Writing Maternity

I just deleted a brief post because I decided it was too legibly about my class today.  I don't think that I've ever deleted a post before, although there've been many times when I've drafted something and then trashed it for similar reasons.  This time, my internal censor didn't kick in until I was on my way home.

I'm feeling discouraged about one of my classes this semester.  It's one of the most challenging and frustrating courses I've taught in a long time, and this afternoon's session was only a mild instance of that.  I'm also at the very end of a very long session of commenting on the students' work.  It's a somewhat strange group: I can't tell what kind of impact my comments are making on the writing of most of them, and the interpersonal dynamics of the group as a whole are Not Great and Never Have Been.  (In ways that I couldn't have known beforehand, and so couldn't have guarded against, but I certainly didn't help transform into positive energy.)

Part of the problem is coherence of mission and expectations.  I thought that I knew what the purpose of the class was before I started.  It's a departmental course, and not one I've taught before, but it's fairly clear that the students and I had different expectations, and that no one else in the department really understands its function as a course.  (Its purpose in other ways is clear, but its pedagogical purpose is not.)  I'm actually not usually opposed to teaching such classes -- they look kind of like opportunities to me, and what is a first-year seminar but everyone's fantasy? -- but this semester it's taking a toll.

Or maybe it's just November.

I'm going to need an "assessment" category soon

This from today's IHE:

[A]t a session Thursday of the American Anthropological Association, there was nary a mention of the federal panel that framed the debate on learning outcomes and value added during its run last year. Instead, there was plenty of griping about the university power structure, much skepticism about the assessment process and a consensus that faculty must take ownership when evaluation takes place.

Panelists noted that many college faculty members — themselves often included — view assessment as a threat. The threat comes not from federal agencies, they said, but from accrediting groups and administrators. College leaders pressure professors to measure the quality of their courses using quantifiable methods. Curricular committees form, a report is produced and everyone goes on their merry way. It’s a top-down process with little faculty buy-in and no meaningful outcome, the time-tested complaint goes.

While articulating the above concerns, the anthropology professors who gathered for the session said it’s time for a change. Peter N. Peregrine, a professor of anthropology at Lawrence University, said assessment works best when faculty members are involved and it’s not a top-down mandate. They need to be the ones asking questions of themselves, each other and their own students. It could be about the utility of an assignment, he noted, or broader questions about a program. Either way, the assessment questions thought up by professors are almost always different from the ones asked by administrators.

Trust the anthropologists to see this kind of thing clearly.  Although, I'll note, it's the kind of thing that people in educational evaluation (as it was once called) and writing program administration have been saying for years.

for all the list-makers out there

You know who you are.

job market advice, from wiser heads than mine

A couple of weeks ago (Nov. 13-15, to be precise), there was a long string on the WPA list about the academic job market, specifically offering late-in-the-game advice.*  It started when Sue McLeod posted a plea of sorts to female graduate students on the market and their advisors, as well as chairs of hiring committees and departments.  She begins by observing the gender inequities in higher education:

The gender differences in academe are well documented, and although we would like to not think so, this is true of our field (see Sally Barr-Ebest, "Gender differences in writing program administration" in Writing Program Administration 18.3 [1995] 53-73).  Women academics, including women WPAs, are paid less, publish less, and are less likely to get tenure than their male counterparts with similar training and background.

She continues,

There are many reasons for these inequities, but one clear reason is that women in our culture are not usually socialized to negotiate in job situations.  When I was a new English department chair, I
unwittingly contributed to the departmental salary inequity when I tendered an offer to a female candidate, knowing that there was a higher salary that the Dean was fully prepared to offer, only to have the overjoyed candidate  agree immediately to the first offer.

McLeod then exhorts advisors to "help your students (male and female) understand that the first offer is almost always negotiable, and that different things can be negotiated, depending on the school (at some state schools, for example, the salary is on a fixed scale but other things like teaching load and travel money may be negotiated)."  And she encourages graduate students to "rehearse negotiation techniques if you are not familiar with them--run practice negotiations as well as practice interviews.  Learn how to sound interested and yet not fully satisfied with the offer without sounding like you are whining; read up on the art of negotiation--there's lots of information out there."

It isn't really surprising that this sparked a long conversation.  It included horror stories from both sides of the fence, as well as substantive and useful warnings about the dangers of going into a negotiating situation ready to play hardball and thereby souring a relationship because hardball isn't a part of institutional culture.  I've tried to boil down the advice into the lists of do's and don't's below.  And, as I've implied but haven't stated, I don't get the credit for any of this wisdom; that goes to the savvy and generous members of the WPA list.

1. DO keep tone and rhetoric in mind at all times: the Dean  (or perhaps department chair) with whom you're negotiating will, you hope, be a part of your professional life for a long time.  You don't want to seem needlessly demanding or high maintenance, or do anything to otherwise jeopardize their pleasure at the prospect of hiring you.  (Remember, too, that many of the phases of the negotiation will be communicated to the department as a whole.)
2. DO keep the requests you're making for yourself separate from those you're making for your program -- e.g., a higher salary versus full-time (rather than half-time) administrative support.
   
3. DON'T simply ask (for more money, or various other things) because you want X or Y or Z: both rhetorically and substantively, you need to connect X to your desire to be at the U of Q and your desire to do your absolute best work while there.
4. DON'T overwhelm them with requests -- focus on the important things, and make it clear that they're important.
5. DON'T waste a school's time: if you aren't going to take the job, let them know.  It's only kindness to the institution and the next person in line for the position.  This includes going on campus visits if you're pretty damn sure that you'd never move to east bumfuck, but it also includes not lingering over the multiple-offer moment of triumph any more than necessary.  (May everyone have such success!)
6. DO do your due diligence: research salary information at institutions considering your candidacy.  Also research cost-of-living, including whatever factors (real estate, childcare, transportation) will be relevant for you.  Find out whether something like a reduced teaching load in your first year would be considered a reasonable request or a sign that you don't really care about teaching (for example).  (On the other hand, if it's a WPA job, DO make sure that the teaching load is reduced to a reasonable level: if they aren't willing to budge on that issue at the negotiating stage, you can bet you'll have difficulty getting the kinds of institutional support you need down the line.)
7. DO remember that some institutions have rigid starting salary ranges, but that even those institutions may be able to be more flexible on things like first-year teaching load, coming up early for sabbatical, start-up funds, or research budgets.
8. DO find out about things that may be relatively far in the future but will matter a lot when they come up: maternity or paternity leave; technology updates; and so on.

Hats off to Sue McLeod (UCSB), Melissa Ianetta (Delaware), Patricia Donohue (Lafayette), Patricia Freitag Ericcson (Washington State), and Deirdre Pettipiece (USIP).  A much fuller version of all this is available at Comppile, including even more job market advice.

* I mean to post this then, but it got lost in the shuffle.  Besides, when better to write it all up than when I have a huge stack of thesis chapters to avoid?

love, geography, and the virtual realm

Squiss just came to say good night while I sit with my laptop at the dining room table.  Hugging her, I said, "I love you soooo much," which sparked one of her ongoing games (inspired by this book):

Squiss: "I love you all the way to Russia and back!"
Mama: "Well, I love you all the way to France and back!"
S: "Weellll, Russia is farther than France!"
M: "That depends on which way you go!"
S: "We'll go . . . that way!" (points to her right, which is west) "And if we get to France, that's where you love me.  And if we get to Russia, that's where I love you!"
M: "You know, I love you everywhere."
S: (looking pleased with herself) "I love you even in the computer!"

two good (professional) things

It's a time of the semester when exhaustion seems to strike.  I can remember a moment at a department meeting, many years ago when I was teaching at Regional State U. with a 4/4 load, looking around the room and noticing that everyone looked as though they hadn't slept in a month.  The blogosphere -- as well as my real-life colleagues -- seems to be exuding that vibe now.  We're hunkering down and trying to make it to the end of classes.  I'm trying to figure out how to teach two essays in tomorrow's first-year seminar, and at the same time trying to figure out how I'll comment on all the student work that needs to be commented-upon by Friday's thesis seminar meeting.

But I have far more energy this week than I have any right to expect for two reasons:

1. My administrative assistant, who's been out since August 31 because of an injury, has been cleared to return to work on Monday.  This is especially great because a) I spent precisely 3 hours of this past Monday doing work that she ordinarily would have done, and b) proposed budgets for the next fiscal year are due next week, and she (not I) has the necessary clearances to look at our accounts.

2.  I got news that the grant proposal I wrote earlier this semester has been forwarded by my institution to the granting institution.  This is the first major grant I've applied for since graduate school, so it's a huge shot in the arm.  (In all due modesty, I'll say that I'm pretty sure not that many people at my institution put in proposals.)

powers of imagination

I have three intertwining thoughts batting around my head this evening that I’m trying to sort out; we’ll see how it goes.   (long post ahead)

The first comes out of tonight’s bedtime reading of Astrid Lindgren’s Mirabelle.  It’s a somewhat bizarre story – a little girl is given a magic seed, the seed rewards her assiduous over-watering by growing into a doll, the doll comes alive (for her) and becomes her beloved companion and daughter-surrogate – but nothing out of the realm of the norm for twentieth-century picture books vaguely inspired by folk and fairy tales.  The thing that I find the most interesting about it is the narrative voice: it’s narrated by the little girl herself to an audience she addresses very specifically; and she’s quite concrete about timing (she’s 8 now but got the doll seed when she was 6) and a final invitation to come and visit to meet the doll (I’m paraphrasing, but it’s basically, “Follow the narrow lane that leads to our house, and you’ll find me and Mirabelle at the gate, waiting!”).

We got the book about a year ago when a local kids’ library was having a book sale.  It was in heavy rotation for several months, but hasn’t been a favorite recently.  When she pulled it out this evening, Squiss announced, looking vaguely amused at herself: “This is a silly book!”  When we read the final page, she shrugged philosophically and remarked, “But we can’t go visit because [insert shrug here] we’re not in the book!”

She’s figuring something out about fantasy and reality, as well as fantasy and realism as literary genres, and I’m finding it fascinating to watch it all unfold.  I’ve blogged before about how she’s an imaginative kid and also a storyteller.  She’s been narrating her life since she was less than three, and she freely appropriates characters from stories we’ve read to her or that she’s learned about on the playground.  3 and 4 are, for that matter, the ages when kids tend to have imaginary friends – I had one named Betty, and my sister had an entire family (called the “Sillees” [accent on the second syllable]); but what interests me about Squiss’s version of this is that, unlike many kids with such fantasy playmates, she always maintains a clear distinction between the things she’s pretending and the things she isn’t. 

Along these same lines, she’ll often ask whether a particular figure or place in a new book exists “in this world.”  For example, we just got The Seal Mother out of the library, which tells the story of a selkie and her descendents.  So Squiss, understandably, wanted to know whether or not selkies exist, and I’ll admit that I didn’t have a great answer.  I want the realm of faerie to be open to her for as long as possible, but there’s also a worthwhile distinction between things that are simply (simply?!) made up by identifiable individuals and things that are, well, more mythic in stature.  Ultimately she’ll learn the difference, and I haven’t decided yet whether that’s a difference I want to start communicating now. 

This brings me back to the fantasy-reality opposition from another angle.  The one component of Squiss’s active imagination that we note with something less than pleasure (“concern” and “worry” are too strong) is her utter antipathy to anything she determines to be “scary.”  Scary things, interestingly enough, populate the cinematic realm more than the literary realm for her: after a few viewings, Mulan was deemed too scary (it opens with the Huns, and they are pretty scary), and although she’d been quite excited to see it, she insisted that we turn off Ratatouille after only a few scenes (which, again, are probably the most alarming of the film).  “Scary” certainly seems to have something to do with pacing, soundtrack, and general volume for her; it also seems to have something to do with perceived danger and/or emotional trauma – which makes me think that she’s imagining herself into the story in ways that are too powerful for her to make sense of, ways that she’s learned not to do with books.

(Two digressive notes here.  First, one of the first books I can remember her loving was a board book Curious George and the Bunny, in which George lets a baby bunny out of the cage only to have it run away.  There was a particular page where you saw George being sad because he’d lost the bunny, and Squiss didn’t care anything for the before or after at age 18 months: she just wanted that scene, over and over again.  Second, it’s probably obvious from this post as well as other things I’ve written, but I’ll say it directly: Squiss watches very little television.  This came about organically: G and I essentially never have the TV on except in the evenings after the girls are asleep, so it wasn’t as though we had to make a decision about whether or not we were going to “let” her watch.  When she was about two, we introduced her to Blue’s Clues and have since gotten her The Electric Company, both of which are a familiar and beloved treat, at this point.  She asks to watch TV very rarely, and has other ways to veg out when she needs to tune out the world.  But she may be somehow less equipped than some of her agemates to process the medium.)

It’s that sense-making component that brings me to my third thought of the evening, which has to do with Squiss’s relation to the whole princess thing.  (“I love princesses,” she’s taken to announcing periodically.)  A year ago, as we were starting to offer the occasional homeopathic princess, we rented Mulan and watched it with her.  (We also got that and Aladdin out of the library, which was a fiasco.)  She enjoyed it, hiding her face in the neck of the neighboring parent during the Hun episodes, and Mulan has since been a fixture in her fantasy games.  Part of this (no doubt) is the prevalence of princesses on the playground.  (Although I’m pleased to observe that Gemstone has no substantial interest in princesses.)  But Mulan is sometimes an alter-ego for Squiss, and at other times simply a (neutral) name for a character.  She’s just reappeared after a fairly brief absence (replaced by Cinderella).

While I can’t stand the plastic nature of the princess phenomenon in its current incarnation, I can remember being an eight-year-old who loved building and re-building houses for my Barbies, not to mention all the ways in which my friends and I worked out questions about sex by having Barbie and Ken go at it.  I actually bought Squiss a book of princess paper dolls the other day – partly because I’d given her free choice and didn’t want to go back on it, and partly because it seemed like a relatively innocent alternative to the small plastic figurines (etc) that many of her friends have.

And Squiss’s imagination feels to me like her safety net in this.  Her willingness to think about whether or not she can enter into the world of a book may be part of what helps her pull characters out of books and make them do her narrative bidding.  If she’s doing that with Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty as well as Mulan, we’re in good shape.  I wonder if part of the difficulty of the “scary” parts of movies is that they’re too deeply narrative – if she gets caught up in the story and can’t control it, can’t get herself out, somehow.  Who knows.

um ... really?

the funding actually depends on their hiring a member of Phi Beta Kappa?  give me a break.

toys

I just came across this post on toys and gender over at Outside the Toy Box.  (Thanks to Eszter at Crooked Timber for the link.)  It crystallizes many of the concerns I have about raising daughters -- the whole princess thing, sure, although it isn't just the princess thing.  Here's a taste:

I remember the year my daughter got 8 babies for Christmas.  I loved one in particular, much like the killer radio flyer ride-on fire truck.  It isn’t any one item that makes my skin crawl. It’s the bounty — it’s the power of emphasis and omission.  Like the kids can’t hear what the toys are saying.

She received a kitchen at 2. He’ll get a train table.

To compensate for my daughter’s doll museum, I bought her the tool bench. I bought her the doctor’s kit, I bought the little tykes basketball hoop.  I don’t have a problem with baby dolls or with vehicles, but I do have a problem with proscriptive identities.

And I especially have a problem with the shitty biological determinist lay talk about gender.  Like the well-blogged stupid Tonka commercials, “Boys - they’re just built different.”  Sure they are - I change diapers.  But what my daughter and son have in common is so incredibly vast in comparison to how they differ.

And what of the differences that they’ll have later on?  They are likely to be grand and real.  But isn’t it time we recognized that we’ll bear a good deal of responsibility for the authoring of those differences (that’s the universal “we”, not the you and I kind of “we”, you and I, well, we’re already brilliant)?

***

The point is that we make all these rules and pass them on, reinscribe them, and then act as if they are natural.  The gifts?  That’s social, baby.

stretching, cracking my knuckles . . .

and trying to get back to work: these have been this evening's projects.

The strange and lovely thing about weekends -- including long holiday weekends -- when you have kids (at least in my experience) is that they become times when, for the most part, work is verboten.  G and I work hard, often before dawn (me) and after midnight (him) in order to protect our weekend time for family as much as possible.  This has been our choice historically; I'm not always sure that it's the best one for us, and I'm not always sure that it's the choice that we'll continue with into the future, but it's where we are now.  I feel the combined sense of rest and panic that comes from a mid-semester vacation: I took Wednesday off 1) to make the Thanksgiving desserts*, 2) to go to Squiss's school's Thanksgiving lunch potluck **, and 3) because I'd been working so hard Sunday night through Tuesday that I didn't have a brain cell left.  As a result, I haven't done any work in almost a week, which hasn't happened since early August.

Because of that, and as I've been scanning blogs these last few days, I've felt very intensely aware of the difference children make.  A friend of mine thanked her children in the acknowledgments of her book "for making the process of writing both much slower and infinitely more pleasurable," and this is resonating with me now.  Childless academic bloggers, whether single or coupled, have written about getting work of various kinds done this holiday weekend.  Instead, I spent time with my in-laws, read Squiss a million stories, cooked with a 25-pound toddler on my hip, and ran various kinds of errands.  I'm not saying that I'd trade my kids away, or that the childless are missing out on something -- or rather, I'm saying that we're both missing out on something.  I could use (and in some ways would love) the long days of reading and writing that I had before Squiss was born; I'm aware of that loss, although I'd never pay the price that would get me those long days back, and am more than happy with the choice I made to (essentially) give them up.

This brings me, a bit obliquely, to a couple of realizations born of my rapid transition from a binge of writing to total family time.  First, I've gotten a good deal more writing done this semester than I have in a couple of years.  Given the teaching and administrative overload, I'm feeling quite proud of that.  (It can't be over yet, though: I have an MLA talk to write!)  Second, I seem to be a binge writer in a way that I would have found hard to imagine becoming a decade ago, and this concerns me.  (Donna was writing about this, and also about setting goals, which is one catalyst for these thoughts.)  While there's some utility in the binge writing model -- utility that the image doesn't convey -- there's also danger.  Almost every time I've been writing something professionally important -- conference paper, article, proposal -- in the last three years, I've felt as though I had started it too late and was working more frantically in relation to the deadline than I was comfortable.  In working on my project last week, I was utterly blocked for one moment and then suddenly realized that it was because I had been essentially skipping the brainstorming step, which for me is typically some kind of freewriting.  I've re-acquired all the bad habits that I try to teach my students to overcome, and I don't quite know what to do about it.

Part of the problem is that my writing process relied on long stretches of time -- the kind of time one has in, say, graduate school.  The kind of time few (post-graduate school) academics have, but the kind of time that academics with adminstrative roles and academic parents of small children may find in particularly short supply.  I haven't yet figured out how to make small chunks of time work for me, which means that I'm not writing regularly.  That, in turn, means that I waste a good bit of time thinking myself back into my projects when I get a somewhat cleared desk, and that (I fear) the things I'm writing aren't as good as they should and could be.***

This is, I think, one my tasks for next semester.  It's a lighter teaching semester than usual, the payback for this semester's overload.  The challenge will therefore be to maintain intensity while losing some of the stress, and to learn how to keep a steadier pace.

I'll keep you posted.

* I'm the dessert chef in the family.  This Thanksgiving I made an apple pie and a pumpkin clafouti.  The clafouti recipe was straight out of Claudia Fleming's The Last Course, which is an outstanding dessert cookbook.  I sprinkled in pumpkin seeds that I'd first toasted in olive oil and then sprinkled with salt and demerara sugar rather than the hazelnuts she recommends because I'm not a big hazelnut fan.  G and decided this time that the clafouti, while good, doesn't really pack enough pumpkin punch for Thanksgiving.  I make an apple pie every year.  It along with my mother's stuffing, make the meal for me.  This year, I used the new piecrust recipe from Cooks' Illustrated (with vodka!) and am cautiously pleased.  I also sauteed raisins in butter, brandy, and spices before adding them to the filling.

** They'd set up all of the tables in a banquet style, and had the kids sit around them and say, one by one, what they were thankful for.  There was something utterly cliched, but no less moving and lovely for it, in hearing each of these pre-schoolers, with a vaguely embarrassed smile, say shyly some version of, "I'm thankful for my family."

*** The quality issue is mine, not one that I'd generalize.  I don't do my best work with the deadline in plain sight.  Many academics, of course, do.