I've decided that summer is here, at least for the purposes of my summer writing, and so I have updated my writing goals for the season (and given myself a new blog format in the meantime) -- I'm obviously ignoring the fact that I still have final writing portfolios to grade and that my sophomores won't even take their finals until this Thursday! So there is clearly wrapping up to do of the school year, and I won't be completely free for over a week because of commencement and final faculty meetings and the like, but time has now entered that less scheduled, more free-form mode, so I'm in a summer kind of mood even if my workload doesn't reflect it.
And, as good timing would have it, tomorrow is the first day of the June Academic Writing Club, so I can get started on those summer writing goals in good company. I mentioned this online supportive community a month or so ago, when I was imagining what my summer was going to look like, and a couple of folks asked me to say more about my experience. This will actually be my fourth stint in the Academic Writing club, so I've already figured out that it works very well for me. I'm the kind of person, as you know, who loves a gold star, and writing abut my daily progress and getting a little green check and positive feedback from other people is one big gold star-fest. It doesn't really work at all for D., I should say, since she doesn't find checking things off a list at all intrinsically rewarding (weird, isn't she?), so this clearly isn't the thing for everyone, but I'm actually much more productive -- or maybe I just feel better about my productivity? -- when I'm part of an academic writing community that's checking in regularly. I had a writing group in grad school (and I'm convinced that this is the only way I finished the dissertation), and I've tried recreating such a community ever since then but to no avail. The Academic Writing Club isn't the same kind of group at all -- it's daily rather than bi-weekly, and it's about process rather than about improving the final product (that is, no one is reading my drafts, but they're checking in to see that I am in fact writing the draft I said I was) -- but it has the same effect of moving me forward. (For those of you similarly motivated, I encourage you to give it a try! It's too late to get the early bird special of $50 for this month, but you can still sign up and get started now; and if that doesn't work, a new Club starts every month.)
And I do have a lot of writing that I want to get done this summer, far more than will actually happen, I think. I'm still figuring out what kind of writer I'm going to be now that I'm a high school teacher. I hope that my "hot stuff" post the other day wasn't too braggy. I'm just finding it kind of funny that my academic distinctiveness has moved from being a Caring and Creative Teacher -- since, after all, that's no longer unusual in my new arena -- to being an Intellectual and Writer, which is much more unusual a chosen identity in this new world. I'm not the only Ph.D. at FGS, but I'm the only one who had a substantial university career before arriving at high school, and publication is just not part of this new world ... such that, when my last article was published, the academic dean sent a congratulatory email about it to the entire faculty, and colleagues kept stopping by to say how impressed they were! Very different, kind of weird, but nice. That new sense of distinctiveness is paired with the fact that a senior English teacher at FGS pulled me aside when I was interviewing to warn me against even trying to write during the school year, so I think that's why I overcompensated a little bit this year and wrote more than I normally would during the school year.
I was thinking about all of this today -- mostly because I was slogging through the tedious task of cleaning our old apartment, and also because my year-end evaluation meeting is Tuesday -- and decided that I have a little bit of a "kid in the candy store" thing going with writing right now. Since there's no writing that I have to do, I can write anything I want, and therefore I've taken on more projects than I really have time for, but they're all so fun! So I need to learn a little balance along the way, but in the meantime, I'm looking forward to my first summer as a high school teacher/writer and to moving forward on all of the different projects I have lined up. And if it turns out not to be so fun after all, ... well, I don't have to go ahead with any of them. Freedom!
And, as good timing would have it, tomorrow is the first day of the June Academic Writing Club, so I can get started on those summer writing goals in good company. I mentioned this online supportive community a month or so ago, when I was imagining what my summer was going to look like, and a couple of folks asked me to say more about my experience. This will actually be my fourth stint in the Academic Writing club, so I've already figured out that it works very well for me. I'm the kind of person, as you know, who loves a gold star, and writing abut my daily progress and getting a little green check and positive feedback from other people is one big gold star-fest. It doesn't really work at all for D., I should say, since she doesn't find checking things off a list at all intrinsically rewarding (weird, isn't she?), so this clearly isn't the thing for everyone, but I'm actually much more productive -- or maybe I just feel better about my productivity? -- when I'm part of an academic writing community that's checking in regularly. I had a writing group in grad school (and I'm convinced that this is the only way I finished the dissertation), and I've tried recreating such a community ever since then but to no avail. The Academic Writing Club isn't the same kind of group at all -- it's daily rather than bi-weekly, and it's about process rather than about improving the final product (that is, no one is reading my drafts, but they're checking in to see that I am in fact writing the draft I said I was) -- but it has the same effect of moving me forward. (For those of you similarly motivated, I encourage you to give it a try! It's too late to get the early bird special of $50 for this month, but you can still sign up and get started now; and if that doesn't work, a new Club starts every month.)
And I do have a lot of writing that I want to get done this summer, far more than will actually happen, I think. I'm still figuring out what kind of writer I'm going to be now that I'm a high school teacher. I hope that my "hot stuff" post the other day wasn't too braggy. I'm just finding it kind of funny that my academic distinctiveness has moved from being a Caring and Creative Teacher -- since, after all, that's no longer unusual in my new arena -- to being an Intellectual and Writer, which is much more unusual a chosen identity in this new world. I'm not the only Ph.D. at FGS, but I'm the only one who had a substantial university career before arriving at high school, and publication is just not part of this new world ... such that, when my last article was published, the academic dean sent a congratulatory email about it to the entire faculty, and colleagues kept stopping by to say how impressed they were! Very different, kind of weird, but nice. That new sense of distinctiveness is paired with the fact that a senior English teacher at FGS pulled me aside when I was interviewing to warn me against even trying to write during the school year, so I think that's why I overcompensated a little bit this year and wrote more than I normally would during the school year.
I was thinking about all of this today -- mostly because I was slogging through the tedious task of cleaning our old apartment, and also because my year-end evaluation meeting is Tuesday -- and decided that I have a little bit of a "kid in the candy store" thing going with writing right now. Since there's no writing that I have to do, I can write anything I want, and therefore I've taken on more projects than I really have time for, but they're all so fun! So I need to learn a little balance along the way, but in the meantime, I'm looking forward to my first summer as a high school teacher/writer and to moving forward on all of the different projects I have lined up. And if it turns out not to be so fun after all, ... well, I don't have to go ahead with any of them. Freedom!
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