Living Small

Woes of Academe

One of my favorite things about my new upstairs office is that, when I go to make a cup of tea in the new upstairs kitchen (assuming that the circuits haven't been tripped and the power is still flowing), there are stacks of recent issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education to read while I wait for the water to boil.  Yesterday, however, I was horrified to find, on the front page of the Careers section, an article (published pseudonymously, of course) in which a faculty member wrote that she had given up on working with grad students and regretted having wasted her time mentoring them for the past twenty years because the majority of them were only using her to help them get through grad school. 

This article angered me on a number of different levels.  The first thing that bothered me, of course, was the content.  Isn't helping students complete their education one of the major duties of faculty members?  She complained that students seemed to be more interested in finishing their Ph.D.s than in promoting academic freedom and engaging in cutting-edge research, but the fact of the matter is that there is no academic freedom for grad students (their work must be approved by their committees or they don't get their degrees) and one can't do cutting-edge research until one is taught how to do research period.

Next, I began thinking about what this type of article says about academia in general as a profession.  How many other trade journals publish such negative stories about their professions?  The Chronicle regularly prints articles from and about disaffected academics.  An article in the magazine section, for example, detailed the woes of professors who can't get by on their academic salaries.  Not only is there a ready supply of such articles, but also a huge audience for them.  Finally, I began to wonder how many other trade journals allow people to publish under false names, knowing that to use one's real name given the content of the article would be professional suicide.  For a profession that supposedly values freedom and critical inquiry, I'm struck by the lack of honesty.

Football and History

This was quite a weekend here in Ann Arbor.  On Saturday, David and I and our friend Ken watched the Michigan football team's historic defeat to Appalachian State University.  Bizarrely enough, while everyone in the world, including the sports commentators on NPR, expected Michigan to blow ASU away, my father in law predicted this defeat.  At the time, I chalked it up to his characteristic pessimism (he always says we are going to lose), but maybe he knew what he was talking about.  Poor David, on the other hand, really expected us to win, even up to the last second of the game (actually, we should have won with a field goal right at the very end, but someone on the ASU team caught our field goal attempt and ran almost all the way across the field with it, very nearly scoring another touchdown, in which case they would have beat us by eight points instead of two).  He just kept saying that the better team would win because the cream rises to the top and we are the better team.  When we did lose, he said that every year some highly-ranked team loses one of these early games to a lesser opponent and this year it was our turn.  Later, of course, we learned that this was the first time in history that a Division I A team has lost to a Division I AA team (I may have that mixed up, all these numbers and letters can be confusing, especially since I went to a Division III college).  Then again, in this case "history" only begins in 1978, when Division I was split into A and AA.  In any case, it was a great day to be an Appalachian State fan -- they were even louder in the stadium than UM fans -- until someone sitting near us loudly pointed out that Appalachian isn't a state!

Yesterday, some of my history department friends and I got to try our hand at football when we got together for a Labor Day picnic and someone brought a Nerf football.  First we threw it around in a circle in one direction, then somebody had the brilliant idea to change direction.  Then we switched some players and just started throwing the ball to whomever.  Given that we were all historians, ex-historians, and partners of historians, we were doing pretty well, catching passes just about as often as our team did on Saturday...

Burning the Midnight Oil

What is it about blogging that sends me right for the cliches?  Anyway, that is exactly what I was doing last night.  In three and a half years of grad school I don't think I ever did schoolwork past about 8pm.  Then, last night, I stayed up until midnight working on stats homework.  If I don't out myself right now, David probably will: the homework I was up late doing last night isn't due until Tuesday.  However, I have my Kaplan class on Monday night and have to spend much of the weekend preparing for that, and I knew I would be able to focus better on it if my stats homework was already out of the way.  There was also something exciting about working late at night -- it kind of reminded me of college, when I was routinely up working on homework until 1 or 2am. 

So why didn't I do that in grad school?  Partly it was that I was better organized -- I got up and worked during the day so that I wouldn't have to work in the evenings when David was home.  I also had more time to work during the day -- in college I had work-study jobs, orchestra rehearsals, club meetings, etc.  I also spent a lot more time in class than I did in grad school.  In grad school, I didn't have to work at night because I could work all day. 

But I think there is something about different types of brain work that lend themselves to being done at different times of the day.  For me, writing always has to happen early in the day, when I'm fresh.  I write best right after I wake up, before my internal censor has had a chance to wake up.  I also read best in the morning because, at any other time of day, I'm likely to fall asleep.  Since most of the work I did in grad school was either reading or writing, it makes sense that I worked best between about 6am and noon (fortunately most classes in the History Department are in the afternoon, so I could work all morning and then go to class).  But computer work (other than writing) seems to lend itself to being done late at night.  This is probably an artifact of the way technology used to work.  I work with social scientists who have been doing statistical computing since it was first invented.  They have stories about being grad students back in the day before personal computers.  When they wanted to do an analysis they would have to take their data (on punch cards) to the one computer on campus and pay to have it run.  Since it was cheaper at night, that is when grad students would use the computer.  Also, in the early days of the internet, it was faster late at night, when fewer people were trying to use it.  So there seemed something fitting about doing stats at night, even though technology now allows me to quickly analyze just about anything at any time of day.

This morning, however, I realized that, no matter what work I may be doing, I personally work best in the morning.  Perhaps it is that thinking in my sleep thing -- by the time I woke up this morning, I had already thought of something in that homework that I wanted to change.  As soon as I got in to work, I pulled it out and started revising, only to find that I had interpreted the whole second problem incorrectly.  The question, though, is whether I would have gotten it right on the first try if I hadn't been doing it at 11pm, or whether I would have had to do it wrong once in order to figure out how to do it right regardless of the time of day or my exhaustion level.

Midterm Jitters

Today is the midterm exam for my intro stats class, and I have to admit that I'm a lot less nervous than I expected to be.  Perhaps it is because I have not taken any kind of test since college (that would be 2001), so I have forgotten how to stress out about them.  That's right -- I went through three and a half years of grad school without taking a single test.  Granted, I should have taken my prelims at some point during that last year, but I just kept putting them off because I was so busy with research, and then I decided to leave the program, so the exams became a non-issue.

Tests used to just drive me crazy, even though I usually did pretty well on them.  For some reason, I would never feel like I had studied enough, and there was no point at which I would let myself stop studying.  This was especially frustrating for tests in history classes because I could study for hours and hours and never even be sure I was studying the right thing.  The nice thing about being a history major, however, was that I had a lot more papers to write than tests to study for.  Unlike with tests, when I was writing a paper, I could just write it and then be done.  I didn't have to agonize over it up to the last possible second. 

And I'm really not agonizing over today's midterm.  I stayed current with the homework, so I feel like I know the material pretty well.  I was a bit nervous about all of the formulas, but we are allowed to bring them with us, so I don't have to memorize them.  I am super glad for this because, last night I didn't have a chance to study at all.  Between my two jobs and two classes (I'm taking statistical computing in addition to statistics, but there are no tests or homework, so it isn't much work), I was busy from 6:30am to 9pm last night, and then it was pretty much dinner and bed.  I did, however, manage to watch an episode of the OC, so I guess I'll see this afternoon whether I should have spent that time finding areas under the normal curve instead!

Reunion

The other day when I opened my mailbox, I saw a blue postcard with the words "save the date."  A wedding, I thought excitedly.  Most people my age have already been to all the weddings they can stomach, but the majority of my friends either haven't gotten married, haven't invited me (I'm trying not to take it personally), or have had non-wedding weddings, like David and I had.  But the postcard wasn't for a wedding, it was much more sinister: my ten-year high school reunion!  We didn't have a five-year reunion, so this is the first one.  My immediate impulse was simply to throw the card away.  But then I remembered that high school wasn't actually that bad.  After all, it was way better than middle school!  And my least fond high school memories are the ones having to do with the guys I dated, who won't be at the reunion because they weren't in my class.  I'm still in touch with my closest high school friends, but there were actually a lot of other nice people in my class who I wouldn't mind seeing again.  The reunion is the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, and I haven't been back to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving since 2001, and it seemed like a nice excuse to spend Thanksgiving with my mom.  Thinking I might actually want to go, I logged in to the reunion website, where I found that tickets cost $96 dollars!  They should really have made it $97, in honor of our graduation year, but even $96 is way too much.  I wouldn't mind reuniting for free, but I don't want to pay to do it!

Out of the Rat Race

This post by one of my favorite academic bloggers (an historian!) makes me very glad to be out of academia.  Grad school is hard enough, but this post suggests that things only get worse.

Paying the Piper

In 2001 I graduated college with $17,718 in student debt. Over the next few years, I paid $447.41 plus interest and my mom paid $7147.73 plus interest (thanks, Mom!) toward this debt. Then I went to grad school and my loan repayments were deferred. Now that I have left grad school, however, the payments for the remaining $10,122.86 are coming due, and the companies that own my loan are not into giving advance notice. Yesterday I got a letter from <a href="http://www.salliemae.com">Sallie Mae</a> telling me that my next payment of $92.32 is due on February 18. Reader, yesterday was February 21. There is nothing scarier than getting a bill <i>three days after</i> the payment is due! This morning when I logged in to make the payment, I was informed that my account is three days delinquent. If they want people to make payments on time, they should give us a bit of advance warning!

When I decided to go to <a href="http://www.pomona.edu">Pomona College</a> almost ten years ago, I knew I would graduate in debt, and I didn't care. After all, that was still four years down the road, and then I would have ten years to pay off the debt, by which time I would be in my early thirties. It is <i>very</i> hard for a seventeen-year-old to think that far down the road. My dad tried to warn me what it would be like to be in debt, telling me that I would never even be able to buy an ice cream cone because all my money would have to go to debt service. To this day, I still resent him for using the "no ice cream" threat to try to scare me. It is true that being in debt isn't fun, but fortunately -- between my two jobs -- it isn't an overwhelming burden. Yes, it is true that I could have gone to <a href="http://www.bu.edu">Boston University</a> for free, as my dad wanted me to, and today I wouldn't be in debt, but I still think I got the superior education (no offense, Dad).

Recently, I have been looking at debt blogs, which make me feel a lot better about my own indebtedness. Unlike <a href="http://bloggingawaydebt.com">some</a> <a href="http://saveleighann.blogspot.com">people</a>, I don't owe anything on credit cards and, compared to <a href="http://wereindebt.com">others</a>, owing $10,000 is just the tip of the iceberg.

So today I made my Februrary and March payments on my Stafford Loan, and next week I'll start making regular monthly payments on my Perkins Loan. My goal is to put $300 monthly toward these loans, at which rate I should have them paid off within about five years (accounting for the interest that will accrue as I repay). Perhaps this is tmi (too much information), but this kind of accountability worked for some of the debt bloggers, who managed to pay off their credit cards super-fast once they started blogging about it, so I'm trying to take advantage of it too.

Why I'm Not An Historian (Anymore)

<a href="http://10-year.blogspot.com/">Kisha</a>'s recent <a href="http://10-year.blogspot.com/2007/01/microfiche-research-and-all-things.html">post</a> reminded me of just why I gave up on my brilliant career as an historian. Historians suffer some of the world's worst working conditions. Okay, that is probably an exaggeration -- it would (probably) be worse to work in a third-world sweatshop for pennies a day -- but considering that we are Americans with close to a decade of post-college education, our working conditions are abominable.

Granted, faculty positions can be pretty cushy for tenured professors, but in order to reach that near-mythical status, one must spend quite a bit of time in the dreaded archives, the subject of Kisha's post. In the archives, you can't eat, drink, or go to the bathroom. The chairs are uncomfortable and the documents are dirty. The archives can get away with treating historians like that because we aren't employees of the archives. Believe me, however, if the <i>archivists</i> couldn't eat, drink, or go to the bathroom all day, OSHA would close down the archives. Furthermore, when you think about the fact that grad students are paid on average about $15,000 a year for an average of about 60 hours a week, that works out to about $5 an hour, less than the federal minimum wage. Add on to that the fact that we have higher than average living costs because we have to travel to the archives and pay ridiculous amounts of money to stay in sub-standard housing while we are there (in London, I paid $50 a night to stay in a dorm), and it gets even worse.

The worst archive I worked in was the Public Records and Archive Administration Department in Accra, Ghana. The catalogs were scattered on the floor, half were missing, and the archivists kept the most important ones hidden. But what really bothered me was the bathroom situation. To begin with, it was kept locked, so I had to suffer the indignity of asking the archivists for the key whenever I wanted to use it. One would think that a locked bathroom would stay relatively clean, but not so. Just imagine what could be all over the walls, floors, and other surfaces of a bathroom. It was. Finally, there was toilet paper only for archivists and not for researchers. They got it out of their locked desk whenever they used the bathroom, but didn't give it to us! It was particularly disheartening to hear from another American historian there that Ghana's archives were better than most in Africa. After the first day, I just didn't eat or drink all day (since I couldn't do so in the archive anyway) in order to avoid having to go to the bathroom. I returned to the US 10 lb lighter than when I left.

So now that I have spent all this time complaining about the archives, you may be wondering why I work in one. I have addressed this in a <a href="http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/~eklanche/archives/2007/01/irony.html">previous post</a>, but Kisha's post reminded me of more reasons why it's better to be an archivist than an historian. To begin with, as an employee of an archive, I have to be paid at least minimum wage and all of the usual OSHA standards apply to my working conditions. But I think I work in the world's best archive because researchers don't ever have to come here. All of our holdings are digitized, so scholars can download our materials from the comfort of their homes and offices, sandwich in hand if they so choose. They don't have to fly to Detroit or pay the exorbitant Ann Arbor hotel rates. For this reason alone, being a sociologist or political scientist (our main clientele) is <i>way</i> better than being an historian. Unfortunately, I didn't think of that before I applied to grad school.

Now if only someone could digitize historical documents...

Et Tu Brute?

Last night I went out with my friend Diana to celebrate her 26th birthday (!) and she told me to check my History Department mailbox because teaching evaluations from last semester had come in. Eager to see them, I set out extra-early this morning (6:45) so I could stop by the History Department on my way to work. Let's just say, I shouldn't have.

To begin with, my 1pm section didn't even bother to turn in their evaluations. That's right -- out of my 37 students, I only had 16 evaluations. I opened the evaluations for my 10am section first. This section had been my favorite to teach and, judging by the midterm evaluations, I really thought they liked me. But I was wrong. All of my scores were between 3.13 and 4.20 (on a five-point scale), and most were in the bottom quartile for the university as a whole. Even though I had very few scores of one or two (strongly disagree or disagree with statements such as "one real strength of this discussion section was in the classroom discussion"), I was surprised at how many threes (neutral) I got. Please, kids, have an opinion! My highest scores were on "the discussion instructor seemed to enjoy teaching" and "the discussion instructor was friendly." What bothered me the most, however, was that only two of the nine respondents in this section took the time (and I gave them plenty of time) to answer the open-ended questions. One person actually did answer all five of these questions, demanding "more light, individual work." What is the point of coming to a discussion section if the instructor has students work individually? Another person simply said "this discussion was largely unhelpful" and nobody else wrote anything. I have to admit that I'm pretty pissed off at these kids for giving me low scores and not even explaining why.

Opening the 9am evaluations made me feel a little better. My lowest score on those was 3.67 ("I reconsidered many of my former attitudes") and all of the other scores were above 4.25. I even got unanimous fives on "overall, the discussion instructor was an excellent teacher." That warmed my heart. These students did answer the open-ended questions, saying things like "the quality of instruction was excellent, Emily was friendly, enthusiastic and knowledgeable.
She listened well and always gave positive feedback on responses;" "Emily was such a viable component to our success. Whether fielding questions, providing her own, or engaging us in debate, she was always there to help;" "Emily was an <u>amazing</u> GSI. Her passion for the subject clearly showed whenever she was teaching...She was very good at getting everyone to participate in duscussion and understood that some people, though they aren't necessarily vocal are actively participating and listening. She even got <u>me</u> to speak a lot in duscussion section and that says a lot." The worst comment I got from this section was "9:00 is too early."

So what were those 10am kids thinking?

In the Thick of It

I graded twenty-seven papers yesterday and have eight more to go. I thought I had thirty-eight students, but I only received thirty-five final papers. According to my contract, I could have had up to seventy-five students, and right now I'm very grateful that my class was underenrolled. I still can't believe just how little time they give us to grade finals -- seventy-two hours! There is simply no way to give justice to papers in such a short period of time. Unfortunately, however, my students' final papers don't seem to deserve much justice. There are, of course, some excellent ones, but most are just atrocious, and I'm not sure why because previous papers from the same students have been much more thoughtful, engaged, and well-written. I don't know if they were thrown for a loop by the essay questions or if they were simply too busy with other papers and finals to put in a whole lot of effort. What I really wish is that more of them had come to me for help. A few did, and their papers showed the extra effort. Other papers are full of misinformation, devoid of textual evidence, and just poorly written. Many were obviously not even proofread. And when did "dominate" become an adjective?