Summer at last

Ahhhh... (that was a big sigh of relief)... I am finally done with this academic year. Commencement was last Saturday, and I only finished up with grading yesterday (due partially to IT problems that were not under my control--the less said about those, the better).

Now I need to figure out what to do with myself.

I feel as though I've been running at top speed since about mid-March, and certainly some of the things I need to do now are slow down, catch my breath, and catch up with all the various non-work-related things I have shoved to the side in the last two months.

In the short term, "what to do with myself" is pretty straightforward: I'll be leaving home toward the end of this week and go on a road trip. It is mostly vacation, but will also include a trip to the Berks conference, where I will give a paper that I'm trying to convince myself is not shoddy and slapdash.

After that, then what? There seem to be quite a few things I should be working on this summer, and I need to start just by sorting out what they are. I have thought about joining this writing group, but at the moment I feel very reluctant to commit to a particular one of the several things I could be / should be working on. Plus, I'll be out of town for the first couple weeks of this group. I'll see if I can sort something out in the next few days, I suppose.

Almost summer

I am not counting time as part of "summer" until after commencement this Saturday.

But I find that I am somehow, amazingly, almost done. Classes are over. Most of the grading is accomplished. I am waiting on a few late assignments before I submit grades.

Here, therefore, some summer goals (just the academic ones, there are others regarding yard, social life, etc.):

1) Earn my summer stipend by ordering and reading materials and making plans for my fall course on the Crusades.
2) Look over my old conference papers and prepare an article to submit by the end of the summer.
3) Look at my book manuscript, figure out what revisions it needs, and begin work on them.
4) Make plans for a research trip in the fall.
5) Make plans for my other new courses next year, plus start putting materials together for my review. (My school does a 2nd-year review and another in the 4th year.)

Reorganization

Today I took some time to reorganize my (computer) files, which were in a terrible state.

Back when I was in graduate school, I dumped all notes, drafts, etc., for a particular course into a folder labeled with that course's name. This system broke down a bit once I got to the dissertation research, when virtually everything got dumped into a folder titled "Diss." Eventually this acquired some subfolders ("Drafts" and "Comments", for example). All the research, writing and note-taking I've done since then have not been organized systematically. Sometimes I made new folders, sometimes I shoved files into pre-existing folders, sometimes I left files in the main "Research" folder. 

The result of all this is that it has gotten increasingly difficult to find stuff, and every time I look for some particular notes, I end up searching in half a dozen places on the hard drive to find what I'm looking for.

I hope that I've licked that problem going forward. The Research folder now has subfolders for Writing, Research Materials, and Secondary materials, among others, with appropriate further subdivisions. I sincerely hope that making it easier to find research materials will make the time I have for research more productive, and that clarity in organization reflects clarity in thought. We shall see.

Is it possible I might one day do research again?

My new job is time-intensive, but yesterday I managed to get a little ahead on class prep, and today I had some time to think. I wrote up an abstract and made some lists:

goals for the year

materials to get from the library

ideas I might want to pursue in the future

I keep most of such notes on the computer, and I have a terrible time keeping track of such stuff. On the list of goals, in fact, is "for the love of God, reorganize the files so I can find things." My system of electronic file-keeping broke down once I moved beyond my dissertation materials, and whenever I try to find an idea or reference I wrote down, I end up searching in five different folders, opening and closing a dozen different files before I find what I'm looking for. 

I think I have a pretty manageable agenda for the year, and we'll see how things go.

Now back to paper grading and class prep.

Office organization

Today I moved twelve boxes of books into my new office. Yay new office! As the newest prof, I get the smallest office, but it is more than adequate for my needs: lots of shelves, new desk, new computer, plenty of filing cabinets. 

I'm pretty sure these books haven't all been on the shelves at the same time. My last few jobs ranged from "lots of shelf space" to "half a shelf in a shared office," so I've been storing various items for a while. Other books were shelved, piled, or boxed at home. Now I have to figure out how to organize them.

So, gentle readers--assuming you're still out there--what are your favorite methods of office organizing? By period? By author? By color? (Some friends once rearranged my shelves by color as a prank; the result was striking but a little surreal.) Primary sources separated, or mixed in?

Academic Moving

Today I have been sorting through the last 5-6 years' worth of notes. Since I have to pay to ship these across the country, everything unnecessary must go.

Notes relevant to research I'll keep; likewise copies of articles, which I keep either for reference or because I may assign them in a class someday.

But do I really need to keep all my printed-out class notes? When the same files are on my hard drive? I tossed the ones for classes I don't anticipate teaching in the near future (or, perhaps, ever again), but I'm undecided about the others. 

Notes for graduate classes can also be purged, I suspect, especially since I haven't really looked at most of them in ages.

Terrifying discovery: my senior thesis. I'm afraid to look at it too closely.

Edited to add:

I did throw away student evaluations of my grad school teaching. I've taught my own classes for years now, no one cares how well I led discussion sections at the age of 25. Evaluations for my own older courses may go, too--I'm undecided.

Getting unblocked

I have so many things to do this month it has been a little paralyzing. I came back from the AHA (via train) last Monday and spent the afternoon totally zoned out. I took a nap, which I almost never do. Then I spent a couple of days catching up on correspondence and finishing my grades and such.

As I puttered away at one thing and another, I realized I was reluctant to get back to my research. I need to finish revisions on an article and resubmit it, and then I need to dig back into the book manuscript. And I felt blocked. I wasn't totally sure how to address the comments of one reader, who seemed most interested in some points I felt were tangential to my major argument. I hadn't worked on it since probably early December, what with all the mess of finals. Prep for the spring semester seemed more pressing. And so on.

But today I may have gotten unblocked. I allotted two hours to work on the article. I sat down and read through it, made notes on things to do, fixed up some footnotes, added some brief explanatory material, explored the sources suggested by the reader. I think things are coming together. It may not even take that much more work. I'd be delighted to send this off by the end of the month.

I also allotted two hours to work on course prep. That was good, too; I made some progress, and the two-hour time period kept the prep from sprawling over into the rest of the day. I hope I can keep this up for the rest of the week.

This month's agenda

Well, I hadn't actually meant to take the holiday week off from the blog, but, well, it was a holiday after all. Or at least Thursday was a holiday, and I had guests, which entailed a certain amount of preparation before and clean-up afterward.

At any rate, these are what's currently on tap:
1) Editing a group of papers to be sent to the publisher, with an imminent deadline. I actually quite like the editing. There is something about checking other people's footnote formatting, use of commas, and the like that I find rather soothing.

2) Completing revisions on a certain article. Here the difficulty is figuring out how to respond to the reviewer's comments, some of which tack in a different direction from teh one I'm going in.

3) Surviving the semester with sanity intact. I get final papers in a couple of weeks, and I have relatively little prep to do until then. I do have a slightly sticky problem to deal with today, though.

4) Revising my book manuscript. Since I recently got a lot of thoughtful comments from two helpful readers, I need to rethink and reorganize portions of it. I'm sure I will be working out some of those ideas here, though I don't think I'll be able to get into the manuscript until January.

Catching up

Well, I am not sure what happened last week. It's only in the second week of the semester here, but somehow I found myself very preoccupied with classes and short on sleep. I seem to have rectified that situation to some extent now.

Meanwhile, I am plugging away revising a conference paper (project A). I am finding it a bit recalcitrant, possibly because I'm more interested in other things (projects B and C), but A has a more imminent deadline. I've just downloaded or requested a blizzard of books and articles for project B, which I'll start reading as I finish the work on project A. As usual, combing the indexes of journals has flushed out several articles which I really should have read already, or at least been aware of. That does tend to induce some guilt, but at least I'm aware of them now...

Taking stock

This has been a busy week. There was a parental visit and a full-day new faculty orientation on top of the various other stuff I regularly do.

The start of the semester seems more real now due to the orientation. I staggered home from it with my brain full of information and a tote bag jammed full of event schedules, contact information for student and faculty support services, pamphlets on writing and grading, etc. I've also acquired keys to my new office and verified that the bookstore has my books in. Today I finished up my syllabus. So I'm just about ready to go with classes, and I still have a full week to plan class before I need to teach. 

I need to not let teaching swamp the writing and other aspects of my professional life, though. Therefore, I'm going to take stock of my summer accomplishments as well as goals for the fall.

This summer I did the following:

• finished a conference paper
• participated in a very lively conference session
• agreed to co-edit a project which should see print in the spring
• finished and submitted an article (entirely separate from the conference)
• began revisions on the conference paper
• began to think about the paper I'll write after that
• read assorted & sundry volumes
• planned my fall course

This fall I'll need to do the following:

• review a manuscript, as recently requested to do
• finish revisions on the conference paper
• do my responsibilities as co-editor
• submit an abstract for Kalamazoo and work on the ensuing paper
• apply for jobs (I may submit as few as two applications)
• teach my fall course

That all sounds reasonably manageable. The hitch is I have two projects out and under submission, and if they come back with revision requests and short deadlines, things could get much more complicated. As things currently stand, I can be satisfied with my summer and optimistic about the next 3 months.

Desk successfully excavated

Now I'm chugging through my manuscript images, comparing them to transcripts, etc.  

The whole reason these files are on my desk is that I don't have enough space in drawers to file them properly.  And no place to put a new filing cabinet, either, so that's out.  This leads me to some questions:

1. Do I really need to keep notes from classes I took as a student?
   
2. What about notes I took during other people's talks?
3. What about newsletters from various organizations I belong to?

Currently I'm keeping quite a bit of such things--in particular the class notes take up a lot of space.  Since I haven't touched many of these things in years, the answer to the above questions is probably no, but I suspect some more sorting and clearing stuff out is in order.

More on nuns next post.

Uh-oh

Less writing time today, but still going OK; I drafted one of the two remaining sections of this essay.  So just one section left to draft, and then I'll have a complete draft.  

There's just one problem.

In order to write the next section, I have to excavate my desk.  

I know that somewhere on my desk is a manila folder with printouts of the relevant documents I need to check before I can write this section. Somewhere, that is, under:
--book catalogs
--sample syllabi from my new employer
--notes I scribbled during sessions of the last two conferences I attended, one of which was in January
--random magazines
--mail I meant to deal with weeks ago
--photocopies of articles
--etc.

When my desk is organized, there are a lot of piles on it, but I know what type of thing is in each pile.  When my desk is not organized, as now, everything smears into one big pile.  So...time to go digging in the pile.  

How is your desk organized (or not)?