Spring (E) Cleaning: Clearing Away Online Clutter

Posted on May 24, 2012 by

The academic calendar is full of rituals. Fall book orders, winter break, spring cleaning. All year long, I let things pile up. I stack papers in my office at school. I tuck stray notes into my desk at home. Then, at the end of spring semester, I clear it all away. Files get filed. Trash gets recycled. Books get lined up on the shelves. Catharsis.

But this spring, I am finding that there is one other area that is in desperate need of cleaning: my online presence. As you might recall from previous posts, I’m a bit of a technophile. If there is a new web or mobile app, I will try it. I have multiple Twitter accounts. I use Instagram. I have more email addresses than I care to admit. It has all gotten to be a bit much. I’m experiencing online clutter.

We have all heard how important it is to have a clean, professional online presence, but with the proliferation of cool online utilities and the ever changing nature of the online environment, we often end up with too much out there to really control. Also, it can just start to feel like you are being bombarded.

Lately I have been trying to get my online life under control. Here are some tips I have for those of you who might also be ready for some spring (e)cleaning:

1. Whenever you get an email from a site you have purchased something from, experimented with, or subscribed to don’t just automatically delete! Think critically about the email. Do you really need weekly updates from that venue you went to a concert to once? Probably not. Unsubscribe. Over the last couple of months I have unsubscribed from so many different emails. The difference it has made in my inbox is amazing. Much less noise.

2. Try to think of all the sites you where you have created a log-in. Do you use the site? Did you just sign up to try it out? Do you need it? Delete accounts you don’t use. For instance, I just, right at this very moment deleted my MySpace account. Didn’t need it.

3. Review your public profiles. Facebook. Twitter. WordPress. LinkedIn. Etc. etc. etc. This is the hard part. It is going to take some time and it might even be a little painful. Make a day of it if you can. Sit down with a bottle of wine, prepare for some feelings of nostalgia, and get cracking. Delete embarrassing posts. Take down silly photos and save them to your hard drive.

4. Speaking of your hard drive, give it a clean up too. Do you really need that document you created six years ago for a class you haven’t taught since then and wouldn’t use anyway if you taught it now? No. You don’t. And remember back up what you do want to keep. Dropbox, external hard drive, Google Docs, whatever floats your boat.

What do you do to keep your e-space clean and sparkly? How do you stay organized and block out the noise? Tips? Tricks? Share!

Posted in The T1000 Teacher | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Conference like a Champion

Posted on May 14, 2012 by

Last Thursday, I went to my first solo teaching conference. I’ve been to some stellar academic conferences in the past several years, traveling to California, Kentucky, and Connecticut. I have attended and/or presented at these conferences, but always with colleagues/friends. The thought of going to an academic conference alone made me a bit nervous. Who would I sit with at lunch? Who would I inappropriately pass notes to during the talks (I’m looking at you ProfKM)?

But you know what, I liked it.

I arrived late, slipping into the auditorium to catch the final keynote speaker remarks. Promptly, I  spilled coffee down my white cardigan. I cleaned the spill as best as I could with soap and water, and grabbed another coffee. It was free, and far to early in the morning to think about teaching intelligently without a cup or two or three of coffee. I tentatively reentered the auditorium, this time the door slamming behind me. Startled, I spilled my coffee again. Awesome start.

The conference was on technology and teaching. I couldn’t get my iPad  to connect to the Internet. I needed the Internet-machine for my presentation later in the afternoon. Several other conference-goers seemed to be having a similar problem. I contemplated the irony of a technology conference sans Internet.  However, after some struggles and a tech consult, the problem was resolved. Internet resurrected, I was on to my first panel about service-learning.

However, the conference was in a very tall library with many floors. And no maps. At first, I followed the crowd and took the elevator to the lower levels. When the elevator arrived at Lobby, I assumed Floor L (my destination) stood for Lobby. I hopped off the elevator only in time to realize that no one had followed. I’d left the pack. I felt shocked and anxious that I had to find the room alone. I probably looked a little like this monkey…

The kind front-desk librarian told me to take the stairs to the lower level. I did. But found myself in a creepy basement filled with boxes and cobwebs.

Eventually, I found my way to the Lower Lobby, and took a seat. I was not late. Usually, my colleagues and I chat while we wait for the presentation to begin. Since I was on my own, I slunk into my iPad and waited for the presentation to begin.

Of the three speakers I saw that day, two used a Prezi. These days, I exclusively use Prezi rather than Powerpoint. For my afternoon panel on the decentralization of teacher authority, I had crafted a rather handsome Prezi. My plan had been to wow the audience with the Prezi, meaning that if I messed-up a bit, it wouldn’t matter. But these conference-goers were tech-savvy. They would see right through me!

After the first presentation, I meandered through the giant library, eventually locating my second destination, a presentation about teaching online. Once again, I ignored everyone around me and gave all my attention to the iPad. An older gentleman sat next to me and announced that he was one of the deans at the college. The Dean asked me questions about my iPad, how I use it in the classroom, and which apps were worth the extra cost. I gave him a quick overview before the presentation began. Afterward, he asked me to stay and help him write an outline for a proposal for a grant that would provide him with an iPad. Of course, I helped him out. We chatted about teaching, and I gave him some buzzwords (my speciality) to include in the proposal. Before we parted ways, I gave him a THTT business card. 

Next came the part I had been fearing: lunch. So far, I’d  enjoyed my solo day into the depths of academia. I’d networked a bit. Spilled some coffee. Learned about online teaching. So far, so good. I grabbed my lunch (turkey wrap, cookie, soda, banana, and chips) and boldly strolled through the room looking for an empty seat. There were none. I’d taken so long helping The Dean with his proposal, that there was nowhere else to sit. I  felt like a sixth grader on the first day of class. I didn’t have any friends. No seat. And I was about to eat chips and a cookie for lunch. However, I did spy a seat at the very last table in the very corner of the room. I approached, sat, and introduced myself to find I was surrounded by comp. instructors! Brilliant. My people.

After lunch, I presented. Nothing exciting to report. I think I did a fine job. It was the first time I’ve presented while being recorded, which was a bit unsettling, but a good experience. My presentation had more attendees than ever before. I handed out more business cards. Score.

I’ve noted at conferences that there seem to be two types of presentations. In one format, the presenter reads from a paper. In the other, there are less notes and a Powerpoint or Prezi. Sometimes, you find a hybrid presentation that merges both an academic paper and a visual. This conference was the first I’d attended where the presenters didn’t read from papers. I attribute the trend to the technology theme. While I see the value in sharing one’s academic prose, I find it much more engaging when I can see the ideas in the form of a multimodal presentation. It was exciting to see this shift.

I have to admit that after my presentation, I was all conferenced-out. There was one more panel, but I had to leave. My head hurt. My feet hurt. My stomach hurt from all the sugar.  I said good-bye to a few of the teachers and administrators I had met during the day, and boarded the train home.

I liked conferencing alone. I talked to more people than I probably would have with the crutch of ProfKM or PT_KC. Overall, I think I conferenced like a champion.

Posted in Field Notes from the Classroom | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Write Like You Draw: Achieving Flow

Posted on May 4, 2012 by

In an attempt to indulge my non-teacherly interests, I’ve been taking a class through my university called, “Foundations of Visual Communication.” It’s the first in a series of classes that will, very eventually, lead me to a masters degree in visual media. Though the title may not give it away, the class is basically Art 101. We draw, we paint, we look at Monet paintings and Serra sculptures online.

I adore it.

Value Scale, or Art is Hard

Value Scale, or Art is Hard

For starters, it feels wonderful to do something with low stakes. It doesn’t matter if I’m good at art, it doesn’t matter what grade I get in this class, it doesn’t even matter if I ever earn the degree. As a result, I find that I am rediscovering my concentration. I offer my “value scale” project as an example. Those three lines of various shades of gray were done, by moi, in charcoal, pencil, and paint.

I cannot stress how difficult this was.

You have to stay within the line. You have to apply just the right amount of pressure to keep the value jumps (changes in shade) uniform. You have to keep the charcoal dust from getting everywhere.

An assignment to sketch the work of other artists

Yet, when I was working on this, I achieved what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” Flow is that state that you enter when you are completely absorbed in what you are doing. Time stops. All distractions melt away. You have fun. I feel this when I sketch.

I offer this in contrast to how I feel when I attempt to do what is supposed to be my primary creative pursuit–the thing I am supposed to be an expert in enough to teach, the fine art I am supposed to be a master of: writing.

I rarely achieve flow when I write. I achieve flow in the drawing studio. I achieve flow on the yoga mat. I do not flow when I write.

I suspect it has something to do with all those supposed tos. I find it difficult to sit down to write without feeling the weight of my expertise. I have lost my ability to do what I know is right and just write, as Anne Lamott calls it, a shitty first draft. When I write, I find myself in the voice of the teacher still. I question all the moves I make. I find myself thinking, “what would I say if my student did this.” I expect better of myself. Always better.

I want to write like I draw.

In order to try to fulfill this desire, I did what I always do: I enrolled in a class. Once a week, for three hours, I pay to sit in a room and have someone tell me to write. It is exactly what I need. Already I have wrote more freely, more creatively, and just more than I have in a long time.

Already, I am starting to understand how I might write like I draw. In both classes my art and my writing class, my instructors stress the idea that us students are learning how to see. In art, you are learning to see the world as it really is, as a mesh of colors, shapes, and values. There are no thick black lines around objects. In writing, you can’t record the world through abstraction. You cannot make your reader understand love, happiness, loss, pain, etc. without first showing them the world for what it is: a series of specific details set in a particular time and place.

I’ve often told my students to write it like they say it, but now I’m telling myself, write it like you see it. Don’t worry about the rest.

Posted in Writing Teachers Write | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Time to get Meta: Bloggin’ about Bloggin’

Posted on May 2, 2012 by

As we at THTT evaluate our summer goals and look to the future, I’ve been contemplating the rhetorical concept of The Blog, as well as the future of this particular blog. Over a year ago, ProfKM approached me with the idea to begin a feisty feminist teaching blog. I was all in. But then, I paused. Except for a brief affair with a dating blog, I had done very little blogging. In fact, my experience with reading blogs was limited.  At first, I approached THTT with a level of formality and meekness….and I am anything but formal and meek. The idea of strangers reading my private thoughts, evaluating, and commenting made me insecure. And nervous.

I figured I had to start somewhere, so I might as well do what I’m comfortable with, and read. I started with teaching and writing blogs: ProfHacker, Teaching College English, Profgrrrrl, The Picky Girl, Worst Professor Ever, and Confessions of a Community College Dean, amongst others. I spent a lot of time considering what made these blogs “good.”

What compelled me to return?

The answer is simple. Honesty. I thought about the genre awareness that I preach to my students: each genre has a different call to write, a different sense of urgency and need. Each genre has specific conventions. This personal, yet public, genre calls for an incredible about amount of honesty and vulnerability. I began to write honesty, and candidly. Slowly, I read and wrote my way through the genre.

I continue to learn more about how to construct blogs by consuming blogs. I’ve expanded from the teaching circle, reading everything from pop culture blogs (Guys on Girls) to food blogs, goofy girly blogs (What Should We Call Me) and design blogs. My tastes have become vast and varied.

ProfKM often calls me The Collaborator (post to follow!). The process of collaboration is the main philosophy that fuels my teaching. In the spirit of collaboration and curiosity, I’d love to hear about your favorite blogs, teacher or otherwise. What makes you read blogs? Write blogs? Return…

Posted in Reflections | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Tales of a Temp or How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Posted on April 26, 2012 by

This morning was surreal. I emerged from the subway and looked around. There were people everywhere wearing suits, and skirts, and real shoes. I couldn’t spot a single backpack. Not one pajama-clad soul to be seen. Also, these well-dressed, sensibly shoed people all appeared to be around my age. Some were older. En masse, they surged toward the towers of the finanical district. I joined them. For the first time, I think, ever, I entered one of those towers. Today I began my journey as a temp.

At the end of every spring semester (and yes, my school is indeed out for summer), I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s the “oh shit” feeling. I look at the empty days and weeks and months ahead on my calendar and recognize the symptoms of anxiety: face tensed, toes tingle, teeth grind.

The summer anxiety is difficult to explain to people outside of the academy. The first thing that many say when I first tell them that I teach is, “oh, you must love having the summers off.” And yes, in many ways I do. I love having time to myself. I would love it more if I got paid.

I hate to say it, but money is really what it comes down to. I make a decent salary, but I also live in one of the most expensive cities in the United States. I can save up all year to get through the 2 months I don’t teach, but sometimes that isn’t even enough. Then, I’m faced with the ultimate smack in the face: to be full of free time but empty of pocket in an endlessly entertaining city.

This summer, I’ve decided to be proactive about the whole situation. I don’t have the constitution for food service or retail and otherwise it is hard to find short-term, part-time, flexible employment. So I’ve decided to temp. Not only will it help with the whole money and boredom thing, but I’ve also been thinking recently that someday in the distant future I might want to work somewhere besides academia (another post, another time).

I’m actually on my first assignment right now. Like, literally. Right. Now.

I have to say, it’s like a dream. I’m sitting in a beautiful office. It’s all wood-paneled, marble counter-topped, leather-furnitured, and glass-walled. People are extremely polite. They are dressed very nice. There are snacks for the taking in the break room. Just look at the picture at the top of this post: that’s a bowl of candy and some fuzzy plant-like things. For lunch, I walked just a few blocks to the park and ate lunch on a bench. It was lovely.

The best part? My only responsibility seems to be answering the phone. It has rang maybe 5 times. I’ve had the most productive day. Inspired by misskrg, I spent the morning setting my summer goals. I graded a few stray papers. I looked up funding opportunities for a new project. I did preliminary research on another.

I have to say, this is what I always imagined my life would be like after graduate school. My degree is in creative writing and I always thought I would just get some simple, stress-free job that would let me focus on other projects. My friends keep asking me about my temp job, are you bored? No. Not at all. I could entertain myself endlessly…I think.

But, I guess its easy to get all romantic about a job that will end in about 24 hours. I’m exhausted and drained from the academic year and it’s fun to pretend to be someone else for a day or so. I even wore my best “Joan” (from Mad Men) dress today to really get into the part. (It really looks like this bright pink number!) Am I going to leave the university to pursue a career in answering phones, making coffee, and setting appointments. No. Am I going to fantasize about doing so? Yes. Yes I am.

Posted in Career Change | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

From the Self Help Shelf: How Setting Goals Saved my Semester

Posted on April 24, 2012 by

Over the past few months, I’ve thought about THTT…a lot. I missed writing, reflecting on pedagogy, and asking questions. I missed the community of teachers, writers, and students I’d grown to rely on and respect.  I questioned the rational behind our sudden departure from the blogosphere. I rattled off many excuses: too much grading, too tired, too annoyed with students, too obsessed with the new boyfriend, too stressed about the new job, too busy with hobbies and friends and the cats…

But it doesn’t matter why my blogging life came to a hiatus. It happened. And I’m back. What does matter is what I’ve learned in the interim about myself, teaching, and, as ProfKM so eloquently put it, “the professional woman’s complicated identity.”

Teaching is time-consuming. And teaching is personal and hard and lonely. The work never-ends. Many times throughout my teaching career, I’ve felt that my job defined me. When people ask me about myself, I usually reply, “I’m a teacher.” That’s that. But what about all the other wonderful, quirky things that are apart of my identity? What about what makes me, me? This past semester, I decided that I would not allow teaching to rule my life.

I knew this would be harder than it sounded. Still relatively new to my job, I found it easy to convince myself that grading literature reviews was more important than cooking myself a nice crock of beef stew. Willpower alone wouldn’t do the trick. I needed something tangible to remind myself of my quest. In a self help book-ish manner, I made a list of “goals,” a disorganized list scribbled on a yellow piece of paper that I consistently returned to throughout the semester.  These goals focused me, and served as a constant reminder that teaching, while important, could no longer, and should no longer, be my sole defining quality.

Goals:

Don’t read every student draft

Don’t feel like you have to return their papers within days

Don’t read student emails after 5pm, or on weekends

If the email bothers you, don’t respond for at least 12 hours

Remember: you’re awesome and your students learn a lot from you

Get some sleep. It can wait until the morning.

Stop working at 5 in order to cook a decent dinner

Remain positive, even when you suspect a student might be the devil in disguise

Keep in touch with old students

Tell jokes, but be professional

If you want to watch that extra episode of The Wire, do it!

Be clear about expectations

Wear jeans on Thursdays

Don’t get mad at yourself when you mess-up the schedule (because it will happen)

Rely on your friends

Don’t forget to take time to write for fun, go to yoga, run, and play Words with Friends

Though I didn’t always follow through on my goals (I’m sorry Words with Friends challengers, I know I don’t take my turn in a timely fashion), they allowed me to better understand what I wanted professionally and personally, and how the two related. In short, I learned to balance.

So, readers, that’s where I’ve been. I’ve been writing for fun, horribly messing-up the class schedule (but not freaking-out about it), running my first 5 mile race, having coffee with old students, watching The Wire, and telling (mostly) professional jokes. I’m looking forward to crafting my summer goals, and writing for this blog will be sure to make the list.

I’m curious:  Did you have any teaching goals this semester? How’d it go?

Posted in It Never Ends, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

A Resurrection: A Reply Ode to Red Lips and Academics

Posted on April 19, 2012 by

Spring is the season for resurrections. THTT is not immune. After almost an entire academic year of silence, I was forced to shake off my blogging negligence by our friend @laurabond. One recent afternoon, my phone buzzed with a simple notification. I had been tweeted at. It read: “I miss the ladies of @toohottoteach so much, my latest blog post was inspired by them. Come back!” When I read said blog post on her blog, Red Lips and Academics, it almost moved me to tears. It also inspired me.

When we first started this blog, we were delighted by the fact that we gained a modest, but faithful, following rather quickly. We could see from the activity on this site and our Twitter account that people were reading what we posted. We could see from the comments that our readers left that people seemed to like it.

But for some odd reason, the thought never even occurred to me that our blog might actually mean something to our readers. There is really no excuse for that kind of thinking. After all, didn’t my interactions, via this blog or via Twitter, with @highheeledprof, @WorstProfEver, @ProfSnarky, @janniaragon, @shailyspatel, @Samjb, @literarychica, @picky_girl, and of course, @laurabond (plus many, many others) mean something to me? YES!

We’ve written often here about the isolation that comes with teaching. Every time my phone lights up with a notification that someone has commented, tweeted, or emailed in response to this blog, it hacked away a bit at that isolation. I knew that there was a whole army of THTT teachers out there fighting the good fight.

The irony here is that much of what kept me away from the blog were the very issues the blog was created to address–the professional woman’s complicated identity. Over the past year, I have been grappling with the idea that as a married, but childless woman, I seem to by default have fallen into the identity of the “career woman.” Whether I like it or not.

And here’s the thing, I don’t wanna be a career woman. (Yes, please read that in a very whiney voice.) I love my job. I am driven in my work. I am even ambitious. There was a time when “teacher” did in fact seem to be the essence of my identity.

But something in the last year has changed that. I feel frustrated by the restrictive categories our culture places on women’s lives. Madonna or whore. Mother or worker. Ann Romney or Hilary Rosen. For that matter, conservative or liberal.

Perhaps as I grow more comfortable in my career, it just becomes less of a defining factor in my life. Aside from the fact that I earn money doing it, I wouldn’t say that teaching is any more essential to who I am than practicing yoga, being a friend, or a writer or this blog. I don’t want to be a career woman, I want to be a career-artist-friend-wife-yogini-level4rogueelf-styleobsessed-gardener-metalhead-woman. Is that too much to ask?

It is a strange time to stage a comeback. Spring semester at my school ended yesterday and the next class I am scheduled to teach doesn’t start until July. Like I said, it may seem strange to reboot my teaching blog at just the time that I won’t be teaching. I’m hoping though to reflect a bit on the past academic year and, if you all will indulge me, maybe exploring some of these other parts of my identity too.

I will let the other ladies tell you what they’ve been up to. But we all say thanks, laura bond. We’re back.

Posted in Identity Crisis | Tagged , , | 5 Comments