Monthly Archives: November 2020

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book recommendation: The Courage to Teach

I realize I’m behind the times here. Parker J. Palmer’s The Courage to Teach was published in 1997. I’m reading the 2007 updated edition, but still, teachers are facing new challenges that Palmer couldn’t have imagined when he wrote this book. But then again, maybe he could. The specific circumstances are unprecedented (I know; we’re all tired of that word), but the underlying issues are the same. Schools having to shut down due to a pandemic—that’s a new challenge. Teachers being required to go into work, even though their buildings are shut down, because the people in charge don’t trust the teachers to do their work unsupervised—that’s an old problem.

This is a book about inner work, and Palmer is a Quaker who talks a lot about the voice of vocation and stuff like that. Don’t let that scare you away. He’s a wise, level-headed teacher with years of experience. I was going to share some quotes today, but I’d end up quoting entire chapters. So I’ll just share one example of how this book has helped me so far: It’s allowed me to understand and admit that, when I’m not at my best, I’m deeply afraid of what my students think of me. And it’s given me some steps forward to deal with that fear—not “quick tips,” but truths that will require some reflection.

If you’re a teacher at any level, I highly recommend this book. If you’re not a teacher, you can read it anyway—or you might enjoy one of Palmer’s other books, such as Let Your Life Speak. If you’ve read any of his books, let me know what you think!

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my weekly rhythms

The word rhythm, in reference to the daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual practices that provide a semblance of structure to our lives, is trending. I have to admit that I’m a sucker for the concept; I am drawn to links or magazines that tell me how to improve my bedtime routine or make adjustments to my home to make it feel more like winter than fall. (By the way, it currently feels like summer outside where I am, proving that while the natural world does have rhythms of its own, these don’t always correspond to our schedules.) I think the word rhythm is a little cheesy when applied this way; it always makes me picture a Jamaican reggae guy playing one of those portable drums. (Is that weird? Don’t answer that.) But in spite of the over-trendiness, the cheesiness, and sometimes the total lack of correspondence to reality, I think this idea of rhythms (or habits, if you want to sound more practical or less Rasta) can be useful.

It is particularly useful for those of us who work jobs that do not have a set schedule—a group of people that has become larger this year, since a work-from-home schedule is by nature more flexible than an on-site schedule. (Read more about this in my post from two weeks ago.) I am thankful that, as an online faculty member, I can set my own hours. I want to be clear about that—I realize my flexible schedule is a rare privilege. I also realize that many online faculty members don’t have as much freedom as I do, whether that’s because of a second job or a heavier courseload or small children at home. But despite all that, I thought it would be helpful if I shared a bit about why and how I have developed some flexible weekly work rhythms.

First, why. I actually started learning the importance, for me, of having a semi-structured work schedule two years ago, when I went from working a mid-level administrative position—in which I was expected to be on campus more or less all day, spent a lot of that time in meetings, etc.—to a teaching-only faculty position, in which I was expected to be on campus only during classes, office hours, and meetings (which were rare in this context; my university did a good job protecting people from pointless meetings, at least in my experience). This flexible schedule, combined with the fact that I lived only a two-minute drive or ten-minute walk from campus, opened up an immense freedom to do what I liked with my waking hours, unlike anything I had experienced since my own college years. Unfortunately, I spent a lot of that precious time pacing around my house trying to figure out the best way to use it. Here’s an example: In my previous job, the daylight hours were mostly spent in a windowless office, so when I got home from work, I wanted to spend the remaining daytime out and about. So I had gotten into the habit of grading at night, and I had a hard time getting myself to sit down and grade when the sun was out. When I changed jobs, I was so determined to use my free time during the day for doing non-work things (even if some of those things were time-wasters) that I still ended up shoving all of my grading until the end of the day, dreading it all day, and staying up too late to get it done. Again, I want to stress the fact that everyone has different styles of working, and some people work best at night. I am not one of those people. But because I didn’t have a schedule, or at least an outline of a schedule, for using my daytime hours, I wasn’t getting things done during the time I tend to be most productive and get the most enjoyment out of my work.

I was still trying to figure all this out when I met my now-husband Jordan and made the goal of aligning my schedule with his (he works all day on weekdays except Friday, which is a half day) so that when we got married, we could spend our non-work hours together. And I was still in the process of making that shift when COVID-19 forced my spring classes online, thrusting me into the life of a fully-online professor several months before I expected it. Fortunately, I had received an excellent planner as a Christmas gift and was filling it out religiously every week. The planner and my motivation to align my schedule with Jordan’s helped me create a work week that resembles a typical 8 to 5 schedule, but departs from it in some key ways.

I won’t bore you with all the details of this schedule, but I do want to outline some of its main features in hopes that you might pick up an idea or two for establishing your own weekly rhythms.

  • When it comes to grading, I dedicate one day per week to each class. I reply to emails throughout the week, regardless of the class the student is in, but for grading, when I’m done with the class, I’m done for the day. (There’s an exception once every eight weeks, when I grade the big end-of-course projects. That week, I pace myself more carefully.)
  • I take Fridays off. (This works out perfectly right now, since I have four classes.) Again, I realize this is a privilege, and I’m thankful for it. But I don’t feel like it’s necessary to create busy work for myself just because this is a workday for most Americans. (However, during that big grading week, I sometimes have to work on Friday.)
  • I start and end work around the same time every day. I start a little later than Jordan, who begins his workday at 7 am; I use the first couple of hours of the day to do laundry or other tasks around the house. I take a lunch break with him from noon to 1 pm. And I finish when he’s finished, at 5 pm, if not earlier. If there’s something on my work to-do list that didn’t get done that day, I cross it off and move it to the next day.

I have other weekly work rhythms too, like posting my weekly announcements on Sunday afternoons, but I’m afraid this post is already pretty boring, so I’ll stop. Perhaps next week I’ll write about the non-work rhythms I try to incorporate into my life—the “restorative habits” I write into my planner each week. Meanwhile, do you have any regular scheduling habits or other work habits you’d like to share? Like I said, I eat this stuff up, so I’d love a new strategy to try! As always, thank you for reading my blog.

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What’s your metaphor?

Several years ago, when one of the universities I teach for asked me to design and serve as the subject matter expert (SME) for a research class in the professional writing master’s program, I immediately thought, “How can I possibly be an expert in all of the subjects that my students will need to research?” (By the way, I can’t be the only person in the curriculum design world who always pictures Captain Hook’s sidekick Smee when I see the acronym SME.) True, one could argue that I wasn’t being asked to prove my expertise in all the topics someone might research, but instead in the process of research itself. But even research itself can look vastly different depending on the researcher’s field and the genre, audience, and purpose of the writing. So it didn’t take me long to decide that I didn’t want to create “talking head” videos for the course, in which I would simply share from my own research experience–which, while it isn’t to be discounted, has mostly been in one small corner of a field that most of my students aren’t even going into. Instead, to give my students a broader picture of what “research” can mean in a variety of career fields, I decided to conduct a series of interviews in which I would talk to a nonprofit fundraiser, a biologist, an education professor, and a pastor about the research and writing they do in their work. So my students are seeing me in the videos, but mine is not the main voice they’re hearing. I’m the interviewer, whose role is to ask good questions to draw out other people’s expertise.

Ever since reading Helen Sword’s Air and Light and Time and Space, I’ve been thinking about how metaphors shape the way we do our work. Her book has a whole chapter about writerly metaphors–for example, you’re going to approach writing very differently if you think of it as a voyage of discovery as opposed to an uphill slog–but I’ve been thinking about metaphors in the realm of teaching. And I’ve come to the conclusion that the best metaphor for how I approach teaching, especially with my graduate students, is that of an interviewer. Because the focus of my course is a process–research–rather than a body of information, I allow my students to choose any topic for their major project, with very few limitations. Occasionally, students will choose a topic that I’d actually consider myself an expert or semi-expert in, like composition education or, that one wonderful time, Charles Dickens. But usually, they’re researching and writing about things I have no clue about, like family law or urban foraging. So I can’t pretend I know more about the topic than my student does. Instead, I find myself once again in the role of an interviewer, asking good questions to help the student access his or her own expertise. Most of the time, when I ask my grad students, “Would this be considered an authoritative source in your field?” or “Would your intended audience know the definition of this word?,” I’m not playing that old teacher trick of asking a question I already know the answer to (although I usually have a suspicion one way or the other–otherwise, I wouldn’t have asked). Instead, I’m gently pushing the students to access their own developing expertise.

I’m not downplaying my work here. Being able to ask the right questions is a genuine skill. But I’ve found that approaching my work as an interviewer, at least with these graduate students (a lot of this applies to my upper-level undergrad creative writing students too), keeps me from overstepping my boundaries and doing more harm than good–and losing the students’ trust–by trying to act like an expert in something I’m not. My job is not to look like the most knowledgeable person in the (online) room on every topic; it’s to help students access and build their own knowledge.

Now, as always, I turn the question over to you. Whether you’re a teacher or not, what metaphor(s) do you use to characterize the way you approach your work? If you’ve never thought about this before, think about it and let me know what you decide!