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08/04/2005 Archived Entry: "New Semester"
The New Semester
The New Semester approaches.
For the first time in ten years, I didn't teach during the summer. One would think this opportunity would have given me all kinds of advantages in terms of reading and writing - what most folks claim to want to do right before summer begins - but I haven't seen a significant change in work patterns. If anything, I saw my work drop off a bit - less reading. Less writing. For me, that doesn't really mean much since I am active and get work done all the time regardless of the semester or time of year.
But this is not a lament.
The work mantra in our field is fairly obsessive compulsive. "WORK" "WORK" "WORK." And yet - with, of course, exceptions - I find that the loudest voices are the ones who get the least done. Real work is not the declaration "I'm so busy." Nor is it the always-not-to-be-fulfilled promise of summer catching up. Work is management. Time management. Life management.
I've recently skimmed through several PhD to be or already PhD reports of schedules which go unrealized or get bogged down in trivial affairs (cats, checking email, reading sports scores). The overall conclusion seems to be how difficult it is to get anything done as an academic unless one chains oneself to a wall somewhere and leaves aside earthly pleasures like BoingBoing, PlayStation, or Pardon the Interruption. The trivial has no place in our work, this account claims. If only I could get away from these seductions, I would get my work done!
That trope is as bad as not working at all. It's amusing to read the accounts, but if one really wants to get work done (whatever that ambiguous phrase might mean - each institution offers its own demands), one doesn't have to be a recluse either. The clichés of academics (summer catching up/being busy) are often more counter-productive than anything else. They materialize in how one works ("first I need to do a literary review" "then I show methods") to what one writes about ("and here's the actual assignment to show what I've been discussing" "first we need to address access" "this representation shows inequality"). And they materialize in responses to new kinds of work ("maybe that will go at your fancy research school, but at our more humble we accept anybody school, it would never work"). Either way, these are all clichés. It might do the profession better to move beyond repeating these little mantras and to start the meta-quest of work (hmm...it turns out that all these interests which attract my attention on a given day connect/inform/spark ideas/provide context/relate). This is all part of a larger issue of binary division (work here/life here) which, of course, is necessary, but maybe not in the sense it is currently being drawn out to be.
Replies: 2 comments
I have to agree with you that we academics spend a lot of time spinning our wheels. Time management is really difficult. I think part of the problem is so many of us come from college to grad school to being professors and never experience the way the world outside academia demands time and structure...so we don't learn. I know that my life before academia, working in jobs where my time was managed down to the minute, often by outside forces, taught me how to deal with time in a different way.
Posted by Lynda @ 08/05/2005 10:54 AM EST
Bob Dylan's boy has been workin' as i understand it ... doesn't he have a new album out?
Whatdaya think?
Posted by gvcarter @ 08/04/2005 11:18 PM EST