This post is to let our readers at LTLWI know that Asad's mother passed away in Karachi last night (Inna-Lilah-e-Wa-Inna-Ileh-e-Rajeoon). Please say a prayer for her as well as Asad and his family.
It's been a horrible few days on my end as losing loved ones is concerned. My aunt's (father's brother's sister) mother died of cancer, a colleague I know through the conference circuit lost his father, another dear friend lost an aunt, and one of my dearest, closest friends lost his mother very unexpectedly which made it even worse. You're all in my thoughts. I hope once you get through this difficult time that fond memories bring a smile to your face and warmth in your hearts.
In all of these instances, the people I know were either in North America or Europe while the person who passed away was in Pakistan. I've been through that too - in fact all of my loved ones who have passed away has happened while I was traveling or living in the US while they were in Pakistan. That sucks. In fact, it makes me think globalization sucks! I could do with some good news real soon. In fact, I guess some baby news would be nice - that'll make it feel more circle-of-life-ish rather than black-hole-ish which is what it feels like right now.
For all of those people I mentioned above, I hope and pray that you and your family/loved ones have the strength and patience to bear your losses. Please take care of yourselves.
Additionally, I'll be praying for the safety, long life, good health, and happiness of all our loved ones (Inshallah/God Willing).
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
This is my new mantra!
It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power. [Alan Cohen]
Watch out world! Here I come :-)!
Watch out world! Here I come :-)!
Saturday, May 24, 2008
"Aren't You Done Yet?"
I seem to not be having a very good month in between all the questions about marriage (which, call me crazy, but I think is really inappropriate to bring up at any point during a funeral) and finishing my Ph.D. I've already ranted in the past about the marriage question...so today it's the turn of the PhD rant.
The underlying theme of all these questions is that if I get a total of 4 months off during the year - or so it seems from the outside - and if I only teach 2 classes a semester then why the hell can't I just sit down to write and finish. How do you explain to an outsider that the "real world" gives you time off to take time off but the academic world is better at giving that illusion than actually giving time off? Yes you can take your own little vacation but at the cost of immense guilt and overwhelming stress that 3 days off is likely going to translate into weeks of catching up. There is something exponential about the work you do if you're academicking - by which I mean either working on a PhD while holding down teaching duties or adjuncting in 5 places as a newly minted PhD or in a tenure-track/tenured professorial position.
When school is in session, I think those of us who try to do this decently well, end up spending about 6-7 hours of prep for teaching a single class. That doesn't include grading, office hours, student meetings, e-mail questions, etc. Then there's the in-class performance - you have to go do it even if you're feeling particularly blah - and you have to do it enthusiastically. If you teach 2-3 courses a semester chances are that about 4 days of the week you barely have time to breathe. That leaves 3 days. You catch up on grading and reading and answering student e-mails. You plan ahead for research projects. You get yourselves organized. One day of the week you slow it down or else you'll be too bitchy and burnt out to pick yourself up and get through the next week. There are always disgruntled students to manage who don't do the work, feel like they deserve nothing less than an A+, and are convinced that their poor grades have nothing to do with their performance but your whims and fancies. [I hear women in academia struggle more with this than men and I think that's purely *&^#@( unfair!) Then that summer arrives. O blessed summer! To the world it looks like you aren't going to work. Except - well you're catching up on the last 9 months when you never got enough time to write and writing what you would have written in these 3 months irrespective.
Of course it isn't all dreary. Some of the students are wonderful, sometimes you reach out to particularly difficult students and it pays off after a few times, and the days you have a writing epiphany can be orgasmic in their own way.
The 5/22 issue of The Chronicle has what I think is a great article titled "Did You Publish Today" that explains the rhythms of an academic life for those on the outside. An excerpt from this piece pasted below really capture the essence of what I'm trying to say:
"When I first started running competitively, each time I told my brother that I had run a race, he would ask me the same question, "Did you win?" It diminished any achievement I may have felt -- a personal best, feeling good the whole time, having a great day. Perhaps the fact that he thought I was fast enough to win the Boston Marathon meant that he really loves and believes in me. But it also meant that the months of hard work I did training for the race were made invisible by the way he had framed the question. This column, I'm sure you realize, dear fellow academics, is not for you. You don't need me to tell you that when you're working it can sometimes look to the rest of the world like you're curled up in front of the fire petting the cat. This column is ....for the people who believe that academics have the summers off, for those who argue that we have cushy jobs because we have to teach only a few classes a week for a couple of hours at a time, and for those who think that reading books isn't work. This column is for those who think that getting published is as easy as winning the Boston Marathon."
So for all those people who have asked me why I'm still not done here are some responses based on the year of the PhD I was in then:
Years 1,2,&3: Oh come on! Even an undergraduate degree takes 4 years.
Years 4,5, &6: Contrary to popular belief I can't really whip this out of my posterior.
Summer of year 6: I see the finish line...but not I'm not done "yet"!
The underlying theme of all these questions is that if I get a total of 4 months off during the year - or so it seems from the outside - and if I only teach 2 classes a semester then why the hell can't I just sit down to write and finish. How do you explain to an outsider that the "real world" gives you time off to take time off but the academic world is better at giving that illusion than actually giving time off? Yes you can take your own little vacation but at the cost of immense guilt and overwhelming stress that 3 days off is likely going to translate into weeks of catching up. There is something exponential about the work you do if you're academicking - by which I mean either working on a PhD while holding down teaching duties or adjuncting in 5 places as a newly minted PhD or in a tenure-track/tenured professorial position.
When school is in session, I think those of us who try to do this decently well, end up spending about 6-7 hours of prep for teaching a single class. That doesn't include grading, office hours, student meetings, e-mail questions, etc. Then there's the in-class performance - you have to go do it even if you're feeling particularly blah - and you have to do it enthusiastically. If you teach 2-3 courses a semester chances are that about 4 days of the week you barely have time to breathe. That leaves 3 days. You catch up on grading and reading and answering student e-mails. You plan ahead for research projects. You get yourselves organized. One day of the week you slow it down or else you'll be too bitchy and burnt out to pick yourself up and get through the next week. There are always disgruntled students to manage who don't do the work, feel like they deserve nothing less than an A+, and are convinced that their poor grades have nothing to do with their performance but your whims and fancies. [I hear women in academia struggle more with this than men and I think that's purely *&^#@( unfair!) Then that summer arrives. O blessed summer! To the world it looks like you aren't going to work. Except - well you're catching up on the last 9 months when you never got enough time to write and writing what you would have written in these 3 months irrespective.
Of course it isn't all dreary. Some of the students are wonderful, sometimes you reach out to particularly difficult students and it pays off after a few times, and the days you have a writing epiphany can be orgasmic in their own way.
The 5/22 issue of The Chronicle has what I think is a great article titled "Did You Publish Today" that explains the rhythms of an academic life for those on the outside. An excerpt from this piece pasted below really capture the essence of what I'm trying to say:
"When I first started running competitively, each time I told my brother that I had run a race, he would ask me the same question, "Did you win?" It diminished any achievement I may have felt -- a personal best, feeling good the whole time, having a great day. Perhaps the fact that he thought I was fast enough to win the Boston Marathon meant that he really loves and believes in me. But it also meant that the months of hard work I did training for the race were made invisible by the way he had framed the question. This column, I'm sure you realize, dear fellow academics, is not for you. You don't need me to tell you that when you're working it can sometimes look to the rest of the world like you're curled up in front of the fire petting the cat. This column is ....for the people who believe that academics have the summers off, for those who argue that we have cushy jobs because we have to teach only a few classes a week for a couple of hours at a time, and for those who think that reading books isn't work. This column is for those who think that getting published is as easy as winning the Boston Marathon."
So for all those people who have asked me why I'm still not done here are some responses based on the year of the PhD I was in then:
Years 1,2,&3: Oh come on! Even an undergraduate degree takes 4 years.
Years 4,5, &6: Contrary to popular belief I can't really whip this out of my posterior.
Summer of year 6: I see the finish line...but not I'm not done "yet"!
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Quiz-Blogging
It's been a while since I felt like posting something without making a *real* effort to think or feel. In other words, it's quiz time again:
Your Personality at 35,000 Says... |
 Deep down, you vastly prefer being with others to being alone. You love to engage people in conversation. You are good with your place in the world. You are confident and comfortable with who you are. Your gift is dreaming and imagining. You can take yourself to another world anytime you feel like it. You are inspired by challenges. If something is hard to accomplish, you want to do it. You are happy as long as you are given some personal space. It's important for you to have your own private life. |
Monday, May 12, 2008
Unwelcome Priying or I detest dinners with the extended family/family friends circle
If you were to ask me tonight, I'd rather be asked when I'm going to finish my dissertation as opposed to when I'm going to get married. Why? Lots of reasons of which the most obvious is that I don't believe you can control finding love whereas dissertating is relatively easier to plan to finish. I also think random strangers asking me about my dissertation isn't inappropriate but asking me when I'm going to get married is really something very private. That I'm working on my dissertation makes questions about it legitimate. Whether or not I'm in a relationship is also something that doesn't quite make the BBC headlines. Even if I were in a serious committed relationship, the mother-in-law of a family friend's son asking that question fairly aggressively and proceeding to tell me how the PhDing is a frivolous luxury (umm need I even say anything?) whereas marriage is "critically important" is uncalled for.
Yes I would like to get married. No, not to just anyone but to someone whom I love dearly and would work through any issues and problems to stay together because I don't want to imagine a life without him - and vice versa. In other words, I have no earthly desire to get married for the sake of getting married. When I get married it's going to be for the aforementioned reasons. So far I haven't quite met "The One". Not as in "The Perfect One" but "The One" where the imperfections and idiosyncracies don't serve as an excuse to run away but are all part of wanting to stay.
I don't know why the fuck people, especially those of Pakistani origin, can't let it go until a woman is married. If a man in his 30s is single the narrative is very different when compared to the woman of the same age. The man is sowing his wild oats. The woman is picky and past her "shelf life". So the goal is to get married at/by a particular age. To anyone who is single. That's really all the matters. You get married and you make it work by hook or by crook. Perhaps that works for some people. I'd really rather not.
Why is it only when I can get the three letters "Mrs" attached to my name that people will think I did what I was put on this earth for? Apparently the three letters "PhD" mean jackshit. And that really pisses the fuck out of me. Yes the opinions of these mentally deranged individuals shouldn't matter but it's an attitude that's fairly pervasive and it happens to make its presence known on my path with an increasing frequency that I do not have much patience for.
Again, I'm not at all anti-marriage. I don't know why "32 and single/never been married" is looked upon as an evil deviance. Doesn't it matter that I'm doing things with my life? My father has this theory about this obsession with marriage for the sake of marriage amongst Pakistanis. Long story short, when women enter puberty they're perceived as hyper-sexed and the need to get them married lest they commit any transgressions is urgent. I used to tell him he was being too cynical but given the kinds of ridiculous crap that distant acquaintances have put forth in suggesting to me that I'm basically at red alert on the whole marriage front leads me to think he might be on to something.
So let me get a few things straight here:
1. I'm a very happy, well-adjusted (for the most part ;-)!) single woman in her early 30s. Knock on wood! I don't need a man to make me happy but I would like to share certain things with a significant other and look forward to doing that when I find that person. Still, my life is hardly on pause.
2. I do not hate men or the idea of marriage. Far from it...I believe deeply in love and in the institution of marriage. I think Paul and Jamie Buchman from the sitcom "Mad About You" have the kind of marriage I'd love to be in. Easygoing, supportive, very little melodrama, happy banter, committed 100% to loving the other with every fibre of one's being, and comfortable with being in-progress. I like the marriage that I think my parents seem to have (Mashallah, touchwood) i.e. the bestest of friends who have made whoopee and whose love, respect, and care for each other is unmatched (again Mashallah).
3. I also believe firmly that you meet the one you're destined to be with when you're both ready. I can't understand why people who claim to be very religious Muslims don't process that too well. I mean aren't you supposed to have faith in God or some kind of higher, divine power? So get over the idea that if a woman is single it's because she's doing something wrong or is too picky or commitment phobic or uninterested in being a wife and a mother if that's not all she's doing.
4. No I'm not waiting for Prince Charming to arrive or under the delusion that Prince Charming will arrive magically on my doorstep. I'm open to love but I can't make every freakin' breathing moment about it. Like I said my life isn't on pause (knock on wood again).
5. And please do not bother introducing me to a "nice, single boy". No it's not that I prefer mine naughty and married (although the former is welcome ;-)!). It's just that I don't think that's the only basis for playing matchmaker.
6. I can't get married only because I think it's time or because I feel like my biological clock is ticking. I have friends who have done that in the past and I can see how miserable they are. I really would much rather not wake up feeling that way every morning.
7. Women do not have a shelf-life. Learn to treat them with respect and dignity.
So distant acquaintances who don't even know what color I like let alone me as a person - please butt the fuck out. If you must ask me a question despite us having nothing in common, let's discuss the erratic weather patterns of the last couple of weeks. Or what the Chinese are up to? Or if I watched "The Big Bang Theory" tonight. Although to be honest, if our paths have to cross let's just keep it to superficial pleasantries and move on. I don't particularly like you, you don't approve of me and feel like you have to preach absurdities at me if you do speak to me, and I really detest our interaction as I'm sure you must so why don't we save us both some trouble.
Yes I would like to get married. No, not to just anyone but to someone whom I love dearly and would work through any issues and problems to stay together because I don't want to imagine a life without him - and vice versa. In other words, I have no earthly desire to get married for the sake of getting married. When I get married it's going to be for the aforementioned reasons. So far I haven't quite met "The One". Not as in "The Perfect One" but "The One" where the imperfections and idiosyncracies don't serve as an excuse to run away but are all part of wanting to stay.
I don't know why the fuck people, especially those of Pakistani origin, can't let it go until a woman is married. If a man in his 30s is single the narrative is very different when compared to the woman of the same age. The man is sowing his wild oats. The woman is picky and past her "shelf life". So the goal is to get married at/by a particular age. To anyone who is single. That's really all the matters. You get married and you make it work by hook or by crook. Perhaps that works for some people. I'd really rather not.
Why is it only when I can get the three letters "Mrs" attached to my name that people will think I did what I was put on this earth for? Apparently the three letters "PhD" mean jackshit. And that really pisses the fuck out of me. Yes the opinions of these mentally deranged individuals shouldn't matter but it's an attitude that's fairly pervasive and it happens to make its presence known on my path with an increasing frequency that I do not have much patience for.
Again, I'm not at all anti-marriage. I don't know why "32 and single/never been married" is looked upon as an evil deviance. Doesn't it matter that I'm doing things with my life? My father has this theory about this obsession with marriage for the sake of marriage amongst Pakistanis. Long story short, when women enter puberty they're perceived as hyper-sexed and the need to get them married lest they commit any transgressions is urgent. I used to tell him he was being too cynical but given the kinds of ridiculous crap that distant acquaintances have put forth in suggesting to me that I'm basically at red alert on the whole marriage front leads me to think he might be on to something.
So let me get a few things straight here:
1. I'm a very happy, well-adjusted (for the most part ;-)!) single woman in her early 30s. Knock on wood! I don't need a man to make me happy but I would like to share certain things with a significant other and look forward to doing that when I find that person. Still, my life is hardly on pause.
2. I do not hate men or the idea of marriage. Far from it...I believe deeply in love and in the institution of marriage. I think Paul and Jamie Buchman from the sitcom "Mad About You" have the kind of marriage I'd love to be in. Easygoing, supportive, very little melodrama, happy banter, committed 100% to loving the other with every fibre of one's being, and comfortable with being in-progress. I like the marriage that I think my parents seem to have (Mashallah, touchwood) i.e. the bestest of friends who have made whoopee and whose love, respect, and care for each other is unmatched (again Mashallah).
3. I also believe firmly that you meet the one you're destined to be with when you're both ready. I can't understand why people who claim to be very religious Muslims don't process that too well. I mean aren't you supposed to have faith in God or some kind of higher, divine power? So get over the idea that if a woman is single it's because she's doing something wrong or is too picky or commitment phobic or uninterested in being a wife and a mother if that's not all she's doing.
4. No I'm not waiting for Prince Charming to arrive or under the delusion that Prince Charming will arrive magically on my doorstep. I'm open to love but I can't make every freakin' breathing moment about it. Like I said my life isn't on pause (knock on wood again).
5. And please do not bother introducing me to a "nice, single boy". No it's not that I prefer mine naughty and married (although the former is welcome ;-)!). It's just that I don't think that's the only basis for playing matchmaker.
6. I can't get married only because I think it's time or because I feel like my biological clock is ticking. I have friends who have done that in the past and I can see how miserable they are. I really would much rather not wake up feeling that way every morning.
7. Women do not have a shelf-life. Learn to treat them with respect and dignity.
So distant acquaintances who don't even know what color I like let alone me as a person - please butt the fuck out. If you must ask me a question despite us having nothing in common, let's discuss the erratic weather patterns of the last couple of weeks. Or what the Chinese are up to? Or if I watched "The Big Bang Theory" tonight. Although to be honest, if our paths have to cross let's just keep it to superficial pleasantries and move on. I don't particularly like you, you don't approve of me and feel like you have to preach absurdities at me if you do speak to me, and I really detest our interaction as I'm sure you must so why don't we save us both some trouble.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
A Dissertation Prayer
O Ye God of Dissertating Goodness! Please be thou kind enough to stop messing with me dissertating momentum. I plead with thee to grant me no (melo?)drama from "The Loved Ones" on every day 2 or day 3 following a serious commitment to finish the last couple of Dissertating Hurdles successfully. Particularly when I have a meticulously detailed plan for completion.
I thank you for your time - please be kind enough to give me back mine.
Optimistically yours,
Bionic-Woman
I thank you for your time - please be kind enough to give me back mine.
Optimistically yours,
Bionic-Woman
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Bewildering & Unsettling
Since 2008 began, particularly this past month, several friends and acquaintances of mine from the world of academia have ended up either seriously contemplating a departure from academia or actually exiting. The stages they're in range from "almost ABD" to "tenured and sick of it". I am told by "them" that this isn't surprising given the attrition rate in social science Ph.D. programs. I have, however, no official stats on tenured professors deciding they've had just about more than they can take.
Cut to any of the critical points in the academic cycle i.e. completed coursework to ABD, ABD to PhD, Ph.D to tenure-track positions (often punctuated by postdocs and horribly underpaid adjuncting gigs), tenure-track to tenured (where the horrors of the process might favor the mediocre rather than the wonderfully accomplished), and so on and so forth.
That's when it seems to change perhaps - or is changing of late?
Of all the people I've spoken to are brilliant minds (no-one else really opts to pursue a PhD so that isn't at all surprising) and hardworking, dedicated souls and stellar scholars. The reasons I've heard have more to do with extenuating life circumstances. For example, the "almost ABD" who can no longer continue the program because his/her committee members failed to read his/her proposal when s/he submitted it a semester ago and s/he has no way of funding himself/herself through this process because of visa issues. The "ABD to PhD" who can't really rely on adjuncting to pay the bills while continuing to work on the dissertation. The "almost PhD" who has worked hard but languished in the program because of inaccessible/unsupportive committee members. The "tenure-track Ph.D" who is freaking out because she's having a particularly difficult pregnancy while her due date falls right bang in the middle of the fall semester and it seems that her employer is uninterested in pausing the tenure clock let alone work with her in case she can't be up and about in 2 weeks time after she has the baby. The "tenured Ph.D" who, for the last 16 years, has lived far away from family and is simply sick of being unable to have a regular family life. Or the "tenured Ph.D." who feels completely frazzled in between the demands of teaching and parenting none of which are 9-5, Monday-Friday commitments. And the list goes on...
Maybe this will sound incredibly naive on my part but it seems strange to me that the same reasons why one wants to pursue academic life aren't, at many times, enough to keep one there. It's mind-boggling to imagine that up until the MA/MS/MBA level society rewards individuals with better pay and more flexibility in terms of things like geography and being able to bring your life into more balance at some finite point if not right away but that your prospects are relatively (quite?) dim if your terminal degree is the Ph.D. Add to that factors like the reconceptualization of students as cash-paying customers that must be satisfied lest they become disgruntled and the organization lose money, the notion that college is more a vocational/technical training grounds than a place to be educated, etc and that pretty much saps a lot of (but luckily not all) fun out of the teaching experience. Maybe it's not that grim and maybe I've lately found myself interacting within a configuration where these challenges abound for whatever reason. After all, I just finished a visiting professor gig that was probably one of the most rewarding experiences ever in lots of ways. Of course it was challenging in ways I'd never thought about either - but that's all fodder for another (forthcoming?) blogpost.
For now, I just wanted to vent about what seems to me to be a trend within the larger community of which I'm a part because I find it, as the title suggests, bewildering. Did something happen over the past couple of years that this is the conversation I'm hearing more of whereas it was previously non-existent? Something tells me that might be the case. Or, perhaps, the people I got to know in academia are at critical points in what I call the 7 year academic cycle (tenure takes about 7 years, the average time to finish a social sciences PhD in the US is about the same) where they have to make bigger decisions like whether or not pursuing the PhD fits in with the rest of their life plans or whether their tenured life in NoWhereVille, USA is something they can keep doing until death do them part.
Irrespective, that these conversations are happening is surprising to me because these are not the things anyone raises when you inform them that you're considering the pursuit of a PhD and putting yourself on the path to that most-celebrated-of-all-things-holy-in-academia AKA a tenured professorship. At that juncture, it's all about the nobility of the profession in so far that you get to create knowledge and shape young minds. We're told it's like being in school - something most aspiring PhDs have a pretty good knack of thus far. Your grad advisors tell you how you're made for research and teaching. How your mind and curiosity ought not to be wasted and how this is the only space that affords you the ability to indulge what excites you. What nobody tells you - or at least nobody told me or anyone I know/know of - that there are all of these other things that perhaps ought to be part of this calculation. I'm sure these folks I've spoken to feel cheated. I would be livid if I was in their positions. Why? Because we're sold this dream of the nobility of the profession - it'd be nice if someone dialed it down a notch so that reality doesn't feel like it's biting your butt hard when the satisfaction of sitting around in seminars or at conferences connecting with and being challenged by brilliance is confronted by things like bills, education loan payments, moving to the boondocks far away from civilization let alone an emotional network, disciplinary boundaries you must pander to for the 14 or so years from when you start the PhD to when you get tenure presuming all of these happen without any breaks in-between, spoilt kids whom you have to indulge lest you bruise their egos and rights as cash-paying customers at the expense of creating a genuinely open learning environment, the fickleness of the world of academic employment where networks are often tie-breakers over merit, and, perhaps most importantly, everything we label as 'life outside academia.'
Nopes I'm not bitter...just unsettled by the unsavoriness of what I find around me. I think those other things that remain unspoken ought to be raised. Of course it doesn't make for very good advertising but at least it isn't false advertising. The former might mean you lose some folks but the latter avoids the disgruntledness and disillusionment that might accompany an individual's learning of the truth. Not to mention that this is a time-consuming process not only because it is lengthy but because it is emotionally draining and, often, soul-crushing. Knowing that's inevitable would leave folks better prepared to deal with a challenge. I know that I would've pursued this path because, as geeky as it sounds, I got into it given my love for learning even if someone had told me all of this but I wouldn't be feeling nearly as unsettled as I am right now.
Having said that it's back to the drawing (dissertation) board :-). Why? Not just because I see the light at the end of that tunnel but because I like what I've created.
Cut to any of the critical points in the academic cycle i.e. completed coursework to ABD, ABD to PhD, Ph.D to tenure-track positions (often punctuated by postdocs and horribly underpaid adjuncting gigs), tenure-track to tenured (where the horrors of the process might favor the mediocre rather than the wonderfully accomplished), and so on and so forth.
That's when it seems to change perhaps - or is changing of late?
Of all the people I've spoken to are brilliant minds (no-one else really opts to pursue a PhD so that isn't at all surprising) and hardworking, dedicated souls and stellar scholars. The reasons I've heard have more to do with extenuating life circumstances. For example, the "almost ABD" who can no longer continue the program because his/her committee members failed to read his/her proposal when s/he submitted it a semester ago and s/he has no way of funding himself/herself through this process because of visa issues. The "ABD to PhD" who can't really rely on adjuncting to pay the bills while continuing to work on the dissertation. The "almost PhD" who has worked hard but languished in the program because of inaccessible/unsupportive committee members. The "tenure-track Ph.D" who is freaking out because she's having a particularly difficult pregnancy while her due date falls right bang in the middle of the fall semester and it seems that her employer is uninterested in pausing the tenure clock let alone work with her in case she can't be up and about in 2 weeks time after she has the baby. The "tenured Ph.D" who, for the last 16 years, has lived far away from family and is simply sick of being unable to have a regular family life. Or the "tenured Ph.D." who feels completely frazzled in between the demands of teaching and parenting none of which are 9-5, Monday-Friday commitments. And the list goes on...
Maybe this will sound incredibly naive on my part but it seems strange to me that the same reasons why one wants to pursue academic life aren't, at many times, enough to keep one there. It's mind-boggling to imagine that up until the MA/MS/MBA level society rewards individuals with better pay and more flexibility in terms of things like geography and being able to bring your life into more balance at some finite point if not right away but that your prospects are relatively (quite?) dim if your terminal degree is the Ph.D. Add to that factors like the reconceptualization of students as cash-paying customers that must be satisfied lest they become disgruntled and the organization lose money, the notion that college is more a vocational/technical training grounds than a place to be educated, etc and that pretty much saps a lot of (but luckily not all) fun out of the teaching experience. Maybe it's not that grim and maybe I've lately found myself interacting within a configuration where these challenges abound for whatever reason. After all, I just finished a visiting professor gig that was probably one of the most rewarding experiences ever in lots of ways. Of course it was challenging in ways I'd never thought about either - but that's all fodder for another (forthcoming?) blogpost.
For now, I just wanted to vent about what seems to me to be a trend within the larger community of which I'm a part because I find it, as the title suggests, bewildering. Did something happen over the past couple of years that this is the conversation I'm hearing more of whereas it was previously non-existent? Something tells me that might be the case. Or, perhaps, the people I got to know in academia are at critical points in what I call the 7 year academic cycle (tenure takes about 7 years, the average time to finish a social sciences PhD in the US is about the same) where they have to make bigger decisions like whether or not pursuing the PhD fits in with the rest of their life plans or whether their tenured life in NoWhereVille, USA is something they can keep doing until death do them part.
Irrespective, that these conversations are happening is surprising to me because these are not the things anyone raises when you inform them that you're considering the pursuit of a PhD and putting yourself on the path to that most-celebrated-of-all-things-holy-in-academia AKA a tenured professorship. At that juncture, it's all about the nobility of the profession in so far that you get to create knowledge and shape young minds. We're told it's like being in school - something most aspiring PhDs have a pretty good knack of thus far. Your grad advisors tell you how you're made for research and teaching. How your mind and curiosity ought not to be wasted and how this is the only space that affords you the ability to indulge what excites you. What nobody tells you - or at least nobody told me or anyone I know/know of - that there are all of these other things that perhaps ought to be part of this calculation. I'm sure these folks I've spoken to feel cheated. I would be livid if I was in their positions. Why? Because we're sold this dream of the nobility of the profession - it'd be nice if someone dialed it down a notch so that reality doesn't feel like it's biting your butt hard when the satisfaction of sitting around in seminars or at conferences connecting with and being challenged by brilliance is confronted by things like bills, education loan payments, moving to the boondocks far away from civilization let alone an emotional network, disciplinary boundaries you must pander to for the 14 or so years from when you start the PhD to when you get tenure presuming all of these happen without any breaks in-between, spoilt kids whom you have to indulge lest you bruise their egos and rights as cash-paying customers at the expense of creating a genuinely open learning environment, the fickleness of the world of academic employment where networks are often tie-breakers over merit, and, perhaps most importantly, everything we label as 'life outside academia.'
Nopes I'm not bitter...just unsettled by the unsavoriness of what I find around me. I think those other things that remain unspoken ought to be raised. Of course it doesn't make for very good advertising but at least it isn't false advertising. The former might mean you lose some folks but the latter avoids the disgruntledness and disillusionment that might accompany an individual's learning of the truth. Not to mention that this is a time-consuming process not only because it is lengthy but because it is emotionally draining and, often, soul-crushing. Knowing that's inevitable would leave folks better prepared to deal with a challenge. I know that I would've pursued this path because, as geeky as it sounds, I got into it given my love for learning even if someone had told me all of this but I wouldn't be feeling nearly as unsettled as I am right now.
Having said that it's back to the drawing (dissertation) board :-). Why? Not just because I see the light at the end of that tunnel but because I like what I've created.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
On Cloud 9: best teaching compliment ever
I haven't finished grading finals which means I also haven't read the exit papers I have students submit at the end of the semester to get an actual sense of their experience of the course as opposed to the insipidness of standardized course evaluation forms that most institutions distribute. Okay that's a bad dig. Perhaps those forms are okay but they don't really tell me much. They don't really work for me - maybe they do for others. But that isn't the point of this post.
I've been getting lovely notes from students about their experience having taken my classes. Since I'm still swamped with grading I don't quite have time to write the longer post - or perhaps series of posts - around my teaching experience this year. [I was a Visiting Professor at a prestigious private university in the Northeast area of these fine United States]. However I do want to share what I think is the best compliment of my teaching style which really is more of an unstructured seminar if we want to label it.
Color me giddy with happiness by this particular piece of praise! Why? By which I mean something other than the obvious reason that most of us, if not all, like being told how fabulous we are. When I started teaching in 1998 as part of a team-taught course that would convene as a large lecture and break up into recitation groups I knew how I wanted to teach - aka the unstructured seminar style which is how I learn best hence the desire to teach that way - but my craft was getting there. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I didn't always know how to bring it together after letting it go. This past year I felt like I had some measure of control over my craft. I also felt like I learnt in the process. In fact, I'm quite impressed that I took the decision to significantly alter the syllabus for one of my classes a few sessions in. It was scary but I also thought I'd figured how it would work better given the configuration of the class in terms of the people and the relationships we'd begun to cultivate as part of a learning community. That this kind of praise came from someone in that very class makes it all the more sweet. Here it is - almost verbatim:
"I don't know how you did it but you let all of us contribute to the learning process. We'd start someplace, go all over, and then somehow you tied it all back together and at the end of each session we felt like we learnt stuff".
How cool is that?!
I've been getting lovely notes from students about their experience having taken my classes. Since I'm still swamped with grading I don't quite have time to write the longer post - or perhaps series of posts - around my teaching experience this year. [I was a Visiting Professor at a prestigious private university in the Northeast area of these fine United States]. However I do want to share what I think is the best compliment of my teaching style which really is more of an unstructured seminar if we want to label it.
Color me giddy with happiness by this particular piece of praise! Why? By which I mean something other than the obvious reason that most of us, if not all, like being told how fabulous we are. When I started teaching in 1998 as part of a team-taught course that would convene as a large lecture and break up into recitation groups I knew how I wanted to teach - aka the unstructured seminar style which is how I learn best hence the desire to teach that way - but my craft was getting there. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I didn't always know how to bring it together after letting it go. This past year I felt like I had some measure of control over my craft. I also felt like I learnt in the process. In fact, I'm quite impressed that I took the decision to significantly alter the syllabus for one of my classes a few sessions in. It was scary but I also thought I'd figured how it would work better given the configuration of the class in terms of the people and the relationships we'd begun to cultivate as part of a learning community. That this kind of praise came from someone in that very class makes it all the more sweet. Here it is - almost verbatim:
"I don't know how you did it but you let all of us contribute to the learning process. We'd start someplace, go all over, and then somehow you tied it all back together and at the end of each session we felt like we learnt stuff".
How cool is that?!
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