Reading and thinking

I got a copy of Nihil Nimus (Advice to New Faculty Members, but NN is quicker to type) in response to Alice's suggestion that it would be a good thing to work with over the next semester/year, and having never read it before, decided to read the whole thing now to get an overview. I'm now half way through the writing section (just about to start chapter 14), and have a few initial reactions that I thought I'd record here.

I bought my first books on university teaching while I was interviewing here - there's an on-campus bookshop which I'd wandered into when left to my own devices for a couple of hours. When I was offered the job, that seemed like a good omen (no, I have not bought teaching books at every subsequent job interview!). When I arrived and put teaching books on the shelf in my office, people found it either funny or just plain odd. When I asked to be allowed to take a post-grad certificate in teaching in Higher Ed, eyes were rolled, and I got no work load allowance for doing it. I felt that I'd learnt to research during my PhD, learnt to do it independently and to write papers and funding apps during my post-doc years, and that teaching was the big gap in my skillset. Actually, what I needed was more political savvy and committee-person-ship (and still do), but that's another topic.

Boice's book seems to be aimed mainly at people coming into the profession straight from grad school or from a very controlled and structured lab where they haven't had the chance to learn much about independent working and 'juggling'. Not unexpected, given his own background, and frequent reference to social science and humanities faculty, and not a serious problem or reason not to read the book. I could relate really well to his descriptions of stressed novice teachers preparing for hours and hours up against the deadline of the next class time. However there was a great hole in the middle of the teaching section - where were the students? They seemed to exist as assessors (via evaluation forms) and as potential problems (causing or being subject to classroom incivilities), but their needs and rights and responsibilities as learners and partners in the HE process was really backgrounded. It was only when I began to focus on their needs above my own (e.g. to be the expert, to tell them everything, to control the situation, to be impressive, to feel that I'd got a perfect set of slides...), that I began to get comfortable in the classroom and become a more competent teacher.

I know that he deliberately aimed not to talk about content, but I would also have felt it very important to say that teaching preparation can only happen effectively when you know where the course needs to go - what are the key things that need to be covered and done? How do all the parts link together? Signposting in sessions needs to be not just about the next 10-50 minutes, but also to the module as a whole - next week, last week, the final project... All his tips would also serve you well in preparing the module as a whole, but that has to come before the preparation of sessions. Or did he assume that all that was done via some externally imposed syllabus and the faculty member only had control of the sessions themselves?

I am now reading the writing section, so some of the patterns of behaviour, his 'rules', are being repeated. Encountering them for the second time, I realise that they can relate very well to the 'rules' I've learnt from experience for success in the lab. Moderation, taking breaks, planning, exploring, working steadily and consistently, focusing on the process rather than stressing about the results, the product - all these things make for a happier bench scientist. Although by nature I tend to be the kind of person who does 'binge' on writing - or rather, gets caught up in the moment and stays up til 4am because she's engaged by what she's doing - I also use practices similar to the BDS (Brief Daily Sessions) approach when writing papers to keep things moving, and also in general to explore ideas within a project as it's developing. But what I realised is that I'm pretty rubbish at doing the same thing for grant applications - I leave them til the last minute and 'binge' against the deadline, again and again and again. So the tasks I'm going to work on with Alice's group is the writing of the two grant applications I plan which have longer deadlines, BigModellingProject for 1st December and ThemeE for March.

The emphasis on process not product of the book so far echoes with my earlier discussions of what success needs to look like for me, which suggests that working through this book will be useful (even if it does quote far too many 'self-improvement-guru' types for my liking!) in keeping me to that definition in the midst of the busy. And that helps me come up with some metrics for success this year:

every day that I am in work, I aim to do a 30 minute BDS in the lab (or on lab-related tasks like data entry) (thank heavens for one of my methods being 'leavable', i.e. I can make progress in short sessions and leave things half done without any problems for the samples) and a 15 minute BDS on writing. More BDSs will be good but... I will have some very hectic days, so committing to 45 minutes seems a reasonable minimum.

Do you think I should have a star chart???