Preparing for exams

My exams are in six weeks. I haven't finished reading yet, but I'm getting there. The paralysis that occured in conjunction with the dissertation proposal set me behind schedule. I got a good response from the Advisor on my last proposal draft, but it requires one more revision before the exams. I actually wrote a whole proposal without mentioning any primary texts. I'm that good. I knew that wouldn't fly, but I am reluctant to assign primary texts to my chapters yet--I'll get to that in another post.

All advice I have received about preparing for exams has included writing my own questions. Not necessarily answering them, but coming up with smart questions and listing works I might address in an answer. Good advice. But there are a few questions that I need to answer before I get into the exams--major concepts that I need to articulate, works that I need to connect explicitly, big ideas that I will need to have worked out so that I can answer other questions.

So here I am assigning myself essays. On the blog. Public accountability. My lists are 20th c. American lit, Southern lit and culture, and religion and modern culture.

I need to narrate a kind of history of the study of Southern literature, connected with the history of "Southern identity" (C. Vann Woodward), with a focus on what scholars in the field are doing now and how that is different from the idea of Southern literature when it began to be established as a field. What is The South? What is Southern literature? What do the Agrarians have to do with it anymore?

I've got a lot of theorists of religion and modern culture on my third list: Marx, Freud, Jung, Durkheim, Eliade, James, Girard, Nietzsche. I need to write an expository essay that addresses the major ideas of all of these guys and then finds connections and disagreements among them.

The poetry on my lists appear in chronological clumps: 1920s-30s, 1950s-60s, late 1970s. And somehow Rita Dove ends up in the 80s all by herself. They're actually clumped more by the dates of specific collections than by the author "schools" they are usually classified in. So some poets end up in a different "clump" that one might expect. Why the clumps? What features do the poems share? What are the differences between the clumps? Are poets responding to one another? What major formal changes are happening?

I need to write something about African American religion that mixes Christianity with African religion. That shows up a lot in my primary texts, and I've never done much more than recognize and acknowledge that it's there. I should write something about that--I'm fairly certain that such a question will be on my exam--and anything I write about that topic will be useful in my dissertation later. It's something I need to work out.

So, there. Four essays. My paying-the-bills job responsibilities will be over next week (as will the paycheck!) until July so I can devote myself fully to obsessing over exams.

Academic babies, pt.2: Quick ramblings

I don't have time to develop much more of my topic from yesterday, so this is going to probably read like a string of disjointed ideas. I'll point out a few points from Mary Ann Mason of Berkeley, whose Do Babies Matter? project I linked to yesterday. The short answers are, for women, yes, and for men, no. Women with children are less likely to get a tenure-track job and then are less likely to get tenure than women without children. Men with children are slightly more likely to get tenure than men without children. Hmm. The gender gap is not that surprising because mothers are still the primary caregivers more often than men. And, of course, there's that whole pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding thing. As for timing, it seems that having a child within five years of earning a Ph.D. has the most impact on a woman's career. Which all goes back to the fact that our whole notion of career advancement is based on a man's biology--men are much more likely to be able to have children in their forties after establishing their careers, and women who want children, of course, take a big risk when they wait that long. Mason has some proposed solutions on her website as part of the University of California's Family Friendly Initiative, including high quality childcare slots, limited part-time options, and re-entry post-doc fellowships for Ph.D.s who have taken time off for family reasons and wish to return.

To look at things from a different perspective, academia seems to be a career that is relatively conducive to family life--moreso than say, my husband's career, restaurant management. As much as we want to share responsibilities, I am the primary caregiver of our daughter because he is at work 50-60 hours per week, and it's not very flexible. Planning for my upcoming conference trip has been--well, it has yet to be successfully planned. If I did not have childcare--really great, really expensive childcare--I would not be able to do this. But that is true of most careers.

From where I sit, the whole grad student parent thing is totally doable--I've been doing it for almost two years, and with our share of ups and downs, things have been good. In a couple of years, when I'm trying to figure out how to go on a job search, I anticipate major problems, especially considering how hard it's been to get to a conference. If I had extended family nearby, that would help tremendously, but one of the difficult facts of academic life is that you don't usually get to live close to family.

As much as trying to get tenure terrifies me, I obviously can't speak to that now and really don't have the space in my mind to worry about it. I wish I had some great point to make with this post, but I have to get on to other matters and don't have time to write anything with any coherence.

Timing of academic babies, pt.1

Thanks to everyone for the well-wishes attached to my last post. And I am happy to see that some bloggers I really enjoy reading are also reading me. Bonus.

So the frequent question of WHEN??? to have children in an academic career has come up again lately. I know a lot of bloggers have addressed this but I recently got an email about it, and my handy dandy tracker tells me that someone surfed in from Google using the search terms "timing + motherhood + phd." The conversation has no end. And it is enormously important to many people.

There is a baby boom coming in my department--the halls of this floor will be downright comical in the fall. Several are in my class, which makes sense--we were a large class and many of us were married or in stable relationships when we arrived. Now we are approaching ABD status, and that seems like a good time for a baby--out of course work, flexible schedule and deadlines. I took job search into consideration with my planning. We wanted two kids, and while it was complicated caring for a newborn baby while still taking three classes and teaching one, it seemed more difficult to go on the job market with a nursing baby. Now's the time to "complete" the family, so the second child will be weaned by the time the job search begins.

The decision to have children as a student was based partially on advice from professors who said it's easier to deal with a new baby in grad school than when you're trying to make tenure. Makes sense. But age was also a factor--my husband had a fear of being an "old dad"--he was 31 when RB was born.

The reality is that there's just not a good time. Having children is monumentally inconvenient. You have to learn to make hard choices, and career cannot always come first anymore. That seems obvious, but when, like many grad students, you have single-mindedly pursued something for so long, it's not always easy to accept that. You come to a new understanding of your own limitations, which can also be hard to take. After all, we've been told since we were born that we could have it all, right?

This is getting long, so I'll add more tomorrow. Here's a link to some articles on the effect of having children on academic careers. And I feel like I should add since I'm dropping this on a negative tone--I love being a mom and I'm pretty darn satisfied with my life--obviously, or I wouldn't be having another child.

A talent for scheduling

When I decided to have a child, I wanted to deliver a baby in the summer so that it would be easier to deal with teaching and classes--I was still taking a full nine-hour course load at the time. I decided to get pregnant in October so I could have a baby in July. And that's exactly what happened.

So then I decided to take a bigger gamble--shoot for the four week break between fall and spring semesters...and here we are! Baby's due in December! Even my womb respects the academic calendar.

Things will be different this time around--I'm not taking courses and I've got a whole year of teaching web-based classes ahead of me. And a toddler at my knees. Hello to a whole new world.

example of "academic" parenting

Frequent conversation in my life:

Person who meets RB: "What a pretty dress you have on."
My response: "Yes, she is performing gender today." (chuckle at my cleverness)
Response from fellow academic: smile and a chuckle (humoring my perception of myself as clever)
Response from anyone else: "Umm..." (strange look of worry that I am somehow grooming my child to be a transvestite)

That never gets old for me.

Proposal sent...now I wait...

I sent the diss proposal draft to the Absent Advisor (who will soon be the Present Advisor once again--counting the days!). I am trying not to be nervous about it. My goal right now is to get a draft that is "good enough" to pass prelims and then write a fuller, better draft AFTER the tests are over. The fear of the proposal and the failure of the first draft have paralyzed me for the past few weeks so that not only have I been unable to write the proposal but I have also been unable to get any useful reading done for exams. Maybe now my momentum will pick up again and the feeling of being not-smart-enough will pass for a while.

I do see the "Objective" section of the proposal as the weakest part, I think because it's hard for me to conceptualize a project that is so big. In fact, what got me out of the rut this week was a fellowship application I wrote last week, for which I proposed a much smaller project directly related to my dissertation. When I wrote the "Procedure" section in which I outlined possible chapters, I felt like I was really getting to what I wanted to say. I could work with small pieces of the whole but I still don't think I have adequately expressed the goal of the whole project. I hope that the "State of the Question" section did what I wanted it to do--to communicate the serious lack of and need for major studies on religion in the lives of contemporary Southern women and religion in the works of contemporary Southern women writers--the two are inextricable. And that's what my project is on--so there's the first specific reference to my research to appear on the blog. Exciting.

Diss proposal is happening!

Just had to say that the proposal is on the move. It is becoming something. Words are on the page.

Some links for today

Happy to report that the diss proposal is now in motion again. I don't think my draft is very good at this point, but I wrote something, and something is better than weeks of nothing.

So today I offer you some links.

Anastasia, one of my favorites, is talking about the canon and ghettoization, and I'll let you follow her links back through the larger conversation. I have left a brief comment there that may become an new post later about the trip my diss proposal has taken, leading me back into "Women's Literature" when I had resisited such a label. What is unfortunate is not the scholarship, but the limitations and assumptions that come with the label.

And here's a teaching carnival.

Expanding the definition of "Academic Mom"

I have recently become tired of the word "balance" in discussions of parenting and academics for many reasons that I'll go into a little at a time rather than all here at once. It's a loaded word, but even as weighty as it can be, I don't think it is always an effective analogy for what we are trying to achieve.

It occurred to me today that part of what bothers me is that often conversations about academics and parenting revolve around a metaphor of a juggling act--a time management issue--and that elusive balance--which often seems to mean a sense of divided responsibility and the fear of giving too much on one side and short changing the other (we're just full of mixed metaphors, aren't we). While these are real concerns and worth discussion, what is more important to me is how academic life--the training, the information, the research techniques, the critical thinking skills, even the simultaneous identities of teacher and student--informs the way I parent. I think about these things all the time, and I'd like to have more conversations about them--Geeky Mom and Dr. Dad's The Articulate Child blog have great examples of this.

I think parents are compartmentalized by other people more than they actually think of themselves as compartmentalized. It's like when I'm at home with RB, I'm Mommy, which is somehow separate from my Student/Teacher/Scholar self. Of course I am performing certain roles in certain contexts, but my mothering is very closely tied with my academic experience. This gives me more to think about in my consideration of performing identities (BTW, I'm designing a composition class themed "Identity and Community" so there's lots more on that to come). This is also related to a general prejudice against working parents, especially mothers--as if by choosing to have a child you are also saying that career is somehow less important to you or you are less serious than others. We need more understanding of how parenting and academics are integrated. I have a lot more thinking to do on this.

The joys of Freshman Comp

In my efforts to figure out exactly what a "Blog Carnival" is, I found this post at Confessions of a Community College Dean that "compares and contrasts" Curious George and Brokeback Mountain, Freshman Comp-style.

While the first sentence of this essay is a classic, I think I have the winner for a student's worst first sentence: Langston Hughes wrote many poems.

Gotta love Freshman Comp!

Teaching in the South panel

The conference I attended last week was focused on teaching--not always pedagogy, but most of the presentations I heard had some comment on teaching relative to the topic of the paper. I liked that aspect of it. But I attended a panel that bothered me and I can't stop thinking about it.

The panel was titled "Teaching in the Southern Region: Ideas for Engaging Students," and it consisted of a moderator and four panelists. They weren't reading papers but instead having a roundtable discussion in which the moderator participated as much as the panelists. I will say that I appreciated the handouts they distributed with classroom activities and assignments that were actually quite good. But the overall conversation was troubling.

The panel began with an attempt to characterize the "typical" Southern student. That should have been the red flag for everyone--how can professors really believe that this is useful? The disclaimer that these were "generalizations" was not sufficient--these were derogatory stereotypes. The discussion began with the idea that college students from the South come from backgrounds of homogenous culture and that their ideas, beliefs, and preconceptions about the world had not been challenged much. Okay, I can work with that. From there, it turned into the idea that students from the South are racist (and apparently all white!), closed-minded, country-music listening rednecks. And they all go to the same church. Nice. Are these really professors talking here?!

I felt very defensive of my students. I couldn't believe that the panelists really held these beliefs about the students that they taught--how unfortunate for their classes! I considered walking out, but finally formulated a comment. Unfortunately, the discussion was dominated by a couple of people and I was not able to get a word in--I am not willing to yell over people to be heard at a professional conference. This has been bugging me ever since.

The hopeful incosistency here was that the actual teaching strategies that they offered were quite good and did seem to give the students more credit than they were given in the conversation I heard. One panelists proudly described the creative and innovative projects that her students had submitted--projects that demonstrated the thoughtful engagement that the "typical" Southern student described there was incapable of.

I feel the need to do something about this, but there's really nothing I can do except remember it. And I can use this medium to say that, while it is true that some students in any region may come from homogenous cultural backgrounds and that their assumptions may have never been challenged, it is a gross injustice to assume that they are unwilling or unable to engage in new ideas. Give them some credit! College is the place where people learn to challenge their beliefs and ideas--TO LEARN! As teachers it is our responsibility to facilitate that and to constantly learn from our experiences, whatever region we're teaching in. Yes, I have had bad experiences with students and there can be certain challenges that are more prominent in the South than in other regions, but to go into a classroom with such dangerous stereotypes is sabotaging the class before it begins. We're teachers, for goodness sake!

working from home

I have returned from my conference--first time I have left RB overnight--lots to say about lots of things but I don't know which ones I'll get to.

Right now I want to talk about working from home. I've almost blogged about this several times, but after reading Academom's revelation, I decided now's the time. When I was pregnant and interviewing pediatricians, the one we chose told me that studies have shown that stay-at-home moms and work-outside-the-home moms are the most satisfied with their work-family...situation (I have rejected the word "balance" in all references to working and parenting but have yet to find a more suitable metaphor). Work-at-home moms express the least satisfaction and the most conflict. Disclaimer: I have not seen these studies, nor am I claiming their veracity--what's important here is the message I received. I was actually appreciative of this information, but I did not waiver in my decision--in fact, I would probably do it the same way again. RB had part-time daycare, and the rest of the time I attempted to work at home. I think I have to add here that my husband works 50-60 hours a week. So it was pretty much on me.

The first semester (which started when RB was seven weeks old!) was fine because she slept a lot. In fact, some of my favorite memories are days when I would spend hours on my bed with a baby and a ton of books, nursing, then letting her nap beside me, then nursing, and so on, reading all the time. The second semester did not go smoothly. Serious discontent set in. She no longer slept for long stretches during the day--in fact she stopped sleeping for long stretches at night, too. The times that I had other childcare were the times I was physically in class, so I had no prep time, writing time, grading time, or reading time to myself. I felt like I was doing a full time job on 20 hours a week, and I was unhappy. I felt guilty when I was working and I even felt guilty when I was taking care of RB--I had no division of work and home, and the person I ended up blaming for all my unhappiness was my husband. Needless to say, that was not good.

I worked part-time for part of the summer and then took the rest of the summer off, and I was quite content then. When the fall semester started again, and RB was a toddler, she started all day care and now I work while she is at school and don't work when I am at home. Please don't think that I am generalizing my experience--I personally need that work-home division and I believe that having it has made me a better student and a better mom because I am altogether a happier person. I feel satisfied and not torn anymore (usually).

Big changes are on the horizon for me, and I don't know how I'm going to handle things in the future. I will not forget that experience, and I have learned about what to expect of myself and the hard truth about trying to work at home with a child.

Busy week...and a kid story

Another short absense coming up--Tomorrow I revise a seminar paper into a conference paper (might deserve a blog entry), write a reader's report on a classmate's article, and load up all important files from my office computer to a jump drive to carry with me to my conference at the end of the week. Probably won't touch them, but somehow I'm comforted when I bring a laptop and half a dozen books with me when I go out of town. Like I get points for good intentions. Next week might be even busier than this one--but exciting things are going on.

Still no diss proposal. Not a real one, anyway. I did read an article I was told was "essential" for me. Not sure what to do with it yet, but I think it's one of those that has to marinate for a while. I expect an epiphany momentarily.

Oh--here's a kid story--I haven't posted many of those. RB loves music--she'd have to in our house--and she's always singing and dancing. She has also been resisting bedtime lately. I started to sing the bedtime song tonight--one that I made up with her name in it--and she said "No, Happy." She wanted to sing her favorite, but inappropriately active for bedtime, song "If You're Happy and You Know It." So I changed the words. Here's the song:

If you're sleepy and you know it, Give me a kiss... (you can fill in the repeats)
If you're sleepy and you know it, close your eyes...
If you're sleepy and you know it, say "Night night"...

She was so happy to participate and went right to sleep with no complaints. I'm a genius. I should write a dissertation on bedtime songs.