Fall semester is literally just around the corner, and like many of my colleagues, I'm gradually pulling myself out of my summer work mode. This year marks the first time in my professional life when summer translated into 3 very distinct activities: travel, research, and writing. (Research-related travel meant that I spent 4 weeks in Brazil and I also saw more music than I normally am able to do. It was awesome.) Since I am now living 3 flights away from my wife, recreational travel was very important to my emotional health even if it took a toll on other aspects of my life. For those who don't know, my partner and I both live about an hour or so away from the nearest regional airport and visits mean 8-14 hours of travel time. Now I am becoming one of those seasoned travelers contemplating expensive, travel-related purchases like noise-canceling headphones, an airport wifi package, and an ereader. All of that travel aside, writing actually happened, and very soon an article will be off to a journal. All of this is exciting.
I have been thinking about how much we academics need summers to get our research and writing done. Many academic bloggers "go dark" during the summer months, and many others get out of town with laptops in tow to web-challenged locales just to get some work done. I've found that I am the opposite. I actually tend to do worse with unstructured time and prefer to have some sort of constraint on my time, but not too much. During my fellowship-supported grad school years, I would often volunteer for various non-profit causes, and I wrote most of my dissertation while being a teaching assistant. A big appeal of a loose structure is the feeling of productivity and accomplishment. On the days when I have tangible results from my other demands, I feel more motivated to sit in front of a computer and tinker away at whatever project is before me. It really is too bad that the academic year is structured in feasts and famines of free time. I think the trick is that the other demands need to not take very much time of my day. In the real world, however, most demands take over when given the chance. And this is why so many young faculty fall into the trap of spending too much time on teaching or service.*
In other words, I am currently neck-deep in a self-assessment mode. As I face another year of clear structural demands on my time, I wonder if my anxieties about the daily grind of sitting before a word processing program will slip away? Or will they just change? In the distance I can anticipate the demands of students, colleagues, and more travel on my time. And let's not forget another year on the academic job market. It's going to be an interesting ride.
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* Most of Robert Boice's Advice for New Faculty focuses on this problem. See also Kerry Ann Rockquemore's advice columns for InsideHigherEd.com.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Escaping Disaster in Higher Ed
Musicology and ethnomusicology blogs rarely discuss money matters. However, over the last month or so, as many of my former colleagues and students have been protesting the disastrous state of affairs at the University of California system, the silence has been deafening. At a recent meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology which happened at the height of protests UC-wide, I only heard of one scholar mentioning the situation during official business. From merely a musicological and ethnomusicological perspective, the long-term effects on our fields are something that many of us cannot possibly know. The two flagship universities, Berkeley and UCLA, have some of the most celebrated scholars in their respective fields of study. Now take a broader look at the scholarly contributions of the entire UC system and the effects are exponential. Imagine, if you will, what the fields of music study would be like without the scholarly giants at the UC and their academic offspring? It would not be imaginable without the investment of California taxpayers. From a personal perspective, I always felt that I had stumbled onto something special when I learned of the academic powerhouses that resided in Schoenberg Hall (before it was renamed Schoenberg Music Building) during my undergraduate years. I am sure that many of us young and seasoned academics would not exist without the California taxpayer's investment in superior music scholarship even if we never stepped foot on a UC campus. UC faculty permeate our proseminars and undergraduate surveys. What would we be without them?
As news of fee hikes, ballooning class sizes, faculty furloughs and pay cuts, protests, and arrests (numbering over 220 as of this writing) reached me in my small town in Maine, I breathed a massive sigh of relief. I escaped institutional disaster. I attended UCLA as an undergrad when resident fees ranged between $1200 and $1700 per academic quarter and when (shocker!) summer fees were subsidized by the state to help students graduate in a timely manner. My academic loans totals are less than the price of a mid-size sedan. That figure is unimaginable now. As a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant when student tutoring was one of the most tapped resources in undergraduate education. Tutoring centers all across the UC have laid off employees to half their desirable size. Tutors, like TAs, are teaching to larger groups where a typical tutoring session can have one tutor teaching to a full classroom. How much learning do you think happens in those settings? I can't imagine grading papers without undergraduate writing support. This is not the quality of education that made California's system the envy of the world. Imagine what California would be like without broad access to quality higher education. How can UC compete for the best students? What if a diverse group of high quality students just stopped attending the UC?
Plenty has been written about UC President Mark Yudof's failed public relations and flat out dishonesty. As a former TA union activist, I have far too much experience with the UC behaving badly when it comes to its relations with the state legislature and the public. (For a recent example, news of UC's record high research income in comparison to postdoc and staff researcher wages come as no surprise. Just yesterday, there was a protest for that: Postdoctoral Researchers Union and staff researchers demonstrated over stalled contract negotiations.) What shocks me is the complete lack of public outrage over these policies. When will the California taxpayers do something? Just last year a staff researcher died over inadequate safety precautions in a lab. What would happen to the state of research if it became too detrimental to one's health and too financially unfeasible a profession to pursue? What would happen if it all just stopped?
Music scholars on the job market like to moan about our dwindling job prospects as public and private institutions alike continue painful hiring freezes (for the record: last year there were 3 tenure-track musicology / ethnomusicology positions in the UC; this year there are none). I am concerned about the other side of the problem: the students public universities are supposed to serve. This last semester, my students have been extremely smart, but they have had far from the diversity of perspectives that the students I taught during my time at UCSD and UCLA had. As educators, we learn from our students. Pricing many of these students out of higher education will have as adverse an effect on the state of our field(s) as cutting jobs or entire departments. What will we do when our students become homogenous? What kind of action will musicology and ethnomusicology take to keep this from happening?
As news of fee hikes, ballooning class sizes, faculty furloughs and pay cuts, protests, and arrests (numbering over 220 as of this writing) reached me in my small town in Maine, I breathed a massive sigh of relief. I escaped institutional disaster. I attended UCLA as an undergrad when resident fees ranged between $1200 and $1700 per academic quarter and when (shocker!) summer fees were subsidized by the state to help students graduate in a timely manner. My academic loans totals are less than the price of a mid-size sedan. That figure is unimaginable now. As a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant when student tutoring was one of the most tapped resources in undergraduate education. Tutoring centers all across the UC have laid off employees to half their desirable size. Tutors, like TAs, are teaching to larger groups where a typical tutoring session can have one tutor teaching to a full classroom. How much learning do you think happens in those settings? I can't imagine grading papers without undergraduate writing support. This is not the quality of education that made California's system the envy of the world. Imagine what California would be like without broad access to quality higher education. How can UC compete for the best students? What if a diverse group of high quality students just stopped attending the UC?
Plenty has been written about UC President Mark Yudof's failed public relations and flat out dishonesty. As a former TA union activist, I have far too much experience with the UC behaving badly when it comes to its relations with the state legislature and the public. (For a recent example, news of UC's record high research income in comparison to postdoc and staff researcher wages come as no surprise. Just yesterday, there was a protest for that: Postdoctoral Researchers Union and staff researchers demonstrated over stalled contract negotiations.) What shocks me is the complete lack of public outrage over these policies. When will the California taxpayers do something? Just last year a staff researcher died over inadequate safety precautions in a lab. What would happen to the state of research if it became too detrimental to one's health and too financially unfeasible a profession to pursue? What would happen if it all just stopped?
Music scholars on the job market like to moan about our dwindling job prospects as public and private institutions alike continue painful hiring freezes (for the record: last year there were 3 tenure-track musicology / ethnomusicology positions in the UC; this year there are none). I am concerned about the other side of the problem: the students public universities are supposed to serve. This last semester, my students have been extremely smart, but they have had far from the diversity of perspectives that the students I taught during my time at UCSD and UCLA had. As educators, we learn from our students. Pricing many of these students out of higher education will have as adverse an effect on the state of our field(s) as cutting jobs or entire departments. What will we do when our students become homogenous? What kind of action will musicology and ethnomusicology take to keep this from happening?
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Lectures on your own stuff
For the last few week I've been officially teaching repertoire that rubs right up against the music I research. While my prep time for lectures has diminished to a minimum, I find teaching my own area to be the most unexpected challenge of my course. And I'm not alone. Just last week, I met with a few other ethno/musicologists working in a visiting assistant professor capacity for other liberal arts colleges in Maine, and we all agreed: teaching your own stuff is the most difficult unit of a semester. That is, even if you do not necessarily write or research one aspect of the broader specialization, you may still fall victim to assuming that basic things to your topic are common knowledge (which they are not) thereby complicating even what you envision to be the most straightforward of lectures. Rest assured, I have been learning a lot in this class.
Rather than embarrass myself by listing the many examples of interesting assumptions I made during my São Paulo unit, I thought I would add my own take on lecturing best practices.
1) Even if you disagree with a canonic point, lecture is not the time to complicate it. Save those problematizing discussions for individual meetings and small seminar situations.
2) When discussing a culture different from the U.S. present, start with the nationalizing myths before delving into hybrids. I know it sounds basic, but it's an easy lesson to forget when trying to plan your syllabus.
3) When discussing notions of race elsewhere, avoid as much as possible comparisons to the United States. It's a rabbit hole and you will not escape.
4) Be emotionally prepared to get through significantly less content than you normally would in exchange for more depth. Students will ask more questions if they know it's your area.
And finally, when in doubt, refer to other sage guides on lecturing. It can be quite fun.
Rather than embarrass myself by listing the many examples of interesting assumptions I made during my São Paulo unit, I thought I would add my own take on lecturing best practices.
1) Even if you disagree with a canonic point, lecture is not the time to complicate it. Save those problematizing discussions for individual meetings and small seminar situations.
2) When discussing a culture different from the U.S. present, start with the nationalizing myths before delving into hybrids. I know it sounds basic, but it's an easy lesson to forget when trying to plan your syllabus.
3) When discussing notions of race elsewhere, avoid as much as possible comparisons to the United States. It's a rabbit hole and you will not escape.
4) Be emotionally prepared to get through significantly less content than you normally would in exchange for more depth. Students will ask more questions if they know it's your area.
And finally, when in doubt, refer to other sage guides on lecturing. It can be quite fun.
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