Last week we thought about what we want out of this summer. This week the prompt is a two-parter… We will set our goals for the session as usual, but I would also love to set an intention for the session. What word or sentence can embody your intention for the summer, as a guiding principle, as a reminder, as a reset when things go off the rails? I have a feeling I might need one.
Here's the boilerplate from previous sessions about goals: Goals can be in any aspect of life, although the key focus is often writing tasks that are personally and professionally important but that never quite tip over into important AND urgent. Urgent things sometimes find their way in here too; that is completely okay, and process goals are also most welcome. If you've been thinking for awhile about joining in, we'd love to have you try us out this time around!
So, a few things to do this week - introduce yourself if you want to, set an intention for your session, set some session goals, do goals for the coming week (if you feel like it!), and in the spirit of the theme of the week, tell us a little about your favourite flowering plant and what it means to you. The photo is a set of cherry blossoms on my sour cherry tree that produced so much last year that I learned to make sour cherry jam which is delightful. Even better, we have a resident fox that visits the tree to eat fallen cherries...
Thank you all for being here and being wonderful company!
Hello and thank you for hosting! I'm JaneB, I guess I'm late career (I have no more than 10 years left, maybe less either by choice or by university reshaping) and I'm in a STEM subject area at a struggling regional University in the North of England (we're having another recruitment crisis). I'm late-diagnosed neurodiverse and in burnout, so I'm often grumpy and overwhelmed. Summer is my least favourite season because it's bright and hot and often sticky, my allergies are playing up, everyone is loudly enthusiastic and active, and as a fat person who gets heat rashes and hates bright lights that is just not going to be fun for me! I've always felt summer was overloaded with expectations of having fun and doing loads of exciting things. A bit like Christmas can be really! Basically I'm not built for it, physically or mentally, and it's over-stimulating and usually disappointing. That said, I have got better at approaching summer more gently and in kind-to-self ways over the last few years. Summer is never long enough, especially in a system where academics are expected to still work like normal just on slightly different things, but the change of pace and focus can be restorative anyway. So this is a great season for thinking about words and intentions, especially as I seem to have failed to set an intention for the year back in January.
ReplyDeleteI guess I want to incorporate various elements - peace, restoring balance, setting a good foundation for both the next academic year and for the longer term, working on myself and my space as well as my professional obligations. The idea of kintsugi is rattling around in my brain - the Japanese art of mending broken china/porcelain with lacquer dusted with gold. I like the idea of making a feature of the breaks rather than trying to pretend they never happened, and the fact that after kintsugi pieces are often more valuable than in their original perfect state also feels friendly. So perhaps something like "life and work kintsugi"?
SESSION GOALS:
I'm honestly not really ready to set these, but am I ever? I think my session proper doesn't start for at least one more week (we have one more "assessment week" and then official break starts, although obligations wander on into July and start again mid August) so I have time to ease into them a bit. Categories as usual!
SELF-CARE:
regular intentional movement, making, doing small things with other people and reading for pleasure. I want to do all these things an appropriate number of times a week. I also want to explore a wider range of kinds of making over the summer, and I have an aim of having a more habitual practice in all these areas by the time we start back with students.
HOME AND ENVIRONMENT: regular chore habits, plus working on the living room (shelf-box-sofa project), working on clothing storage/management, and working on my finances.
TEACHING AND ADMIN: it is summer, but...
Delete* I need to rewrite my final year honours module to fit into a different trimester (and fit around the honours project drama - modern students canNOT seem to work on anything else around the few weeks before the project is due, and I'm leaning into that because there's no point fighting it any more)
* I have a lot of minor tweaks to do to my other teaching (spread across four modules)
* I WANT to work through the practicals from another colleagues modules - they teach GIS mapping, and I want to be up to date on how they are teaching it so that I can better support my students (and know what I can expect from them so push them to deliver on it in assignments - most assignments should have a map included, and this is one of the tools we can ask them to use).
* I'm on a "task and finish" group (i.e. co-producing a report for Faculty) which might or might not involve a lot of work
* There will be extra work around trying to show we are taking the current recruitment crisis seriously (so much drama and stress and other people not so much dropping balls as yeeting them into orbit or dropping them into random abysses), but I don't know what will be my part. I'll roll that in with getting settled in to my new admin role
* I also want to get one of my MSc by Research students completely done (and working on publishing her work) and the other much closer to submission than they are now
RESEARCH:
As ever, balls in the air!
* contribute to governmental advice reports
* keep up contributions to Big Project (which is doing my head in because, too many people and too little clarity and organisation)
* progress at least three writing projects from a list substantially
GOALS FOR THE COMING WEEK:
SELF-CARE:
* 3x20 intentional movement, 1 x making, 2 x small things with people, reading every day (with dinner, in waiting times)
* make a list of different making methods and projects I might play with this summer
HOME AND ENVIRONMENT:
* 75% of chores
* braindump the steps for the living room and clothes projects
* braindump smaller house and environment things I would like to get done this summer
* braindump where I want to get to with my personal finances
TEACHING AND ADMIN:
* last week of marking, I hope - finish the marking! And the reminding of colleagues on shared modules!
* meet with the MSc by Research student who is furthest from submission
* start writing the summer block list for teaching preparation tasks
RESEARCH:
* submit small group paper
* check in with student author of the paper that got the horrible review (my review luck continues to be bad. Former PhD student submitted their first paper last week and got it desk rejected in 13 minutes - with a letter that began "we have read your paper, and..." - I really don't think they could have! Fortunately they are a very resilient person who said "they can't have read it, and their reason is wrong. Oh well their loss!" and we resubmitted it elsewhere the next day (same publisher so limited reformatting needed)).
* continue calm systematic exploration of the laptop problem. No crying, no suppressing the urge to throw the laptop out of the window!
*write a start of TLQ session list of writing projects and their status.
FAVOURITE FLOWER:
I don't know if I have one. I like a lot of flowers and plants! I like simple rose-type flowers like cherry blossom or May or dog-rose or buttercup, but I also like little bells like heaths and lily-of-the-valley, and the many-small-flower towers of lavendar or enchanter's nightshade. If I have to pick one today, I guess Rowan is a good place to start - lovely flowers AND leaves AND fruits, a brave little tree which grows in hard places at the edges of woods and in the uplands and in hedgerows, and a tree full of stories and woven into folklaw.