Holidays and Conferences

• I just spent 3 days off line. There's something to be said for that, although I'm having fun catching up with all of you friends-in-the-computer.
• We stopped at the National Bottle Museum. I love quirky museums, and I love Politica, who stopped to park even before I'd finished my "It's open!" sentence as we drove by. And Curious Girl clapped when I said we were going into the bottle museum, and wondered whether she should bring in the blue water bottle she'd been drinking from.
• Curious Girl's first report card came home last week. We have a teacher conference in the morning. I'm looking forward to it: kindergarten is clearly going well for her, and her teacher seems to have connected with CG quite well. I'm curious to hear a bit more about CG's social habits in class, and I have a few questions about how persistent she is with challenging tasks at school.
  
• I like CG's school quite a bit. But the report card? Spectacularly uninformative in some key ways. The scale refers back to the state standards, for several reasons, including that "A standards-based report card gives "parents a clear understanding of what their children know, what they are able to do, and what they need to learn in relation to the standards." So the scale on the report card is "Exceeds/meets/nearly meets/fails to meet standards and then "little evidence." Problems here include:
• "little evidence" is not actually on the same scale of exceeding-to-not-meeting any given standard. There might well be little evidence of a student meeting a particular standard; little evidence sounds like a comment about what there is to evaluate, not an actual evaluation.
  
• the report card does not actually point us to anywhere where the actual standards are explained. I remembered that there is an explanation of the report card on the school website, but the explanation there focuses on the transistion from the old (2 years ago) format of report cards. I had to google the state standards.
• the school website does gloss the scale, though, and says that "little evidence" means that "Student's achievement shows little evidence of meeting grade level standards."
  
• When your kid "meets the standard" in October, does that mean she has met the (end-of-grade) standard? Or that she meets the where-we-think-we-are-with-this-standard-in-October-standard?
• CG "exceeds" the standard in music performance. (Yay! I got a 5! she said as we looked at the report card together. She has no clue what the numbers actually mean but clearly has solidly grasped the notion that 5s are bigger than 4s, and at the moment, bigger is better in her book.) On the state standards site, the document I found about arts standards says that there aren't kindergarten level music standards.
• All of this is more philosophically troubling me to me than parentally troubling: CG is having a fine time in kindergarten, and we already knew that this is totally the right time for her to be in kindergarten. (Anyone reading here who's obsessing about whether to repeat a year of pre-K: do it. CG wasn't ready for kindergarten a year ago, and she is in totally the right place now. I could have obsessed about something else during her first year of pre-K. It was such the right call.) So it's not like I have serious questions about what's going on in kindergarten. She's learning to read, she's loving math, she's quizzing us on what are living and non-living things (the subject of the science unit this fall). She likes school, and she's making friends. That's pretty much my idea of good kindergarten outcomes right there.
  
• I really need to come up with a good Thanksgiving entree. But not tonight. Magpie suggested a potato pie, but I am hoping for something with protein (to go along with the turnips braised with maple syrup, and turkey and traditional trimmings my sister will prepare). I'll make bread or rolls of some sort. But what protein? Time to get decisive.
• Except it's time to go to bed. So decisions will have to wait until tomorrow. But comments on non-turkey Thanksgiving options are welcomed!
  

Just Say No (Thanks), But Say It Well

I don't know how many academic jobs I've applied for over the years. I had two big years of job searching, one right as I was finishing my doctorate, in which I applied for jobs all over the US and Canada and tried to work out whether I wanted to be a literature-and-writing researcher or a composition and literarcy researcher, one in which I thought I wanted to be a literature specialist, and then a few more scattered applications here and there for positions that seemed interesting. That's a lot of letters, and, of course, a lot of rejection letters sent my way. I still remember two of them: one, from Big State University, a short rejection letter in the fall, after they'd asked to see a writing sample, with a handwritten note from someone on the committee at the bottom. She used an ocean metaphor I can't quite recall to say that she was glad to have come across my scholarship in the search, and that while this wasn't a good fit, she looked forward to seeing more of my work, more of me in the future. The other, a full-page letter sent from Regional State University, went to all applicants who'd applied for a position whose funding had been yanked after the position had been posted. The department chair's letter explained the situation, and talked about how he had loved reading all the applications, describing in general terms the kinds of research and teaching interests he had seen reflected in the applications, and how much he wished he had the chance to meet more of us, and how he wished us well.

Those letters were written by people who were imagining readers on the other side. They were written by people who were self-conscious about the rhetorical situation. They made me feel good about my work, because both letters showed me that real people were out there reading them.

Tenured Radical recently posted on the art of rejection letters. Her tips, as always, are sound, and search committees would do well to heed them:

1. Do not send rejections by email.
2. Do not send rejections by post card.
3. When writing a letter to candidates, if you actually met them, or solicited the candidacy, take two seconds to write a personal note. This means not having your departmental secretary sign them, of course.
4. Send rejections in a timely way: at least when the search is over, if not before. In fact, although wisdom has it that you reject no one until the chosen candidate has signed on the dotted line, truth be told, a large part of the pool is out of the running after the first cut. Why not tell the people who didn't make the semi-final cut -- say, in January, rather than April? [just to be clear: these 4 tips are the Radical's words, not mine]

I'd add a bit to TR's excellent list (framed in the way that English searches happen, which is to say, with deadlines in the fall, interviews at or around the time of the MLA convention in late December, and campus visits anywhere from January through March):

1. Do not send rejections by voice mail on people's home phones.
   
2. Send rejections in ways that acknowledge interactions with the candidates (at least the formal stages of the search): a letter to someone you interviewed at the convention should be a bit different from someone who didn't make that cut. It should be clear to the candidate that you remember meeting them, and that you remember something about their work. It is easy to personalize letters given the wonders of mail merge.
3. Send rejections. Does the fact that the campuses who never wrote to me back in 1990 when I applied mean that I'm still in the running? Probably not, and in any event, I've not found the job I want for the next phase of my careers.
   
4. Send rejections in waves. When you advertise for a position in Magical Forestry, and specialists in Green Peas who took a single course in Magical Forestry apply, it's pretty clear that you wouldn't hire a Green Pea specialist for the position even if everyone else in the applicant pool fell away. There are probably other candidates who are clearly not going to make the final cut. So send those rejections promptly (I wait until the affirmative action review of the interview list is settled). There's no reason to wait until after the search has concluded, which in English can sometimes be 6-8 months after applications are first received.
   
5. When you interview candidates at MLA, and a few of those candidates are clearly not a good fit, send those rejections right away, too.
6. When you invite your top candidates to campus, but think that the next few people on your convention interview list might be fine to invite if some of your top candidates withdraw, let the other candidates know. Yes, this will let them know that they are not your top choice, but they're likely to figure that out when it's mid February and you still haven't called. This gives you a chance to say, "We've invited some other candidates to campus. We had strong applicants and we're impressed with you and your work. We'll keep you posted." This kind of honesty lets candidates know where they stand. OK, this isn't exactly about rejections, but it's related.
   
7. When people come to campus, and they don't get the job, write them a personal note that acknowledges the ways in which they interacted with you. Yes, it is difficult to write such a letter, especially when the reasons for ranking candidates sometimes turns on things candidates can't control (like whose secondary interests overlap or don't with other members of the department), and when candidates 2 and 3 may be really quite good. A short, general "We're reviewing applications and unfortunately your application will not proceed any farther in the search" kind of letter is fine for an early refection, but rejections later in the search should acknowledge the nature of the contact with the candidate.

In some of the departments I've worked in, search committees have used very brief letters of rejection out of fear of creating extended interactions with rejected candidates. But from the writing side, and the receiving side, I'm more comfortable with letters that reveal the humanity in the process. (I'll pause for some snickers. yes, there is much to be cynical about in academic job searches, but the search committees I've participated on or supervised as chair have generally done a fine job working through a crazy process.) There are people on both sides of the search, and search committees hold almost all the power through most of the search. Our correspondence should be gracious, clear, honest, and timely. Searching creates networks, and we never know how candidates will move along in their careers. Writing well on a search creates a good impression of a department, and it helps job seekers.

And yes, I do like to read Ms. Manners, in case anyone was wondering.

Professor Ms. Manners

A friend wrote to me today, wondering what to say to a friend and colleague who's been denied tenure. Any suggestions from out there in reader land?

My own experiences with a friend denied tenure were wrapped up in some awful personal and campus politics, so much of our conversations around that involved venting and analyzing the rather idiosyncratic and personal factors that led to the situation. My friend was so angry that the anger steered a lot of the conversations.

In the friend-of-friend's case, I don't know anything about the background. But I can imagine that this general scenario is the kind in which many people don't know what to say, so they don't say anything, and they avoid the person, which could well make the person feel even worse. So what to do?

When New Kid on the Hallway didn't have her contract renewed last spring (click back to the April 2007 archives to see a set of posts about that, and here's the first long discussion of it), there was an impressive array of comments supporting her in all kinds of ways. Her most recent post, in fact, discusses what she's thinking about her future career options; it's clear that her response to the non-renewal has been to stop and consider what she wants to do with her talents and interests (not to mention moving, necessitating a new pseudonym for Long Distance Husband). That's the attitude at a moment like this, I think, to try to remember that life goes on--in or out of academia--and there are options to consider.

But still, what to say, in the moment? In the face of any kind of loss or sudden bad news, it's wise to let the friend take a bit of a lead: does s/he want to discuss it? avoid it? dwell on the sadness? anger? At the same time, the friend probably doesn't know what s/he needs, either. So bringing over dinner, or movie tickets, or inviting the friend over for lunch or out for a walk or whatever seems good. Dropping a note to say, "I'm thinking of you," or bringing by flowers. Gestures that let the person know you notice them, that they've not gone invisible, that you're trying to make their day a little brighter.

What to avoid, I think, is pushing to solutions when the person isn't ready for that. In any kind of crisis, we need to be sensitive to when someone wants a listening ear, when they want some help with strategy, when they want additional ways to look at things, when they want validation for their analysis or reactions. If the friend really wants someone to say "Ah! those b@st@rds! " and instead gets detailed advice about how to work the grievance procedure, frustration will ensue.

I remember a Tenured Radical comment at New Kid's last spring that brought me up short: as I recall, there were a number of comments about NK's non-reappointment that were focused on could she appeal, how awful it was, what should she do next, and TR said, "whoa! let's think outside the box: what do you want to do now?" (I can't find the post and comments to link to, so perhaps my memories playing tricks on me. But this seems like a TR kind of comment to me, and I can't imagine she'd be distressed to find it attributed to her.) So in the long run, I think the friend, and friend-of-friend, need to find ways to use the tenure denial as an opportunity to figure out what is the right next step. There are plenty of prominent academics who didn't get tenure and whose careers have flourished. And there are ways to take skills from academia and use them elswhere. (As college class newsletter, I'm amazed at the jobs people have that I never new existed.)

So those are some of my thoughts. Yours?

It's not April, right?

If it were April 1, I'd be wondering whether this is an April Fool's story. But I checked: it's November, and according to Inside Higher Education, a Florida community college is now providing pet insurance, after declining to add benefits for domestic partners for faculty and staff. Really, you couldn't make this stuff up.

Airport Blogging, Once More with Content

I'm returning from a very interesting symposium on women in higher education held at Fancy Pants University in a reasonably crunchy granola town (so I felt quite at home with my crunchy granola blog persona). Some observations, some more serious than others:

• There are really only about 20 people in the country who work in health food stores, and they magically circulate among the stores. They all look the same--the guy with the long pony tail and the tie-dyed shirt, the guy in lederhosen that somehow looks cool, the gal with long hair and an Indian print dress....I walk into any such store and recognize everyone, even if I've never been before.
• It is no fun to have a cold sore on the weekend you are seeing many former classmates.
  
• There are, according to the speaker I heard on Title IX, about 3 million girls playing high school sports and less than 200,000 playing NCAA sports. Don't let anyone tell you that college women have no interest in sports.
• While there were a considerable number of "follow your dreams, all it takes is passion and perseverance to get where you want to go" sorts of presentations (which were somewhat inspirational even though a sociological voice in my brain was quibbling along the way), there was also ample evidence that gender matters these days. Some of the anecdotes the sports lawyer who spoke on Title IX told were quite shocking (like the fact that a campus administrator at a reasonably well-known western state institution was sponsoring an "ugly female athlete day" well into the 1990s.
• I heard some remarks by a biology professor which included the story about how when she was pregnant with her second child, around 1990, an anonymous idjit put a book on birth control in her departmental mailbox.
  
• Despite the fact that I really never liked playing team sports--in part because I am slow and don't have the greatest hand/eye coordination, in part because no one ever really taught me how to play various team sports and I don't like trying new things in groups--I found myself wishing that I had played a sport in college. The value of connecting with a good coach and teammates really came out in a lot of the conversation at the athletic sessions. I think it's great for girls and young women to participate in organized activities that help them connect with mentors in different ways, and I have a renewed appreciation for sports.
• I am amazed by the number of women I met who have parlayed fascinating careers on meandering paths. I took a very direct route to what I do: college, a year off working on campus, grad school, 3 years of non-tenure track faculty work, then tenure-track work. I've moved into an area of English studies that most of my undergraduate faculty still haven't heard of, but still, it's been a pretty direct path. I do love what I do, but I am a bit envious of the people who have worked various international and public policy advocacy work into their careers. I want Curious Girl to somehow have the freedom and imagination to discover jobs and dreams that she doesn't already know exist. (One of the panelists on women and business pointed out that the jobs our daughters will have one day will include many jobs that don't even exist yet, because things are changing so quickly.)
• I am also amazed by the qualities of students at today's FPU. They are smart, savvy, and amazingly overscheduled. While that's a problem in many respects, it's also very impressive.

I'm looking forward to sleeping in my own bed again tonight. Home will be good. I miss Politica and CG!

Adorable Filler and Same Sex Education

Curious Girl's pre-K class is all girls this year. There are 3 classrooms in every grade at her groovy private school, which generally makes quite remarkable efforts to balance classrooms on a whole variety of criteria (things like leadership and interests as well as more conventional demographics). This year, they ended up with very few boys in the pre-K year. Were the boys evenly distributed across three classrooms, there would have been maybe 4 boys out of 16-18 students in a class. So they decided to try an experiment: they divided the boys across two clasrooms, and have one class of 16 girls.

It's fascinating to see these girls at play. The school is so groovy and egalitarian that I didn't really think it would matter too much (although CG was tickled at the idea, of course). I had noticed last yeart that the boys and girls started self-segregating for play (something the groovy teachers often intervented in, strategically, although there were plenty of chances for the kids to make free choices of activities and companions). Last year, the boys were building almost every day during free choice time. They built up: towers or castles that they took stuffed animals or plastic animals into and played various strategy games--contests, territory, ownership were key themes. It was fun to watch, of course, but the girls really never wanted in on those games. They'd play in other parts of the room.

This year, the girls play in all the space, and they work everything into their play. They take out the big blocks and build low to the ground, building out but never up. They build stages, and then sing or dance on it, or sit on the edge and chat. They build offices, taking blocks to outline work spaces and then they bring office supplies over so they can work (often ending up helping each other, and sharing supplies). They set up an orchestra space so they can take turns conducting. What fascinates me is how the pretending and the building go hand in hand. Last Wednesday I was there for an hour after lunch and there was a stage (which CG built just so other kids could use it). Even after most of the girls had tired of the stage and had moved on to other activities, a few of the girls took small blocks and handed them around to everyone who had been on the stage (who were now either at the writing table area, where CG was showing them how to make jewelry by tying yarn to paper scraps to do necklaces, bracelets, or earring, and where some girls were making cards for their parents, or in the music area, playing with sand blocks or chimes). As the girls handed out the blocks they said, "here's some root beer, for everyone who was on the stage. You need something to drink now." And the root beer was received with thanks, and just got incorporated into the other play (they would stop their coloring to sip their drinks). Eventually someone decided her root beer was really a microphone and the singing started all over again.

This kind of thing just never happened with boys in the room last year. It's amazing to see.

I went to a girls' high school and loved it. Same-sex pre-K isn't going to happen anytime soon more generally, but it sure is interesting to watch.

*************************

Bonus Conversation from the two girls at the end of the table making cards for their parents:

"Hey! My dad's name is D-A-D, too!"

So all that education worked out well....

Thanks to Peripatetic Polar Bear and Jane Dark, I, too, have learned that I'm in the right career. My top 10 career results were:
1. curator
2. professor
3. anthropologist
4. ESL teacher
5. foreign language instructor
6, sport psychology consultant
7. website designer
8. historian
9. music teacher
10. psychologist
11. humanitarian aid worker
12. librarian

and amusingly, hairstylist was just above activist somewhere later down the list.

Librarian, for a long time, was the career I wished I'd pursued, along with that of a park ranger or museum docent. So curator isn't too far off the mark.

I'm teaching a unit in a few weeks on preparing for life after college, something I put into the capstone seminar I'm teaching for our seniors. I've realized, of course, that little in my own professional training has really helped me advise students about how to look for jobs straight out of college. I'm reading a lot of job search websites and planning a resume workshop; I've asked them to visit the career center for a counseling appointment (something which seems to have mixed results). Any readers have good ideas for graduating seniors? I'm happy to take suggestions from the peanut gallery as I work up this new unit.

How to Say No and Other Handy Academic Talents

I have been thinking about how to say no.

My closest colleagues in the department have teased me about how I have learned to say no. When I was first hired into my current department, I had an administrative job that involved handling comments, questions, and complaints from students who didn't want to follow the general requirements for first-year writing matters. Anyone who complained about anything that first semester usually got what they asked for, but gradually, I learned, by watching my colleagues, how to investigate a situation, how to step back, think about what's best for the student and institution, look at the principles involved, and how to be both flexible, fair, and committed to principles.

I have learned to say no on my own account with much more difficulty. When Curious Girl came home, I was on sabbatical. Nine months later, when I went back to my regular assignments, Politica took a semester of family leave. CG had two mornings of daycare, and I took one day a week with her. I have continued that practice ever since (and am having my own version of kindergarten angst: I love my mama days, and I will miss them). One of my colleagues, himself a former chair, told me that it was important to take two half days during the work week to myself. So I figured I'd keep my mama days while department chairing (since the first year sets expectations for my availability).

While I'm willing to tell the internet about Mama Days, and I have certainly told my friends on campus about them, I have been cautious about telling strict colleagues about Mama Days. I never wanted to say to someone convening a meeting of the Mathematical Mushroom Committee that I couldn't come on Tuesday because I was home with my daughter. I would just say, "Tuesday doesn't work for me," and whether people assumed I was researching at home, teaching, or whatnot, I didn't care. I felt that protected my professional credibility. But the thing is, I liked the freedom it gave me. I generally don't schedule meetings after 3:00 (so I can pick up CG), and I keep at least one day a week free for CG. And I like that I've learned to say no. It's made me more able to keep blocks of time unscheduled for my own writing, and to make appointments that are reasonably convenient for me. I'm still quite accessible, but I won't schedule a meeting with a single individual if that's my only campus commitment; I no longer feel obliged to work my own schedule into a pretzel in order to help others do their work.

All of which is to say, I'm a big fan of "No, I can't do that then." And I encourage junior faculty to learn to say no, and to learn to say, "Let me think about that and get back to you," as well. That gives them time to check things with me or another colleague if they're trying to decide whether the cost of "yes" is too high. I think people should manage their own time.

But (you knew there was a but, right?).....I'm getting troubled by the ways in which some people say no, so I'm trying to work out the rhetoric of no. As department chair, I need to ask people to do things quite frequently, and I find big differences among the following (realistic-yet-fictional) sorts of no:

• Sorry, no, I can't do that.
• I'd love to come but we've had X commitment on the calendar for months now and I can't change it.
• No, I can't do that because I'll be at a conference.
• No, because I need to X, Y, Z (where X,Y,Z are things I am also doing, like prepping classes, reading papers, or revising a paper)

That list isn't quite conveying what I want it to, which perhaps means I'm making up this problem. But some people say no in ways that seem reasonable; some people say no in ways that bug me. It bugs me, in particular, when the explanation for no is a chronicle of all the ways in which someone is Very Busy, and those ways are all pretty ordinary. I tend to interpret that--perhaps unfairly--as someone saying "this unimportant thing you are asking me to do is not as important as the Very Important Things I am doing." And that bugs me. Say no, simply, but surely it's not necessary to inadvertently dis the person who's doing the asking. I'm a busy person myself, and I think a lot about managing everyone's work load.

Am I oversensitive? Perhaps. I'm curious what the rhetoric of no looks like in other workplaces. I tend to like the simple no.

This is one of the issues I've been thinking about blogging for a while. Another is leadership, a topic about which Tenured Radical has a fabulously smart post today.

Apologies for the slightly disjointed style of this post: it's end of semester chaos here, and I'm gearing up for five or six promotion and/or tenure cases, so I'm even more chaotic than usual. I have a birthday post half-written, and really, most of anything I"m working on right now feels only half-done. Without the structure of my fours, the posting suffers a bit.

Happy Woman Professor Day, Random Bullets Version

I'm sick, I'm tired, and we're leaving town early early early in the morning, so random bullets of Happy Woman Professor Day. What I love about my job:

• my colleagues in the field. Every year at our major professional conference, Best Professional Friend and I have a conversation that either starts or ends, "People in our field are just so nice!" Yes, I am sure there are jerks in our field. But the generosity of people in my subfield in English, their willingness to take graduate students and younger scholars seriously, and their willingness to laugh and write and be smart and be ethical is a good thing.
• Best Professional Friend. This isn't something specific to academia--people in every field have friends, after all--but I love that working on a long-term scholarly project opened up a friendship as well as a professional collaboration. And I love the way I can trace connections through the field through the friendships and connections I've made.
  
• variety. Every semester is different, every class is different. When things aren't working so well, it's not long to wait until there's a new start--a new unit, a new academic year, a new course. I love that no day at work is just like the one before, and there's always a second chance.
  
• flexibility. As Shannon notes in her post for today, professors don't "have the summer off" (much as we would like to). But we do have flexibility in our scheduling, both in terms of when we take time off and when we structure our obligations during the semester. As a tenured professor I have more flexibility than part-time faculty would, of course, and as someone at a research-valuiing institution I teach less and thus have more scheduling flexibility--but still, I can choose whether and when to teach at night.
  
• words. I love words, and I love that words are how my work is structured. I love learning about words, and I love being around other people who also love words.
• students. I love watching people learn, and it's usually an honor to be involved in helping people learn.
• curiosity. I love a job where so many people are asking good questions all the time.
  

I've been puzzling about whether these are bullets for "happy woman professor day" or just "happy professor day." What would be the difference? I was pleased to be the first woman chair of my department (it gave me great pleasure, actually, to change the name on subscriptions from chairman to simply chair). I'm pleased to be in a field where feminist theory and practice is a major influence. I'm pleased to be in a field where women's voices are valued.

Happy HPWD to readers academic and nonacademic alike. May every day be happy woman professor day for my women professor readers!

Happy Woman Professor Day

Via some newish-to-me blogs, news of a new bloggy holiday for February 14: Happy Woman Professor Day (named in honor of a search string that brought someone to Debra Hawhee's blog).

So, any academics out there, join in. I never have posts ready for the right day, but I'm thinking about what I heart about my job.

Motivation on Campus

Being a college professor--or department chair--involves more responsibility than power. Sure, as chair, I do annual performance reviews and fill out worksheets that set salaries for each of my colleagues for the year, but the average raise amount is set by the dean within limits set by the university trustees, and our raises of late have been 2% a year. Most of the time, I'm trying to persuade people to action--which is my style anyway, but still, I'm aware of the fact that in some respects, I have little power to make things happen. I have influence, but not much power in some respects.

I teach a lot of required classes--as composition director, I always cycled through our comp program's offerings, teaching one version or another of Comp 1 or Comp 2. Even the upper-level courses I teach are taught because they're on a list somewhere (for the English education curriculum, or because the English major requires an upper-level course in X and mine is the only one at night, for example). This term, I have a 400-level seminar, mostly juniors and seniors, who have elected my course from the options on their lists. But motivation seems an issue.

I teach often at night, and my students are tired. 2/3 of my class comes to campus after working all day. They're tired. So problem number one: how to make the windowless seminar room seem energized. They do the reading the night before class (or at least that's when they get around to posting the reading notes I'm requiring them to put on the blogs I asked them to set up), so problem number two: they haven't left themselves much time for letting ideas kick around in their heads. And they think I assign too much work, so problem number three: they don't always think they can do it. And so I'm trying to persuade them that yes, they can.

This dynamic fascinates me. In many respects, I think college should teach people how to tackle things that seem too hard at first. A good course should move a student through a text that seems to hard or a writing project that seems challenging, with the right support. We're reading a lot of work that's not written for them--so far, we've read 3 articles from the top journal in my subfield. These articles assume a network of knowledge in the citations, knowledge my students don't have. It's not easy to walk into that reading, especially when they are used to reading literature. Literature is easier to read, they told me last week in class. I'm not sure about that, although I do think literature may seem more familiar to read.

So I've started preparing reading guides for them, partly summarizing the harder articles and pointing out the structure within those articles, partly telling them what they should be able to do (understand the relationship between X theory and Y practice, or list 5 objections to Z) at the end of the piece. I try to tell them why we're reading the piece together, and how it relates to some other things we've read. Nonfiction reading needs to be purposeful, and I don't think they know how to create a purpose for their own reading at this point int the term.

I'm not whining here: my students fascinate me. They're eager to do the right thing. But I'm puzzled at how much they seem conditioned to expect things to be easy, and how they want reading to be so transparent.

Last week, we read a group of case studies, so I started class asking them to write for 5 minutes about which person in the reading they most related to. We used those short writings as the introduction to discussion, jumping around the table to find ways into the reading. We're doing a writing project now in which they'll make the reading more personal, charting the ways the theories we've been reading have worked out in their own lives. I'm enjoying writing the reading guides, since they feel like a little essay or promise from me to them about why the reading matters. And I'm trying to work up other ways to get discussion started in ways that brings their connections to the fore (but keeps us tied to the readings).

I'm in the midst of reading reports by each of my colleagues about their activities from the past year. We talk a lot about how things should count. People who spent a lot of time doing things that don't count on the annual report are always mad about that, and some of my colleagues have taken some odd routes to getting things into various sections of the report (to take a fictionalized example, if you do a lecture to the Mathematical Forestry Guild on quadratic equation metaphors in 18th century zoologic manuscripts, and the guild puts your handouts on its website, is this a publication?). Counting is important, but only counting is suffocating. It's not motivating. I've been to tons of workshops where the message has been that things need to count in the classroom in order to be meaningful (and I've given those workshops myself--one principle in my grading workshops is always that one's grading scheme should reflect one's priorities and values for the course). In the past, I've used counting mechanisms to try to motivate students--giving attendance points, or points for participation, or daily HW points. I still do that to some extent, but this year, I've been starting to think more about other dimensions to motivation. How to make people realize that they can do things, for example, is a part of motivation.

So that's what I'm working on with my students, and with my colleagues, too. I'll write about some of the departmental aspects of this issue separately. But I'll happily soak up suggestions for how to motivate students to work through hard material. It's not easy to do, but it sure is fascinating to try to figure out.

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

Although I've not written much about it, this academic year marks a big change in my career: I became chair of my department, moved offices up a few floors to one with windows, and became responsible for working on issues that concern parts of English Studies I've not had much to do with since I was in graduate school. Although I started graduate school with the intention of working in both literature and composition--and in fact chose my graduate school because it appeared to support such a dual focus--I realized as my studies went on that composition studies was really where my heart lies. I like reading fiction as much as anyone, but I'll never be a really good literary critic. So I gradually moved into literacy and composition studies, and that's where most of my work--research and teaching--has been.

Being a department chair involves a whole 'nother way of thinking about my job. My large department offers a broad array of programs, and one of the ways I conceive my job is Advocate-in-Chief for the students, faculty, and staff. I need to help each one of my colleages advance, and in some cases, that means I need to learn about aspects of English I've never thought about for a second. Mostly, this learning is pretty fun, but it's also time-consuming. It's not that I need to spend time reading around, but that I need to be learning priorities. What makes people in subfield A tick? What gets them excited? What gets them motivated? What would make a junior scholar want to come here and work in the field?

I recently found a memo from one of my predecessors, a memo written as the department started the process of looking for a new chair. My predecessor noted that it wasn't so much the time required to be chair that was tiring, but the quality of attention the job requires. And I see what that means, now. I'm making the rounds of my colleagues, talking about where they are headed, what they want from the department and the field. Colleagues are coming to me for help with problems in staffing courses, issues around evaluating part-time faculty, requests for time to teach or research or travel to archives. There are 57 people who report through me. That's a lot of people to keep track of.

So I'm working on trying to get the department to be more efficient at taking care of itself. We meet 4-5 times a year, and I've started conceiving of department meetings like classes: what do I want to accomplish at the end of the meeting, what do people need to know in order to do that task well, and what activities or questions will support them to do that task as well as possible? We've had two meetings so far, and in those meetings I've used a combination of large- and small-group activities to produce brainstorming on a few topics, to encourage wide sharing of views on proposals in process, and to open up some review processes. I was afraid people would think this was too hokey, but I've had pretty good participation. It beats announcements.

We just celebrated the retirement of a friend who taught me a lot about running meetings. Don't call a meeting to make an annoucement, she told me. Use a newsletter or e-mail for that. Call a meeting to make a decision. That made a big impression on me. I also think meetings are good for brainstorming, but the brainstorming needs to be tied to decisions. Organizations need to make progress. They need to get things done. So I run meetings trying to keep the emphasis on what's getting done, or what steps we've accomplished on the way to getting something important done. And I try to make the most of the fact that the department meeting brings together people who don't usually talk with each other. I try to structure activities within the meeting to maximize possibilities for conversation.

My secret plan--not so secret now!--is to use the activities I coordinate over the course of the year to help the department articulate its priorities. If I used the word "strategic plan" in a meeting people would groan, I think. My colleagues just want to get on with their research and teaching. But I think some planning, some strategic planning, will help us get somewhere we want to be. I think we have planning impulses lurking below the surface, and I hope to pull them up in the course of our regular work. We'll see how that goes.

My campus is relatively new and there haven't been very many chairs of my department. We've each had, in hindsights, different kinds of strengths or focuses. The two department chairs who influenced me greatly tended to emphasize vision and/or organization, and that make an impression on me. I have my own style, and the department is a very different place now than it used to be, but I see myself using vision and organization in the interests of advocacy. As a department chair, I want to advocate for my colleagues and our students. And as a department, I want us to advocate for the intelligent uses of and applications of our field. I want us to stand for--and teach towards--literacies that stretch writers and readers, bringing them together, taking them to new understandings, challenging dominant, often sterile, notions of what it means to write and read these days. So this means I'm quietly trying to nudge the department, too. So far, so good. I like the job most days, and most days, people seem to like the job I'm doing. I'm so impressed by how many of my colleages have been willing to listen to me, to pitch in when I've asked, or to turn me down in ways that help me see better what the nature of the task is and who else I can call on to get it done.

So in your worlds, what makes for good meeting and good leadership?