a balance-drainer

Lately, I have felt exhausted.

It is probably related to many things, not the least of which is my current pregnancy. Yes, growing an alien being inside one’s body does tend to drain one.

But, this is as much a mental and emotional drain as anything.

It could be related to the fact that we are in the process of trying to buy a house. Nothing like adding a little life-change to the life-changes in progress!

But, this can be traced back to a single source. A digital source.

Facebook.

Like so many of my fellow citizens, I have been disheartened, enraged, dumbfounded and disappointed in turns by the recent political events in our nation. Like so many, I feel powerless to stop so many of the relentless news items of the past few weeks. I’ve been uplifted by small victories, by shows of solidarity, and by friends and co-workers all doing their quiet, steady best to stand against the seeming tidal wave of crap.

I have been able to access so many of these small victories through my Facebook feed. I have also been able to engage in some debates-so far mainly with family members!-through the same feed.

I find these debates exhausting. I have been preoccupied with composing my responses. I’ve been alternately angry and annoyed at the comments to some of my posts. (I asked for that, no? I did post articles and opinions to this mostly-public forum.) I have spent a lot of time engaging with those comments. Working my words like clay, into civil. (hopefully) thoughtful responses infused with as much kindness and good humor as I can muster. I am so tired.

What’s more, I find that these engagements are distracting me from other, necessary work. So, I am asking a question again that I have asked many times before: does social networking drain my work-life balance? I certainly feel off-kilter.

Though it is difficult to engage with friends and family about these current political issues, I also feel very strongly that I ought not avoid it entirely. (I did briefly fantasize about deleted ALL my social media accounts!) Though it is difficult, it is needed. And if I cannot or will not speak up about issues in a rational, kind way, who will? I at least, need to do my best on this front.

For now, I am going to stay off of Facebook. At least until I get the next batch of papers graded!

 

#worklifebalance in higher ed

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Week two of my Social Media Ethos Project. Some interesting results so far, even in just how I am thinking about my Twitter feed. For example, when I have hopped on the past few days, I do so with much more purpose. I no longer scroll endlessly, slack-jawed and glazing over. I am looking for particularly relevant content. I am looking for something. This has helped me: a) not feel so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content I’m scrolling through, and b) has made it easier to dis-engage after a discrete period of time.

Also, knowing that I won’t as easily be “sucked in” to an overwhelming and purpose-less scroll-through has helped me engage more. I used to just avoid the platform altogether.

This week, I posted a bit more boldly on the theme of work-life balance. I am employing the hashtags…

#worklifebalance, usually paired with:

#highered

and most recently,

#higheredworklifebalance

That last one feels a bit unwieldy. But I have to say that due to my increased activity, I’ve seen an increase in reactions to tweets and even gained some followers (6 total).

Specifically, in response to my re-tweeting of her article on why she left academia to start a consulting business, Katie Taylor tweeted at me:

I, of course, liked this tweet and immediately “replied.” The problem with that last step is that I am having trouble finding the reply, or confirming that I actually did hit “send.” I want to respond to her to continue this conversation (my original reply had to do with my thoughts about “balance” as more “homeostasis” than a static state…), however, I’m running into a social-norm-constraint of the genre and platform. If I did manage to reply before, I don’t want to repeat myself. If I didn’t…there is no way to know…

However, I find it interesting that Katie is able to tweet about the fact that there is no panacea. Flexibility indeed doesn’t always equal balance, it just might make it more self-directed than outside-directed (which can be harder for some).

I also noticed 3 likes and 4 re-tweets of an article and accompanying tweet I composed on the 24th:

I am interested into why this tweet, more than the others with similar hashtags, was picked up. It may be the fact that the original article was posted by NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English), and since that is a large professional organization, it would have a) more credibility and b) a wider following than an individual like myself.

Overall, my experience with this project has been fascinating. I’m looking forward to continuing my journey and learning more about Twitter and my own ethos as it develops on this social media platform.

Social Media Ethos Project

New semester, new experiment.

I’m teaching Advanced Expository Composition this Winter, and we are talking a lot about expository writing across multiple modalities-including online. As a semester-long project, I’m asking the class to try out a Social Media Ethos Project. During the semester, we will all choose one social media platform we either haven’t used yet, or are currently using, but want to revise HOW we use it. We’ll post at least 1-2 times a week specifically to cultivate a desired ethos and follow up on our purpose for using that platform. I’m doing it, too, and I’ll be reflecting on my experiences this semester on this blog.

The social media platform I’ve chosen to experiment with this semester is Twitter. I already had an account up, but it is pretty neglected. My purpose this semester is to explore and (hopefully) get some conversations going about work-life balance in academia. 

Here’s what happened as I got started on my SMEP work:

Logging in: When I logged in to Twitter, I realized that my profile page was 2 years old. I decided to switch it to a more recent pic. I wanted the profile pic to include my family, since they are a huge part of my pursuit of “work-life balance.”

A Mini-Experiment: I took a few minutes to search for “what’s out there” regarding the topic I’m interested in. I plugged in #worklifebalance first. There were LOTS of tweets, from an article about how working dads develop work-life balance, to female cardiologists taking shorter maternity leave. Individuals had posted photos of their family and included the hashtag. One colorful article had the title of “Stop pretending work-life balance is a thing: it’s not.” Mainly, though, there were lots of links to articles and blogs about people with corporate jobs seeking work-life balance. So, I decided to refine my search and added to the prior hashtag, #education. This pulled up LOTS of tweets from the UK, which I found interesting. One workshop on how to reduce grading time ( or “marking” as it’s called across the pond and in Canada) was retweeted several times. Mostly, though, the tweets were from or about elementary and secondary teachers. Ok, so I refined one more time. Along with #worklifebalance, I added #highered. What happened next made me say “whoa” so loud that my husband asked what was wrong. (!) There was one tweet with that combo of hashtags. One.

It was a link to an ecology professor’s blog, which had been retweeted by another ecology professor from Montreal. Basically, the blog was a short narrative on how it is ok to do your work at odd times–5am, for example. Maybe less about “balance” per se, and more about feeling less guilty for sending an email at 5am?

Participation: I spent the next few minutes re-tweeting the few articles I found that might be interesting and applied to my new purpose.

Also, as luck would have it, I came across a question from a fellow scholar in rhetoric and composition, asking about a “wicked problem”* that we should talk about. Serendipitously, I replied that we need to talk more about work-life balance.

We’ll see what comes of that conversation!

*Last year’s C’s conference focused on the theme of Taking Action. One of the special Taking Action sessions was led by Dr. Glenda Eoyang and focused on human systems dynamics and conceptualizing the “wicked problems” in our discipline–along with strategies for how to approach them!

it’s not business, it’s personal.

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I used to begin every writing class I taught with a memoir assignment. I don’t do that anymore. But, instead of simplifying and straightening up my assignment line up, it’s complicated things.

I used to rationalize the memoir project with the question: Who doesn’t like to talk about themselves? Turns out, about half my students, half the time. The semi-default use of “personal writing”–telling your story, writing a narrative, a memoir, throwing off the oppressive constraints of academic discourse–as a window into writing, a way to engage students in the collective ethos of the class doesn’t always hit the ball out of the park for my first year writing students. And while I believe in all those things–in giving my students a window into writing, in engaging them, in demystifying the writing process–if that were the only reason I was teaching personal writing, it wouldn’t be enough.

An ongoing debate in my field of Composition Studies, particularly when it comes to the writing classroom, is whether or not personal writing has a place there. If you are of the opinion that yes, students should engage in personal writing in their college writing classes, you may be nastily called an Expressivist, in a similar way that art critics named “the Impressionists.” If you are of the opposite opinion, you might be asked rather snarkily if you even really care about students. Either way, “personal writing” usually becomes over-simplified to refer merely to an “autobiography” or “autoethnography” assigned as the first essay in a composition class.

As Elizabeth Wardle argues in her article ““Mutt genres” and the goal of FYC: Can we help students write in the genres of the university?” what we end up doing in composition courses is creating “general” (read “only found in writing courses”) genres and assignments, like the “autoethnography,” designed to mimic or teach “skills” that students can transfer to the rest of their academic experience, and we end up just teaching them mutt genres that are strange and not actually very useful. So, how useful is that designed-to-engage personal writing project? I’m still not exactly sure.

What I do know is that there is truth in Ira Shor’s assertion that students are very savvy at constructing their “in-school” identity, whether by choosing their seats on the edges of class, or by separating out their “real selves” or “real lives” as far from the education experience as they can. This kind of division of self is, at best, unhealthy, at worst, a form of cognitive dissonance that serves as both coping mechanism, and barrier to knowledge transfer and deployment of ideas in real-world contexts. A way to counter this separation is, potentially, asking students to write personally, to write “themselves” into the academy.

There is also the argument that “academic discourse” is not as free from the personal as “they” (whoever “they” are) would have us believe. Candace Spigleman argues just that in her book Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse. Asking how the personal can find a place in academic writing, Spigleman employs feminist and traditional rhetoric to point out the advantages of blending personal writing and academic discourse, to better prepare students for writing in multiple contexts–indeed, many of the actual contexts they might write for in the academy. Such contexts as my own discipline, where blurred, blended, and otherwise hybrid genres have been growing in ascendency for years. However, the balance between personal disclosure and academic ethos is difficult to strike, and Spigleman notes that “…a revealing self-disclosure can fortify an academic argument,” but it can also, “distract from the from or confuse the terms of the debate” (17), so it must be taught carefully.

However, in the same way that Shor admonishes us that setting up our students’ desks in a circle or collaborating with them on a rubric does not automatically make our class “democratic,” “dialogic” or “free,” so too teaching personal writing does not automatically engage students in the writing process, demystify the writing process, or enrich their arguments. Yet, acknowledging and explicitly teaching ways to write the personal are, in my view, increasingly necessary in a culture blooming with blogs, tweets, “styled” and photoshopped instagram pics and other personal disclosures like algae on a lake.

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My own personal teacher-coping-mechanism for this contested little pedagogical space? I tend to lean toward Spigleman and her call to teach the personal, the experiential, as one part of a rich, complex writing practice. A “tool in one’s toolbox,” as my friend Thomas would say. Experience can be evidence, or a personal discourse community can be a research site. As Spigleman describes, “this blended approach creates useful contradictions, contributes more complicated meanings, and so may provide greater insights than reading or writing either experiential or academic modes separately” (3).  So, things actually have gotten more complicated for me when it comes to personal writing in my composition classroom. And you know what? I kind of dig it.

working at home with baby

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This summer, I am not teaching. It is the summer of QE (qualifying exam) prep! READ ALL THE THINGS!

It is also the summer of being home with B, while Jake teaches for both summer semesters.

Let’s talk about how those two things are not really compatible.

I’ve been trying to balance all the things I need to do–check email, type up notes, catch up with family and friends, and of course, read–while the baby naps. My happy little juggling act just got a jarring kick in the shin: B flat out refused her afternoon nap the other day.

I just had the horrifying thought, “It begins. We’re starting to go down to one nap.” And then:

“When am I going to read???”

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Naturally, I began researching eleven-and-a-half-month-old sleep patterns and how-to-work-at-home-with-a-baby. I found this honest account from a stay-at-home dad, and it made me laugh out loud! I’m still fairly new at this parenting-thing, but generally I’m finding that my anxieties leak out, like air from a balloon, when I just listen to other parents. Knowing I am not alone makes everything much less fraught.

Yesterday, B skipped her afternoon nap again. Fortunately, Jake and I had both been home, and able to tag-team the child-care, swapping turns at the desk and in the nursery. By the time B was “resisting nap,” my notes on the Peter Elbow text I’d read were typed and saved.

I’m honestly not sure how the rest of the summer will go. We’ve found a really nice rhythm, but I’m certain it will be shaken up soon. Wasn’t it Bob Dylan who said that there is nothing so certain as change? The mantra I rehearse to my students over and over again will likely prove true for me, in writing and in life, these next few months: “flexibility is key.”

 

how can lonely teachers learn community?

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One of the main claims bell hooks makes in her book, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, is not only that we are losing community in higher education, but that losing community in academia is dangerous, for two reasons. First, losing community means “the loss of closeness among those with whom we work and with our students,” and second it means “the loss of a feeling of connection and closeness with the world beyond the academy” (xv).

To me, the first loss is important because I have a felt sense of its truth, its presence in my life and work as an academic. I’m ironically not alone in feeling alone. The lack of connection has been an item of discussion in my department, as we work to build a stronger sense of community within our graduate program, and across the ranks of professors, tenure track, full-time and part-time faculty. Why does community need building in a department where everyone (ostensibly) is working toward common goals with common passions? Well, working side-by-side is not the same as working together, and at times the pressure of my personal work load can feel so overwhelming, all I want to do is shut my office door and try to knock some tasks off of the ever-growing to-do list.

Colleen Flaherty reports that a study of faculty work loads at Boise State has preliminary findings of loneliness in the occupation of teaching, due the sheer amount of work: “faculty may feel generally isolated even though they work in a setting full of people, including colleagues and students.”

Well, yeah. We do.

I do.

For me, it may be partially a factor of my maternity leave last summer, and subsequent reclaiming of my rhythm at work since the baby was born. Or it may just be a symptom of the institution of higher ed: though I have great friends at work, I don’t always see them. When I do see them, we don’t always get to connect–meetings, teaching and student conferences demand attention first. It may be that I have a long commute (like many others), and so I don’t often “hang out” after my work is done, choosing instead to make a break for the (hopefully un-clogged) freeways and home. As an idealist prone to ask myself what I can do to help make change, I’ve been wondering: what are the ways to build a sense of community and “place” for academics working at a commuter campus?

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The second loss hooks describes is important, because it is directly connected to our ability as educators to tell our own story about what it is we do. If we lose our connections with “the world beyond” academia, we lose our ability to inform the stories that get told about us.

I find hooks’ writing stirring and inspiring. Speaking from the perspective of an educator, to educators, she wants to “challenge the prevailing notion that it is simply too difficult to make connections” in the academy–teacher to teacher, teacher to student, etc. From beyond the community, she seeks to apply progressive and critical pedagogical theories to promote a sense of community and hope, to “confront feelings of loss and restore our sense of connections” (xv).

But, she does write this book from beyond the community of academia, outlining in the chapter, “Time Out: Classrooms without Boundaries,” her process of leaving her university to teach in the wide world. She sounds relieved to have made this leap. But many, like myself, cannot follow her into the freedom of independent workshop teaching. We must work from within the system to find the hope that hooks describes. Not an easy task, as hooks herself notes:

“Teaching is a caring profession. But in our society all caring professions are devalued” (86).

How can we maintain our caring attitudes, toward our students, our colleagues, ourselves? hooks draws attention to the practice of love–“All meaningful love relations empower each person engaged in the mutual practice of partnership” (136), and of care for our souls, drawing particularly on Buddhist teachings and the writings of Parker Palmer. hooks quotes Palmer,”Telling teachers ‘to see a transformed way of being in the world,’ he gives voice to spiritual yearning:

‘In the midst of the familiar trappings of education–competition, intellectual combat, obsession with a narrow range of facts, credits, credentials–what we seek is a way of working illumined by spirit and infused with soul.’ ” (179).

I’m not sure where my readers might fall on the continuum of “spiritual practice,” but I believe we are spiritual beings, and that our spirits matter, and should be attended to. What I long for is a practice of teaching and learning and being in academia that also allows for connection and a sense of community with and among my colleagues and students. Is such a thing possible? I’d like to think so. In our most luminous moments, I think the members of my department prove that it is. It’s far from easy, automatic, or even safe. It requires, I’m learning, constant attention to my own inner life (soul self-care), and then conscious effort to reach out (practice love). That may mean engaging in, negotiating, working kindly on partnerships with my colleagues, or it may mean partnering with my students in their learning practices. It may be as broad as supporting our overall program goals. Or, it may be as simple as keeping my office door open.

on taking a break.

How was your Memorial Day weekend, friends? Mine was great. Fantastic.

I didn’t do any work at all.

As an academic, I’ve long since gotten used to the idea that my “weekends” are actually more like “workends,” especially during the semester. In fact, since beginning my PhD, I realized that I needed to make a concerted effort to take breaks. This aha moment came two-thirds of the way through that first fall semester where I worked 8-12hrs a day, 7 days a week. I had a larger-than-usual post-mid-terms meltdown, and then was like, “of course you’re cracking up…you’ve been doing nothing but work!” And that was before having B.

Being a mom and an academic at the same time is actually lots better, because I simply can’t work 24/7. I must find efficient work-arounds to my little one’s schedule, and this actually brings much sanity. A tad bit more panic to those dedicated work times, but hey. Aren’t academics famous for “working well under (procrastinated) pressure”? Sure!

So, anyway, this weekend I finally took a leisurely break of three whole days! I didn’t really plan it that way, but at the last minute, my sister and brother-in-law needed help with their move. So Saturday morning, we helped pack and haul boxes. Saturday night was book club with my girlfriends, who have graciously agreed to push our monthly meetings to after B goes to bed. Sunday we totally slept in and were running late to church, but it was really nice when we got there. And after that we landed at my in-laws for an afternoon of BBQ, laying in the grass, and key lime pie. Monday, we hung out with my parents, sister and bro-in-law, and B’s great uncle and G.G. (great grandma).

Could I have squeezed some exam reading in there? Of course. Did I need to because I’m a bit behind? Of course.

But, I didn’t.

And I honestly feel great about it. I had the best, juiciest, most relaxed time with our friends and families! It was glorious weather and I was fully present to laugh, talk, eat, drink and just be.

To top it off, I feel more ready to dive into reading this week. I have sharper clarity.  Initially I thought I might be just making this up. However, Tony Schwartz’s New York Times essay on how taking a rest actually leads to more productivity confirmed the causality. “Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable,” Schwartz says. “The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.”

As a teacher, I understand this only from my own failures at “recovering energy.” Ask my husband. At some point after mid-term, I end up in a quivering puddle on the floor somewhere in our apartment, unable to lift my head under the overwhelming weight of ALL THE THINGS. I will say this, however: a good cry is a tremendous reset.

Thank goodness there are folks out there who are working on prevention of the regular-teacher-meltdown…or even, burnout. The incomparable Parker Palmer has an entire website designated to reaching teachers and encouraging them, The Center for Courage and Renewal. One of these days I’m going to take a mini-break on the baby’s nap and instead of reading for exams, I’ll sit with my coffee and explore that site. The fabulous people at the Eastern Michigan Writing Project regularly attend to the souls of writing teachers, too. Chelsea even detailed a Teacher Spa they put on to encourage and rejuvenate teachers.

So anyway, back to it. I’ve used most of this morning’s nap to compose this blog (another form of self-care), so the afternoon nap is for reading!! (READ, Nicole, READ.) Hope everyone had a lovely long weekend, complete with a bit of rest.

 

poetry memorization

Welp, I did it. At long, long last…I have completely memorized the class text: Dr. Suess’s ABC. How do I know this? Because I rattled it off to a very cranky eleven-month-old in the car this morning, on our way to pick up her dad from the auto repair shop, where he’d just dropped off the other car. I was a little stunned that I’d got the whole thing, though, the pictures and the rhyming really helps a lot.

It made me pause, though, to reflect on the things I’ve committed to memory. Sort of an out-of-fashion skill these days–numbers are all on our phones, events are all digitally photographed and posted online. Memorization is especially out of favor in academia–with good reason, too. Why bother using valuable brain space to memorize when you can look something up and save that space for critical thinking? Analysis? Is poetry memorization a waste of time? Sometimes, when I glance over my “still-to-read” part of my QE list, I wonder…

Yet, I cannot shed the habit of committing bits of text, usually a poem, or now the odd, well-worn children’s book, to memory. I suppose I come by it honestly: Poppa, my dad’s dad, was always puttering about the yard or house, muttering poetry under his breath. He favored nonsense poems, but also could recite “When the Frost is on the Pumpkin” on command–and I frequently commanded it as a child. When Poppa passed away, I claimed his well-worn poetry anthology for my own, and used it as my primary reference for my 11th grade poetry journal.

While my mom is the queen of the appropriate song lyric, my dad has always loved, and recited to me, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” So much so that excerpts of that poem were the first poetry I committed to memory myself. Along with his own poems, my husband would recite “The Litany Against Fear,” from his favorite book, Dune, to me when we were dating.

I can mark my life by the poetry I was remembering at the time. Emily Dickenson’s “That I did always love,” for my wedding. In the early mornings and late nights of nursing my newborn baby, I went over the first stanza of Endymion and this e.e. cummings poem to pass the time. When I first started teaching, I taught, and learned Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” because, of course. Classic hymns or psalms are also poetry that have proven useful in key moments. The act of memorizing is like a slow absorption, or a dissolving. You work over the words until they break down and enter your porous brain, and become part of you.

These days, I am committing Dr. Suess and his crew to memory. I’m not sad about it, either. So much children’s literature is tremendously satisfying and soul-filling in its silly, poignant way. I’m also working on getting all of this poem into my being–a sort of antidote for that post-baby body “shmeh” feeling, or just anything that might be getting me down–studying, scheduling, bill-paying, what-have-you.

I’ll always encourage my students in this endeavor–and some day, if I ever get to teach a poetry course, they’ll be assigned to it. Because it is so personally fulfilling, I wonder, sometimes, if it would be appropriate in a composition classroom? I suppose that depends very much on how one conceptualizes “composition” and “the classroom.” hm…

What can we give students credit for?

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In my reading this week, I’ve noticed various notions authors have of what students bring with them to the college writing classroom. Everyone acknowledges that students bring something…but just what that something is varies widely among pedagogical theorists. Prior knowledge, bad habits that need to be broken, a slew of ideas about how to “do school.”But, do they bring anything we can actually work with? Anything that doesn’t have to be “undone” in the acclimation to academia?

Reading David Bartholomae’s collection of essays, Writing on the Margins, is like following the brilliant career of man, very devoted to student learning, who doesn’t think so. And partly, I believe he is right. Students do not come into the university with much–if any–understanding of what writing at the college level, for academia, really means. In the essay, “Writing Assignments: Where Writing Begins” Bartholomae emphasizes this lack:

“To discover or to learn, the student must, by writing, become like us–English teachers, adults, intellectuals, academics. He must become someone he is not” (177).

This transformation is one of the goals (or for many, the main goal) of college writing instruction: to help students write in college genres for college instructors throughout their college careers (may they last not much more than four years!). There are several ways this way of thinking runs into trouble, in my view. First, students are very, very savvy, and they can sense when they are being instructed in “school-only” tasks. They are happy to do these tasks, however, if it means certainty of a particular grade. Second, if we are teaching students to acclimate to an environment for only four (or five, six, eight) years of their lives, where is the impetus for transfer of that knowledge to contexts outside the university…say, to their future careers? Or, dare I ask, to their civic lives?

Where Bartholomae fails to give much attention, I think, is to the knowledge that students DO bring with them to the First Year Writing classroom. Though they may not already be the savvy researchers possessed of the specialized discourse of academe, our students certainly know how to “do school.” Twelve years of training in the American education system has given them at least that (and sometimes, much more).

It is this kind of prior knowledge that Linda Bergmann and Janet Zepernick discovered as a result of their study written up as “Disciplinarity and transfer: students’ perceptions of learning to write.” In running several focus groups to listen in on how students talked about their experiences in composition courses, Bergmann and Zepernick noticed that students at their university drew a clear separation between the writing they did in English courses and the writing they were asked to do in courses in their majors:

Students, “failed to see any connection between what they [had] learned about writing in English classes and what they see as objective, fact-based, information-telling writing demanded elsewhere in their academic and professional lives” (5).

However, students had great clarity about the rhetorical situation of the classroom–though, this works out to be a kind of “negative transfer.” Being very savvy and privileging grades, students adapt to the culture of “school,” and learn very early on how to assess a particular instructor for the minimum amount of work they must do to acquire the grade they want. Many educators are aware of this attitude and bemoan it. Why can’t students value the learning process? Appropriate their education?? I actually think it is quite a smart strategy, in its way. Why “waste” time and energy achieving a goal when you can simply analyze the rhetorical situation and address it strategically? After the first few assignments, you can get a sense of what a particular instructor expects, and then produce it. Repeat with each new class/instructor. Simple. Effective. (…if what you want to achieve is a certain grade point average, or a certain piece of paper with your name and a school’s name on it.)

This is a powerful rhetorical awareness, but one that needs to be harnessed if it is to first–break students out of their habits of merely “doing school” and second–help students transfer knowledge from our courses to other contexts. Far from coming in knowing nothing, most students know all about how to address the rhetorical situation of classroom and teacher in order to achieve their purposes. But, we as FYW instructors must explicitly address and extend this prior knowledge. Make use of it. Help students become aware of it and harness it. Maybe if we give students credit for what they already know–even though it’s not what we wish they knew–we could put them on the path we as “professional” academics have found so fruitful.

work-life balance, summer style

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Ah, summer. A time for sitting on the lawn while your baby discovers what grass feels like when she rips it up by the handful. Time to spend with friends, at last, after a long, hard winter where–nevermind the seventy tons of record-breaking snow–you were “snowed in” under piles of student papers and a teething baby. Time, at long last, to read that list of 100 texts for your Qualifying Exams.

I’ve never been one to support the myth that teachers, even at the university level, “get the summer off.” We’re either teaching, prepping, researching, or sitting in all the meetings we didn’t have time to schedule during the semester, since we were busy sitting in our offices waiting for students to come see us. But, this summer, I am not picking up any teaching, and it feels marvelous. Granted, I’m not teaching so that I can work on my exam list and work as the primary caregiver for my daughter, while her dad picks up an almost full teaching load himself…but, it sure feels like a lighter load. So, I’m going to go with it.

Still, this lighter load is a load, and it needs to be managed. Balanced. My goal this summer is to be all there, in whatever I’m doing. It may mean I take the baby for a walk, leaving all devices and books at home, so as not to be taunted by all the reading I’m not doing. It may mean that I ignore the laundry and hunker down for an hour of active reading while the baby naps. Whatever I do, I want to do it with all my heart.

I’ll try to keep you apprised of the situation, as I work through this tightrope-walk. Even as I write this, though, I’m aware that babies aren’t the only things vying for people’s time as we all strive to keep our homeostasis in tact. What do you do to keep yourself in balance? Or, do you just say “screw it”? What does “balance” look like for you?