Writing Fever

Like many friends I know, I was under pressure to finish and mail out a dozen fellowship applications. I get quite anxious over these things. It just needed to be postmarked but on February 1st, I was feverishly typing/editing away the night before, left early for Kinko's to make copies the next day, drove to the Post Office and waited in line -- fortunately it wasn't that long -- and made a frantic drive to campus in time for class. I could've done it after class, but I don't like carrying around these applications which includes my letter, abstract, dissertation prospectus, and cv. That's a heavy load to be hauling. Not only that, I needed some peace of mind knowing that my applications are off and away.

I have one more application due next week and it looks as though that will be it for this round of fellowships. It's extremely competitive and I know I should cast a wider net, but I did limit myself to mostly east coast schools. I didn't want to be that far away from home.

I'm making slow progress on my chapter. Working, even as a part-timer, does take quite a lot of time from the day. It may not look much but there have been plenty of moments when I thought to myself, "Where did the day go?" And then you fall asleep. We don't notice the passage of time, nor do we remember what exactly took so much of it in the first place. In the end, you just know that you do not have time to write.

A friend actually monitored all the activities she did in the day. It's a diary of your time. She had a large pad of paper and recorded the activity she was doing and how long it took. So for example, a typical day's recording looks something like this:

• Cooked/ate breakfast - 30 min.
• Answered emails - 60 min.
• Surfed the internet - 45 min.
• Cooked/ate lunch - 60 min.
• Bank/paid bills - 45 min.
• Drove to campus - 35 min.
• Lectured -120 min.
• Office Hours - 120 min.
• Drove home - 45 min. (rush hour)
• Cooked/ate dinner - 45 min.
• Watched TV (an episode of "Heroes") - 60 min.
• Dissertation writing - 30 min.

(This is not me by the way. But it looks rather familiar to my daily routine ... Fine! It does look like my average day!) Anyways, the point of doing this is to look at all the time that is spent on non-dissertation related activities. There's some activities like driving that cannot be negotiated especially if it's rush hour traffic. But there are others that could be cut down and the idea is to redivert that time to dissertation writing. I find it really useful and revealing to see how my day goes. You keep a daily log and review it to make sure you're keeping yourself accountable. In the end it's still about making time to write that gets the dissertation done.

One Week Down ...

... and 14 more to go till the semester ends. Yes I'm already thinking about it and I can't wait. I seem to have a good group of students in both sections, but it's only the first week.

I plan to write again today but I also have to complete several dissertation fellowship applications in the next week. One of the applications requires a 5-7 page abstract detailing my research, how it is located in a discipline or field of study, and what are its contributions. My eyes initially rolled up at the requirement. Another damn thing to write for something that I could be denied. But I quickly found it was a blessing in disguise. Part of writing this abstract is becoming a shortened version of my conclusion. And to have a real deadline is forcing me to put my thoughts together in an articulate and coherent manner. I had forgotten how having a real deadline is forcing me to write and finish a piece.

Here I Go Again

Today the spring semester for 2007 officially starts for me. Two sections of GOVT 101: Democratic Theory and Practice. Another set of students. Some last minute emails from students about adding to my class. Some minor changes to my syllabus.

And away I go.

Zany Student Evaluations

I know first hand that student evaluations can be a bit distressing especially from unregulated sites such as RateYourProfessor.com. You just never know what students will say and sometimes it can be hurtful. But this set of evaluations is probably the most hilarious. And I’m glad that the professor is enjoying it himself. :D

Zany Professor

So I guess this is what happens when you receive tenure. :D

Whoa

I'm not versed in literature. I read science fiction and fantasy novels about dragons and wizards, aliens and space travel. But I do know who Robert Frost is. I'm not a proper historian either but I do recognize a significant finding when I see one: a previously unpublished poem written 88 years ago by poet, Robert Frost.

And congratulations to the graduate student who discovered it. You've secured for yourself, in one of the most heavily saturated fields in the academy (there are A LOT more PhDs in English than there are jobs available), a future tenure-track job in any English department in the country -- at least, the probability of getting a job is distinguishably higher than everyone else.

And off into the horizon, I hear the painful wailings of my colleagues who are adjuncting endlessly in English composition courses. They're crying bloody foul.

Damn ... lucky ... bastard.

Here's the link (and another one) to the article:

Robert Frost poem discovered by student

Saturday Sep 30 17:38 AEST

A poem by one of America's best-loved poets, Robert Frost, has been discovered 88 years after it was handwritten in the front of a book and will be published next week.

The poem was found by a graduate student among uncatalogued books and manuscripts bought by the University of Virginia and once owned by Frost's friend, Frederic Melcher, founder of publishing industry trade journal Publishers Weekly.

The 35-line poem, called War Thoughts at Home and dated 1918, was apparently inspired by the death of a fellow poet in World War I.

Student Robert Stilling said he was alerted to the poem by a 1947 letter by Melcher in which he referred to an unpublished poem handwritten in a copy of Frost's book North of Boston.

Stilling said in a paper that when he read the letter it set off "little scholarly alarm bells" and sent him looking for the book at the Charlottesville university library. Frost died in 1963 aged 88.

It took several months to verify the handwriting and check whether the poem had been published before, said Kevin Morrissey, managing editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, which has permission from Frost's estate to publish the poem.

Morrissey said the poem was very sombre.

"You can tell Frost is troubled by what is going on in Europe at the time," Morrissey told Reuters.

Academics believe it was written in response to the death of Frost's friend and poet Edward Thomas, who died in the trenches in France in 1917.

Frost, who wrote such poems as The Road Not Taken and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, was in Britain at the start of the war and had befriended Thomas.

The poem focuses on a woman in a snow-bound house thinking of soldiers in France and watching some blue jays fighting outside. Here are two stanzas from the poem:

And one says to the rest "We must just watch our chanceAnd escape one by one - Though the fight is no more doneThan the war is in France."

Than the war is in France! She thinks of a winter camp where soldiers for France are made. She draws down the window shade.

"The Angry Professor"

I came across this clip that is getting a lot of responses from viewers. It is an unfortunate, yet common, occurrence where a cell phone goes off in the middle of class. Some professors would ignore it and move on, but this one went over, grabbed the phone, and smashed it on the floor. AWESOME! Yes, yes, yes I know. He probably got into some trouble and was liable for property damage and so on. But still. Don’t tell me there’s never been a professor who wanted to take a student’s cellphone, smash it into a thousand pieces, and return to their lecture without skipping a beat.

Luckily I’ve never been pushed to that point and I hope I never do considering my lecturer’s salary barely keeps me afloat. Although I did grab a student’s phone and started chatting with the other person about how they interrupted my class, how rude it was, and that if they called again I would give a failing grade to their friend. That student dropped out of my class thinking that I was a nutcase. On the plus side, there were no more cell phone interruptions for the semester.