This morning I did my regular WordPress maintenance tasks: upgrading to the latest stable release, updating plugins, clearing out spam comments, etc. And as I did so I looked at the tagline on my portfolio site and realized that it needed updating.
It was:
So now it has a bit more alliteration, and better reflects my current professional identity. Because while I am a historian, I write and think more about teaching than about history.
So it is now:
There are so many other things I could put there: Paddler, Reader, Gardener, Friend, etc. But for right now, these three words seem the best fit.
Image is from Martha Burtis’ keynote talk at the Digital Pedagogy Institute that I attended earlier this summer. Her full talk is available here.
I am a teacher, and am happiest when I am grappling with how to share what I know and what I think with others. Thus, I am fortunate that I hold a position where I am teaching nearly everyday–either through technology training or through teaching courses at ChapmanU.
With this new semester, as with each new semester, I am considering how I can improve my teaching skills. And I’ve determined that incorporating a more regular reflective practice will be the best way that I can improve my teaching. I’ve written about this a bit before on my blog, but I am now committing to make this a more explicit focus of my blogginb.
So, to start off, I will invoke one of my greatest mentors and fellow Friend, Parker J Palmer, who asks:
“How can I develop the authority to teach, the capacity to stand my ground in the midst of the complex forces of both the classroom and my own life?”
He clarifies, that by “authority” he means:
In a culture of objectification and technique we often confuse authority with power, but the two are not the same. Power works from the outside in, but authority works from the inside out. We are mistaken when we seek “authority” outside ourselves, in sources ranging from the subtle skills of group process to that less-than-subtle method of social control called grading. This view of teaching turns the teacher into the cop on the comer, trying to keep things moving amicably and by consent, but always having recourse to the coercive power of the law.
External tools of power have occasional utility in teaching, but they are no substitute for authority, the authority that comes from the teacher’s inner life. The clue is in the word itself, which has “author” at its core. Authority is granted to people who are perceived as “authoring” their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no authority at all.
I am painfully aware of the times in my own teaching when I lose touch with my inner teacher, and therefore with my own authority. In those times I try to gain power by barricading myself behind the podium and my status while wielding the threat of grades. But when my teaching is authorized by the teacher within me, I need neither weapons nor armor to teach.
Authority comes as I reclaim my identity and integrity, remembering my selfhood and my sense of vocation. Then teaching can come from the depths of my own truth—and the truth that is within my students has a chance to respond in kind.
His words remind me of something that I have grappled with so many times as I’ve stood in front of a classroom: that feeling of vulnerability and exposure that comes from the unpredictability of human interaction, as well as the actual physical limitations of my own body to enact and enable a teaching experience.
Perhaps I feel this more keenly because of my awareness that my body can be awkward in the physical space of the classroom. On days when I am using crutches it can be nearly impossible to deftly use the podium computer or to meander around the desks of the classroom. Or on some days when I am physically spent and need to sit instead of stand, I feel the challenge of engaging students with my less-than-powerful physical presence. And of course even on days when I am standing confidently there is the sense that my cyborg body is speaking louder than the words that I am sharing with the students.
But then there is the flipside of that, the fact that I am more physically vulnerable can break down the barriers that might be typical between professor and student. If we all gather our chairs in a circle on a day that I need to sit, the students also move away from the spaces of their desks and the trappings of their classroom role. On those days there is no barricade of podium and desk. On those days learning can happen in ways that are quite different from the learning that occurs when I am delivering content from a screen.
Given that I have little control over the days that I can stand in front of my students versus those that I cannot, I try to do the best I can to prepare for whatever might happen when I enter the classroom. A teaching exercise that I used in the past might have to be altered, or a student might need to run the technology if I cannot. If nothing else, it keeps the teaching experience varied, fresh, and open to all kinds of learning possibilities.
So, to return to reflection about my teaching experiences this week, here is a list of a few moments that stand out:
Giving each of my students in my Introduction to Digital Humanities course, their own WordPress site, as a sandbox domain where they can write/play/experiment and carry out the weekly practicum exercises for our class.
Supporting dozens of faculty in using the Chapman ePortfolios platform for creating their T&P dossiers, and in doing so, helping them to create the best-possible digital representations of their scholarly efforts. The wide gamut of content that faculty can embed and link to from their dossiers is not only remarkable, but represents the best and brightest work done by early-career scholars at our university (and never ceases to inspire me to do better work myself).
Leading a workshop on how to use Classroom-Response Systems at a time where we had a major technical snafu that resulted in my presentation being derailed. Having to accept that the workshop was unrecoverable in that moment (there was no graceful alternative) and not letting my frustration about something that I couldn’t control, completely derail the conversation about how instructors could use technologies for student-response.
Allowing students to choose the platform for their collaborative sharing: one class created a closed Facebook group and the other opted to create a Slack Team.
Having my Intro to DH students read the “Letters to a Future Student” from my previous classes. Seeing that this exercise increased their enthusiasm for what they will learn this semester as well as their sense of courage to try new/hard technologies.
As I think about this list and all that has already happened in this Fall semester thus far, I am feeling pleased about my efforts. As Palmer reminds us,
Good teachers join self, subject, and students in the fabric of life because they teach from an integral and undivided self; they manifest in their own lives, and evoke in their students, a “capacity for connectedness.” They are able to weave a complex web of connections between themselves, their subjects, and their students, so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves…
Last week we did a fairly strenuous canoe paddle, more than 60km, in a remote northern area of British Columbia. The paddling wasn’t so daunting (3-4 hours per day of solid work), but it was the portages from lake to lake, the lightning storms, and the persistent pelting rain that quickly dampened my sleeping bag and all of my clothing that took their toll.
Now that it’s over, however, so much of that difficulty is forgotten. And instead what remains are the gorgeous images imprinted into my memory and onto the roll of film that we shot as we traveled. Such as this one, taken on the home stretch to Bowron Lake:
(Note: the horizon is slightly crooked due to the boat leaning a bit to the right side that morning)
As I was writing in my journal when the journey was completed, the first thing I put on my list of lessons learned was:
I like to do hard things
And it’s true. The stretch of an ambitious endeavor makes me happy. Doing the mundane, the repetitive, the easily achieved task…boring. I thrive when presented with a challenge, which is why the trip to British Columbia was so much more appealing than a resort stay or some other leisure activity.
I just finished reading Tracks today, which is a book about a woman who walked across the Australian desert with four camels in the 1970s. At the close of the text, this quotation jumped out at me, as a better expression of my thoughts about hard things, than I expressed myself in my journal (emphasis my own):
As I look back on the trip now, as I try to sort out fact from fiction, try to remember how I felt at that particular time, or during that particular incident, try to relive those memories that have been buried so deep, and distorted so ruthlessly, there is one clear fact that emerges from the quagmire. The trip was easy. It was no more dangerous than crossing the street, or driving to the beach, or eating peanuts. The two important things that I did learn were that you as powerful and as strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision.
Not too long ago I found myself in a “Strategic IT” meeting we were discussing where we each sit on the curve of change. The discussion leader drew something a bit like this on his whiteboard and asked us each to come up and put a mark where we would be in the curve of adopting to technological changes.
He then asked: Were we on the leading edge? Or did we follow the crowd?
Various colleagues got up and put a mark somewhere on the curve, most of them right around the big bump (those who tended to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else) and a few afterwards (those folks said that they usually waited to whether a technology was likely to last before they adopted it). I was one of the last people to go up to the sign and leave my mark.
This is where I put myself (note: I was the only person to draw a picture, but I’m dorky like that):
I then told the group a story that’s become a touchstone for me…
When I first began canoeing on the ocean, it was pretty scary to be surrounded by wide open water. The swell could be a low rolling bump that gave a gentle nudge to the boat or the entire ocean could be flat as a pancake, where you had to dig in your paddle to do all the work. But of course there was also the possibility of really big swell. And the first time I encountered that, it was unforgettable. (more…)
Because of my IT management role, I recently had the opportunity to complete a leadership profile, and this was my result:
This “Maverick Leader” description seemed fairly spot-on for me, especially the part that says “You’re always full of new ideas, and almost a little restless” and “If something starts to feel familiar, you’ll probably start experimenting to see whether higher goals can be achieved.”
Yep, that’s pretty much me in a nutshell.
Somewhat related, on a friend’s recommendation I just picked up a copy of Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which is not a book that I would have selected for myself. It’s a bit too “business-y” for my usual taste, but I actually found it a fairly satisfying read. One thing he mentions that particularly resonates with me, is this:
If you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau beyond which you fail to get any better.
That’s one reason why I am constantly stretching myself with new goals. I dislike that space of mastery where there’s nothing new or different on the horizon, where there’s no stretch and pull. I don’t even mind trying something new and failing at it, because for me there’s so much pleasure in the attempt.
One other point that Newport makes that I’m somewhat convinced about now, is that telling someone to “follow their passion” is likely to lead to failure, and it’s far better to gain skills than to chase a dream.
This NGram analysis traces the rise of “passion” literature, to show how the idea has percolated into popular culture since the publication of “What Color is Your Parachute” and other similar self-help books (certainly this message has become a popular one in the last decade!):
Reading this book has caused me to reflect on my professional journey. A lot of those steps have been ones born of passion. But even more have been pragmatic choices that led to job security and financial health, and I have learned to love those steps while I’ve pursued them with the same vigor as the very “passionate” ones.
I sometimes make small bargains with myself to keep focused on the things that are important to me (and to reign in my time-wasters). One such bargain is that I often set is that I won’t peer into Facebook until I’ve finished reading my current book. So I’m up to that again, and have promised myself to finish Christina Lamb’s Farewell Kabul, which I picked up in the airport last week. It’s a pretty dense read, but is fascinating. I am learning so much.
(photo is of my new Little Free Library, where I can pass along all of the awesome books that I read, to others!)
“We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.”
This reminds me of something that my ex said to me as we were splitting up. He said that he wasn’t too worried about me, because I was happy no matter what happened. While there’s some truth to that, and I think it comes from having a lot of really awful things that have happened over the years (so awful, so out of my control), that I generally choose not to wallow in misery but to make the best of my circumstances. But that’s somewhat different than being happy–that’s just survival.
Being happy, in my mind, is a daily act of choosing joy:
It’s the parking-lot-Chewbacca-mask Mom who can laugh at herself and at the simple joys of her life (without worrying about how she looks to millions of strangers).
It’s jumping into Walden Pond and taking a long swim even though that’ll mean that your hair is a mess for the rest of the day.
It’s pulling over to take a photo of a field of poppies even when you’re running late for your train.
It’s drinking straight out of the milk bottle because every other cup in the kitchen is dirty.
It’s getting sand in your shoes because of a spontaneous ramble at the beach.
It’s getting up at 2am to stare at the full moon.
It’s building wooden things with simple tools.
It’s a cozy chair and a novel.
It’s supporting the people you love as they embark on their own journeys.
It’s a text message with silly emojis.
It’s starting the day with a walk in the garden, noting how things have changed since yesterday and imagining how they will be different tomorrow.
It strikes me, as I read this list, that many of the ‘happinesses’ that come to my mind right now are solitary ones. In years past there were so many more that came from caregiving for my children and from time with my community. While those are still important to me, I spend most of my work-work time with people everyday, that the small acts of happy-solitude feel like a necessary counterweight to teaching/leading/collaborating.
The past few weeks I’ve been fairly contemplative about where I am in my life. I passed a milestone birthday and I marked the anniversary of my cancer diagnosis (or rather, I didn’t mark it at all this year, which felt alright). Also, I visited with a few old friends recently where we discussed all that’s happened in the past few decades.
And after all that, I suspect that I just might jinx myself if I say that things are pretty positive right now. But it also seems worth noting that while there are still some hard days and some things that I hope to change about my circumstances, for the most part it’s just really good: my days are filled with interesting activities that are mostly of my own choosing, I enjoy my work colleagues very much, there is little friction in my family life, I have few health complaints, my home/garden are well-worth returning to each evening, and I average about 7.5 hours of sleep at night (and every once in awhile, I even take a nap).
Am I the only one who misses that era of about 2008ish where everyone had a blog and part of the day’s ritual was to read all of your friends’ recent posts? Every once in awhile I peruse the lists of sites from my now-defunct RSS Reader and I can recall the thrill of having so many writerly friends that I heard from nearly every day. But mostly I miss the thrill and energy of regularly writing for an audience–my writing muscles have become pretty flaccid these past few years.
Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It’s the flying. It’s the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it’s like, “Dude, the ball.”
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ?
(Note: the peonies have nothing to do with blogging, but they seemed worth including anyways…)
Feeling pensive today as I reflect on the past year and consider my intentions for the future. So as part of that I spent some time looking through my blogposts from the past year and weighing how they reflected my memories of 2015.
Some of the larger happenings of the past year include:
Having a hysterectomy in the early summer. Few friends even knew that I did this–it was scheduled quickly and I had a remarkably (and also unremarkably) speedy recovery. At some point I may write more about why that surgery was necessary, but for now I’m just relieved to have it behind me.
Repeatedly having problems with my prosthesis. This is still far from resolved, despite dozens of repairs and appointments and (re-)fittings. I have almost given up on having a comfortable and well-tuned leg, and I am exhausted by the constant discomfort of an ill-fitting one. I could whine say much more on this topic, but will move on instead.
Teaching a remarkable set of courses: Environmental History, Digital Humanities, and American Disability History.
Visiting the Gold Country in the Fall, and in doing so marking a big item off of my bucket list.
Paddling in the off-season with IMUA. I’ve also been training in gyrotonics, which is increasing my joint strength & flexibility (especially my hips & shoulders).
Choosing to learn a new instrument. I’m still a total n00b, but it’s wonderful to try something hard and different.
And I’m writing this list as I’m snuggled up on the living room sofa of our Brussels home (photo below). Life continues to be interesting as I straddle the cultures of continental Europe and Southern California, and as Stijn and I consider our future together. It’s hard to predict how that will evolve as we make professional and personal choices, but what is obvious is that it’s wonderful to have many possibilities for the future. In past years I’ve found my greatest longing was for home, and now I have two of them. :)
My resolutions for 2016 are pretty simple, so far:
invest time and energy into our Orange home, to make it more comfortable–both inside and out
be a better friend, by making time to spend with mine one-on-one, and also by hosting more events at our place
send monthly care packages to E&C at college
practice Dutch and banjo, 3 days/week
speak French often
grow more food and cook more with our homegrown food
have some travel adventures
relax
laugh often
worry less
I’m tempted to also set some writing goals for 2016–I’ve totally slacked in that department in the past few years and I just haven’t felt inspired to write. So, I’ll give that some more thought and see if I feel ready to formalize a plan for writing this year (or not).
The laryngitis hit a few days ago and doesn’t seem eager to leave. So now I must be silent and let my voicebox rest and heal.
In the meantime, I am missing calling Ellycat in from the back porch, giggling with the kiddos on skype, and rehearsing my day with Stijn over dinner. Not to mention the difficulty that I found in teaching my three-hour seminar and the work meetings that I’ve had to put on hold until I can vocalize.
Of course it’s a temporary thing and I expect to wake up in a day or two and be able to talk comfortably again. But in the meantime it feels awfully lively with all these thoughts knocking around in my head that I can’t share with anyone around me. But that does seem to be the gift of getting older, that there are so many thoughts and associations and memories and wonderings. I can easily fill an hour by sitting in the garden enjoying the scent of the basil plants, and rehearsing in my mind my favorite basil recipes and basil foods, as well as the most humble and the most exquisite caprese salads that I’ve ever tasted. And the pretty soon the sun is setting and the hour is past and now I’ve moved on to the rosemary…
A favorite tea (which always reminds me of my friend Sara, who first introduced me to Kusmi)
Recently my office moved and I acquired a new set of colleagues, as well as gaining a new set of IT-related responsibilities. Such changes bring challenges–not the least of which is the necessity of solving problems with new-to-me team members.
As a result of these changes, I found myself at my desk later than I’d expected tonite, trying to understand some messy data and longing for a crystal ball to appear to give some clarity to a process that was feeling really murky.
And then a colleague came around the corner and offered me a cookie. It was a small gesture and a generous one given that he, too, was staying late and staring at that similarly messy data on his screen. But that moment of solidarity meant a lot and was so-so much bigger than a few carb-calories. In a very good way it reminded me of this night and the stranger who offered me a cookie at a moment when I was hopeless.*
It reminded me that I want to be the kind of a colleague who is always there with a cookie when the going gets rough. Because even at the hardest of times (and after the longest of work days), there is always space for kindness.
*And because Proust and because I also had a cup of tea at the ready to enjoy with my cookie…
So now it has a bit more alliteration, and better reflects my current professional identity. Because while I am a historian, I write and think more about teaching than about history.
There are so many other things I could put there: Paddler, Reader, Gardener, Friend, etc. But for right now, these three words seem the best fit.
