#AcWriMo - Academic Writing Month (Part 3)

Ambivalence. As #AcWriMo2014 winds down, I have mixed impressions of my success. I produced what I set out to (and then some), which is gratifying during such a busy time of year. As planned, I:

• Completed and submitted a teaching enhancement grant application
• Completed and submitted my first year self-report
• Finished and submitted two in-progress papers (including my first solo-authored!)
• Make significant progress on a (major) revise and resubmit invitation for my dissertation manuscript

I also submitted four conference abstracts (three with student co-authors), attended the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies conference to present two posters (one an Obesity & Eating Disorders SIG citation selection), and received word that my submission to the Society of Behavioral Medicine annual meeting was accepted as a paper presentation. All of this is fantastic, and I'm delighted to share the success with students.

Up next, I'll find out whether my department votes to keep me (i.e., the result of my first year report) on Tuesday, December 2nd; I'll hear about the teaching grant sometime before the end of the semester (December 16th). Manuscript submissions? As always, it's anyone's guess. (Though very nice to have them on someone else's plate, so they can linger for a while without complaint from me.) I hope to send the R&R off to co-authors for feedback in the next few days.

So why the ambivalence, if I met my goals? The goal that I didn't meet had much less to to with outcome than with process: I committed to writing for one hour per day (or two half hours), and as noted, I did not meet this goal 2-3 days per week. Even after recommitting to blocking out time, the MWF teaching/office hours/seminar schedule got the best of me. I did meet my goal on two of four Mondays and one of four Wednesdays and Fridays, which is decent considering everything else going on. But every blog, book, and tweet about being a productive writer, from productive writers, recommends a daily writing habit, and there is something alluring about such consistency. 

Perhaps what #AcWriMo has taught me is that I don't need daily writing to be "productive" at my desired level. I can continue to strive for this goal or knuckle down when I need to finish something, but beating myself up isn't necessary. Maybe relief, or disbelief, is manifesting as ambivalence? Either way, maybe it's time to lighten up.

Credit where it is due. I'm immensely grateful to Charlotte Frost at PhD2Published, who started the initiative, and to the hundreds of academics who posted tweets of progress and support. Especially @ATRWibben, @JosephsonJyl, and @iladylayla (aka the Global #AcWri Team) for their company and encouragement during writing episodes. Being part of the community has made the frenzy of #AcWriMo enjoyable. Sign me up for next year!

#AcWriMo - Academic Writing Month (Part 2)

November. The first semester has hummed along at a steady clip for two months. I've had time to get to know colleagues, write and submit, run, and even relax a little. It seemed that I might achieve work-life balance after many years without it. 

Then, BAM - November! This is me on 11/14:

Now I know why November is #AcWRiMo - so easy to get caught up in other tasks! Tomorrow = reflection on the first two weeks, and planning.
— Dr. Danielle Arigo (@DaniArigo) November 14, 2014

Let's review. I knew that it would be a busy month. I had decided to apply for a teaching grant (due 11/3) to buy materials for a new course. I'm traveling for a conference the weekend before Thanksgiving, and then again for the holiday, plus I agreed to  do a guest lecture on eating disorders in a sports psychology course. And that first year self-report, due the 24th, which needs to be drafted early enough that generous colleagues can provide feedback. So I needed to get ahead of the game. 

My #AcWriMo goals included a mix of necessary tasks and additional objectives, which I thought were reasonable:

• Complete teaching enhancement grant
• Complete first year self-report
• Finish and submit two in-progress papers
• Revise and resubmit dissertation manuscript

It started with the teaching grant application. Syllabus for a new course I've never taught, timeline, budget, proposal, and letter of support (which I wrote myself). Despite my head start, there was a bit of cramming the night before to make the pieces cohere. Fortunately, the eating disorders lecture occurred in the same week span as the same topic in my own courses, so there was only a bit of extra work there. Though I learned that four straight hours of teaching with no break = fatigue and the 10,000-step buzz from my FitBit by 1:00 pm. Conference poster is nearly done, I've made steady progress on the revision and first year report. And I submitted one of those in-progress manuscripts.

So where am I? The concrete achievements sound pretty good, except that the workload is catching up to me. I set a goal of writing for at least one hour every day, as I would really like to get into a daily writing habit. The first week went well; I skipped one day, but exceeded the total for the week. I realized that finishing the revisions for an invited resubmission is NOT reasonable, considering the work involved. So I edited that one to "address revise and resubmit invitation," which I can make progress on for the next few weeks. 

But this week, I skipped three days of writing - my teaching days, which are exceptionally busy, and require either early mornings or late evenings to squeeze in writing. One hour isn't that much, so I could have done this. Though I realized that I really, really enjoy having nights off during the week. Right now, I don't think I'm willing to spend two or three nights per week working. I've done it for years and I'm tired. I could feel guilty about this, but I think it's reasonable. I think about Tanya Golash-Boza's commitment to a 40-hour week and wonder if it's possible to achieve it as a junior faculty member. So I have to think of another way.

Some options include:

• Spending less time on Twitter
• Breaking the hour into 20-minute blocks
• Closing the door after office hours, no matter who wants what
• Accepting that MWF are not writing days

I don't like the first or the last; I get a lot from the academic support and suggestion network on Twitter, and I learn about valuable research in my area. And I'm not a quitter. So this week, despite travel, I will schedule time to write each day and commit to sticking with it. Wish me luck.

#AcWriMo - Academic Writing Month 2014 (Part 1)

It starts! November 1st marked Day 1 of Academic Writing Month - a month-long effort to set goals, work toward them, and hold yourself accountable. You can read the history and full instructions here; in brief, you set writing goals, identify your plan for accomplishing them, and check in each day using the publicly shared accountability spreadsheet. Many academics say that this burst of community-oriented writing invigorates them and increases their productivity. As this is my first year participating, it's a good time to (1) discuss goals, and (2) reflect on how to improve my writing process.

#1: Goals. November already is a busy month for me, so setting goals wasn't terribly difficult. Here are the ones I included on the accountability sheet:

• Finish and submit a teaching enhancement grant (i.e., a proposal to earn extra money for teaching equipment and other resources)
• Put the final touches on two nearly-done manuscripts, and submit both
• Complete requested major revisions to my dissertation manuscript, and resubmit
• Complete my first year faculty self-report (i.e., a summary of what I've done so far/why my institution should rehire me for year two/goals for next year)

The teaching grant and the self-report have hard deadlines, which are early and late in the month, respectively. (At the time of this post, I've already submitted the teaching grant. Hooray!) In the middle, I have two manuscripts that require a few hours each, and a set of major revisions that will take several days (at least). 

My plan is to focus one hour per day on writing, either all at once or split up into chunks. It's not much every day. But considering that teaching prep takes a good deal of time, and I have endless stacks of exams to grade this month, an hour every day will be an accomplishment. Writing here, counts, as well :)

#2: Process. I realized long ago that being a great writer takes more effort than I've been willing to give. For example, this excerpt from an advertisement for Hands On Writing sums up my process while in training (red = my edits):

This is how I (unrealistically) thought I would improve my academic writing back at the start of my PhD. Please feel free to laugh:

• I write something. I send the first un-revised draft to somebody (usually) more senior than me asking for feedback. 
• I will go to “track changes” and accept all of them automatically (so I save time). 
• Write some more and re-do the feedback accept-all-changes step. 
• Rarely - When the reviewer says it is good enough, read the document, try to find the 13498986 differences with my first draft so I can  learn some lessons for next time I have to write. 
• Forget everything quite a lot the next day.

I internalized some basics, like how NOT to use a colon and striving to keep sentences short. And my academic writing has improved dramatically over the past few years; I can tell when I read others' writing and I find ways to improve clarity. But I wonder how much better my writing would be today had I paid more attention to the process during training. 

These days, I still rely on others' feedback. I'm rubbish at finding the holes in my own logic and even worse at spotting typos. So a good friend and I trade documents and give each other comments, which has been helpful. I also include my undergraduate students in the process, by encouraging them to compare early- and late-stage cooperative pieces and asking them to proofread for me. And I read as much as I can. I often read about writing, of course. 

But I've also recommitted to reading books, for several reasons. One of which is that staying immersed in others' writing helps me stay in tune with what writing should (or shouldn't) look like. I'm partway through David Quammen's Spillover (about zoonotic diseases) and William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep (about problems with higher education). Both informative and timely for entirely different reasons. (More to come on these, I suspect.)

It's Day Four of #AcWriMo, and I'm going strong. Fingers crossed that we all keep it up!

The 50-Minute Lecture

50 minutes. Depending on the activity, this could sound like a lot. Actually, having 50 minutes of uninterrupted reading time, or 50 minutes to go for a run, or 50 minutes to watch an episode of House of Cards sounds luxurious. But in the context of teaching a subject you know well, it's nothing. Nothing! It amounts to consistently running out of time and having to cut from your carefully-designed slides. Which throws off the schedule and gives students an excuse not to read ahead. And leaves me considering whether to leave material out completely or expect that (undergraduate) students learn it on their own. 

Let's figure out why 50 minutes is so difficult. Well, the first few minutes are occupied with housekeeping, announcements, collecting or returning homework, and students coming in late. (The last is something to work on.) So 45 minutes at best. Any review takes up another 5 minutes. (I do this once per week in my 100-level class.) So as not to bore students to tears, I try to craft learning exercises, which take up 10 minutes at the very least.* Add or substitute one video clip with any discussion whatsoever (5 minutes). For example, today we covered psychotic disorders in Abnormal Psychology, and I worked in some Ryan Gosling. Effective, but time-consuming.

That's 20-30 minutes of actual lecture. How many slides can you get through in 30 minutes? I can get through 10, if it's a really good day (i.e., if students have read and there aren't any tangential questions). How many do I have prepared for each lecture? Minimum is 12, mean is 14. Compounded over a week, that's almost a full lecture behind.

So what goes wrong? Well, most students don't read, so we waste time with me waiting for them to answer my questions. (Sometimes they don't even seem to have opinions about concepts like identity or friendship, which is beyond me.) Maybe I should pick out only one or two main concepts, and cover those in detail. Maybe I should give more quizzes to ensure that students are reading, so that I don't feel any pressure to review everything important in class. Something needs to change; my midterm evaluations were quite positive, but it seems as though we've gone downhill since then. Though I'm not yet sure how much is me and how much is middle-of-the-semester laziness.

Based on several sources of recommendation (e.g., word of mouth, student feedback, this recent article about using PowerPoint in the classroom) I've started breaking up even non-wordy slides to make sure that each one is visible and useful. My "lecture" style relies heavily on eliciting responses from students; I naturally pause at least once every 2-3 minutes to ask students for factual information (from the readings) or their opinions about concepts. What keeps my prep time down is that I don't plan out these questions in advance. Keeps the lecture conversational, but likely wastes a lot of valuable time.

I need resources. What else do you recommend as a source for tips on planning lectures? I regularly read research/academic writing sources, but I haven't found the treasure trove of teaching wisdom yet. Share your favorites in the comments.



*I admit that sometimes I dispense with this.

Underway

Week 5. Five weeks into my first semester, and it's starting to seem.... normal. I'm beginning to settle into the weekly routine of teaching, office hours, research, and lab meetings. Extras like department and union meetings, coffee with colleagues, working through sticky professional situations, and student inquiries can make or break a productive week. 

But as many seasoned academics recommend, I'm learning to see the big picture.

For example, 2013 was a rough year for publications. The main paper from my dissertation and my first paper on postdoc each were rejected by multiple journals, and other papers were VERY slow-going. It wasn't until this summer that submissions really picked up, and I'm happy (and grateful) to report that I recently received three revise and resubmit invitations. (Three rejections, too, but that's still a marked improvement.) 

The R&R invitations coincided with the first few weeks of classes, of course, so I haven't turned them around as quickly as I would have six months ago. And I came very close to being frustrated with myself for not doing any revision last week, which was a difficult and stressful week all around. Why? Each paper has a deadline, of course, but those aren't for a few weeks yet. But my first year review occurs at the beginning of December (yes, after three months on the job), and I have to submit my report before Thanksgiving. Wouldn't it be great to have a paper acceptance - or at least, revision submissions - listed as completed during my first few months?

In addition, one of the recent R&R invitations was for my former undergrad research coordinator's first first-authored manuscript, so I have quite a bit of mentorly pride about that one. And it's motivating me to get my new undergraduates going on their own projects ASAP. Two are assisting with a conference submission (due in two weeks), and two will have an independent study with me next semester to prepare for their senior theses. That will look great on my report! Plus the new course I'm creating for the university and prepping from scratch!

Wait - I've only been on the job for five weeks?!? What am I getting myself into?

Fortunately, I realized something important that has buffered against the worst of the stress and guilt that can come from an "unproductive" week. (And by "unproductive," of course I mean that I've prepared for my classes, given exams, and participated in meetings.) I've worked for more than a decade to acquire a faculty job. Which I have now. In a place where research productivity is fully supported, but no one breathes down your neck abut the number of papers or grants you have. I don't need to keep up the same pace that I had over the past eight years. I need to get out of the trainee mindset.

I don't intend to stop being productive, certainly. Having acquired a job doesn't mean that I can just sit around now. But I need to think long-term and pace myself, so that I don't burn out. (I used to think that I'd never burn out. Ha!)

So far, my first year report will include:

• Midsemester evaluations for three courses
• Two guest lectures and an extracurricular seminar
• Creating a new course
• Supervising six RAs and three TAs (two RAs on a conference submission with me)
• Two IRB submissions, data collection for one project underway
• Attending one conference (four posters, one as first author) and submitting to two conferences (four or five abstracts total, three as first author)
• Three R&R invitations and resubmissions, one new submission
• Two external grant submissions (one as co-investigator and one as consultant), one internal teaching grant submission
• Participation in new faculty mentee activities and union meetings

This needs to be enough for three months of work. My goal for this weekend is to plan when to work on projects and papers that are not on this list, with emphasis on intersession and summer. And to add me-time goals to this list, like training for a half-marathon that will happen in April, and taking a real vacation. 

Somehow it always comes back to vacation.... Leave me some suggestions for my first real one in ages.

The First Two Weeks

Well, it's for real. I wrote syllabi. Students showed up last Monday, pens in hand, and made frantic attempts to write down everything I projected onscreen. Three interesting points about this simple observation:

(1) Yes, I said PENS, not keyboards. And WRITE, not type. Three classes, approximately 110 students (less than half of whom are freshmen), and only three who regularly type during class. A pleasant surprise - definitely cuts down on the time I spend policing in class. Though they still seem surprised that I want hard copies of their assignments.... go figure.

(2) Some things haven't changed since I last taught, in 2011 - students made the mistake of assuming that the words on the PowerPoint were the (only) important ones. Or they tried to write down everything on the screen and everything I said, which is a nonsignificant improvement. I decided to nip this behavior in the bud with the freshmen by doing a bit of coaching. 

On day 2, I asked everyone to put down their pens/stop typing and just engage with what I presented. I spent a few minutes discussing the "nature-nurture" question with respect to human behavior and ended by guiding students toward the conclusion that both contribute. Then I asked students to summarize the discussion in their own words. After a few lengthy summaries, we got down to a one-sentence overview; I encouraged students to write down this one-sentence summary, rather than trying to record all of the detail and missing the context of the conversation. The goal was to help them learn, rather than simply memorize. We'll see how well it worked when the first exam comes around.

(3) Eight months after I accepted a faculty position, I stood at the front of a classroom and didn't have to correct students who called me "professor." I have a two-room office, a one-room research lab, six research assistants, and three teaching assistants. I spend a lot of time on my own work. I'm getting used to this, but it's still strange, in a very pleasant way.

One final note about the first week of class, in particular: I spent most of it without a voice, due to a bad cold and consequent laryngitis. I croaked through two of three class days, three hours each day, plus a lab meeting. I got creative on the second bad day, by spending extra class time on an activity and inviting my TAs to give students feedback as they started an assignment. And in between teaching, I took a real sick day - watched/slept through several movies while lying on the couch. 

Eventful, and enjoyable, first two weeks as faculty. Now I need to work on my website.

Orienting

So close! With less than one week to go before the semester commences, the house was (mostly) unpacked, my office was (mostly) in order, and syllabi were (almost) ready to go to the printer. Still so much to do: create a website, order lab equipment, organize my research team, and finalize the first week of class. I could have made significant progress in each of these areas, if not for the mandatory welcome party - three days of university orientation.

Let me be clear. I looked forward to meeting other new faculty and learning something about Jesuit education. (I'm woefully ignorant.) But few faculty - and really, few employees across the board - have fond memories of orientation. And the week before classes begin seemed (and still does seem) like the worst possible time to tear us away from actual preparation, in order to talk about preparation. Logistics rule the planning here, as there isn't another time when new faculty all will be in town and not otherwise occupied. That I understand. And I've taught my own classes before, so I should be able to make significant progress on course prep without orientation.

Yet here are all of the incredibly useful information I learned this week, which would have been even more helpful a month ago:

- How to write and assess student learning outcomes (and that this is mandatory)
- How to use the new online course management system, Desire2Learn (already rebranded  as Brightspace, though no one seems to know that)
- What to include in a syllabus (summary: everything you can think of, or you'll spend the  entire semester answering questions about policies)
- Who my assigned mentor is (another resource for preparing to move!)
- What the tech support center does and does not do/have (no, they don't loan out  PowerPoint remotes; thank goodness for Amazon two-day shipping!)
- How long it takes to get approved to edit your own website (many days, and I don't have  access yet)

In addition, some fun tidbits:

- The faculty union meetings (and its president) are VERY entertaining
- The Provost is new; he started on July 1st (repeat, repeat, repeat....)
- The library administration redirects absolutely every possible topic to the library, its resources, and new student study center (and I do know a lot about the library now)
- The library administration assumes that you come from an institution where you had to pay for interlibrary loan (poor souls who did)
- Time/priority management is on the agenda, but we will run out of time and not discuss it (yes, this happened)

My wish for more advanced notice notwithstanding, I must say that my university did a wonderful job of making us feel welcome and supported. This is a consistent theme here; not a day has gone by that hasn't included friendly offers for help, advice, and/or lunchtime companionship. Even though this often presents a jarring contrast to my previous job environment, the transition couldn't have been more smooth for me. In addition to the move, setting up, and orientation, I even managed to draft 95% of a manuscript this month!

So, am I 'oriented?" Let's see. I know where the campus coffee shops are, and their employees know me. I've been extremely productive in my office - both course prep and manuscript writing have enjoyed significant progress there. My syllabi have been printed, typos and all. (I managed to misspell the first and last names of one TA. Can you beat that?) Still plenty to do before 9:00 am on Monday, but I'm feeling pretty good.