* I'm going to the fiber fest. This morning, while working out, I looked over at my big bag of sock yarn (I store it in the same room where the cross-country skiier is) and said to myself, "Go, but you shouldn't buy anything. You have all this yarn already you are not knitting up." My knitting mojo has kind of left me. I'm not sure why. (I will still probably buy something, I'm sure I will see something that has that "you won't ever see this for sale again anywhere" vibe)
* I'm still thinking about that motivational speech. And damme, this is how stuff makes me doubt myself. A part of it was on "innovation in teaching" and of course it was the same old "You gotta ENTERTAIN them. Don't chalk-and-talk! Do discussion! Stand on your head! Be the cool professor!"
And on the one hand: I resist that. Yes, I chalk-and-talk in a lot of my classes. But I still get the equivalent of a 90% on my student evaluations. I'm not convinced our students want too much entertainment, at least not the ones who are focused on learning and getting a good career.
On the other hand, it's such a seductive thing to hear....and you look around the room, and wonder, "Am I the only one who still lectures? Am I a dinosaur? Am I actually the 'deadwood' in my department because I'm not trying to innovate, because I'm not spending hours developing Internet resources for teaching?"
I don't know - I tend to be suspicious of changing something that currently works just for the virtue of changing, but I feel like people may be judging me harshly for doing stuff old-school. And if peer evaluations come, as we're being told they are....well, will I be threatened with something if I don't change to a more "active" or "student-centered" or whatever the buzzword is now style? And also it awakens all my "You're not doing enough, you're not working hard enough" thoughts. (And the fact that those keep coming back tell me maybe they're right.) That I need to be pushing more to innovate or some damn thing. That what I've done in the past and what works is not good enough because it's already been done. I don't know.
It makes me sad because for years my default setting was "I'm terrible at what I do" and just when I get some confirmation that I'm NOT, then I hear this talk and I start to doubt myself all over again.
Also, the whole "be the cool professor" thing just raises my hackles. Why should I HAVE to? I earned a Ph.D., I got a job, I got tenure, I've published papers, I meet all my responsibilites and all of those things without striving to be cool. Do I HAVE to add "strive to be cool" on top of the pile of everything I already do? Substance is more important than style, and I have worked hard over the years to develop substance, and it makes me angry to be told that style is really what matters.
* So I guess the "motivational" speech was really a "demotivational" speech for me. Funny how that works.
* Actually, a lot of this self-doubt is a side effect of being part of an excellent department. I probably wouldn't want it otherwise, I wouldn't want to be the lone star in a department full of slackers. I'd resent it more if I felt like I was the only person carrying her weight.
* Several people I am counting on for stuff have not gotten back to me and this also is making me distressed. I can't just let it go because it's one of those things where I will wind up being "the bad guy" if what needs to be done doesn't get done.
* Today is the 100th anniversary of John. T. Curtis' birth. He is one of the best-known Midwestern plant ecologists. For a time, they even had an "intellectual family tree" for him. (You may have heard of "Erdos numbers" - which is how many links there are between a given mathematician and someone who knew Paul Erdos? this is kind of the same thing). If I remember correctly, my advisor is kind of an intellectual grand-nephew of his, as he was taught by someone who had worked alongside of Curtis on his research.
And here's an embarrassing little admission - years and years ago now (it might even be as much as 20 years, I think it was), I was at the ESA meetings in Madison (this was before they got so big and so expensive - they were actually held in the student union) and they had a "family tree" of all of Curtis' "descendants." And the way you got on there yourself, if you were working with someone who had worked with Curtis or one of his students, was to earn your Ph.D. and get a tenure-track position teaching ecology. And it's weird what motivates me (and also what demotivates me), but that chart....I wanted to become part of it someday. (I suppose it's partly a hunger to feel like I have a place I "fit in." So much of my school years were spent feeling like I never fit in with my peer group). And that actually pushed me to work towards a Ph.D. (I was almost done with my Master's thesis at the time). And it helped solidify the vague idea I had of becoming a professor.
I don't know if that pedigree chart still exists or not, and if it does, if my name has been added to it. (If I ever see it again, I hope I can find that it has).
I know that's a bizarre and somewhat trivial thing to be motivated by, but that's how my mind works. Or maybe I already had the decision in mind and this just made me able to state it explicitly, I don't know.
* I took the Dialect Survey that is available at this site. Interestingly, it looks like my time in Oklahoma (currently longer than my time in Illinois) has not affected my dialect much:
I suspect that strongest-similarlty to northern Illinois and Wisconsin stems from the fact that my dad's originally from Wilmette, and my mom grew up in Northern Michigan, and they were the other humans I was around most during my language-forming years.
I find these kinds of things really interesting. (And apparently the fact that I call rain-when-the-sun-shines "The Devil is beating his wife" doesn't make my speech trend "more Southern," even though people tell me that's a Southern-ism.)
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