New Kid on the Hallway

Why I enjoy teaching (when I do)

We've had the now-infamous "why we teach" meme; I was thinking today of a related topic - why I enjoy teaching. Not in the sense of, "I enjoy teaching because it brings light to oh-so-many lives," but in the sense of, "Today, at this specific place and time, class was fun." Because truthfully? Not every class meeting is fun. Plenty are, but not all. What makes the difference?

The thing I've realized is that it's not just about student preparation and performance and so on. Sure, it's pretty much a given that if students aren't prepared, class will NOT be fun. But I have taught classes (individual sessions, that is, not a whole term) where the students were prepared, bright-eyed and busy-tailed, engaged, and willing to talk about the material, and class has gone well, but for me, it hasn't been fun. It's even possible that it was fun for the students, just not fun for me.

By not fun, I don't mean painful or unpleasant or anything like that - I guess I really just mean, well, boring.

It seems I've reached a point in my (so-called) career where there are some things I've taught often enough that oh my god I am SO BORED with them. I know that even if I've read a text seventeen hundred times, it's the first time for my students, but sometimes it's really hard to remember that. And yes, one can change the readings around, and I do, but even so, after teaching a course six or seven times, certain conversations get a little old. Because there are certain conversations that you have to have when teaching a given subject, regardless of the specific texts you're teaching. They're conversations that I consider absolutely necessary for students who are approaching this all for the very first time, but when you've had them so many times before....

Take the Crusades, a subject completely outside my research interests but which I teach due to a variety of circumstances. The Crusades is a perennially popular medieval topic - it's one of the few medieval topics students have heard of, plus, you know, blood and guts - and so I've taught it a lot, probably more than I've taught stuff in my area of research. It's not that I don't want to teach the Crusades; I like teaching it - the students get into it, and there's lots of good stuff to talk about - lots of drama and conflict and all sorts of fun stuff. It's got built-in relevance in today's world, and it serves as a great entree into considering the impact of religion on society in lots of ways (something else relevant to today's world, but also great for introducing students to some of the peculiarities of the Middle Ages).

Anyway, it seems to me that if you're discussing the Crusades, you have to - HAVE to - discuss the question of why people went. I don't think you could possibly NOT talk about that. It doesn't matter which texts you're reading, you have to talk about it. But can I tell you how uninterested I currently am in discussing why people went on Crusade? (Not that I'm teaching the Crusades this term - hypothetically speaking.) It's not at all that I think I have all the answers about why people went on Crusade or that there's nothing else to be said on the question. And it's not that I don't think students are incapable of coming up with new observations on a text, either, because I do - each time I teach a text, a student comes up with something I hadn't thought of. It's just that I, personally, have reached the limits of my own interest in the subject. I've considered the question enough times that I've come up with an answer that works for me, and I'm good with that. I'm ready to move on.

Except, of course, that if I'm teaching the Crusades, I can't.

I was thinking about this today because I was thinking about how much I'm enjoying one of my current classes, and I was realizing that it wasn't so much that the students are so great or that every day goes swimmingly (though the students are pretty great and the class meetings so far have gone pretty well, but not in a way that's radically different from other classes I've taught). It's more that I'm enjoying this so much because I haven't worked through this all in my head, I don't know exactly what I think about it all, and so I get to work through all the issues with the students. To put it bluntly, I'm getting just as much out of this course as they are.

My relationship to the topic of this course is very different from my relationship to the Crusades. While this class isn't explicitly on my research (at all), a lot of it is set in the right century and country. I do find things in the course readings that I note down as relevant to my research. It's also pretty focused on a specific phenomenon, rather than a chunk of time or geographical region. Beyond that, though, I've only taught this topic once before, as a course aimed at first- and second-year students who, it turned out, were all pretty much fulfilling requirements. This time round, it's an upper-division course that fulfills no requirements. (That I know of.) So obviously that leads to a very different kind of class dynamic, one that's immensely more satisfying than in the previous incarnation.

But seriously, I really enjoy this class because I'm learning lots of cool shit. Some of that's coming from me, but a lot of it is coming from them. I didn't change the readings, so it's not that the material is new to me - but they come up with things I hadn't thought of, and I put that stuff together with things I already had thought of, and the result is something entirely new to both of us. This is one of the few courses I've taught where I feel like the students and I are collectively doing research, and coming up with what I consider honest-to-God scholarly arguments.

I hope this doesn't sound dismissive of my students' efforts in other courses. I have had many, many students who have produced really great stuff in my classes. I've had a lot of students who are way smarter than I am. But the structure of many history courses just doesn't allow for what I think of as really scholarly thinking. For instance, I used to teach the first half of the World Civ survey. I actually enjoy World History a lot, for some of the same reasons that I enjoy the Crusades. But it just seems to me that given the parameters of your average World Civ course, you're not able to address the material at what I'd consider a scholarly level. This has nothing to do with the abilities of the students; it's just that scholarship doesn't do what a World Civ course does. Comparing and contrasting the Roman and Han empires is a valuable classroom exercise and students can learn a lot from it, but in Intro to World Civ, we're never going to make that comparison in what I would consider a really scholarly way - in a way in which I learn just as much as the students, and what I learn is NOT about how better to teach the course or put materials together or emphasize themes, but is an actual understanding of the history that I wouldn't have had otherwise. At the intro level, that's because students are simply learning how to do this thing called history. Upper-division courses aren't always better, though, because they're still often divided into bigger units than your average scholar tries to tackle in their work.

Graduate seminars are probably a whole different kettle of fish. I know my program had an "Intro to Medieval History" sequence, which might not have been much more fun to teach than the undergraduate medieval survey. But there were also always those seminars that reflected the instructor's current research project, like Modernity and Violence, or The African-American Experience in South Africa - cool stuff like that. In some undergraduate contexts, you can teach courses like these; the one I'm teaching now is along these lines. But there's still always that need to teach World Civ, Western Civ, Intro to US History, etc. etc... and if you develop a cool topics course, it often ends up as a permanent addition to the catalog and a warhorse of the departmental offerings. In heavily teaching-oriented departments (as opposed to a doctoral program, perhaps), there's not always a lot of incentive to keep developing new courses, because the chances of connecting them all to your own research interests are not good, and it's a hell of a lot of work. (It's not that developing courses like these isn't work for graduate instructors, too. But if you can turn your current research project into a graduate seminar it seems to me you're making it serve double-duty in a way that's less common at undergraduate, teaching-oriented institutions.)

Obviously, me learning history is not what teaching is about. Producing scholarly work - the kind of scholarly work that teaches me something new - is not a realistic expectation for most college classes - again, not because all undergraduates are incapable of doing so (though many are, and we have to work with a range of students), but because the structure of their courses doesn't allow it. Nor is it the point. The point is for students to learn a whole bunch of stuff that, by now, I've known for a long time - but that doesn't matter, because they don't know it yet.

But me learning something new is what makes teaching fun. I take great satisfaction in my students' learning and progress, but it's not always fun.

The course I'm teaching now, though? Fun!

Language's fundamental inability to express... or something like that

I had a friend who grad school whose undergraduate majors were history and English. She chose to go to graduate school in history, she said, because she got tired of what we might call the theoretical excesses of some of her literature classmates. I particularly remember her saying that she had grown very tired of a classmate whose stock response to almost any literary conundrum was to point out "language's fundamental inability to express."

There are times when it feels like the simplest of conversations online suffer significantly from "language's fundamental inability to express."

One of my mantras about writing has always been that you don't get to say, in response to criticism, "But they didn't get it!" If you're the author, it's your responsibility to make your writing so obviously painfully staggeringly crystal clear that no one reading it can possibly "not get"  your point. (I think I got this from Howard Becker's Writing for Social Scientists,* an oldie but a goodie; he describes asking a class of graduate students to mark up each other's writing, which they set to doing with gusto. He asks them what they thought of the writing they critiqued, and they complained about sloppiness and lack of clarity and weak arguments and whatnot. Then he asked them what they thought about the comments they got back, and they universally complained that the reader "didn't get it" and was way too mean and didn't understand them. Then they realized they were talking about themselves. Great anecdote. Even if it's from another book entirely, which might be the case. But back to what I was saying...)

I really do believe that you don't get to say, "But they didn't get it."

And yet, I have also reluctantly come to the conclusion that no matter how hard you try to be just that painfully clear, you cannot control how other people read you work. Wait, let me be direct. I cannot control how other people read my work. I cannot control the circumstances under which they read it, and I cannot control the baggage they bring to the table. I cannot control the fact that some people will never "get" it when they read what I write, because somehow I've managed in blissful ignorance to push the right combinations of buttons in their brain that bring to the surface all kinds of things that I, in fact, neither said nor thought.

I think this is especially the case online, but it's not restricted to the online world; readers' reports prove this every day. I once saw two readers' reports for the same set of essays, in which the first reader praised the collection up and down as an incredibly insightful compilation - except for essay X, which was a real stinker and totally out of place and which should be excised; the second reader trashed the collection and said it was pointless and added nothing to the scholarly conversation - except for essay X, which was really rather lovely and deserved to be placed in much better company. The poor author of essay X had no control over those reactions, and honestly, I don't think they even had an awful lot to do with him/her. (No, I was not the author in question.)

Sadly, what this has also led me to conclude is that conversations about writing - especially online writing - can rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns, and it's at this point that I have to give up on my mantra. Because the problem with believing that I actually can somehow make my writing crystal clear to EVERYONE, to every possible reader, is that sometimes I find myself spending waaaaaaaaay too much time trying to counter misinterpretations, and wasting an awful lot of energy continuing to try to explain and justify myself, long after it should be clear that basically nothing is going to convince this reader of what I actually meant.

I'm not talking about simple disagreements here - disagreement is fine; I have no problem agreeing to disagree. But there are times when people aren't disagreeing, they just really aren't getting it. And the emotional energy that goes into trying to make people "get it" - well, I need that for other things.

*You know what's kind of scary? When I zipped over to Amazon to look up this book so I could provide the link, it was already listed on the front page under my recommendations.

I defy you to watch this without sobbing like a baby

In which I go on at surprising length about not much

NLLDH and I went out yesterday and explored an outlet mall in the suburbs of this fair city. It's kind of like a transplanted version of an outlet mall I visited occasionally from Former College City (it was a few hours away),  because they're done by the same people, and walking in was an odd blast from the past - I said to NLLDH, "I feel like I'm in [City X]!" He reminded me that we'd always had fun in City X, unlike Former College City, which helped me regain my equanimity.

Afterward, though, we agreed that it was a slightly sad kind of place. Maybe it's just the time of the shopping year - well after the holidays and the greedy post-holiday sale binges, but not yet quite time for spring shopping - but the place felt a little empty and desperate. It's always a bummer when you try to wallow in consumerism for a fun distraction and find yourself confronted with its fundamental emptiness.

Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy some good shopping - it's just that our fortunes were a bit mixed. I've been wanting new sunglasses forever, and we found a Sunglass Hut staffed by an actual FEMALE EMPLOYEE. Since one of our shared pet peeves is the usual fraternity-jock-stereotype guys who populate sunglasses stores, this seemed like a great opportunity, and it was even more encouraging to discover that instead of having to ask the salesperson to open each and every case for you as in the regular stores, the outlet store had all the cases open, so you could try on anything and everything without having to deal with the salesperson (I don't really like help when I shop - good salespeople are wonderful, and scarcer than hen's teeth; I prefer to be left alone than to deal with non-wonderful salespeople. Since this woman didn't seem inclined to leave her seat, we were good). Unfortunately I did try on what felt like every pair in the store and found none that floated my boat. They all seemed to be the same shape, too big and rectangular for me. Plus, NLLDH was really bonking from an early-morning run, and sunglasses are really one of those things where you need someone with you who can say, maybe/those are good/DEFINITELY NOT, and he wasn't quite up to the task at that point. And it's stupid, but something about that was really disappointing. In fact, I'm all bummed again, writing about it today. I am such a little kid.

But I did end up getting a new pair of chocolate brown ankle boots (a staple of my wardrobe, and my current pair is terribly scuffed), and a pair of pants and a blouse from (yes, wait for it) Brooks Brothers. NLLDH and the saleswoman raved over the blouse on me, and I bought the pants because I already have three pairs in other colors, although once home I was forced to acknowledge that they've changed the cut slightly and they're the tiniest bit tight in the waist. Sigh. The salespeople at Brooks Brothers, even the outlet, are actually always really good and helpful - this woman was honest about how the pants were fitting on me, so I guess I can trust her about the blouse - but again, I like to be left alone to shop. I was in the dressing room changing back into my own clothes and NLLDH was talking to the saleswoman about me, which was making me nuts (I kept thinking, "Stop talking so she'll leave and I can come out of the dressing room already!"). Anyway, he told her where I worked and all, and when I came out she was very pleasant but of course started trying to sell me more stuff (I mean, it is her job), and in an effort to push their khakis, she said, "Now, I don't know - are you allowed to wear chinos to work?" That was pretty funny, I have to confess.

So, it was a fun day in some ways, and in other ways it was sort of disappointing. This is what one gets when one attempts to acquire happiness along with material stuff, I suppose, although myself, I'm still pretty fond of material stuff. Now I'm sitting here trying to figure out how best to organize my day, and I think the first order is acquiring more stuff - but food this time. If I don't go get more cat food I think they'll end up eating me pretty soon. And then it will be time to start prepping for the weekly grind all over again.

Thomas Hart Benton/William Pannapacker has a First Person column in The Chronicle this morning, titled "The Year of Dressing Formally." That pretty much explains what it's about - about a year in which he revamped his wardrobe and went from dressing "like [he] worked in a bait-and-tackle shop" to sartorial splendor.

It's a perfectly fine column, but there's one bit that got me. Assessing his year (now over), he writes:

Although it got out of hand, I think my year of dressing formally was a worthwhile experiment. In general, professors at liberal-art colleges are encouraged to be nurturing. But I found that a higher level of formality improved my students' learning. My larger classes ran more smoothly. I had fewer disruptions, less chatter, more note-taking. I had fewer grade appeals, even though I graded more rigorously and made larger demands. I saw fewer bare feet, boxer shorts, bed hair, and pajama pants in my classrooms. E-mail messages to me almost invariably began with "Dear Professor" instead of "Hey."

I read this part, and wanted to say, Well, DUH! And I also wanted to say, Any woman professor could have told you that. Well, okay, maybe almost any is more accurate. Because while I know there are lots of women out there who teach (brilliantly and successfully) in very casual clothes, I have also had the same conversation with lots and lots of women faculty - the conversation in which we agree that in order to project a certain authority in the classroom, we dress formally for teaching.*

And those of us who feel this way have reached this conclusion long before our first post-tenure year.

Because we've HAD to figure it out - because students respond very differently to men and women teachers. I've certainly known students to mock male professors' clothing (usually when such clothing consists entirely of jackets produced in the 70s, or rotation between the same three outfits). But it's different from when they mock women professors' clothing. Bad dressing doesn't seem to undermine male professors' authority - in fact, it might enhance it: oh, look, they're so smart they don't care about clothes. If you're a woman, however, and you don't care about clothes, you're just a mess, a slob, and unworthy of respect. And if you do care about clothes, then you're frivolous and not serious about your work, and unworthy of respect. Or, god forbid, you're a slut, and obviously unworthy of respect.

I realize I'm painting with a broad brush here - I am overgeneralizing somewhat. But I don't think the reality is that far off. It's not so different from the way people respond to the presidential candidates. Sure, everyone criticizes all the candidates, because that's what you do - you pick apart their performances. So the male candidates are getting criticized, sure. But Clinton seems to get criticized no matter what she does. 

I don't mean this as a criticism of Benton/Pannapacker, either - he's just writing about his own experience. It's just funny how that one paragraph above made me grit my teeth, because he has had the luxury of figuring these things out in a different way than I had.

*I'm also not entirely convinced that his wardrobe change is the only factor at work here - he is describing his first year of teaching post-tenure, which is in itself a big change. And I'd speculate that things like "grad[ing] more rigorously and ma[king] larger demands" can themselves inspire more respect in students and improve their learning. But for the sake of both our arguments, I'll accept that it's the clothes.

Was that a pig up there in the sky?

So, I got up early this morning to go for a walk before breakfast. Well, let me amend that: it wasn't actually early, since I stayed up too late last night watching Ivanovic and Hantuchova slug it out in the Australian open, but it was as early as I ever get up of my own free will, and earlier than I've exercised for a long time. And I realize that a brisk walk isn't exactly vigorous exercise, but given how much I've been sitting lately, anything's an improvement. So I threw on various layers of stuff and went. Yay for me. Unfortunately it's cold today (about 19 degrees F) and I didn't have warm enough pants on, so I'm sitting here feeling my thighs tingle in that we-were-really-cold-so-now-we're-going-t0-burn-and-itch way. (I originally wrote I was feeling my things tingle, which, um, gives a slightly different impression than what I intended...)

Someday it would be fun to have the right gear for exercising, especially in the cold. NLLDH, who is running five days a week now, has a whole set of spiffy cold-weather running gear, including a SmartWool long-sleeved shirt and a Patagonia jacket. The problem I have is that such spiffy gear is REALLY expensive. I don't begrudge NLLDH spending $150+ on a running jacket - especially when you figure he's wearing it 5x a week - but myself, I'd rather spend that money on a pair of boots or completely frivolous consumables like perfume and bath scrubs. Plus, NLLDH is fine with wearing his running gear five days in a row, if laundry schedules necessitate, whereas I am such a sweat monster an efficient cooling machine that I hate wearing the same exercise gear more than once without washing it, which requires having more stuff, so my gear all comes from Target. And while Target has pretty decent stuff, I find that like most other inexpensive stuff, it's easier to wear the closer you are to model-sized, and so when I'm putting on layers to brave the cold I end up looking like the Michelin man, and honestly? Target exercise gear is not as nice quality as Patagonia (which is like made out of spun gold or something).

Though the nice thing about  exercising in the great outdoors, I'm realizing, is that fastidiousness is not so much of a big deal as if you're in the close quarters of a gym or fitness class - unlike the person on the next treadmill over, Joe Dog-Walker and his pup passing me in the park aren't going to be able to tell if my t-shirt is less than springtime fresh. And it's a good thing, really, that in the great outdoors you're not that up-close-and-personal with the other people out there, because the hat I have for exercising in the cold? Is one of those goofy knitted things with flaps. It just barely fits my oversized head and I look like a dork in it - a complete and utter dork. I think one of my central problems with exercise is I greatly dislike thinking I look like a dork, and I have yet to find an activity or gear that goes along with it in which I do not think I look like a dork. Something to get over, I guess - it's probably good for me to look like a dork on a regular basis. Keeps you humble and all that.

Why I teach history

Craig Smith at Free Exchange on Campus has tagged me for a meme. Inspired by Dr. Crazy's wonderful post about why she teaches literature (and how those reasons are different from the ones espoused at the MLA), he writes, I am challenging faculty to tell us why they teach and do the work they do and why academic freedom is critical to that effort. So, I'll weigh in (and then I have to tag some folks).

Not to be too much of a downer in what is supposed to be more of an inspiring thread, but to be honest? The first reason I teach history is that I wanted to be a historian, to spend my life researching and writing about history, and teaching is one of the obligations attached to that career. I don't have a problem with that; I don't resent teaching or wish it away or consider it less important than research (I think it's more important than research, actually). But I didn't get into this career to teach; I got into this career to do research (more about why below). And while I've never run into the slightest bit of interference in my research, there are still people out there who consider the topics I study invalid and politically suspect. So, yeah, academic freedom remains important.

I also teach history to help students learn that there's more than one way to view the world and that they themselves and their experiences are not the measure of all things. One of the things I've started telling students is that when a source confuses them, that's probably one of the best signs that it's telling us something important about how people in the past are different from people today. Because while I think history requires skills and you can't just "do" history just because you can read a history book, I also don't think history is like nuclear physics; the readings I assign are not usually incomprehensible (my apologies to nuclear physicists). When students are confused by something, 99% of the time it turns out they're not really confused by what the source says; they're just confused about why someone would act that way/think/say such a thing. Et voila - a teachable moment, as the saying goes. I recently taught an excerpt of the Hildebrandlied and students were confused, because here were this son and father and they didn't recognize each other and were about to fight to the death and what was that all about anyway? The reason it confused them was because, for these students at least, the idea that you could grow up knowing so little about who your father was that you could encounter him in battle and not know it - and, in fact, refuse to believe him when he tells you who he is - was incomprehensible. But such a situation wasn't incomprehensible to whoever wrote it down in the ninth century (I'm not saying that they considered it realistic or an accurate account of the past, but the situation held some resonance for them). Boom, a difference! (The father kills the son, by the way.)

That might all seem fairly esoteric, but I firmly believe that to be a responsible, respectful citizen of the world, you have to be able to recognize that not everyone sees the world the way that you do - and that doesn't make them wrong. In fact, they probably have just as good reasons for seeing the world the way they do as you do for seeing the world that you do. So I want students to understand that historically, there have been a lot of ways to organize society and live life that don't look a lot like the modern U.S., and that each of those have been reasonable responses to the circumstances in which those people found themselves. This doesn't mean I require students to accept all ways of living as equally desirable; just because I can understand that there are cultural reasons behind, for instance, female genital mutilation, doesn't mean I accept it as a valid practice. Even though I don't, however, I think you have to understand something in order to change it. Academic freedom is crucial to this - we need to be able to understand even practices we disagree with on their own terms. So we can't just label something "evil" and not try to understand it further.

Finally (and I could probably go on and on but this is getting long enough), I teach and study history because I want to know what it was like to live in another time or place. I want to know what it was like to be a medieval peasant or a woman running an eighteenth-century salon or a member of a Mongol horde - whatever, really. While on the one hand I could say this is just due to insatiable curiosity, I think the cause runs deeper: I have always wondered how much of "me" is me, and how much is the creation of the time in which I live. I've wondered, for instance, whether, if I grew up in the antebellum south, I'd have supported slavery, even though the idea is abhorrent to the me I am now. It's nice to think I'd have stood up for equality and justice and denounced slavery, but honestly? if I'd grown up in a slave-owning culture, as a white woman, I can't see why I'd have been any different from the thousands of Americans who did support  it. So I think I'm constantly driven to figure out what people were like in the past to figure out the ways in which I, too, am a creature of my own culture. This, too, depends on academic freedom, because I need to know what it was really like, whenever and wherever - not just what it's politic to think it was like. 

Hmmm. Two out of three of these are completely selfish, aren't they? Although I suppose the third reason is easy enough to turn outwards: I want students also to recognize that they are creations of the culture in which they live - that they are not the culmination of a mysterious process called "progress," the pinnacle to which all of human existence has been moving. They are trapped in their own culture and it's only by figuring out how people in the past were trapped in theirs that they have any hope of escape. That may sound hostile towards my students, but truly, I don't mean it that way; I don't resent them or dislike them for being who they are. I just think that history can make them that much better.

History makes everything better. ;-)

So, the tagging: I'm going to tag a whole bunch of premodern folk - Anastasia, Dr. Virago, Bardiac (though I guess you might be a little busy right now!), Flavia, squadratomagic, and Another Damned Medievalist. And anyone else who wants to participate should feel free!

Advice on how to write a lot (not from me)

I've probably mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of the self-help genre, so when I saw someone (probably at a blog, but I completely forget where) reference Paul J. Silvia's How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, I said to myself, Self, you know you want to read that. So I did, most of it while waiting for my car to be serviced a week or so ago - it's a slim little volume of under 150 pages, and it's very approachable. Much of what he says can be found in Robert Boice's Professors as Writers (or reworked with other good stuff in his Advice for New Faculty Members), but Silvia's presentation is refreshing, largely amusing, and generally effective.

Silvia's main point is that writing is hard and that people don't usually like to do it, but the fact is that academics have to write, so rather than spending a lot of time deeply analyzing the roots of one's particular phobias about writing, one just needs to do it. That sounds like the Nike school of writing methodology, and that's not far off, but I think what Silvia's really trying to do is demystify writing - by pointing out that it's an activity just like any other, and a skill that anyone can learn and incorporate into his or her life, not a mystical process that requires years of psychoanalysis.

The crucial tool Silvia offers up for doing so is a schedule. He states, "This book cannot help you unless you accept the principle of scheduling, because the only way to write a lot is to write regularly, regardless of whether you feel like writing." (28) He doesn't care how long you write at a time, just that you write regularly. His chapter on "Specious Barriers to Writing a Lot" is probably the most helpful of the book, partly because his humorous presentation succeeds in graphically puncturing the pretentions behind many of the "specious barriers."

For instance, he identifies "Specious Barrier 1" as: "'I can't find time to write,' also known as 'I would write more if I could just find big blocks of time.'" (11) As Silvia points out, academics have used this excuse since time immemorial, and it's a nicely reassuring excuse because it suggests that not writing so much isn't really your fault - it's about your circumstances. He then proceeds to shred any plausibility this excuse has ever had:

Why is this barrier specious? The key lies in the word find. When people endorse this specious barrier, I imagine them roaming through their schedules like naturalists in search of Time to Write, that most elusive and secretive of creatures. Do you need to "find time to teach"? Of course not - you have a teaching schedule and you never miss it. If you think that writing time is lurking somewhere, hidden deep within your weekly schedule, you will never write a lot. (12)

Instead, academics must "allot" time to write, not find it. Those academics who claim not to be schedule people, are, he says, "masterly schedulers at other times: They always teach at the same time, go to bed at the same time, watch their favorite TV shows at the same time, and so on." (14) Therefore, to claim that they can't figure out how to schedule a time to write is nonsense.

Now, this made me laugh. It also made me wince, because it describes me far more closely than I'd like. And it made me take a closer look at my writing habits and carve out time only for writing. (After all, one of the upsides of my current gig is that there aren't that many hours of the week when it matters to anyone else where I am and what I'm doing.)

Silvia's "Specious Barrier 2" is "'I need to do some more analyses first,' aka, 'I need to read a few more articles,'" and his solution is another one of my favorite parts of the book: do your reading during your writing time. (18) In essence, although he doesn't say this explicitly, he defines "writing time" as "time for doing whatever you need to get done in order ultimately to be able to produce writing" - and for me, this articulates and resolves one of the problems I've had with other academic writing guides. Because while I know some people do this, I don't neatly separate reading/researching from writing - it's only by writing that I figure out what else it is I need to research, and vice versa. Advice about writing that treats writing only as the actual process of putting words to paper always left me uneasy, subconsciously, because it overlooked all the kinds of looking things up and revisiting of articles and books and so on that are an integral part of my writing process. I probably shouldn't have needed someone to tell me that yes, such work IS writing work, but at heart, that's what Silvia does in discussing Specious Barrier 2, and I have to admit, it's a little liberating to hear.

Silvia's other Specious Barriers are that one would write more if one had a better computer/chair/desk/etc., and that one can only write when one feels inspired, and he dispatches them just as expeditiously (in the case of the latter, relying heavily on Boice's research about levels of writing productivity in scheduled sessions versus "inspired" sessions). His comments about the physical space of writing are an especially nice corrective to guides that emphasize having space to yourself and a space only for your writing, where you do nothing else - certainly a dedicated workspace is a good thing, but it's also good to remember that in its absence, it's still possible to write.

After demolishing the Specious Barriers to writing, Silvia discusses motivational tools, particularly setting goals, setting priorities, and monitoring one's progress. His next chapter describes how to set up a writing group in order to enforce writing on a schedule; he then has chapters on writing style, how to write journal articles, how to write books, and a conclusion.

Overall, his book is entertaining and sensible, but after its first two chapters it grows increasingly discipline-specific. Silvia is a psychologist, writing for psychologists (the book was published by the APA), and some of his advice is less well-suited for non-psychologists. For instance, he describes writing journal articles as following a formula, and argues that once one has mastered the formula, writing articles is easy; he proceeds to outline the typical sections of a social-science article. That's all very well and good for psychologists, but less helpful for those in the humanities, whose articles are more free-wheeling. Now, of course, Silvia's not talking to such people; I just want to point out that non-psychologists will find much of value in his book, but not everything.

I'm also not sure what I think of his discussion of writer's block, which he dismisses somewhat brutally:

I love writer's block. I love it for the same reasons I love tree spirits and talking woodland creatures - they're charming and they don't exist. When people tell me they have writer's block, I ask, "What on earth are you trying to write?" Academic writers cannot get writer's block. Don't confuse yourself with your friends teaching creative writing in the fine arts department. You're not crafting a deep narrative or composing metaphors that expose mysteries of the human heart. The subtlety of your analysis will not move readers to tears, although the tediousness of it might.People will not photocopy your reference list and pass it out friends whom they wish to inspire. Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.

Writer's block is a good example of a dispositional fallacy: A description of behavior can't also explain the described behavior. Writer's block is nothing more than the behavior of not writing. Saying that you can't write because of writer's block is merely saying that you can't write because you aren't writing. It's trivial. The cure for writer's block - if you can cure a specious affliction - is writing....

One of the great mysteries of the writing schedule system - a spooky mystery, in fact - is that scheduled writer's don't get writer's block, whatever that is. Prolific writers follow their schedule regardless of whether they feel like writing. Some days they don't write much - writing is a grim business, after all - but they're nevertheless sitting and writing.

I appreciate this, but I'm not sure I completely agree with it, because I think he paints what academic writers do with too broad a brush. For one thing: what is spray-painting a basement if not a metaphor? For another, without overestimating its importance, I think humanities writing needs to borrow more from the novelists and poets at times than perhaps psychological writing does. I also get the sense Silvia's never suffered from writer's block himself, and that perhaps he doesn't realize how it's possible for those days when writers don't write much to start to accumulate and make someone's life sheer hell. I realize, though, that this may simply mean that I'm too attached to writer's block as an excuse for my own lack of productivity at times. In any case, his blunt perspective shocks the reader into thinking about writer's block in a new way, which is useful.

Silvia's discussions of style and the mechanics of submitting to journals or book publishers are fine, though they seem a little cursory; if these are the areas of writing about which you have the most questions, Beth Luey's Handbook for Academic Authors or William Germano's Getting It Published will be much more helpful. In fact, it's hard not to come away from How to Write a Lot with the impression that Silvia's real contribution here - and what interests him most - is the concept of Specious Barriers, and that much of the rest of the book is a more or less conventional retelling of advice available in many other formats. He presents it well, however, and his direct discussion of why the excuses we make for not writing are just that - excuses, and pretty sorry ones to boot - is definitely worth a read.

Nothing blew up

Sorry not to update sooner about the stove, but no, it has not done away with me! The nice maintenance guy (kid) came and checked the connections and unplugged everything and told me that his supervisor told him that the same thing had happened to another tenant, and that the management company would replace the stove. More maintenance people came by the next day and tried everything again, and of course, once re-plugged the stove worked perfectly, but (according to NLLDH who was home for this) the one guy overruled the other and insisted that if this had happened once it would happen again and rather than inconvenience the nice tenants, we were getting a new stove. Which would take about a week. Since then, the stove's been perfectly fine, but I won't complain about a new one - this one is pretty ultra-cheap and I'm hoping that a new one might have a couple more amenities (like maybe a light that goes on/off when the oven reaches the correct temperature? Right now we just have to guess). But I can't imagine that there are that many options when you're looking for a stove as small as ours needs to be.

In any case, I didn't update sooner because I have been in the ne plus ultra of all craptacular foul moods this week, especially regarding blogging, but as tomorrow is my last teaching day of the week and I found a new job to apply for, I'm feeling much cheerier. Not especially inspired with interesting insights, mind you, but cheerier.

If I disappear, question the stove

You know how if you have a gas stove, when you turn the burner on, you turn it all the way up to light it, and you can hear that click click click click of the flint (or whatever) sparking, and then the pooof! of the gas igniting into the pretty blue flame? (at least, this is what happens when you have a cheap little stove like the one in my apartment.)

I had been using the stove earlier this afternoon, but in fact wasn't anywhere near it - all the burners were turned off - when I heard the click click click click of the ignition.

And it didn't stop.

click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click

It's still going.

click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click

My stove is possessed.