Change is Good

My dear officemates (Jess, Jessica, and Kate Jylkka) will confirm that I have experienced a variety of emotions during the weeks of this course in preparation for blog writing.  I once described my writing process as follows:

“Read, read, read; think, think, think; panic, panic, panic; PICTURES.”

After laughing about this for some time, I then decided to look back at my posts and realized that I not only did not always use pictures, I actually wrote a few things that will be useful to future-me.  Especially now that I am in the throes of *writing* (read: somewhere between the think/panic stage described above) my term paper on The People in the Trees for Mark’s class on Race, I believe that thinking through this book in ways that were not always comfortable was a very useful practice.  I have also experienced, in no particular order, the following other mental meanderings:

1. Writing every week

    ...is a scary and unfamiliar practice for me.  I knew this would be good for me to do because of the scariness business I mentioned above, but it is not something I have had to in a very long time.  I tend to be one who ruminates on something for a long time--days, weeks, months--makes lists in the meantime, and then in a flurry of somewhere between 12-48 hours, writes the whole damn thing.  I wrote about 70 pages of my master’s thesis in two weeks, and had previously prided myself on my 15 hours-15 pages schedule.  Now, in this new ballgame of professional rumination, dialogue, and critique, I find myself making adjustments to what had heretofore worked for me.  To extend the metaphor with another metaphor, let’s just say this game’s been a nail biter.  

2. Change to the routine can be a good thing.

    I am no longer a high school teacher, and realize now how much I had become one.  I spent the last 6 or 7 years thinking about how to explain very complicated ideas to teenagers.  Teenagers are exactly like what you think they’re like, including but not limited to, having very short attention spans, very ego-centric, highly emotional, starved for attention, and absolutely hilarious.  As many teachers (hopefully) do, I realized that not all students learn the way I learned.  There are all kinds--auditory, kinesthetic, those who can do rote memorization, those who want nothing more than to know all the answers and all the right ways, and those who could give approximately zero f*cks.  After many of my long think-think-thinks, but not quite panics, I found pictures.  Pictures became my way to explain all kinds of things, especially what those who said they were not “English people”...whatever that means (and not British citizens, nor Anglophiles).  I taught essays with geometric proofs and geography with dice and the American Dream with triangles.  Of course we did close reading and discussion too, but the larger, and in my mind, more exciting learning happened when we had to think differently than we thought we were supposed to.  Now that those around me give more than many f*cks, I am reorienting myself to thinking about the words, then using the words to talk about them, and writing words about the words.  Strangely, as one who considers herself a words person, it has been a challenge, but a welcome one at that.  

3. This is fun.

    I honestly didn’t think I would laugh this much in graduate school.  Perhaps I spent too much time on the East Coast with old boys in brick buildings with marble floors, but I never expected the camaraderie that I feel around this community of scholars.  I love hearing from my professors that they go to each other for help, or that the graduate students schedule work sessions just to make sure we’re doing the thing we came here to do.  And should we feel compelled to make a joke about this week’s readings, everyone gets it.  Did I always enjoy doing all the readings? No, but they forced me to get out of my weird island world that I spend the rest of my time in my head in, and they aided my process of making meaningful adjustments to work that I truly care about.