One of the many wonderful things that academic life gives you is a seasonal invitation to pause, and review, and then resume. It’s an overlooked blessing that I’ve come to appreciate in the past few years.
I’ve been in the habit of keeping a text file in each class folder on my laptop, and as things go well or poorly during the semester, as ideas occur to me on how to approach a lecture differently, or how to modify an assignment, I jot down the note, and then give myself the freedom to forget about it for the rest of the semester. Mid-course corrections seem to usually end in disaster for me, so I wait until summer.
Then, at about this time every summer, we go up to the cabin in Santa Cruz, and I sit out on the redwood deck with a cup of coffee in the morning, or a glass of wine as the sun drops behind the hills, and I rewrite my courses. I rewrite all of my syllabi, I rewrite my assignments, I remake my slides and my semester lecture outlines. As I do this, I pull out that file of notes I made during the year, and think back through how I succeeded and failed at different points, with an eye toward making things better this time.
It’s an exercise in optimism, and the sense of renewal is cathartic. By the time I’m done, I can’t wait to get back into the classroom, and do it again, do it better.
Do you have pause points in your professional life, or in your personal life, where you get to review how and why you do things, and then plan changes?
yet another mike trick i will have to borrow…
Once we send a book off to the printer, it takes about six weeks before it’s done. That amount of time is, for me, long enough to regain some sort of perspective on the big picture and evaluate the small editing choices I made to get there. I don’t reread the entire book (God, no); I thumb through to passages that gave me trouble to see if I got them right. If so, yay me! If not, it’s usually been long enough for me to (somewhat) critically assess what I should have done instead.
Every book is a learning experience, but more in a general than specific way. That’s one of the things that has most surprised me about editing: Every book teaches you something, but you rarely come up against the same problem twice (which is great for those of us who get bored easily).
Since parenting is presently my full time occupation (and hey! will be from now on) I feel as though I am able to pause in the evening when Michael comes home and we discuss our days. I get to hear about the interesting things he did during the day, the people he met, the lessons he taught. I enjoy living through his experiences for a while and discussing ideas. But I truly enjoy the times we can chew through decisions I had to make on the fly with our children, discipline I used, frustrations I had butting heads with my 3 going on 13 year old. I love that we get to decide together how we want to parent. How we want to shape and mold our children. How I can better handle a situation the next time it undoubtedly comes up again. I enjoy discussing the situations that seemed so impossible during the time that are not so bad when reviewed.