October 12, 2011 · 8:43 pm

Confessions of a Sometime Couponer

Over at feMOMhist’s blog, it’s Work, Labor and Money week. Among the topics that she’s tackled? Extreme Couponing.

I confess to being a tiny bit of a fan of both the show and the philosophy. (Note: Canada has a much less robust coupon culture and opportunity than in the states, so even if I did go crazy, I wouldn’t be saving and stockpiling like those folks on the TV show.) I haven’t bought into the idea all the way, but I’ve found ways to make coupon and loyalty points work for me.

My biggest score’s been a Wii system bought entirely with loyalty points earned over a three month period of strategic shopping at our local pharmacy. I didn’t spend all that much to stockpile those points! I’ve gotten free bananas, free ice cream and free ground beef. Toilet paper’s always purchased on sale and with a coupon to boot. There’s a whole shelf in the bathroom cupboard with a small stockpile of deodorant, shampoo and other necessities which has also relieved me of reacting on short-term need to buy something at a high price.

Still, my time’s too much in demand for me to spend a lot of time on couponing. Yet you need to approach couponing with insight and information, or you’re just collecting slips of paper that don’t do you much good or thinking you have to buy stuff you don’t need or want to save money.

So how do I save some bucks but only spend on what I need? I rely on the group-mind of internet coupon sites. Here in Canada, there’s one great web community, Smart Canucks, and another wonderful blog, Mrs. January, that I follow. (In the states, I’d recommend following my wise friend Denise, at Blogher.) These sites alert me to all sorts of avenues from which I can get useful coupons (circulars in the paper, printable coupons or others I can order from manufacturer or retailer websites) and also track hot deals in weekly flyers. They’ve alerted me to coupon codes for the book store and favourite clothing stores.

I also learned about how to better use store loyalty programs. One pharmacy offers a 20x loyalty point event every few weeks. If I buy necessities on those days at a good sale price and with a coupon to boot? I’m laughing and buying that Wii with my points. I’ve saved that many points again to use on another bonus redemption day and that’s just since August.

Everything I’ve saved, I’ve done so because of their guidance. If I didn’t have these sites, I’d have to work a lot more to save even half as much and I just wouldn’t find it worth my while. Not when there’s editing, writing and marking to be done. Speaking of which. . . .

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October 10, 2011 · 10:34 pm

Happy Thanksgiving

Canadian-style, that is! There was turkey and pie and fall leaves turning beautiful colours and I got to spend some time with family.

Pretty darned great, even if I don’t have all the marking done and out of the way.

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October 5, 2011 · 9:36 pm

10,000 hours

Typing away While Malcolm Gladwell may be an annoying gadfly at times, in his assessment of the importance of practice in mastery, he’s dead on.

Ten thousand hours, he explained in Outliers, is the amount of time believed needed to achieve true proficiency whether as a musician (like The Beatles whose years of nigh-constant performances in Germany put them over the top) or in other fields. Like, say, academic history or writing.

Those five years I spent pursuing the Ph.D.? 5 years * 40 hours/week * 50 weeks/year = 10,000 hours right there. That gave me a basic mastery of my field of history, though: not a mastery of writing. I managed to work my way through my thesis pretty painlessly once I stumbled upon an approach that worked for me (write from the middle, starting with something you know well and want to incorporate – worry about the introduction and conclusion later). I wrote, but not nearly as much as I read, researched and pondered. Five years of doctoral studies didn’t make me a proficient writer.

The problem is, neither did becoming a full-time academic. While in the last months of being ABD, I was hired here. I struggled with a new full-time job and the crazy expectations that included: teaching in fields far abroad from my grad school preparation although I’d studied widely, learning arcane elements of academic administration as I stepped into a major position before I was tenured, being expected to do all of this while bringing my French up to speed in a bilingual institution. I wrote, yes, but not nearly as much as I needed to write. Somehow, writing became more and more difficult, at least in my conception of matters. Plus, there was always teaching and administration that needed ‘doing’. Not to mention life!

That said, I wasn’t content with the status quo. I love to research and share the results. I was just out of practice and unsure of how to best get back in the swim of things. That’s when I borrowed Outliers from the library and hit upon this motivating tidbit. 10,000 hours? I was willing to devote serious amounts of time if it would help me out.

This year, I’ll have written somewhere close to 80,000 words and edited far more than that. Over the last few years, I’ve put writing and editing back at the top of my priority list: not easy to do in a term such as this when I’m also responsible for teaching five classes and almost two hundred students. The hard effort’s paying off: I’m writing better and I’m editing with more facility. I’ve clocked a lot of hours at the keyboard and that’s made it easier to plan out how these 5000 words or those 7000 words need to come together.

I’m not saying I’m an awesome writer. I’m not saying that my words will set the world on fire. I’m just saying that I can write well enough to meet my expectations and occasionally exceed them.

I suspect, if I sat down and figured it out, I’d have passed another 10,000 hour milestone recently. Thank you, Malcolm Gladwell!

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October 2, 2011 · 10:26 pm

Don’t Cite So Much From Me

(Post title with apologies to The Police.)

Yes, this week the first essay, a short research essay analyzing a primary source document, is due. I’m fielding lots of questions, including a surprising number about how they can cite me. Me, me, me, me, me and my lectures! Me from the course manual I wrote for the other course they’re taking or took last year via continuing education. I’ll probably even get one or two wanting to cite from the chapters I wrote for one of the Wiley Pop Culture and History series!

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be flattered. I’m not. Mostly, I feel worried. We had an in-class workshop on how to find research resources using our library catalogue and our databases. I passed out a rubric that underlined the expectation the research would have to draw on a book, chapter or article from our library collections. I spent a fair chunk of two class sessions explaining what we’re doing and why the research part is important.

When they want to cite me, it feels little better than when they cite some random website. Both strike me as timid or lazy choices made by students who’re afraid of not finding an acceptable source or just don’t want to work at the research required. If they don’t learn to search effectively and in different ways besides using the internet search engines, they’re not going to uncover the majority of scholarship. They need to learn how to start finding other scholars’ writings, how to read those effectively and how to use this information in their essays. That’s one of the objectives of this course!

If all they do is parrot back my own words at me, how will they know if I wasn’t leading them astray? I want them to test my suggestions from our class time, not just blindly accept one of the interpretations that I’ve offered. I want them to see if they can articulate an idea and find some support for it outside of what I’ve said or what’s there in their textbook!

I guess I’ll find out on Wednesday how many of the students got those messages.

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September 28, 2011 · 9:25 pm

Five Days a Week?

For the full-time academics out there, how many days a week do you teach?

I know there are two schools of thought with the popular one hereabouts being to pile up all your teaching on two, three, maybe four days so you have at least one reserved for research. The alternative model is to teach five days a week, spreading it out in smaller chunks.

At my undergraduate university, that could even be six days a week given the existence of Saturday morning classes (usually taught by grad students and sessionals, as I recall.

Because of family issues, I am unavailable for one time slot four days a week. It effectively blocks off many afternoon classes since running a seminar for three hours in the afternoon automatically runs afoul of my restricted time.

As a result, I’m pretty well resigned to teaching five days a week. It has the advantage of spreading matters out so I’m not teaching six hours one day followed by three hours the next and so forth. The disadvantage is that it really breaks up my days and, when the inevitable meeting requests come in, those bits and pieces of time are fractured even more.

At least this only lasts through December. Starting in January, I’m on my lighter term, teaching three classes instead of five (sure, one of these is a graduate level directed readings course but I feel completely justified in counting that as a course in that I have one student now pursuing a topic far afield from my research and I’ll have a second directed readings student starting in January in a completely different topic also far afield). I might actually get to keep Mondays and Fridays sacrosanct for research, except for when those pesky meetings interfere.

However you experience teaching, do you prefer to spread it out or bunch it up? Do you have any say in your schedule? How does it affect your ability to research and write?

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September 25, 2011 · 10:36 pm

Small Class Bliss

My senior seminar on early medieval chronicles has a total enrolment of sixteen.

In twenty years of full-time teaching, I’ve never had a senior seminar with so few students. Two years ago I had nineteen and thought that I was fortunate. Sixteen seems even better. This particular group of sixteen is an absolute pleasure to teach.

I suspect that some of the bliss also results from the background many students bring to the topic. Four of the students have completed at least first year Latin, two others say they’re currently studying it. One student is clearly fluent in both Latin and Greek. I am envious as my Greek is at the elementary level of recognize the letters and about three dozen key words!

While all of our readings are in translation, it’s wonderful to have students critique the translator’s word choice or comment on the echoes of other classical models they see in the writing style they’re analyzing. I’m more accustomed to students taking my seminars lacking even the most basic of prerequisites such as our western civ freshman course or a sophomore-level subject survey. When half the class doesn’t have a clue about the history they’re tackling, no amount of background readings will fix the problem.

But it isn’t just the linguistic and topical course background that distinguishes the class. Almost every student has identified a useful background they bring to the course. For instance, another number of students have a strong grounding in religious and Biblical studies. A few others have a good sense of theory that’s quite applicable. Put all of these together and you have a nigh-on-perfect mix for lively discussions on the class board as well as in the classroom.

I like to think this makes up for my other two undergraduate classes sitting right at the course caps of 80. These are also pretty good classes where students are following my lead to comment and contribute but it is far more difficult to achieve this in a group of 80 than in the much smaller class where I’m mostly scrambling to get out of their way and facilitate the shift from talking to the professor to talking with each other.

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September 22, 2011 · 7:41 pm

Choice, Change and Chicks

Haven’t we heard this before? Margaret Wente’s recent column explains the dearth of women managers as an issue of individual choice. “What glass ceiling? It’s the mommy track” trots out that tired explanation to let us know that not only are women not being excluded from the boardrooms, it’s that they want it this way!

According to Wente, what’s important is that women want to have things that are incompatible with a business career. Like children, for instance. Apparently all those male managers are childless. Because having kids is systemically incompatible with business success. Clearly! Since anything otherwise would be unfair and the system isn’t unfair, is it, Ms. Wente? Funny, but it seems I’ve read lots of research that shows that fatherhood in a management-track employee can be seen as a sign of stability and suitability whereas motherhood is a sign that woman’s just not committed. Because those maternity leaves are a real hassle, I guess!

Wente also suggests that maybe it’s because full-time managerial work is haaaaard and women don’t want to do that. Instead, they’re making rational choices to not go for that promotion. Tracy Robinson, a successful executive at CPF who’s also the mother of four kids? Apparently she’s just craaa-azy and no smart woman would want to do what she’s doing. That’s why she’s one of a tiny number of women executives, says Wente, while pointing to the recent study that shows three-quarters of Dutch women working part-time.

I have a radical suggestion. Maybe all of these outcomes are a tiny bit influenced by that old patriarchal equilibrium that criticizes women for not being like men or for being unwomanly when they act like men?

Nah. Couldn’t be. It’s just women’s nature. When confronted with all the choices in a perfectly equitable socio-economic system, women just say “that’s man’s work!” and go put on their pearls, get ready to do some vacuuming and pop a few bon-bons as they enjoy their work-life balance.

Wente also thinks this will all only change, get this, when women change. See? The problem’s all on our side. If we just manned up, we’d all be in the executive suites, sure as shooting! But since we just make these silly choices, we have no one but ourselves to blame when we aren’t all sitting in that spiffy corner office at the top of some office tower.

Now for a refreshing contrast? Ms. Robinson, that manager-mom at CPR? She’s on record with quite a different viewpoint from Wente:

Tracy Robinson, a vice president at Canadian Pacific, says companies need to institute a plan to ensure qualified women are recognized with promotions.

“More than 50 per cent of the workforce — the emerging workforce, the emerging talent — is female,” Robinson said. “If you haven’t put some thought into how to make your environment friendly to women and other visible minorities then you’re at a competitive disadvantage.” (CBC.ca)

Guess whose analysis I find more compelling?

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September 16, 2011 · 5:10 pm

Could Be Worse

Could be dead, or stabbed. Or it could be midweek! But it’s Friday and I’m whole and hearty. Bonus!

Made it to the weekend and neither the meeting with the dean nor my burgeoning workload managed to bring me down. I am already feeling spread out thinly, like butter scraped across hot toast. Saw my schedule get just a little bit more crowded and hectic. We’re already tackling the question of what courses each of us will offer next year: the earliest we’ve ever thought about this in my department. But if we don’t, we won’t know where to make the cuts mandated as part of the university’s overall austerity program. Balancing personnel realities versus budget numbers is a frustrating exercise.

Still, I’m not chairperson and I’m so glad to say that. Once I’ve dealt with various service responsibilities as well as my class meetings, I’m doing my best to get out of Dodge. Even though home is alive with distractions, I find it surprisingly easy to ignore the siren call of the television for the luxury of real mind-work.

This term, I’m committed to Another Damned Notorious Writing Group, an online support group running twelve weeks. Week one is done and gone: I did some of what I’d hoped to do. The sad reality of seeing my writing hopes and ambitions running up against the unyielding requirements of my job’s other requirements? That’s the hardest part of term to deal with on an emotional level. I have such hopes of universal, regular progress, and I feel them dashed time and again by my wacky schedule.

As Dr. Crazy notes, writing every day isn’t an approach that works for everyone. I do my best when I write regularly but Tuesdays, for instance, when I’m booked all but one hour from 8-8? Writing doesn’t happen and I don’t try to make it happen. I might be able to squeeze in a little research or writing time during office hours or my lunch hour but I’d rather use these contingent timeslots for tasks that don’t suffer when I suddenly drop the ball. (Reviewing slidesets for classes so I can tweak the questions and images, for instance, or adding more material to the online course management system.)

I pray there aren’t any meetings on Friday afternoons because then I enjoy a wonderful “sweet spot” of four uninterrupted hours to drill down deep in my current project. Despite leaving breadcrumb trails in the form of ALL CAPS NOTES to myself, I need about half an hour to reorient myself as to what I’m writing as well as how I’m using the sources.

Sadly, this Friday wasn’t a joyous excursion into writing. My afternoon meeting was important and we accomplished our goals, but it chopped up my afternoon into precisely the wrong chunks. Even so, I’ve completed the key writing task I’d wanted to have finished in the last week. I’m fortunate that my family’s tolerant enough of my wacky work schedule to take it calmly when I say that this weekend is all about writing and editing because that’s what I’ll be doing.

It’s not ideal. It’s not even how I’m supposed to be working as I teach a 3/2 load on paper. You can be that I can’t wait for next term when my teaching commitments drop from five courses to three! But I think this stop-and-go schedule with a clear road map is something that’s working for me.

What’s working for you with writing, editing, research or study this term?

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September 12, 2011 · 10:45 pm

Interesting Times

You know the curse “May you live in interesting times”?

I’m living them right now and while many elements in my life are going swimmingly (my classes have started fantastically well, the family’s busy and healthy, I’m making progress in writing as well as editing), the ominous shadow of those “interesting times” looms overhead. It dogs my footsteps when I’m out walking the dogs. It sits on my shoulder and distracts me from pleasant family time. It follows me into my dreams. I can’t get past the concern to blog about anything else and I certainly can’t blog about this!

Soon I’ll have some information that might help put these worries into perspective. More likely, it’ll simply lay out the parameters for a scary next few months. Hopefully, I’ll be able to blog about the rest of my life once I’ve digested the news.

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September 7, 2011 · 9:53 am

With a Little Help

The virtual commons has been my second home for quite some time now. As the lone Anglophone premodernist on my faculty, it’s great to be able to turn to the online world and get the feedback, advice and support I’ve missed since grad school. In the 90s, we did this on listservs and Usenet. In the last decade? The blogosphere’s been the place to be, but over the last few years, Twitter’s become the digital equivalent of the old water cooler. (We used to discuss “Murphy Brown” at mine. Oh, I know I’m dating myself with that!)

Got a question about where to find an obscure source or who might be the expert on a tangential topic important to your research? Ask the #twitterstorians! Need to plan for some upcoming meetings or want some feedback on work in progress? You can’t do better than starting with the #twitterstorians. Want to share some triumphs as well as the occasional frustrations of your historical work: teaching, researching or in outreach? Turn to #twitterstorians.

Thanks to Katrina and all the others who’ve made the tag come alive this past year and may we have many more years of camaraderie ahead of us! Happy Anniversary, #twitterstorians!

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