You Wish Your Bed Was Already Made

June 9, 2008 in Reading, Teaching by smalinky | 2 comments

I’m not totally ready for it to be Monday. I think I achieved a good balance this weekend between doing work and having fun, but does this every get easy? Does any academic ever hit an automatic stride in which you’ve figured out how to get enough work done, how to feel like you’ve gotten enough work done (not necessarily in a direct or obvious relationship with the first goal), and how to have time to unwind and just, you know, eat hot dogs outside while melting into a puddle or whatever? Between bike rides, barbecues, and housewarming parties this weekend, made good progress on the Foucault article, starting to sort out some coherent thoughts on the relationships between Foucault’s state racism and what Dean and I have been calling “racism racism.” Last night, reading Jeff Manza’s excellent review article on sociology of the New Deal, a great moment of clarification when he writes that a strict (or “strong” as they say in sociology) historical institutionalism comes to odds with what I’d call a critical race view insofar as the latter says that the institutions of U.S. government themselves get produced by structures of racism. This gels with what I’m trying to say through a biopolitical framework, and helped me understand my own resistance to some of the new institutionalism. But for now: I have to grade papers to turn back to the students tonight. On the upside, only half the students did the assignment, so I don’t have too much to grade. On the downside, only half the students did the assignment. Any thoughts on how to overcome overwhelming summer-inertia and motivate students?

  1. Emily on June 10, 2008 at 10:25 am

    My brother had a child, taught a three-course load plus supervising several Hampshire senior projects, and turned out a book. He says his secret is that you write in the ten or fifteen or twenty minute increments in your day rather than in big scheduled chunks. I suppose it depends on ‘process.’

    Also, xoxo ‘racism racism.’

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  2. smalinky on June 11, 2008 at 10:54 am

    I so can’t work that way. I need like a six hour block set aside to get two hours of work done. The other four are spent: getting up to make coffee, drinking coffee, going to the bathroom because I drank so much coffee, pacing around, and taking care of some task that suddenly needs to be done immediately like pruning my plants. But figuring out how to be productive in short bursts seems like a good idea. In some ways, though I envy grad students who have the experience of plentiful funding requiring little service, the fact that CUNY makes us work for almost every dime turns out to be good prep for life after school, in terms of figuring out how to manage teaching duties while also getting things done. Or thinking about figuring it out at least.

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