honor this man's legacy.
• The beginning (post-MLA or no) of the semester marks the real beginning of 2014 for a lot of us.
• Historiann's Liturgy of the Book post is worth reading more than once for a lot of reasons, not least what it says about the difficulties of the "bang it out" first draft mode.  I wonder if that works better for fiction than for research-related writing, for, as she says, "Part of the reason for this is that the intricate social history that I must do in this book means that I’m frequently both doing the research and making discoveries and connections while I’m writing."
• Madwoman with a Laptop's well-argued post On Boycotts is another one worth reading more than once. I am trying to stay resolutely mute on this topic (note the deliberately light post-MLA blog post), but there is a report of the meeting at IHE and at the Chronicle.
• And now, on a lighter note: I have a countdown of weeks and days until I have to turn in this manuscript.  Let's hope it's not like Gob Bluth's Final Countdown.

Random Bullets of MLA 2014

• ADM has the best response to the jobs crisis: it's not a discipline issue but a labor issue.  http://anotherdamnedmedievalist.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/an-ex-adjuncts-view-to-this-years-fun-at-the-mla/. 
• I don't have much to say this year because I had a lot of meetings and so didn't get to as many sessions as I wanted.  I didn't follow them on Twitter, either, because that just leads to Session Envy.
• Did anybody mention yet that there were a lot of great panels? There were. I checked in on Twitter from time to time, and if you're only reading from there, you're getting a skewed view of the variety. 
• Lots of great places to eat. It's Chicago!
• Lots and lots of slush, ice, and people falling when walking from the Marriott to the Sheraton and vice versa. It's Chicago! In winter! I saw a tweet that said "Chicago MLA 2014: Because last year in Boston wasn't cold enough." Really, though, there was no polar vortex by the time of the convention, and except for a day of sleet, the weather was pretty good.  
• There were Big Contentious Issues discussed. 
• I didn't hear the "Skype interview" issue emerge in any conversation, but it's early days for that, and maybe by next year in Vancouver someone will raise it as an issue for MLA governance to discuss.
• Apparently everyone is in a tizzy because the granola bars cost $6.25. It's a hotel. Of course the food is going to be ridiculous in price. They charge that because they can. It's called capitalism. Didn't anyone take my advice about packing granola bars in your luggage?  (I packed 6-7 granola bars and ended up eating every one, though I don't especially care for them and never eat them at home.)

Abolish the MLA interview? Sure, why not?

Dr. Virago and Miriam Burstein have posts up about Michael Berube's public Facebook post suggesting the end of the MLA conference interview in favor of Skype or phone first-round interviews and his follow-up post discussing the benefits.  Go see their posts and comments for a more comprehensive look at the idea.

Among the potential benefits:

• The obvious one of eliminating or cutting way down on the costs for job-seekers who go to the conference for the interview.  It's expensive to go to MLA, in terms of time and money both, and no, faculty members don't get their way fully paid.  
• What I love about this idea is that candidates wouldn't have to stress out about how they're going to pay for everything in addition to worrying about whether they're going to get an interview or not. 
• The possibility of interviewing more candidates than the 12 or so customary at the MLA.  
• If the MLA decided to discourage the conference interview, that should have some effect on quashing what Flavia and others suggest is the "prestige factor" for the MLA interview, as in "if we don't take a suite at an MLA hotel, candidates will think we're not serious about hiring." The MLA pronounces judgments and passes resolutions about a lot of things, and this would be one that would have a substantive effect. 
• The possibility of holding MLA in smaller cities, since the conference would be smaller.  MLA apparently doesn't make money on the conference anyway.

There'd still be campus interviews, but maybe universities could bring more candidates to campus (4 instead of 3, 3 instead of 2, or whatever) if they didn't have to partially fund a search committee's trip to MLA.

Also, if you're hiring in rhet/comp, creative writing, or other fields that have different major conferences (CCCC, AWP), this would bring those hiring processes into alignment with ones in more MLA-centric ones. 

Are there negatives? Maybe, but they're relatively minor ones:

• You might not get to hear candidates present papers at the conference, because that might confer an unfair advantage (wouldn't it?) if you met or saw in person a candidate outside the Skype or phone interview.  On the other hand, if you're on a search committee, you can barely leave the interview room as it is, and you probably can't attend a candidate's panel in any case.
• It's nice to meet a candidate in person and shake his or her hand. Well, yes it is, but is that preference worth putting the candidates through the expense of the process?
• Skype (or Google Hangout, or any of the others) isn't perfect; you get dropped calls sometimes, or Goofy Face Freeze Frame.  But if everyone is using something like this, the playing field will be level. 

I like the positive turn that this whole conversation is taking. On to Chicago!

Writers on Writing: Julian Fellowes

Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park, Downton Abbey) on Writing

“I think a lot in bed at night. When I wake up, I never try to get back to sleep; I try to work out the stories of Downton. In the morning, I might have maybe half an hour before I get up to sort out stories and plots and things. I do it when I’m driving, too. When I sit down in front of the computer, I know what the stories are. I might write a page of indications of stories: ‘Mrs. Patmore buys a new hat.’ Then I tell the stories, plaiting them. [. . . ] 

“I started my writing career largely when I was working as an actor on a series called Monarch of the Glen. I had to write in a hotel room or in some horrible dressing room. I could take my computer, plug it in, and start working: I couldn’t do all that Oh, so I’ve got to be facing the sun at this angle.

“I work partly in London and in Dorset; I work in the House of Lords— they’ve given me a little office. I am something of a workaholic, which I can only say is just as well. I feel guilty when I’m not working.

“I don’t have time for writer’s block; I just have to get on, because I’ve made so many commitments. Sometimes you write stuff, and it doesn’t seem any good, and you chuck it out; but you have to keep churning it out. If you want to be a writer for your living, and you’re not just working on your book in the attic, you have to be grown up about it and not wait until you’re in the mood. You can’t afford that. Usually, if you go for a walk, you can come back with an idea of where you go next.

“One thing I do— it doesn’t always work, but it’s pretty helpful— is finish work for the day knowing what the next bit is. I don’t usually stand up from my desk until I know what I will write as soon as I sit down the next day. I put in the heading of the scene: ‘Robert is standing in the library with Mary.’ Once you sit down and you can work immediately, to a certain extent you’ve got forward motion.

“I’m not a big fan of going back over what I’ve done. I like to write the episode and put ‘The End.’ In many ways, that’s when the work starts— changing the structure and altering the thing and taking that story out and putting this one in. Somehow modeling an episode that already exists is miles easier than the trudge of making it come into existence.”

Eaton, Rebecca (2013-10-29). Making Masterpiece: 25 Years Behind the Scenes at Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! on PBS (250-251, 254). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

So, to recap:

1. Use reflection time (before you get out of bed, when you're driving) to work out some of your writing so that you can wake up writing.
2. Just write. No special surroundings needed.
3. Guilt can be your friend: "I feel guilty when I'm not working." 
4. If you want to be a professional, just write: “I don’t have time for writer’s block.”  
5. Keep moving, part I: “If you go for a walk, you can come back with an idea of where you go next.” Or maybe if you take a shower? Just don’t take a bath and slip on the soap left behind by a treacherous lady’s maid.
6. Keep moving, part II. Write down the “next bit” before you get up from your desk for the day. This gives you the forward motion you need. 
7. Don’t work it to death before you’re done. Write “The End” and then go back and change it.  You’ll have to change it anyway, and the rewriting is already “miles easier” than writing it in the first place.

Happy New Year! (Retropost edition)

Happy New Year, everyone! I don't want to reflect on this year (too little done on the Laocoon manuscript, for one thing), but here are some posts to ease out the old year and bring in the new.

No MOOC rants or controversial subjects were harmed in the making of these links.  Nothing will raise your blood pressure.  Have a peaceful night!

What if?

• English Department of the Future 
• New Office Commons
• The Literary Stock Market
• Classroom as Airplane
• Inventions I'd Like to See

Conference advice

• The Hook
  5-Minute Conference Presentations
• Conference papers: the good, the bad, and the don't even think about that
  

Creativity and Writing

• http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2012/02/brain-news-proving-attention-span.html
• This is your brain on multitasking (part 2) 
• Decision Fatigue
• Writing House Fantasies
• Dither and Blather

MLA Job Market Statistics

Bardiac very reasonably asks whether the job situation is worse now than it used to be.  

I don't have the answer, but the MLA does: 

http://www.mla.org/pdf/report_jil_1112.pdf

This report has tables where numbers and percentages of jobs are broken down in most ways--by rank, by region, by month advertised, and so on. 

Among the conclusions of that report are that things are (slightly) looking up from the 2008-9 low and that more jobs are being offered after the big October issue. 

What about cohorts of previous Ph.D. graduates seeking jobs? Here's some older information from 2001-2002, from here: http://www.mla.org/professionalization

The Academic Job Search in English: A Statistical Representation for 2001-02

			Number	Percentage
Job Seekers
New cohort of PhD recipients			1,200
	Less new cohort members who accept postdoc positions		(   60)	5
	Less new cohort members who do not pursue academic positions		(  120)	10
		Total of new cohort who seek positions in four-year institutions	1,020	85
Previous cohorts of PhD recipients
	From 1 year prior		540	45
	From 2 years prior		360	30
	From 3 years prior		240	20
	From 4 years prior		160	13
	From 5 years prior or earlier		107	9
		Total of previous cohorts who seek positions in four-year institutions	1,408
ABDs			120	10
Total number of job seekers			2,548

Also, here's a comment that I left over at Historiann's post about the job market, addressing the issue of why search committees don't contact people at every step of the process, which would be more humane:

The thing is, no one on search committees behaves maliciously, I don't think, and certainly not in the ways that have been charged.  We have a detailed and much-documented process to follow, and HR is right there at our shoulders, seeing to it that we follow it every step of the way. It's ultimately to ensure fairness. 

Why don't search committees notify those who didn't make the short list? Let's say you have 350 applicants, a long short list of 40-50 for additional materials, and a maximum of 12-20 you can interview either at the convention or on Skype. What may seem humane--that is, notifying the 300--is, if seen through institutional eyes, 300 lawsuits waiting to happen, when even one would be too many. And what if there was a flaw in the selection metrics somewhere and all the files or some subset of them need to be re-reviewed after consultation with HR? 

The reality is that the job isn't filled until an offer is made and accepted.  

As Bardiac says, it may be that the search committee goes back to the longer short list or even the whole list, especially if it's a hard-to-fill specialty. In other words, it's not really over until it's over.

That said, we need to keep trying to improve the process and do everything we can to make it humane and responsive to candidates.

Merry Christmas and Happy Boxing Day!

I hope Christmas and all holidays were and are peaceful, restful, and happy.

Calm down, everybody: no one says you can't teach essay writing

Wow. Ignore the interwebs for a week or so and they blow up with a new issue.  Who'd have thought it?

Recently, Rebecca Schuman (you know, she of the declaration that tenured academics have "blood on their hands") wrote a piece for Slate  that said if students hate writing essays and teachers hate reading them, why don't we stop assigning them?  Readers were shocked, shocked! to hear this and inundated poor Professor Schuman with hate mail and her superiors with demands that she be fired.

Profhacker published an open letter defending the Slate piece as an issue of "academic freedom," which  may be a bit of a stretch, and condemning the uncivil tone of the attackers, which is a very real problem and no stretch at all.

But let's review:

First of all, internets: get a grip.

Come on. It's Slate, where all headlines end in a question mark and "We are clickbait. Snark is good." is on the masthead.  Slate lives to be provocative, not informative.  That's why it exists.  Why are you surprised that a provocative piece appears there?

Facts aren't important over at Slate, any more than they are on other entertainment sites (on one of which I read something about "Alexander Hamilton and his daughter Theodosia," never mind that the writer meant Aaron Burr, because hey, it was a long time ago and there was a duel and they're both dead, right?). So Professor Schuman judged the audience and wrote a snarky essay that would gain a lot of notoriety.  That is Slate success, so why pick on her for judging the audience correctly?

Second, so what if she stirs up the conversation by being provocative, at Slate, ChronicleVitae, and pankisseskafka, her blog? Does that mean the conversation isn't worth having?  The fact that talking about writing essays gets started by real (or satirically expressed) outrage doesn't make it invalid. And again: Slate. You notice that Slate didn't publish her carefully reasoned explanation of what she actually does, and why? No click bait here, so let's move along.

Third, the "no essay" idea isn't even new.  Cathy Davidson has been pioneering this approach for a long time, and so have a lot of other people. We can argue about ways of writing until the cows come home, and maybe learn something from the discussion, even if what we learn is the inspired lunacy of some approaches. No one's forcing you to adopt The One Best Way (yet). That's the time to begin the more reasoned conversation.

So let's take a break from the outrage and realize that this is what passes for literate entertainment and discourse on the interwebs--and that the best way not to get upset by it is not to engage it if it upsets you.

Random bullets of interesting news

1. You know how people are always warned to make hard-to-crack passwords and end up using "password" or "12345678" or something easy anyway?  Would it make you feel better to know that the people behind the nuclear launch codes felt the same way?

From Making Light:

Given how nervous many of us were during the Cold War, it’s just as well that we didn’t know the interesting fact recently reported in The Guardian and Gizmodo: for about twenty years, and in direct contravention of orders from presidents and defense secretaries, the U.S. military had the eight-digit nuclear launch codes for Minuteman missile silos set to 00000000.

Apparently they resented the eight-digit “fire only if ordered to do so by the president” security system imposed on them in 1962, as it made firing nuclear missiles slower and more difficult. They responded by permanently assigning the system a single launch code that was the moral equivalent of using “password” or “12345678” or “qwerty” as the overall password for your online account.

But it gets worse: 

[I]n case you actually did forget the code, it was handily written down on a checklist handed out to the soldiers. As Dr. Bruce G. Blair, who was once a Minuteman launch officer, stated:

Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel.

This ensured that there was no need to wait for Presidential confirmation….

Feel safer now? 

2. And in MOOC news:

Many speakers repeatedly pointed out that the cost of MOOC production -- which can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars -- has created classes of MOOC producing and MOOC consuming institutions. This creates issues for both groups; the former doesn't want to appear elitist, while the latter rejects content not created by their own faculty members.

“Maybe this seems obvious,” said Christopher Brooks, a research fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information. “Lots of things seem obvious in hindsight.”

Or maybe, for some, in foresight. 

3. In closer-to-home news, I'm trying the "append only a final comment" to their last papers based on advice you've all given.    The comment gives feedback on the paper, but I didn't put in any marginal comments. The students have all been invited (via the comment) to come and talk to me next semester if they want a more complete set of comments on their papers. Do my hands twitch to add marginal comments? Yes, sort of. Is the time tradeoff worth it? Yes.

Just keeping the plates spinning

Aren't we all keeping the plates spinning about now, just trying to get through grading papers, or calculating grades, or turning in grades, or holiday preparations, or buying gifts, or baking, or cooking big meals, or sending Christmas cards, or seeing family, or writing up syllabi for next semester, or getting ready for the (still mercifully in January) MLA?

I want to turn my attitude around so that instead of seeing all these as points on an endless to-do list, or too many plates to spin, I see the relaxing or happy spaces in between.  I want to sit and concentrate long enough to shift focus and see the dancer spin the other way.

Random bullets of thankfulness

Historiann, Dr. Crazy, Belle, and What Now are being thankful for/expressing gratitude at this appropriate season, and so will I, knocking on wood lest I anger the spirits:

• For my family, the ones who are here and the ones who left us this year. And for the fact that no one is traveling amidst storms this year, except via the magic of Skype.
• For a job I love that allows me the autonomy and authority to speak my mind and the ability to do what I think is right.
• For really enjoyable students despite my anticipated grumblings over some of their papers still to come.
• Still grateful that MLA has been moved to January.

A couple of truly random bullets:

• You may be an academic if your Christmas tree ornaments are held on every year with bent paperclips instead of the little wire ornament hangers because you've always got paperclips and who has time to go to the store for those little hangers?
•  You might be an academic if the big red circle on your calendar is for the date grades are due rather than Christmas (Hanukah is early this year, so that isn't in the running this time.) 

And now I give you Bing singing Irving Berlin for Thanksgiving: 
http://youtu.be/jyiJSpReL2Q

A rhetorical question: should teachers stay or should they go?

I can't stop thinking about something that Historiann said in her comments section in the post on "Death of an Adjunct":

Tenured Radical raises a point that the Anderson article touches on but doesn’t address directly: the question of age. I’m already feeling (mid-40s) like my hold on the students has an expiration date. I think it’s hard to relate and appear relevant to students past a certain age, no matter how able-bodied, vigorous, or determined one is. (At least, not 4 classes a semester, every semester.)

 On one hand, I see how this could be, and it's clear that, to put it kindly, the subject of "DoaA" should not have been teaching.  On the other hand, I keep thinking about all the teachers I had who were older than mid-40s but still were vibrant and relevant in the classroom.  Yes, I had a couple who should have retired a few years before I had them, but mostly the older teachers were impressive. They just knew so much more, not that they displayed that unless we asked questions.

The time to quit would probably be when you're no longer curious, passionate, and really engaged in the classroom and in the profession.  On a personal level, I still feel all this, and students still respond to it as best I can tell (class discussions, good enrollments, good evals, etc.).

Colleagues (not necessarily those at Northern Clime) who are retiring or have retired have done so because, as they explained, "I don't want to do this any more. It's just time." But as Historiann's comment raises the issue, how would you know "should I stay or should I go"? What are the signs?