Semester three was a doozy. Semester three felt like it was ten seconds long. Honestly, before I wrote this, I was feeling kind of crummy about how it turned out, but I wrote this introduction last, and you know what, it wasn’t that bad. Here’s what happened.
I actually like teaching, thank goodness
Some academics want to research and discover they like teaching. I’m the opposite. I’ve always wanted to teach and I’ve only in the past, say, five years? discovered I like research.
So I flung myself off to a PhD program to find a path to teaching, which in hindsight was a huge risk - at the time, I’d never actually taught before. Like get-up-in-front-of-a-classroom, here’s-some-material teaching? I’d never done it. What made me so sure I would like it?
I’m relieved to report that I was right. This semester was the first time I taught taught. What a rush. What a fantastic way to spend a day. My students are awesome. It was an honor to teach them. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Implicit learning
I’m not a person who picks up on clues. I originally wrote that I don’t pick up on context clues, but no, I don’t pick up on clues clues, either. My notes are full of excruciating detail that’s probably, I’ve gathered, self-evident to most: structure, categorization, explicit links. And I’ve found that my instinct is to teach with that same level of detail.
My big pedagogical lesson of the semester is that people figure out more than I anticipated off vibes alone. It’ll probably take me a lifetime to find the right balance of implicit versus explicit learning. But now I know that the balance is out there and I need to find it.
I forgot how hard conferences are
During my gap years, LSA (the big national linguistics conference in the USA) was my yearly vacation. Even the few times that I went during application cycles and had to put my game face on, the sheer novelty of the travel and the escape from my day job made the travel more pleasure than business.
I’m getting to the point where conferences are becoming a job requirement: a little less vacation, a little more way of life. The fatigue, the stress of booking your hotels, the humiliation ritual of traveling with a poster tube, they’re starting to pile up. It didn’t help that on a recent trip I discovered I’m allergic to the entire state of Michigan.
To be clear, it’s worth it. You get there all grumpy from the airport before pockets of camaraderie poke through the awkward professionalism, and by the end you feel like you’re home. For a brief, fleeting moment, you taste the academic sublime. And it’s at this exact moment that you have to get back on that return flight.
Time makes things better, unfortunately
I walked into this semester with a draft of a QP done. I thought I’d defend it in, like, a month. Then things kept happening: preparing an abstract revealed a new angle that threw me back into revisions. Life got in the way and ate up my writing time. Details I thought I could take for granted turned into rabbit holes. I think I’m on, like, my fourth revision of the stats.
So here I am a semester later not that much closer to finishing the QP. This worries me! It’s due next semester and I don’t like deadlines! But I regret to inform you that my QP is a whole lot better from the extra time. We’ll see how I feel in a few weeks when I start super aggressively pushing for completion and start freaking out about it. But academia is set up to incentivize these long periods of slow, incremental improvement. I suppose I can appreciate the value it brought.
Out of my comfort zone
One of the most valuable exercises I did this year was present outside of my “target” audience. I was invited to present at a seminar on child language development, and despite my initial reactions - I don’t do that! My work is so unrelated to that I can’t even find anyone else who does both things at the same time! - I really fought for dear life, but I found ways of connecting my research to themes relevant to the seminar. (Presentation here!)
More broadly, I spent a lot of time taking classes in kinds of linguistics I’d never done before. It is difficult to start at the ground, find a foothold, and clamber up high enough to say, here’s how I relate to that. But I remember some of my grad school interviews when I had to be like, I gotta be level with ya, I have no idea what it is you do. I’ll cross paths with some of those people some day. I can’t wait to show them who I’m becoming.
Wacky work-life balance
I ended up with the worst possible schedule this semester, one chock full of little hourlong breaks between meetings and classes. What am I supposed to do with an hour? You can’t do nothing in an hour.
I ended up not doing any work on the weekdays: just going to class, working out, and eating brought me straight to bedtime. Then, usually on Saturday, I’d do a huge marathon work session and prep all of my coursework for the upcoming week. It got a little hectic when I had to play catchup after missing class for conferences, but honestly, I kind of liked it. I’d roll up to the lab in my pajamas, help myself to a coffee, put on some Denz1000, and get into the zone.
What I learned about myself is that I like to get things done immediately. It was a little stressful to get assignments during the week and have to sit on them until the weekend. But I probably worked the same number of hours I did in previous semesters, and I did enjoy the feeling of leaving my last class of the day and being done.
I still forgot to have hobbies
Last semester I forgot to have hobbies. There was so much I wanted to do, but I kept telling myself I still have time in the semester, I can do this next week. I guess I said that twelve times in a row, and there were thirteen weeks in our semester. Whoops.
So let me hold myself accountable this time. This winter break, I’m going to prepare graphics for a new season of Wing It And Sing It, and next semester, I’m going to record new episodes.