When life throws you a curve ball

Earlier this month, I had been looking forward to some time to focus on writing and to recuperate from the semester of teaching but those plans went right out the window. My personal life took an unexpected nose-dive. It's been a very tough month. Luckily, the chaos hit in the final week of class and I've had three weeks to wallow in my sadness but I also blew away those three weeks that I had planned to complete revisions on a chapter and to do some RA work. One week remains until the start of a new semester. I am to teach yet another new course, this time a fourth year seminar on pharmaceuticals. I just hope I pull myself together this week.

Earlier this summer, I went from scrambling to be ready to put myself out in the job market this year to making the difficult decision not to. This significantly freed up my daily schedule but I was determined to continue the daily writing routine I had set up in the summer. I found the space, (workspace at my advisor's research hub), times (late morning to late afternoon) and days (weekdays only, not weekends) that work for me so that I consistently wrote everyday and still managed to enjoy the weekends. I did this while balancing the responsibilities of teaching and RA administrative work. We all know that finding a routine like this is like finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow: it's rare, much sought after and when you find it you hold on to it with your dear life.

But then you can't plan your life like you can plan your schedule. Life doesn't allow for micro-managing. It likes to throw you curve balls: personal tragedies, injuries, accidents, etc. What do you do then? And what do you do when you're on a tight schedule?

One of the things I try to be mindful of when teaching is to not perpetuate neo-liberal demands on the individual without regard for structural forces. With general increase in tuition costs and decline in the guarantee of employment after graduation, university and college students these days face major pressures. They often work full-time, have various family responsibilities and get sick quite often. Let's face it. Life as an undergrad is extremely stressful. As an instructor, I want to see myself as a facilitator in learning, not a gatekeeper for diplomas and grades or an enforcer of penalties. With grading systems in universities and the role of post-secondary education in social stratification, it's impossible to fully dissociate my from these roles. But I try to do my best. I make a point of being lenient on late assignments so long as the students explain their reasons. I think this effort on my part creates a climate of trust between the students and I and produces good work from the students.

I want--and should--apply the same kind of leniency based on a critical stance in relation to neo-liberalism on my own work ethic. It's really hard not to feel like I'm slacking off and wasting my time. I often have to remind myself that I'm taking the necessary time to heal and recover from a very stressful event. As my best friend reminds me, not only is it necessary, it is feminist to value emotional well-being and to withstand capitalist pressures to primarily define myself solely in terms of work.

So far, I've taken some steps to help those around me be aware of where I am. I've told my advisor that I'm facing some challenging times in my persona life and I asked a professor for additional time to do RA work for her. In other words, I've asked for help... and I tried to do so in a way that is professional, respectful and honest. So far, everyone has been very kind and generous, which is not always the case. I have also been very lucky because not everyone would be so accommodating. I'd like to think that asking for help when times are tough (because, let's face it, they can't always great) and allowing myself to be a bit vulnerable actually makes me come across as more mature and professional.

Teaching Journal (9): Course evaluations

When I saw students' comments in my course evaluation last semester, I realized that students really don't know how to evaluate a course or the instructor. The comments were all over the place, from sweet but relatively unhelpful praises about me to complaints that the course did not sufficiently deal with new information technologies when I explicitly told them in the introductory class that we will look at old technologies and science in general. There were also contradictory comments about there being too much writing on one hand and the feedback they received from me being very helpful on the other. And I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, either, but there is no dialogue between the two comments so there's no way for me to know what they mean in the context of an entire course.

I see two immediate problems with end-of-semester anonymous course evaluations.

1) Seeing the evaluations after the course is over means that the instructor can't make any changes to address concerns. During the very first course I taught last year, I gave out mid-semester evaluations for feedback but I quickly realized that I'm too much of a novice to improvise mid-semester to meet the needs of the particular group. And so for two semesters I haven't administered the mid-semester evaluation. But perhaps I'm now experienced enough to try this out again.

2) Anonymity means that the students are protected to make honest comments but it has also come to (unnecessarily) mean that students complete the evaluations in isolation from other students. There are already issues of reliability when administering an evaluation survey on one day during the 13-week semester. But to have the evaluations be only a solo affair adds to the problems. How about a focus-group style evaluation where students can draw on the pool of memory about the entire course, rather than relying on their own limited memory? I do think that anonymous and individual evaluations are also useful but should not be the only type of evaluation that is meaningful. Isolating students during evaluations takes away from the idea that seminars are driven by group learning.

Even when I was an undergrad, I was never taught how to complete a course evaluation. The survey is considered self-explanatory and the comments are seen as peripheral. Now that I'm teaching, I find the comments the most interesting (and frustrating) to read. It's when I am most challenged and also the most meaningfully acknowledged for my efforts. This semester, just before administering the course evaluations, I invited all the students to recall my objectives for the course (which are to help students become critical scholars and engaged citizens) and to consider this when doing the evaluations. I also told them (may for the first time) that the department takes the evaluations very seriously. I asked them why the evaluations may be important for the department to arrive at the idea that they help to meet the learning needs of students. To this end, I asked them to consider their own learning needs and limitations and be aware of them when evaluating the course.

I left the room as part of the ritual of anonymous evaluations and wondered if I came across as too defensive and trying to sway their comments in my favour. I was stricken with fear. I haven't seen the evaluations yet but will find out whether or not my words helped students to comment in a meaningful way. I need to figure out a better way of doing this, I think.

Teaching Journal (8): Reflection activities--benefits and pitfalls

I tend to make up assignments as I go. A risky process, I'm sure. But I'd like to claim that the spontaneity allows me to meet the needs and interests of students as they arise. *ahem* I gave four reflection assignments during the summer semester for the second-year seminar, "Introduction to Power and Regulation of Self and Society." Here is a breakdown of the process and results of each.

1) Borders: I asked students to think about different kinds of borders that they have encountered in their lives. I defined "border" as more than just a geographical border between nation-states; they can be cultural, symbolic, social, political and economic borders. The objective of this assignment was to understand how relations of power manifest themselves as limitations and barriers of all kinds that apply to different people. By locating some of these borders in the life of the students, they would be able to objectively examine their own unique experiences. Many students ended up writing about crossing the border to go to the US but some talked about borders with respect to mental health, gender roles and class status. And it turned out that the became the defining theme of the first third of the entire course and I could refer back to the assignment during class. It's great when things magically fall into place! Success rating: 5/5

2) Single Story: I screened the video lecture of Chimamanda Adichie called "The Danger of the Single Story" and asked students to choose a newspaper article that portray a single story and discuss the context and possible consequences of such a narrow narrative. I adapted an in-class activity I gave during a third-year seminar into an actual assignment for a second-year course. The objective of this assignment is to understand the concept of stereotype as it relates to relations of power and to analyze concrete examples from everyday life, i.e. newspapers. I think that this activity is appropriate as an in-class activity for a upper-level class, since they should be able to exercise critical thinking with relative ease and speed. Meanwhile, this is appropriate as a take-home assignment for a lower-level class so that it allows students time to think and write with care. The only problem was that I didn't have enough time during the class to discuss the video after showing it, which resulted in some mis-reading of the video for the assignment. I'll need to remember to give myself enough time for discussing the video before students write the assignment. Success rating: 4/5

3) Walk-About: I asked students to bring a digital camera device to class and sent them out to the Vancouver downtown area to photograph spaces that they think are safe and then unsafe for the poor and the homeless. This activity followed readings and presentations on the spatial politics of class, poverty and criminality. I explicitly asked the students not to photograph people. I mostly did this because I knew from my very first teaching experience that photographing people for a class assignment opens up a can of worms in terms of ethics. I also didn't want students to objectify the poor and the homeless by photographing them, which would be against my personal ethics. Students went in groups for about 45 minutes and returned with lots of photos. We discussed what kinds of borders we see, why they photographed the things they did, why they think the spaces they captured were safe or unsafe for the poor. The objective of this assignment was to understand the relationship between space and power. One student approached me afterwards and explained that she is involved in the Downtown Eastside community and has always felt uncomfortable about students going to the area to take photographs. She had asked to conduct the activity solo rather than in a group as I had asked. I was impressed that she asked me to meet her needs, which was to avoid contributing to the imbalance of power and objectification of people living in the DTES. I explained to her that I had specifically asked students not to take photographs of people for the same reason, but I did feel somewhat caught for potentially partaking in the objectification of the DTES. What did I learn? I will give this activity again but more explicitly integrate the notion of power in the relationship between the photographer and the photographee, particularly when their relationship outside of photography is already so skewed through relations of power. Success rating: 4/5

4) Research Journal: I had to miss two consecutive weeks of class, one of which overlapped with a holiday. I cancelled one class and scheduled a information session with the campus librarian on how to access the library's resources for research. I also asked a friend to introduce Community Health Online Digital Archive & Research Resource (CHODARR), which is a community-based free-access archive of research and community literature related to different groups in downtown Vancouver. I asked the students to explore both the library and CHODARR archives, write down the kinds of key terms they searched for, and then discuss the differences between them. The objective for this assignment was for students to reflect on their own research process and also to understand the relationship between knowledge and power. I prepared a short lecture about CHODARR for my friend to give to class before they did the activity, which explained CHODARR as a project that seeks to address the imbalance of power between researchers and marginalized people in downtown Vancouver who are often the objects of research on additions, mental health, HIV/AIDS and housing. Unfortunately, many students missed this introduction because they arrived in class late (which was another issue throughout the semester) and the resulting reflections was a broad range of critical insights about the links between power and expert or legitimate knowledge, to unreflective criticism of CHODARR as limited and unsuited for their own research. I will give this assignment again but will make sure that I provide a more robust introduction and allow time for discussion beforehand. Success rating: 3.5/5

Return, refocus and reflect

I tried out a different web-space through my university but publishing a blog with iWeb turns out to be rather inefficient and takes up a lot of time and web-space. And so back to trusty Blogger! I've moved all the posts I made earlier in the year below.

It's been a very interesting and trying year so far. I've taught two courses back to back as a sessional instructor (and am teaching another one in the fall), finished a draft of a dissertation chapter, did some administrative work through my RA position and made some tough decisions about going on the job market. I decided not to, after a long and painful deliberation. From all the great advice I've gotten over the years, it seems that entry-level tenure-track and post-doc applications consume all time and energy, so much so that my advisor has told me to write off the semester when I put together job applications. "Don't even think about planning do any writing on your dissertation during that time because it won't happen" were her exact words. The mental, emotional and temporal demands of putting together job apps are so particular and strenuous that it makes doing any other work virtually impossible. My dissertation as it stands is not ready to win the confidence of my committee for them to write stellar recommendation letters for me. I decided that it's pointless to waste time and energy putting in a mediocre application and have to do it all over again in less than a year. Instead, I decided to devote the time to put forth a solid dissertation and win the confidence of my committee.

This was a very tough decision. To say that I'm eager to graduate and start working is an understatement. The year of teaching and the summer of teaching+writing+doing administrative work has helped to raise my confidence about my ability to deal with the demands and pressures of the job. I feel ready to get out there and start my professional life! But alas, I will have to put it on hold. That is the hardest part. Ultimately, though, I feel very good about my decision. I will be happier and healthier for it.