Chris Kelty’s advice. I haven’t tried his method though I have my own “plowing” methods which I may detail at a later date if I decide there’s something original in it. I tend to real slowly and obsessively when I teach. Leaving aside dull and moralistic arguments about how much effort should be expended in …
Category Archives: Academe
Interview Season
Over at Sivacracy Siva Vaidhyanathan has dispensed some very useful advice to those people who have campus interviews coming. But there are a couple places where I’d add and one where I’d heartily disagree. It’s a little awkward to make this post since there’s a big round of interviews coming up at McGill, and I’d …
Q&A on Being a Scholar and Musician
This is one of those blog entries from an email exchange. Someone asked: Someday I’d love to hear anything you have to say about being a musician/scholar. I’m probably the wrong person to ask since I’ve been doing serious admin for the last 2.5 years and at the same time I’ve been playing the jet-setting …
R is for Responsibility
Yesterday’s Gazette featured an article entitled “Professor Shortage Looming, Feds Told: Schools Urged to Boost Post-Grad Ranks by 35%” The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada made its annual pitch for more federal money by saying that we try to lure in more than 150,000 postgraduate students because nearly have the country’s 40,000 professors …
Flashback — the Bad Kind
My first year teaching — ever — was in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois. The course was SpCom 111-112, a year long speaking and writing course. One of those “skills” courses with no official content, though students had to read a minimal amount of stuff. I still remember the first …
Forgetting
As I may have mentioned somewhere below, writing has been my most daunting task since becoming chair (to be fair, this was complicated in the summer by virtue of moving). Mostly it’s a time issue, but though it is also something of a concentration issue. To write well and creatively, one must forget (if momentarily) …
Why have graduate students?
I often say that I went to graduate school to become a grad student, and not a professor. And that my goal as tenured prof is to approach the state of graduate-studentness as much as possible (minus, of course, the poverty and angst). It is fair to say that during my stint as department chair …