Conference panels: a pop quiz

I'm getting the Inspiration Award post ready (thank you, profacero!), but in the meantime, here is a pop quiz about putting together conference panels. You may think these are no-brainers, but I've heard arguments put forth for all the options over the years. (My answer to #3 is below.)

1. You are putting together a panel for Big Conference, which encourages you to have an "expert in the field" (i.e., a famous person) on the panel or as a respondent. A friend of yours, very junior, has submitted a brilliant proposal. Which one do you include?

a. Famous person. Academe is cutthroat, and having Big Conference on my vita is important.
b. Friend. I am not THAT soulless yet.
c. Get them both, if I can.

2. You're in charge of a panel that you know will run because you're the Division Head or Discussion Group Head or whatever. You have a number of really good proposals from graduate students and several that could be good from Dr. Famous and the Oldbloods, who have been writing about these issues for years. What do you do?

a. All grad students. Dr. Famous has had his say; let's hear from some new blood.
b. Grad students and Dr. Famous or one of the Oldbloods. Dr. Famous is a draw, so having him on the panel brings exposure to the grad students.
c. Dr. Famous and the Oldbloods. They're famous for a reason.

3. You want a panel that will go well and people who won't go over their allotted time so that you have to suffer through a terrible presentation or use the hook. Whom do you choose?

a. Graduate students.
b. Mid-level scholars who've been doing this for a while.
c. Dr. Eminent

4. Panelist A wants to use A/V media in her presentation. Where do you put her on the panel?

a. At the beginning to draw people in.
b. In the middle, so that it wakes people up.
c. At the end, because fiddling with the tech stuff and using PowerPoint or media always, always takes longer than expected. Besides, this gives people something to look forward to.
d. I can't believe you're shallow enough to think about this. Put the presentation wherever it fits thematically and don't worry about it.

5. What is the best method of giving the hook to a panelist who is well over his or her allotted time?

a. a card or note saying that time is up
b. tapping on your watch
c. an air horn

Answer to #3: Trick question! All levels can give great papers, and all can give poor ones. Think about how often you've seen these:
--the grad student who brings in an unedited diss chapter and flips through it while muttering "I'll skip this part, but here's what I say in it"
--the mid-level person who has a paper of the appropriate length but feels compelled to gloss every sentence with commentary
--Dr. Eminent's intense love affair with his own voice and confidence in his mad skilz at extemporizing, which results in a scenario in which you get, say, 25 minutes of background on something that everyone already knows. No kidding: I once heard a presentation for which the closest analogy would be telling a group of American historians who Abraham Lincoln was.

What are your answers? There's extra credit on the line here.

Blog trifecta: human hibernation, Malcolm Gladwell, and writing

I guess you'd call it a trifecta of blog obsessions, anyway: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers not only has a lot to say about what creates success in writing (and everything else) but also, yes, weighs in on human hibernation.

It's a really interesting read (er, listen), even if it does have a little of the "2 + 2 = 5" quality I mentioned earlier. A sample of what I have learned:

• The 10,000 hour theory. Exceptional performance has less to do with natural ability than with the capacity to work hard and consistently at a task. The Beatles got to be The Beatles by playing the Reeperbahn in Hamburg 7 days a week for 8 hours a night. Bill Gates was ready when the opportunity came because he'd already been programming for, yes, about 10,000 hours. This is also why a longer school year would be better, as Gladwell shows with statistics.
  
• Being born at the right time helps, too. If you're a hockey player, it helps to be born early in the year so that you're big enough to get the extra practice and coaching (see: 10,000 hours) that will help you succeed. It helps to have only a few people in your cohort (fewer New York lawyers born in 1930) or to have skill sets that no one else does (Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York who could sew in the early 1900s.) Oh, and privilege (better schools) helps for some things, too, you'll be shocked to learn.
• You are your ancestors, basically. The nineteenth-century "culture of honor" in the South originated in rocky highland regions (Gladwell cites Scotland and Ireland, but the same would be true for Albania) where herdsmen had to defend their property--goats, cattle, or sheep--because the property could be taken from them if they weren't prepared to fight to the death for it. Gladwell shows that this persists in Southern students even in the North in the 21st century, but is this the only reason?
• There are three things that make work meaningful, and two kinds of intelligence. Unfortunately, I can't remember the names of them but will look them up when I get the book version.
  

A couple of things seemed a little too pat; maybe they're footnoted in the book version, but my eyebrows went up.

• I had no idea that European farmers were such lazy people* (I'm paraphrasing) in medieval times, especially in comparison to Asian rice farmers. I thought Piers Plowman and company worked pretty hard, but according to Gladwell they worked only until noon in the spring and fall and then sat around all summer. Life after noon was just hanging out waiting for the next kermess or for harvest, whichever came first. This doesn't sound like the farmers I've known or read about, who work very hard indeed, but maybe I'm missing something.
  
• Annnnd--human hibernation. Gladwell accepts uncritically the accounts of travelers who said that the French peasants and the Russians went to sleep after the first frost; he even quotes the same accounts that I had posted about previously. "They deliberately weakened themselves so as not to use up too much food or energy," snuggling together spoon fashion to keep warm and sleeping all the time. So I ask again:
  
• If this is true, how did they get their strength back in time for spring planting?
• Who took care of the animals, if they slept all the time?
• Cooking anything, and making bread especially, is a muscle-intensive activity, as the bakers among you know. Assuming that the hibernation cases ate, what did they eat? Who nursed the children? Or was it just the men who slept while Gretchen and Matilda kept the pot stirring? And how did they get the two-year-olds down for a six months' nap, when any toddler worth her salt won't sleep for two hours without a fight?
  
• Now that we've mentioned toddlers, what about the conventional wisdom that more babies are born in August, September, and October than in other months? Was this not true in medieval times?

[*Edited because I felt like it.]

OT: Obama and Fred and Ginger

President Obama, Inaugural Address: "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking."

I knew that our new president had echoed Thomas Paine and Lincoln, but Fred and Ginger? Nice.

OT: Inauguration

To repeat a post from November: Obama! Yay!

His speech was just right. He is just right. I hope there's a moratorium on all the pundits' dissections of speeches, because, just now, for once, let's dispense with rhetorical analysis and just revel in the moment of hope that he's providing.

Next stop: Academic Idol

From The Chronicle :

The chancellor of the Texas A&M University system wants to give faculty members bonuses of up to $10,000, based on student evaluations, but some professors are raising concerns about the plan, saying it could become a popularity contest, The Bryan-College Station Eagle reported.

Faculty members can decide whether to participate in the pilot program, which is being offered at the system’s flagship, in College Station, and at its Kingsville and Prairie View campuses. Though details are preliminary, officials said, the goal is to offer awards starting at $2,500 to the top 15 percent of participating instructors.

Instructors, you've won a ticket to College Station to compete on Academic Idol, except that the voting will be without the benefit of comments by Simon Cowell and company.

What might this change?

1. Teaching styles. There's no question that this could affect people's teaching styles, but would it do so for the better? Philip J. Tramdack, one of the commenters at the Chronicle, says that if he had to teach again (he's a librarian), he'd pull out his popular "lounge act" style of teaching instead of the "casino act" in which he actually asked students questions. Sometimes you can teach students difficult concepts AND entertain them, but not always.

2. Syllabus. Hmmm, what to choose--800 pages of Bleak House or the graphics novel version of Bleak House? Or Bleak House in text-message format?

And what about writing assignments? Writing is hard, and no one likes to hear anything but "superb job! brilliant!" when turning something in. We all, professors included, have to learn to take criticism about our writing, however, and it's only natural to have a hard time separating the messenger from the message. With a fortune like $2500-10,000 hanging over your head, would you be more likely or less likely to wield the red pen as usual, even it if means student displeasure?

3. Academic rigor. Another commenter mentions that the evaluations ask about things like "this course challenged me" and so on--in other words, students are asked to judge the academic rigor of the course.

Here's the problem with those kinds of questions: students all want to take challenging courses as long as they can get an A in them. There's no glory to getting an A in an easy course. On the other hand, if the student doesn't get a good grade, it's the instructor's fault for making the course, as students sometimes put it, "to hard" with "to much writting."

It would be nice to reward good teaching, but making evaluations the sole criterion is daft. To quote our soon-to-be-ex-president, the question that's not being asked is "Is our children learning?"

Archives and fresh starts

Mel's post on archiving and cleaning out old letters (with a link to Flavia's post) struck a chord.  Yesterday I was on a cleaning out rampage, and a lot got thrown away.

What got thrown away (or put in the recycling bin) are things like empty spice jars and a couple of broken colanders.  What is still sitting in the garage and in my filing cabinets taking up space is the detritus--or should I say impedimenta?-- of academic teaching and service: notes from meetings, final exams from classes that have long since graduated, and reports on long-dead issues that have since either been resolved by policy changes, or, in the usual course of things, left to gather dust.  In any case, none of this is material that needs to be saved.  

I've gone through a few of these boxes and have gotten rid of some things.  About twice per box, I'll come across a teaching exercise that I had developed and forgotten about that could still be useful.  The rest of it is just paper, and it gets dealt with accordingly:

1.  Anything with student numbers on it gets shredded.

2. Anything printed on one side that won't wreck a printer gets put into a pile for draft printing.

3. Everything else, including anything with a staple in it, gets tossed.  

What isn't clear is why I kept a lot of this stuff in the first place. Documentation in case anyone ever wanted to know what a committee said in Section V, subsection 3 of a report? Backup in case a disgruntled student came back 10 years later and wanted to know why he got an 88 instead of 90 on his final exam?  Teaching notes in case all the computers on which I'd stored ecopies (office and home) went up in flames at once?  This last one is particularly puzzling, since I try to reinvent the teaching each time I teach a course anyway. 

The only good side to this is that the flip side of the impulse to archive is an impulse to get rid of things, for there can't be an archive without selection, can there?  As the semester begins, that impulse to get rid of things takes over. It gives the filing cabinets some breathing space, anyway, and us a fresh start.

What I'm wondering is how much of this kind of stuff is what academics usually keep and how much of it is extra.  What do you end up keeping--class notes? Papers that students don't pick up? Meeting minutes? Old photocopies of articles? Any of it? Or have you gone entirely electronic with these?

A noble ideal, but will it fly?

At Inside Higher Ed there's article on a joint report by the MLA and the Teagle foundation. (Read it. I'll wait.)

While I can see where the recommendations are coming from and I like them overall, I'm trying to fit these ideals into the university systems that we all know and love. Here are the four and some possible real-world reactions.

1. English majors should be able to read literature in a second language. The short version is that about 4/5 of universities had this requirement forty years ago and about 1/5 have it today. Is the MLA on crack?

No, that's too harsh. I think this is a praiseworthy requirement for all the reasons that the report mentions. But is this a realistic requirement? At a minimum, English majors could decamp in droves for less demanding departments. Also, there are only so many credits that a university can require, so many courses that it can offer with a given number of faculty, so many classrooms, and so forth. So what gets tossed out of the Graduation Credits Lifeboat to make room for, say, 15 hours of foreign language instruction?

2. Coherence of course sequences and requirements. Nobody ever says, "Hey, let's make an incoherent course sequence." All the reasons for course requirements seem logical at the time.

But over time, course requirements are subject to mission creep. Maybe the administration has a pet idea that it thinks all students should be exposed to and mandates* required courses in that area. Maybe Dr. Famous Senior Scholar thinks all students should learn about the poetic qualities of widgets and bullies the curriculum committee into making a required course in Widget Poetics. The best use of this part of the report may lie in getting departments to rethink these requirements.

3. The primacy of the study of literature. Again, I like the idea (this being my job, after all), and at first couldn't see any harm in advising that students learn to read complex texts and write well about them. On second thought, though, I can see how all this talk about richness of literary texts, discussing complexity, etc. is going to bring out faculty with the long knives who hate any signs of life in F.R. Leavis and the Great Tradition. Also, new forms of media get mentioned only as "information retrieval systems." Ouch. That isn't going to please people working in this area.

4. Inclusion of all faculty ranks in decisions and teaching. Absolutely right, although again: how might this work in the real world? I don't mean shared decision-making; I mean the recommendation to have senior people teach first-year and gen ed courses.

This would be beneficial in a lot of ways, but here's the problem: How will you get them to do this, aside from making some kind of mandate? Who's going to tell Professor Senior Scholar, Endowed Chair, that he's been assigned an Intro to Lit instead of Widget Poetics? Unless every, and I do mean every, senior person signs on to this and understands its value, it won't happen.

So am I being too much of a pessimist here? How would these work at your university?

*[Edited to add: Not "mandates," of course, but "suggests," as in suggesting that if you ever want to see adequate funding again, you will consider teaching courses in this area.]

I am the captain--no, make that the James T. Kirk-- of my fate

As I sat at my desk today, not wanting to go out (if you saw the weather here, you wouldn't, either), I looked around the study.

Extreme left on the bookshelf: books for teaching.
Near left: books for project I've been working on.
Nearer left: shame pile of a book for review.
Piled high on the left-hand side of the desk: books and journals I've just finished using.
Above the desk: books for another project for which I'm making some minor revisions.
Right side of the desk, both on the desk and on the floor: file folders in wire holders.
Two lamps, one on either side of the monitor.
Straight ahead: computer with writing and .pdf articles on it.

Then it hit me: this feels like the command deck of the Starship Undine, and it has a mission to get as much possible done before classes start. No wonder I'm treating incoming email as if it's the Tholian web.

OT: Themes and resolutions

Since everyone's posting either end-of-the-year memes, themes (here , resolutions (here and here), or no resolutions, here's mine:

It's just one, and I had thought about this one even before Profgrrrrl wrote about it in a more elegant post than this one: mindfulness. Instead of a resolution, I'd like to call it a theme or maybe even (so as not to jinx it) a suggestion.

Mindfulness means a lot of things. It means paying attention to what I eat instead of eating out of stress or work avoidance.

It means distinguishing between what really needs to get done, what I need to do, and what someone else wants me to do. Their wishes do not have to become my to-do list, and their wish for an immediate response to something that isn't important doesn't need to push that item to the top of my to-do list.

It means making time for the things I need to do, not being on campus just because people like to see me in my office in case they happen to want something. Chief among those things I need to do is making time for writing.

It means wasting less time on news sites and checking email, because, all dreams aside, I'd rather let Obama handle the anxieties of managing this country and, as my experiments with turning off the internet have shown me, email can almost always wait.

It means treating reading blogs as an after-dinner dessert instead of something to snack on all day.

In short, mindfulness means paying the same amount of attention to my own life and priorities that I routinely pay to those of others.

Last bullets of 2008

• I dreamed last night that I was at the inauguration. In fact, I was Obama. Do I want to take over the world, or what?
• Reading all the MLA reports makes me feel both relieved that I didn't go and sad to have missed some of the good times.
  
• Eager colleagues are at it again, going through their to-do lists and firing emails at me. The next one gets a throwdown challenge: "Do you want to meet tomorrow at 8 a.m.? No? Then shut up and leave me alone." No, what I'm really doing is much more insidious: I am rudely not wishing anyone a Happy New Year who contacts me with it-surely-can-wait work details. Yes, no one will probably notice.
  
• I have been loving having this time to read and work. I've written a fair amount during the break, and now I'm getting ready for classes in a very random and relaxed way. It's actually a lot of fun.
• Happy New Year to you all!
  

Brave new technologies: online manuscript submissions

The publisher of one of the pieces I had promised to do this fall (now finished and submitted--hooray!) required the work to be sent to the editor AND uploaded to its manuscript submission site. MLA does its program copy for the convention this way, of course, and ASA has an elaborate online system for panel and paper proposals, as do some other conferences. Most of the manuscript reviewing and program committee work I've done for conferences, however, has been done the old-fashioned way--via email and sometimes paper.

Here's what I want to know: I know that online submission of manuscripts to a database is common in the sciences, but is it widespread in the humanities?

If you've had experience with this (as either a submitter or as a reviewer), what was that like? Is it a better system? Worse? Easier? More frustrating?

The grass is greener, academic edition

After several years in a row of going to MLA, I'm glad that I didn't go this year. Grateful. Relaxed. Happy. Christmas was wonderful with the family.

And yet . . . lots of the cool kids are at MLA, so there's a little twinge that says "we're having a party, and you're not there."

Proof positive that academia is an addiction, don't you think?

Edited to add: I didn't realize that What Now and Sisyphus were there, too.

We pause for this message from the holidays

Despite two more messages tonight from eager colleagues (stop, already!), I'm going on an academic fast for the next week--nothing but family, too many cookies, and a little writing, if I'm lucky.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Secret message to eager colleagues

To all those who are contacting me this week, when there is not one single administrative thing I am responsible for doing or can do until spring, about

--policy discussions that you want to have right now but that can wait until next semester
--procedures that you think ought to be discussed at length but can also wait until next semester
--handwringing about the terrible state of the economy in regard to certain cuts in the university budget
--hypothetical "what if?" scenarios for program development that will never come to pass (see previous point)
--whether I plan to be in the office next Wednesday to discuss any of the above

my answer is this:

--I am not going to deal with any of this right now.
--Chill out.
--Back away from the computer.
--Get a life.


If you don't, I will be forced to use the dreaded Annoying Autoresponse as a defense shield.

[Edited to add: Anything discussed or decided this week would have to be redone at the beginning of next semester anyway, because so many people are already gone. Having these discussions twice seems like a waste of time and effort, to put it mildly.]

It's not you--it's the market

This is bad news and good news.

From Inside Higher Ed:

Today the Modern Language Association is releasing information on just how bad the situation is: The number of job postings in the MLA’s Job Information List will be down 21 percent in 2008-9, the steepest annual decline in its 34-year history. For English language and literature, the drop will be 22.2 percent and for foreign languages, 19.6 percent. . . .
For English jobs, the 1,420 positions the MLA lists this year is a drop from 1,821 last year. While the English totals hovered between 1,000 and 1,200 for several years during the mid-1990s, they have not been as low as this year’s figure since 1997-8. For foreign languages, this year’s MLA total is 1,350, the smallest number of jobs since 2003-4.

Over at the Chronicle, on one of the job boards, there is--or was--a little bragfest going on in the guise of problem-solving: "I have twelve MLA interviews and just don't know how to schedule them."
I submit to you, the jury, these ideas:
-- such claims are either highly exaggerated or just plain false
-- the job market is as bad as it has been in a long, long time
-- especially for Americanists
-- and that if you don't have an interview, it's not necessarily about you, your publications, your teaching, or anything else that you can control.

So the bad news is this: It's about the market, which is awful.
The good news, such as it is (and it isn't much), is this: It's not about you.

Updates in two words

Grades: done!

Weather: snow.

Article: sent.

School: none!

Malcolm Gladwell on teaching

There's an essay by Malcolm Gladwell called "Most Likely to Succeed" over at The New Yorker this week. After having read (and listened to) some of his stuff, I always am a little suspicious, because everything seems to end up with the equivalent of "And that's why 2 + 2 really does equal 5!" Since I'm used to literary criticism, though, that doesn't bother me too much, and what he says about teaching does seem to make good sense.

Gladwell makes two major points: (1) for some occupations, you can't tell how good someone is going to be until he or she is actually practicing that occupation; and (2) good teachers have a quality that he calls (after Jacob Kounin) "withitness" and that I've always thought of as watchfulness. What this means is that a good teacher is always aware, as far as possible, of what's going on in the class--not just the activities, but the level of engagement.

It's easy to tell if students are engaged in a class if they're talking, but what if they aren't? Someone once commented after watching me teach, "you watch faces." I don't know if that's good or bad, but watching faces enables me to see if people are paying attention before they completely check out. Of course, no one can do this all the time; if that were true, Planner Girl wouldn't have gotten as far as she did with checking out of the discussion because I'd have noticed it earlier.

I've observed a lot of people's classes over the years, and "withitness," the ability to relate to individual students while keeping the group together as a whole, really stands out as something that keeps students engaged and motivated. Gladwell gives this example:

Then there was the superstar—a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt. “So let’s see,” he began, standing up at the blackboard. “Special right triangles. We’re going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas.” He drew two triangles. “Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can’t, we’ll all do it.” He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn’t easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can’t, we’ll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who’d evidently missed a few classes. “See what you can remember, Ben,” the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: “I’m going to give you a way to get to it.” He made a quick suggestion: “How about that?” Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. “That’s all right!” He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.

That's why, I think, teaching takes so much energy and we all talk about how tired we are at the beginning of the semester. If teaching doesn't take a lot out of you, in the immortal words of LOLcats, "Ur doin it wrong."

40 inspirational speeches in 2 minutes

From overthinkingit.com, as seen at Lifehacker.

(As for the literary connection: there's a little Dead Poets Society in there)

Printed blogs?

I guess you could call this another nail in the coffin of print culture, but in this case, the magazines are the ones shooting themselves in the foot with the nail gun. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)

As a magazine junkie of long standing, I've stayed faithful to--and subscribed to-- some of the old standards for years: Newsweek, The New Yorker, The Atlantic. I've bought subscriptions for family members year after year. I stuck with The Atlantic after it stopped publishing fiction. I even stuck with The New Yorker when the only articles it published were the ones about Hollywood deals (aka the Tina Brown years).

But lately, I've noticed something about the writing in Newsweek: it seemed familiar, somehow. That tone of knowing smartassery. The factual errors in the snarky opinion pieces that pass as cultural criticism. Beginning every story with a long personal anecdote, preferably one that emphasizes the writer's snark credentials or (if it's a serious story) something that Makes the Reader Empathize with the situation being described. (I've taken to skipping the first five paragraphs routinely, just to get to the news.) Trying to be provocative and fun, even if it means asking supremely stupid questions in the interview section. Then it hit me: Newsweek is trying to be a blog. News blogs started out by imitating and modifying print culture, and now print culture is imitating online culture.

You can't blame Newsweek for trying. Readership is down, and the magazine is " trying to be more provocative." It's the same impulse that The Atlantic is now following: it ran a long article about Britney Spears earlier this year and a medium-length article about a boxer in the most recent issue, and its redesign makes it look like Esquire without the ads.

But wait--don't we already have blogs? For free? The Wall Street Journal article says that Newsweek wants to have fewer readers and charge a higher price. The media critics (of which I am obviously not one) can better predict how this business model will work out, but as a longtime subscriber and a blog reader, I'm not convinced.

If you're thinking about going to graduate school

Tenured Radical has had some (as usual) fine posts recently about going on to graduate school. The latest of them explains that, yes, the market is bad, but that grad school isn't the "Ponzi scheme" that one of her commentators called it.

If you get the MLA Newsletter, you've seen this graph already. It represents about 30 years (1975-2007) of the job market in MLA fields, which by traditional accounts tanked after the 1960s and never recovered. I am not saying that the job market is good; it isn't. What I am saying is that if the oral history is correct, there would be a diagonal going from the midpoint of about 1500 jobs advertised in 1975 down to 0-100 in 2007. What the graph shows is that there are peaks and valleys, the latest valley being circa 1993-1997. I leave you to draw your own conclusions about that.

One of the questions that you need to answer for yourself before you apply, and on the application as you apply, is this: why do I want to go to graduate school? The following are just some additional things to think about in answering this question.

• Because I'm good at theory and analysis, and I enjoy my classes in (English or history or whatever). Having this kind of aptitude is a wonderful thing. Can you envision yourself putting this toward any other discipline? This is a little like having a talent for acting: more people have it than there are jobs for professional actors.
  
• Because I want to be a professor. Why do you want to be a professor? Is it because you want to teach? If so, think seriously about secondary education. The pay is the same, or better, and jobs can be easier to find. Is it because you want to work with college-age students? Have you thought about administration?
  
• Because I want to do research. If it's research that attracts you, there may be other jobs (public history, as TR notes, or working at foundations) that may be a better fit. An ADE report from a few years back showed that something like 80% of people in Ph.D. programs had "professor" as their career goal. Only 43-50% ended up as professors in tenure-track positions 10 years down the line, yet the survey showed that those who didn't become professors were still satisfied with their career paths.

And now some other questions:

• Once you have the Ph.D., are you ready to move anywhere for a job? Like Willie Sutton robbing banks because "that's where the money is," job seekers have to move where the jobs are. This sounds obvious, but people sometimes won't or can't move for family reasons. Those aren't bad reasons, of course, but it's unrealistic to think that you'll get a job in a particular area.
  
• Do you have an alternate plan in case you don't get a tenure-track job? In other words, will you regret spending the time in graduate school if a job doesn't materialize?
  
• Can you envision working more hours than some of the people you know? The demands of research and teaching take a lot of time; even if you're mowing the lawn, to use the news media's favorite example of academic slackertude, you're thinking about your work. To quote from an old post: if you can't envision working on your research as a pleasure as well as a duty, you should rethink what you're doing and maybe get into another field.
• Can you imagine spending your vacation money going to conferences and archives instead? Travel budgets will never fund the amount of travel to conferences that you have to do. Are you ready to make the conference/vacation travel tradeoff?
  

There are more items, but that's enough for now.

Edited to add: I'm not trying to say "go to graduate school" or "don't go to graduate school." Graduate schools need bright, interesting, and committed students with good ideas, and so does the profession. All I'm trying to say is this: if you want to go, know why you are going and what you want to do when you get there.