caffeine & books

Hi! I’m not teaching this semester, so it is a bit strange to reply to this seeing as it only affected me in the spring, when pretty much everyone was scrambling at various levels of panic.

On a practical level, leading a discussion-based, seminar-style session became hundred of times more difficult. I won’t go into the ethic of zoom or anything because there are literal hundreds of pieces on this floating the internet at this point, but I want to point out that it’s so freaking hard to get clues from students even when the camera is on. In a discussion session, I rely heavily on physical and facial clues, students react in a lot of subtle ways that become difficult to capture with your camera on and impossible to know with the camera off.

We were very much in panic band-aid mode, and my way of dealing with it was to continue to plan sessions as before but to be more lenient about everything. I know a lot of instructors didn’t take this route and I’m not here to criticize anyone. That was my way of managing my own increasing anxiety levels.

Hello, with the usual apologies for the delay and with the disclaimer that that is not a silly question! I have an old post with some links that might be of interest over here. Somebody on twitter posted a link about exactly this but I can’t find it, so I’ll return and add to this post once I do. Here’s the link I mentioned (more geared towards grad school in the humanities but a lot of it holds regardless of your level/focus, I think).

A handful of small but important things to keep in mind:

Know why you are reading the text. Is it for general content? For a specific theme? For methodological/theoretical framework? Once you have this clear, focus on this. Yes, it’s important to know a little bit about everything that you read but, realistically, that’s not gonna happen at all times.

You don’t know have to learn everything by heart. Really. Take notes if you must (be smart about it; see advice above), hang on to the key words of the text, but don’t try to absorb it all. This sort of self-inducing reading anxiety ultimately only becomes another hurdle for your go get over.

Concentration levels vary and that’s okay. I can sometimes spend hours engrossed in the most boring of 19th-century piece of scholarship and then, after lunch, just not be able to focus on a single paragraph of good contemporary prose. It happens, really. Try to observe what causes distraction in your environment but also in yourself. I can be in the brightest, noisiest room possible but I will *always* feel sleepy and distracted after lunch until about...3pm. It’s my block of death, when nothing unless the most mechanical tasks gets done.

Wikipedia is your friend. Maybe not your bestie, but definitely a friend. Some of my students were shocked when I told them to check the wikipedia page for something they didn’t know, and I stand by it. It’s not an end-all type of resource, but it can be so helpful in getting past some concrete but serious obstacles (if you don’t know what Beowulf and the Sutton Hoo are, for instance, it can be hard to follow an article that puts these two things in dialogue)!

You know your strengths, use them. Do diagrams help you visualize information better? Mind maps? All these things can be used to break down a piece of historiography. Make the text work for you, not the other way around. Authors communicate their ideas the best way they know how (ideally), but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way for each and every one of us to receive and process that information.

This is very late and I apologize.

I wish I had been taught anything. My program has a total of zero pedagogical components, and everything I’ve learned has been on the go, or I brought with me from my undergrad days of getting my teaching certification with my BA (tip: very little actually translates from working with 11 year-olds to college students).

Things I wish had been at least talked about directly and explicitly:

Organize your class plan in blocks. It’s so easy to over prepare and think you will cover much more than you are able to. Prepping in short blocks makes it easier for you to manage the clock and your plan at the same time, and if you find yourself close to the end of one block with 5 minutes to go, you will know ahead if it’s possible to fit a next block or if you should just let them go a bit earlier (usually, it’s the latter).

Set an actual time where you will be available to students for emails and abide by it. I do not reply to emails after 7pm (unless they are of the utmost urgency), I do not reply to emails on Sundays (same thing). I make this clear to students on my syllabus and in class. That doesn’t mean that I will not read the emails on occasion when they come in at those odd hours, but this allows me to block periods of the day to deal with these questions without letting them bleed into every working hour.

Resist the temptation of giving thorough feedback in every single sentence you read. If your students are writing essays and response papers, they will be reading approximately 30% of what you actually comment on. This past spring I was explicit that I would ruthlessly thorough in their first assignment in terms of comments (grammar, vocabulary, construction of argument) but would dial down in the following papers unless they flagged that they wanted all those detailed comments. Most didn’t. Instead, I marked only the things that really stood out and kept to a short comment on their overall paper explaining the mark they received.

Learn the difference between your chest voice and your head voice or you’ll end up with a headache every single time you teach. That means projecting your voice from your chest, not shouting, which will give you bad throat too. I should say that you should not drink coffee while teaching, but I had an 8am slot so you know I had a Red Eye in my thermos (don’t drink Red Eyes if you can avoid either). Just make sure you have a water bottle at hand as well.

Be kind. Or at least try to be. I don’t mean being emotional if you’re not an emotional person. But put yourself in your students’ shoes every once in a while. Sometimes you gotta go with your gut and email more than once that student who hasn’t been showing up because something happened and they’re just too embarrassed to seek out their instructors. Sometimes they will seek you out with problems you can’t really deal with. Know what’s above your pay grade, but also realize that you are dealing with a human being, often younger than you, who is learning how to navigate being in a different environment, with new demands, while also learning who they are and who they want to be. Not all of those things will fit into your course’s schedule.

As you’ve probably noticed, it’s been a minute since I my last post, and the reason for that is simple: I kinda...logged off and didn’t log back in for a minute.

In any case, I know it’s late, I know it’s not much, but please please please if you’re not Black and you haven’t yet, I hope you will take some time to read on current events and how you can help--personally, in your community, in our virtual world. I know many people who follow me here don’t have many financial resources to spare, but there’s a lot more than just donating that we can each do. But also, if you do have financial resources available, make sure to donate to a local group or institution in support of Black youth, Black LGBTQ+ people (it is Pride month after all)...

Also me: But what if we tried all these different things for lunch instead?

Me: Fine, but I need to grade after lunch.

Also me: So...you don't want to bake another cake, is that it?