I started graduate school thinking “I need to be able to walk away and not be bitter if this doesn’t work out.”

I just barely got a job, just before finishing, and I was willing to walk away even then.

Now, I haven’t done my book. There is no way I will get tenure at my institution. It’s time to walk away.

The question is, where to walk to?

I’m 33. I have no debt, but I do have two cats. I expect to have at least the next academic year as a lame-duck year in which to reinvent myself.

Do I continue to teach? Without a strong publication record, I could aim at high schools or community colleges. But there are enough weaknesses in both my teaching and the way I feel about teaching that I’m not sure about this.

Do I consider administration? For a faculty member, I am administratively-minded, and academia is the system I know. But without publishing, the faculty side of admin is a dead end, and I don’t know that the student affairs side appeals. Maybe it does—I am good at advising (but not counseling!) and basically wrote a draft of a student handbook for my department.

Do I go back to school? The historian/law school overlap is not uncommon, but I don’t think it appeals to me. Library school, merged with technology, might be a good fit, and a PhD in history would be an asset there. I doubt the job prospects are strong, though.

Do I try to become a tech writer? I have a small sideline in answering technological questions on forums, which I enjoy, that might parlay into working on help manuals.

Do I say the hell with it and look for any office job that offers a regular workday and benefits?

Regrets? Yes and No. My job was a very good fit for me. It’s been aggravating me lately, but I felt it offered me room to grow and drew on a lot of my varied skills. I had a thirty-year plan all sketched out (okay, it didn’t have much in it). But I feel that if I really wanted to stay, I would have gotten my book done. I’ve had the time, I’ve had the resources, and I haven’t done it. I suppose if I could do it over again, I would have hired a writing coach around my second year on the tenure-track. But I didn’t, and that’s that.

I’m following the Statue of Liberty on Twitter. It just reopened today, and in the first group to go up were some of the new citizens sworn in at the Statue this morning.

One Fourth of July, I traveled to Monticello, Jefferson’s home, to see a friend be naturalized on the lawn before the Big House. It was a beautiful sunny day, and there was a particular poignancy to watching this friend be sworn into citizenship on the territory of a man who would have bought and sold her as a slave.

This is patriotism at its most beautiful, mingling the celebration of the founding moment of the nation with the welcoming of new citizens, in the heart of the land’s historic treasures.

Synchronized lights.

They regularize the flow of traffic so that everyone moves faster, as fewer people waste time sitting at red lights. They punish you for speeding, reward you for following the law. Why don’t all towns use synchronized lights?

I found a lump in my breast when I was 19. This is stressful at any time of life, of course, but I was 19, it was winter, and my mother was really far away. I wasn’t just at college, but doing my junior year abroad in England. Bonus: first-hand experience of the NHS!

I got a primary care appointment within a few days (January), and although the doctor gave me a little spiel on how young girls often imagine they feel something in the normal matter of the breast, he stopped very fast after actually checking the little pebble in my left breast.

He promptly sent me on to an actual hospital, a bus ride to the outskirts of the city, where it did take a few months (March) to get an appointment to check out a smooth, rounded, painless lump in the breast. And the appointment started late, too, but they stuck a long needle in my breast, sucked out some of the pebble, and told me to wait a bit for the same-day results.

All fine. A fibroadenoma, which is to say, benign fibrous mass, as opposed to a fluid-filled cyst. These are apparently the main options for smooth lumps. I said “oh, but it waxes and wanes.” They looked at me oddly and said, “well, fibroadenomas don’t wax and wane.” But had me come back in May for another needle biopsy, which still said fibroadenoma. It still waxed and waned, which I was very confident about, because for the first six months or so, it was pretty fascinating to have a lump in my breast.

Then I forgot about it until grad school, and since my records were in England in all, and I was pretty vague about things, the grad school clinic sent me off to the university hospital to have another needle stuck in it. Still a fibroadenoma. “It waxes and wanes.” “Fibroadenomas don’t wax and wane.”

Neglected for another few years—my doctor here was surprised: “So you’ve never had a mammogram?” “No, just the needle biopsies.” (So reassuring when doctors roll their eyes about what your previous doctors did.) And sent me off to the clinic to have my breast squished and squashed (back in the US, on a good health plan, still took a couple of months to be fit in for an appointment).

Results suggested it was just a fibroadenoma, I said, “well, you know it waxes and wanes.” Quizzical looks, and the decision to do a follow-up ultrasound that day. The ultrasound is rather cool—the technician slides a tool around in some goop on the breast and you can watch the results show up on the screen. Still a fibroadenoma.

A couple years later, next check-up, this past fall. More squishing, another ultrasound. Ooh, look, what looks like a second fibroadenoma, one that I can’t feel. But the original still waxes and wanes.

Anyhow, last week, back for the six-month followup on the ultrasound. Nothing has changed with the two lumps since December, apparently. Finally, FINALLY, I said “well, it waxes and wanes and I’ve been told fibroadenomas don’t do that” and after fourteen years of asking this question, someone FINALLY explained to me why a fibroadenoma might wax and wane.

I’ve forgotten the answer already, but luckily it’s in the breastcancer.about.com page I have linked above. Guess fourteen years is the price of not-googling.

I was composing this post in my head for the last few days, but reading Bardiac’s post about mammograms convinced me to actually write and publish it. Plus jo(e) tweeted about her appointment. Must be the season?

pedantry

even worse pedantry

(after I re-wrote something) see the difference between pedantry and focusing on what PEOPLE are DOING?

argh, pedantry! Kill it!

[twitch]

Yeah. Not science, not data, folks. Just some dressed up anecdotes.

GenePartner tested long-term couples’ HLA [type of gene involved in immune system] makeup and had them fill out in-depth questionnaires. “We asked them whether they find their relationship passionate, about the quality of intercourse, if it was love at first sight,” says co-founder Tamara Brown. With genetic data from 270 couples, the company came up with an algorithm for predicting compatibility based on HLA combinations.

And, 270 couples? Gee, Netflix gave people trying to improve their recommendation algorithm a dataset of 100 million ratings to work with.

Honestly, though, a retrospective of classic soul ballads from the 60s and onward? With old footage? That’s worth watching. The hair! The outfits! The dances! The outfits!

There are a couple big concepts mixed up in my older post about asking a student to leave class before it started rather than walk out in the middle of it (and thanks to commenters for provoking me to think this through more).

One: Students are adults.

This is college. We don’t do hall passes here.

I am not in charge of regulating their time or what they choose to do. I am in charge of evaluating their work. Now, part of that work is being in class and speaking up. Grading is an imperfect mechanism, but I recognize that time as the product of their labor by including an attendance/discussion grade (and that’s why I have one, not to force them to come to class. Although I concede there’s no real difference in practice).

But other than those specified and pre-announced blocks of time which they have committed to by enrolling in the course, it is not my business how much time they spend on their written work, not my business whether they are starting essays four hours before they are due, not my business whether they are emailing me in the middle of the night, etc. I don’t care about these things and I try not to take them into account when I can’t help noticing them.

I don’t differentiate between excused and unexcused absences,* for the most part, because it is not my place to judge which excuses are valid and which aren’t (I also don’t want to create a situation where students get rewarded for lying). Nor do I want to demand documentation for every minor move. They can make up the class, if they choose. They are in control of their own lives.

I have a standard late policy—a per day deduction.* I don’t care why a paper is late—if they need to manage their time such that an essay is late, that is their choice to make, and take the penalty. They don’t need to explain it to me, because it is not my responsibility or right to judge how they spend their time.

They are only responsible to me for the work that they do.

*Things that involve multiple consecutive absences or generate university/medical documentation are treated case-by-case.

Two: Territoriality.

Class went outside one sunny day, and we had to pause while a pro-choice march went by and the chanting made it impossible to hear (incidentally, my usual classroom is such that sometimes a march makes me pause class even when we stay inside). As we stopped and watched, a marcher tried to run over and hand out flyers. I am pro-choice, but my instinctive reaction, as I stopped her, was “oh hell no. You do not just walk up in my classroom like that.” Even if my classroom was currently a circle of students sitting on the grass with invisible walls around.

That time belongs to me. I close the door when the clock ticks over to 10am, and I open it when class is over at 11:20am. I don’t start early, even when everyone is already there (and they often are). If I go over time, and I try very hard not to (including asking them to remind me to stop early so that I can hand back papers), I apologize for infringing on their time, which I have no right to.

I feel like (hope?) the relationship is more citizenship than sovereignty, though.

“Loosen up my buttons”
“Shake that ass”
“peaches and cream”

Especially with students around. I do go—and dance!—at the party for our graduating seniors, but I opt out of some songs. “Push It” just barely made it through, apparently softened by nostalgia value.

Speaking of nostalgia value—why are my graduating students, roughly born around 1988, jamming to songs released before they were born? They flooded the dance floor for “Thriller”.

If you ever write a research paper for me, expect to receive random articles and links on that topic until your email address drops out of my program’s auto-recall.

Coming up to red lights, I change lanes so that I won’t be the car holding up a stream of right-turn-on-red drivers.

I think small things are IMPORTANT. Here’s why.

A scene from Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (intro and novel text quoted from this webpage making a similar point about coding):

Some demons are meeting and discussing the evil things they’ve done — tempting a priest, corrupting a politician, etc. — and one of them proudly declares that he tied up a phone system for most of an hour:

What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves? For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

Oh, and that series of ads where people see someone doing something nice, and then do something nice themselves, and a third person witnesses it, and so forth?  I LOVE those ads. Can’t believe I haven’t already blogged about them.

Rate Your Students:

Are students the way they are because the system does it to them?

I have noticed that professors, put in the position of students, will ask silly questions, refuse to venture answers to even simple questions, and check email on their phones.

Easily Distracted:

a great liberal arts course would interweave studying the history of cars and traffic, the public policy of transportation, and a hands-on disassembly and reconstruction of an actual automobile.

Ooh, I want to take it. Of course, I’m fascinated by traffic and infrastructure, such that I’m about to add another category to my blogroll. A friend said “I don’t know how you’ve driven across country three times—I would get so bored.”

This is me, driving:

• “Ooh, water!”
• “Is that car gonna pass the car in front, I wonder?”
• “Ooh, logs on a truck!”
• “Oh, I wanna take this road so I can go over the bridge.”
• “Ooh, river!”
• “Oh, bummer, we missed the ferry by 10 minutes.”
• “Hey, I’ve never seen that road sign before.”
• “Ooh, water!”

and so forth….

After that trip, I changed my avatar to a river valley, and set up keywords in iPhoto to make smart albums of “river”, “lake”, “waterfall”, and “water”. I also have a “peace” keyword, for pictures that make me feel happy and relaxed. Every single one of them has water in it.

Hayden Valley, Yellowstone

Internship for the bright or advanced individual under guidance of a more senior practitioner. No making copies or coffee.

I have to say, though, I worked as a research assistant for my professor-mentor for three summers in undergrad. Basically, I made lots and lots of photocopies. If you asked me concretely what I spent my time doing, I made photocopies. I knew the people in the copy office really well, because I spent a lot of time there (this totally paid off when I had to produce copies of my thesis at the end of senior year). I also fetched tons of books from the library to make the copies from.

But I ALSO read and looked at the copies I was making. My professor gave me a draft syllabus, and I looked for potential readings for each class topic (this is back before the copyright crackdown on packets). She talked to me A LOT about the process of putting the class together, about what she wanted the readings to do, about how to juggle the calendar and deadlines against the natural flow of interconnected topics, etc. I produced a few options for each class, she didn’t like any of them and went and found something better, and told me why.

So yeah, if I tracked my time, 90% of it was photocopying or fetching from the library. But I learned a WHOLE lot in that other 10%.

The Mac software ecosystem has a habit of doing bundles—nine or ten programs for $50 or so. It can be a good way to find new programs or cheaply pick up some programs you think might be useful.

Anyhow, two are running right now, available for the next week or so—check them out.

MacUpdate (rock bottom price on some big expensive programs)

The Mac Bundles (especially has some very good programs for customizing how the system works)