Day 03 - A picture of the cast from your favorite show

Day 03 - A picture of the cast from your favorite show.
Sheldon Cooper is possibly my favourite fictional character. Ever. If he was real, I would marry him in thirty seconds. I like him so much that I tell people that my brother in law, who is a physicist, is exactly like him, even though my brother in law is more of a Leonard.
In other news, I am on my last day of paper-writing madness. I have one more eight page paper to hand in for this term before I surrender to the holiday break (and the mountain of PhD applications, though I've mostly got all of the parts for those and only need to put them together). I don't think I've been this burnt out before. All term I managed to adapt to the level of reading and work expected. I succeeded at this. And now, at the final push, I just really want to take a nap. Really. Yesterday I napped twice. I am having trouble putting coherent thoughts together that are not related to this paper, the small stack of marking I have left, or books I really want to read. Last night, when I should have been writing, I read the first fifty pages of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, which I highly recommend.
So, internet, I will leave you with this point-form-thought for the day:
*I will get everything on my to-do list done. I just will. I always do.
*When I am done I will drink an entire bottle of wine and then pass out.
*Everyone should read books all the time.

It's that time of year again...

... Exam time is here again! And my mom!

Alright, so I don't actually have exams... but I do have a ton of essay writing and marking to do, and five application packets to get together for PhD programs, and am still in a state of constant exhaustion. Plus I am researching for someone, plus I am working two days at a diner. Except that, well, I'm not. I've taken my last three shifts (one and one half weeks!) off because of school/stress. There aren't enough hours in a week to accomplish everything I need to. There aren't enough hours in a week to spare the eleven that my current job is taking from me. Don't get me wrong, I love this job. However, when I was on the phone with my boss this morning, explaining that I had asked another girl to cover my shift for tomorrow because I just can't do it right now, I secretly hoped she would fire me. Yup, you read that right. I hope she would say "you're taking too much time off and you're being a huge pain. Please pick up your cheque and don't come back." In real life I really hope that when I leave this place I do so on excellent terms- they've been wonderful to me as friends, employers, and coworkers. I love the job, but I hate how tired I am all the time. Waking up and thinking "I don't want to go to work today" is especially terrible when what you reall mean is "I could really use that six hours for writing or researching."
On the plus side, the prof that I am currently working for has offered me another job helping with formatting on an anthology she and another academic are working on. We're waiting to see if she gets the grant she's applied for, and then how many hours she'll be able to pay me for. If it all works out, and I can get enough hours, I am going to consider leaving my other job. Maybe. I always feel bad quitting, even under the most terrible working conditions. Leaving a place that I love sooooo much will be even harder. I'll keep you updated.

Have any of you had to leave a place you loved working?

A tangled end-of-term rant.

There will be no paragraph divides in this post, because I feel like torturing you the way first year essays sometimes torture me. Not that I blame the students 100%, not even close. Right now, in a single class I've got several students that are writing pretty medium to well papers. They exist on a range of "pretty okay argument that you maybe should have thought about a bit longer so your ideas would be better organized" to "this is an excellent thesis, great work!" Their writing ranges from "I can understand what you are trying to say, and this excites me!" to "once you develop stylistically your writing will probably be pleasurable to read." It's great. Why, you ask, have I grouped this wide range of students together (I forgot to mention that I am only including a small portion of the class). Because they are all consistently telling me about "the kings hat" and how "three king's went to buy a hat." Do you see the problem? They all know that there is a rule here, and they are all messing it up consistently. This wouldn't be so bad, if the rule were not to end a sentence with a preposition. This rule sometimes makes writing more terrible. Yes. It can make writing terrible-r (my ipad actually won't let me do this without the dash). Example (courtesy of a lovely friend and lovelier conversation yesterday): "That is something up with which I will not put." Yeah. Because so many students are going to read something as convoluted as that and think "that's way easier and clearer than writing "that is something I will not put up with," thanks grammar handbook!" How will these students tell the difference between "students work" and "student's work?" Most important to this particular rant, how did a whole group of students coming into university at the same time learn this mistake so well? I am suspicious that they may have all had the same high school teacher, and this makes me sad. In other news, I am reaching the end of my term as well, and am hammering through seminars, papers, and research that I should not have put off so much earlier in the term. Lesson learned! I am also sliding into procrastination mode, but it is a very new kind of procrastination for me. Rather than cleaning the house instead of doing work, I have been rewarding myself for doing work by giving myself breaks with which to clean the house. Is this an effect of grad school, or simply a sign that I am getting old?

Are you always watching?

Okay, Internet. We need to talk.
Here's the scoop. I haven't posted in like ten days, for the reasons that I told you about. I also did not expect to post, go away for the day, and come back to find that nine people had looked at my blog. Nine. That's possibly the most internet popular I've ever been. Do you know what all nine of you failed to do? Leave me any comments. That's rude, internet. :( Remember back in high school, when you used to write on your desk, and then the person who had that desk in the next class would write back, and then you'd have a little conversation with an anonymous stranger that lasted weeks and had several day long gaps between entries? This can be like that again, but without the waiting!

In other news, last week I realized that a professor of mine is 100% brilliant. There are many brilliant people that teach in universities, and I have had the great privilege of learning from many such brilliant folk. In this instance, however, I was beginning to doubt the brilliance of this particular professor. Now, let me be clear about this: it is never okay to think your professor is stupid. This happens, often (I've even overheard students in the class I TA for remarking on their professor, who is a friend of mine and, more importantly, a superstar academic who is incredibly intelligent and also did her PhD in three years. THREE YEARS!!!), and it is not okay. Do you know why, dear Internet? Because the professor is always an expert in their subject. Your professor may not always be a good teacher (remember, profs don't often get teacher training), but they do have a PhD. They've PUBLISHED in their area. They are contributing to scholarship in their area. They may even be a leading scholar in their area. The book you're reading in class? They may have written it. These are not stupid people. Getting back to my point, I was beginning to doubt my professor, and was frustrated with myself.
You just read my little rant about professors not being stupid, and I believe every bit of it. Again, I was frustrated. She seemed disorganized, and like she wasn't focused on the material or structure of the course. She missed two days at the start of term due to illness, and once left early. BAH!! Frustrating, right? Well, for starters, this was more frustrating for her, I am certain. After having an excellent talk with her the other day I realized I had been neglecting her own academic work- this incredible woman has been all over the country doing surverys and interviews on homophobia in high schools with the eventual goal of bringing her findings to people who have the power to change policies. Yeah. She's doing the legwork to try and make high school more livable for gay teens. Be stunned, internet, because not only are you reading the very blog of someone who KNOWS THIS PERSON, but she exists, and is doing work that may benefit you, your friends, siblings, cousins, or your children. Okay, so I neglected to think about the fact that she is doing astounding work and also teaching. This was a terrible mistake on my part, clearly. AND THEN, I realized that she has been teachign us two classes (!). Hear me out, Internet. The class she teaches in the terrible requirement course, "Research Methods for Cultural Studies." It is boring, and though she picked the most exciting textbook she could find it is still dated and dry. However, she's also been teaching us a much more practical class (in secret!, the "hey listen up grad students, this is how the real world of academia works" class. And it is amazing. We've practiced "blind" (it's hard not to know whose paper you have in a class of ten people in which only one is interested in psychoananlytic theory and you've got a paper on Lacan) vetting at two stages, and are participating in a mock conference complete with panels, chairs, discussants, and snacks. It has been eye opening and rewarding.
Thus, dear Internet, I will leave you today with two posts, a very happy tale, and this question:
What must I do in order to get comments?

Why I've been away

My family is pretty tight. We're all close, and there's a lot of sickness in my family, particularly cancer. My mom and my dad's sister are both survivors of various cancers, and make frequent trips to the city I live in for related checkups and appointments. So the other day, when my aunt's daughter gets a phone call informing her that my aunt should have next of kin with her at the appointment because she will be getting some very bad results on a few tests she's recently had done everything stops. We went out for dinner. We rented movies. We played games. I handed in two essays late, and all of my professors understood (because I have wonderful, understanding professors). Imagine how frustrated we were when my aunt's results were clear.
*blink*
Our initial responses were joyful, as they should have been. And then we got thinking, and when my mom had her appointment (half an hour later), she asked the doctor about what might have happened. You know, because news like that is really hard to take, and can really influence life decisions. People take trips they can't afford to take when they think a relative might be dying. In this instance, my aunt's daughter (my cousin) did not travel the 10 hours she would have had to travel to see her mom, but sent her daughter (my second cousin) to my aunt's hometown for a visit and was planning on making the 15 hour trek to visit her mom at home after the appointments. What did the doctor think? That someone thought they saw something that wasn't there on her lab samples, and really, really felt for the family. So, after all of that, we're grateful.

In other news, I gave my second guest lecture. Let me tell you, internet, that this class has restored my faith once again, but troubled my allegiance to the academy. I wrote a quiz for them (it has been the habit of the prof to give them quizzes on the last day dealing with a text, and left that as optional for me), and told them they didn't have to take it if we could, instead, spend the allotted ten minutes discussing pedagogy and assessment. And then we did. !!!!! They had amazing things to say about learning styles, about how some small assignments are useful and others are simply not. Many of them expressed their own difficulty remembering ten random details from a text they had spent a week and sometimes more reading, and feeling disheartened at having to do so to prove they had read the text. Some of them enjoyed the effect of the quizzes, and said that because they knew the quiz was coming they found themselves taking more time for reading. We got into complexities, we did. And then, there was forty minutes of lecture and discussion, and they were incredibly engaged! Do you know what I noticed, internet? I noticed that every student that felt comfortable speaking up yesterday had something a little bit different to say about the text (and its relation to life, culture, politics, literary analysis, course themes, the real world, etc) that we could have had an entire class on. I cannot begin to tell you how encouraging this is, to see people excited about reading texts. On the other hand, I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating it is, having to say (not exactly like this, there was more tact in the classroom, but the overall message is:) "yes, the final fight scene is very childlike, a direct reference to the childhood fights between the two characters. But this lecture isn't on that, and now we have to move on to talk about language as a colonizing force, because that's what my notes are on and we only have fifteen minutes left. Good point though, really."

And I was left with a beautiful dream about a class structure that allowed professors the freedom to let their students discuss whatever elements of the text they've latched onto (with guidance, of course), instead of one that makes professors anxious about organization, structure, and, I hate to say it, but, legitimacy.

On Teaching: wherein I ask you questions, internet.

Alright. Pull up a chair, and ponder some stuff with.

While sitting in on the class that I TA for, I witnessed an exchange between the professor and a student that just didn't sit right. Basically: the student brought up something related to the current text but outside of the prof's expertise, and the prof said something (very politely) to the effect of "sometimes we have guests that experts in those things, you should save your questions for those times."
Now, I don't think that either the prof or the student meant anything negative in this exchange, I just wonder (as someone who wants to be a prof someday) if there is a good way of getting around situations like this when they arise. I mean, let's face it, students... wait... EVERYONE synthesize information all the time. We all know how awesome it can feel when we make a connection between two things we hadn't seen as related before- in this case it something high-tech (and beyond my own capacity, can I indulge a bit and say it made me really happy to have this high-tech thing I can't explain come up from a female student?) that all of a sudden made sense as related to a text. Cool beans! How do profs/teachers/role models address things like this in a way that lets the student have that "wow, neat" moment but doesn't overtake the class or take the discussion into unrelated tangents?
Let's break it down:

Good Things that Happened in this Exchange:
*the student felt comfortable speaking out about something obscure (though connected) even if it might have made them look like techo-nerd (which, btw, I was super jealous of. OMG, you understand how my computer's BRAIN works!!)
*the teacher addressed that the classroom would (at specific points in time) have space where those things could be explored by people who are actually able to engage.

Bad Things that Happened in this Exchange:
*the student may have felt brushed off.
*possibly the prof addressed the student in this way because there was only a small amount of time left in the already short (50 minutes) class.


So. What next? Where do we go from here, is there something that could have been done differently, and who, really, is the most important person in the classroom? Does it all go back to the idea that the teacher has some know-how, and will then put that know-how into words that you can either listen to or not? Anyone?

Trigger Warning, and also Political Stuff

On October 28th I was thinking about writing this post, going over what points I would cover in my head and stuff like that, when I came across this, which led me to this, which led me to not writing this post. I was afraid, because suddenly the thing that I had planned on writing about had become topical. It took me a few days to get over that, and I'm back and ready to tackle this. That having been said, if you're reading this and thinking that I missed something and would be way less ignorant if I saw it, post it, please.

This came up in my personal life before it also came up in the discussion/cute cartoon video I reference above. Before I say anything about anything I want to clarify:
*I do not dislike the discussion or the video mentioned, nor do I mean to suggest that I think the stuff being said here is wrong. I think that, for the most part, it is absolutely right.
*I do not mean to attack any single person here. The issue I have is with a trend and a phrase.

Here is my issue:
I have heard TAships called "slave labour for the university" often enough that I am certain that this is just a phrase that gets said sometimes. By that, I mean one of those things you say without thinking critically about. This is a problem, and it is a problem mostly because it is coming consistently from people within academia, the same people that I hold to the very high standard of trying to be politically correct because they understand the power of language. I am not (NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT!!!!!) aligning myself with the "Just Be Grateful" crowd that is mentioned over at Shitty First Drafts. In fact, I understand where the phrase, and the though process comes from. Academics work stupid long hours, are under the pressure to publish or perish (which means doing a shit ton of your research and writing in addition to teaching classes and doing hours of class prep and grading), and are expected to do all kinds of committee work (I've even probably missed things that are par for the course, I'm still in grad school so I can't speak to this reality yet) , all without any guarantee of job security, and, according to the discussions mentioned above (I say according because I can't speak to this experience, but I do trust these sources) are being expected to do more work for less money all the time. When the phrase in question came up in my personal life it came from a professor that I work for who was encouraging me to keep track of every hour that I worked, and to make sure not to work more hours than I would be paid for (at my school research and teaching assistants are allotted a number of hours per term, and must claim those hours throughout the term to be paid for them). I am certain that she did this 1.) because it is common for student markers to work more hours than they will be paid for in the interest of getting all of the marking given to them finished (I do not think that professors do this on purpose- it is probably really hard to keep track of the number of hours your TA has worked, especially since you can only usually estimate this, but it is really easy to know how much marking you have left), and 2.) to make sure that I don't get into this habit, which can only lead to worse and worse situations.
That still does not make it okay. Why? Because there are still people involved in slavery. Human trafficking is, as far as I am aware, currently the most commonly reported form of slavery, but there other manifestations out there. There are real bodies being affected by slavery in real, damaging ways all the time, people that are forced against their will to continue to work in bad conditions for little or no pay. .
Do you know they call it when someone leaves slavery? Escape. Liberation. Freedom. When someone leaves academia we call it leaving. This is the crucial difference.
Does this make everything in the university system okay? No. Does this mean that all professors, even those on contract work can pay their bills and live comfortably? No. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the system is set up to make grad students feel like working overtime as a TA is a privilege, because having the opportunity to do that work is really good for your CV and might increase your chance of work later. Maybe. If you do a good enough job, get a good enough reference, or make enough contacts. You know what you don't mean in your academic future? A contact that perceives you as lazy because you didn't put those extra hours in, and even if this isn't likely the way professors will actually view you I think that fear is still present and motivating. I know it is for me. Again, it is not slavery. I can leave if I want to. Professors can leave if they want to. They should be paid more, and have a more reasonable workload, (yes, yes, yes!!) but are not slaves.