Hello everyone!
We have excellent collections of summer goals and wishes from last week. And we all like all the flowers! What’s not to like about flowers? Love them all.
I spent a lot of time last weekend digging up and moving plants, and doing all those garden preparation things like mowing, mulching, weeding, sowing, dividing clumps of things, and weed whacking. We’re planning to hire a tiller to pull up some grass and putting in new actual garden beds. The work is not the most satisfying because it does not look like much actually happened, but I know it is there, and I know it is important.
So, for this week’s prompt, here is a lovely unfurling baby hosta to inspire you to think about what invisible but important work you can do this week to set yourself up for success with your goals later in the session? Which project needs to mulched and protected? Which project is in need of a good pile of compost? What needs to be ruthlessly weeded out? What needs to be trimmed to make space for something else?
Good luck with your week!
This week’s goals:
DEH
-Write (or transfer) 3000 words for Overdue essay.
-Write 1000 words for First Conference Paper
-Contact 2 (or am I up to 3?) writers with reviewer comments
-regular PT exercises, otherwise rest cranky back (maybe try a short swim,
short walks)
-finish booking 3rd summer trip
Daisy
Get three talks ready for conference
Data processing for other people’s talks
Do a million interviews
Organize student assistant’s work for the next month
Three fun things with friends
JaneB
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.
Julie
1. Finish 30,000 word chapter and try to draw a line in the sand with
editor.
2. At least one day on Big Article
3. Teaching prep: check draft timetable for next year has everyone's teaching
in correctly, suggest some seminar readings to rest of teaching team.
4. Plan archive trip for end of June ahead of funding deadline next week.
5. House/life admin: book trains for summer travel, sort out insurance, book
annual leave, optician's appointment, organise daughter's birthday party.
6. Self-care/fun: run x 3, read, journal, fill hanging baskets and patio pots
now it seems to have stopped hailing at random, enjoy surprise trip away with
friend this weekend.
I’m leaving for a conference and two different field trips this week, next week, and a good part of the following week, so thinking time is going to be in short supply… I think the best thing I can do this week is make a list of projects for the summer, and really think hard about what each of them have, and what they need, and then prioritize from that. Student projects need me to be really present and engaged, I have a pet project that I’ve wanted to work on for years and really need to focus on, beyond that I need to think hard. For things I can do, I suspect I need to set project work schedules and actually put them on my calendar as blocks, and specifically work on those things in the assigned blocks, otherwise the strangling vines of all the other things will take over…
ReplyDeleteLast week’s goals
Get three talks ready for conference SORT OF…
Data processing for other people’s talks MOSTLY
Do a million interviews DONE
Organize student assistant’s work for the next month SORT OF
Three fun things with friends YES! MOSTLY BECAUSE ALL THREE HAPPENED ON THE SAME HOLIDAY MONDAY BUT WE’RE NOT PICKY HERE…
This week’s goals
Take time to do project planning
Polish and give talks and support students with theirs
Have fun catching up with people at conference
Keep admin work going while away
starting the summer with travel and a conference can be rejuvenating or can leave me feeling behind for the rest of the summer. Hope you have the former experience and fit in lots of planning, ready for a great summer, and have fun with friend-colleagues!
DeleteLast week was hard work, and culminated in a colleague insisting that content/facts are the bread and butter of what students need and all skills teaching is a luxury we can't afford, so the courses that take almost all of my time and energy are rubbish and should be scrapped. And in the meeting NO-ONE stood up to them. Of course afterwards some people were like, oh, yes, skills are what get most of our students jobs, and learning how to learn is far more important than what they learn. But others actively agreed with him. That was very upsetting! Especially as there are so few of us staff left, and our future is uncertain (thanks, person who messed up admissions this year and lied about it until it was probably too late, so we have even fewer students - and who was loudly agreeing that teaching skills is rubbish, students learnt stuff at school or can go to the library or use the extra resources online in their own time. Which makes me worried for their own children, and for the students in their tutor groups, because especially for the latter, they come out of school without HE skills (not the school's fault directly, they are constrained by national policy and having specific incentives too and being underfunded), they're often first generation so have no cultural background to support their HE journey, many of them have additional needs and almost all of them have the reduced attention span/retention/capacity to do dull hard things repeatedly that come with early exposure to social media. But sure, we can expect the weaker ones to just spend extra time doind self-directed learning about skills using generic materials not rooted in the discipline.
ReplyDeleteAnd the persons on the other side of this are all touchy/difficult/capable of double-think so there is no point trying to debate any of this calmly, it'll just make more trouble. SIGH. At least Monday is a bank holiday this coming week!
SELF-CARE:
* 3x20 intentional movement, 1 x making, 2 x small things with people, reading every day (with dinner, in waiting times) moved 2x (it has been upper 20s hot this week (crazy weather!) and I slept badly for that and other reasons, and between those I'm in pain and Not In The Mood), made none, will do one thing with people this afternoon, did read every day
* make a list of different making methods and projects I might play with this summer not really but began to think about it
HOME AND ENVIRONMENT:
* 75% of chores about 50%
* braindump the steps for the living room and clothes projects no
* braindump smaller house and environment things I would like to get done this summer begun
* braindump where I want to get to with my personal finances thought about but not reached pen to paper stage yet
TEACHING AND ADMIN:
* last week of marking, I hope - finish the marking! And the reminding of colleagues on shared modules! finished my marking, held off on reminding because other stresses going on
* meet with the MSc by Research student who is furthest from submission she cancelled. Sigh
* start writing the summer block list for teaching preparation tasks done and nicely set out with tick boxes and washi tape
RESEARCH:
ReplyDelete* submit small group paper still waiting on three authors for the 100 word biographies the journal requires. GRRRR
* check in with student author of the paper that got the horrible review done - she's doing OK. And the bouncing paper has gone out for review from the second journal, so that's better than a desk reject!
* continue calm systematic exploration of the laptop problem. No crying, no suppressing the urge to throw the laptop out of the window! I THINK I have made progress. I think the ::insert crude adjectives here:: machine is DOING all the things, it's just not writing out that it has done the thing into the output file, so I can't see/find the information I need. I've worked out a different way of telling it to tell me what it did in the output file, and a four day run is going on on my worklaptop now - so next week I might have a temporary solution! We suspect it's a windows update problem...
*write a start of TLQ session list of writing projects and their status. yes! Always satisfying to go through the previous start of session list and realise the projects that have now left the list altogether!
GOALS FOR NEXT WEEK:
I think the obvious bit of mulching and clearing to do is to get all the lists written, even though that can be quite a daunting task.
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:
* assessment-related bureaucracy
* meet with the MSc by Research student who is furthest from submission
* one block of summer teaching tasks
* one block of time on Icky Admin Task
RESEARCH:
* submit small group paper
* continue calm systematic exploration of the laptop problem.
* write draft text for first two sets of results from modelling problem
* schedule meeting for teaching related project