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Itās been a āwork from bedā kind of month...

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I hope your term is going well so far.
Hello and thank you! Iām not teaching this semester so my term so far has been nothing but a week of my running around in circles trying to get some work done!
hey Juliana!! i know this is a bit of a silly question, but do you any advice on staying concentrated and retaining information when reading history books/essays? i have a acience background and sometimes i feel like history and philosophy in general just go over my head and i'm too overwhelmed to know where to start!!
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 canāt find it, so Iāll return and add to this post once I do. Hereās 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, itās important to know a little bit about everything that you read but, realistically, thatās not gonna happen at all times.
You donāt 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 donāt 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 thatās 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. Itās 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 didnāt know, and I stand by it. Itās not an end-all type of resource, but it can be so helpful in getting past some concrete but serious obstacles (if you donāt 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 doesnāt mean itās the best way for each and every one of us to receive and process that information.
Ultimately, a lot of ālearning how to readā is about learning what works for us under various different circumstances, so the best thing I can say to you is to not be disheartened and to really embrace it as an exercise. It can be frustrating, it can be tedious, it can literally make you fall asleep. Itās part of the process, I promise!
Reblogging because I found the link I mentioned before, so I added it to the post as well!
What has the pandemic changed in terms of teaching for you?
Hi! Iām 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 wonāt 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 itās 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 didnāt take this route and Iām not here to criticize anyone. That was my way of managing my own increasing anxiety levels.
I think overall the pandemic made me realize how important kindness is in the university environment and it made want to be a better person in the classroom, for my students. I donāt want them to see me as their best friend, but I do hope that, in the future, my students will see me as someone on their side, not against them...
hey Juliana!! i know this is a bit of a silly question, but do you any advice on staying concentrated and retaining information when reading history books/essays? i have a acience background and sometimes i feel like history and philosophy in general just go over my head and i'm too overwhelmed to know where to start!!
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 canāt find it, so Iāll return and add to this post once I do. Hereās 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, itās important to know a little bit about everything that you read but, realistically, thatās not gonna happen at all times.
You donāt 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 donāt 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 thatās 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. Itās 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 didnāt know, and I stand by it. Itās not an end-all type of resource, but it can be so helpful in getting past some concrete but serious obstacles (if you donāt 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 doesnāt mean itās the best way for each and every one of us to receive and process that information.
Ultimately, a lot of ālearning how to readā is about learning what works for us under various different circumstances, so the best thing I can say to you is to not be disheartened and to really embrace it as an exercise. It can be frustrating, it can be tedious, it can literally make you fall asleep. Itās part of the process, I promise!

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Instagram reminded me of this photo earlier this week (originally posted here) and it really hit me how I actually miss the empty atmosphere of the library in the summerāand its AC.
TRYING TO READ AT THE END OF A REALLY LONG DAY
Itās just like:
Iām not one to drink regular dairy because of allergies, but the mood was so bad that I caved and got caramel-flavored creamer for the week and let me tell you, I donāt know how I can have iced lattes without it anymore.
I forgot to add to my previous post, but if anyone has specific questions about teaching, feel free to send them--Iām not sure how much I be of help, but I can always give a try or at least give it an open forum for others to add to it!
What do you wish you had been taught or learned before teaching?
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 Iāve 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. Itās 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 itās possible to fit a next block or if you should just let them go a bit earlier (usually, itās 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 doesnāt 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 didnāt. 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 youāll 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 (donāt 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 donāt mean being emotional if youāre not an emotional person. But put yourself in your studentsā shoes every once in a while. Sometimes you gotta go with your gut and email more than once that student who hasnāt been showing up because something happened and theyāre just too embarrassed to seek out their instructors. Sometimes they will seek you out with problems you canāt really deal with. Know whatās 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 courseās schedule.
Iām sure thereās more to it that I canāt think of right now. Truth is, teaching in the spring semester was nothing like I had planned, so more than ever I think a lot of it you just learn from doing. But also from reaching out to friends and colleagues, asking questions.

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Ops, IĀ guess I sorta...disappeared yet again? Truth is, things just sorta spiraled and snowballed out of control. Things are still not as under control as I would like them to be, and among the many many many pieces of news in the US, the latest one concerning international students hit particularly close to me and so Iām trying to recenter and just...reorganize myself mentally.
Anyway, back now? I think? Iām not sure. Outlets are good and all but Iām not sure what this space is anymore. I have an ask that I received sometime in May that Iām trying to respond to now, weāll see where we go from there.
Hi everyone,
As youāve probably noticed, itās been a minute since I my last post, and the reason for that is simple: I kinda...logged off and didnāt log back in for a minute.
In any case, I know itās late, I know itās not much, but please please please if youāre not Black and you havenāt 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 donāt have many financial resources to spare, but thereās 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)...
And to my Black followers: you matter.
Second day back at my dissertation.
Second day that I get distracted by scholarly tangents...
Finals: graded.
Back: killing me.
Whenever Iām grading, thereās always that moment when a bunch of students offer a handful of variations of the same mistake concerning the material and I feel the cold sweat of panic rising caused by āomg itās my fault.ā Then I see students treating the same material and getting it and I can breath a little better for a moment or two.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Sitting through these finals, Iām reminded of that one time I was in a History of Historiography course in undergrad and our midterm had one question and literally all 30 of us just regurgitated what our professor had told us in the first half of the course, basically in the same order that he did, and the next week he just showed up looking defeated and saying āIāll never ask this question ever again.ā
Me: I need to grade finals.
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?
Me: Oh crap.