Light and Momentary

Bearding the Lions

Remember how I have been teaching one class for the first half of the semester, but I am picking up the second half of another class? The handoff is next week, and tomorrow I am meeting the students and also, voluntarily, running a 75-minute class on a complicated topic.

Eek.

The students are not a happy group at the moment. Their first exam was a bear, so much so that my co-instructor is still dealing with the fallout. I'm hopeful that they'll be open-minded and glad for a change of pace, but some of them may have just decided that they're going to hate the class. Here's hoping we get off on the right foot.

I love my job. Walking to work makes me happy; I love my sunny little office with its big south-facing window. I gave my first exam last week and I tell l you what: I was nervous as a cat. Too easy? Too hard? Too long?

I think it worked out beautifully. I have just deleted some specifics, because it is probably better to be vague. But I will tell you that a student whose initial reaction to her graded exam sounded hostile came to see me in my office. She said she wished she had done better, but she told me twice: "This was a really good test." The conversation made my day.

Here's hoping I don't say anything too stupid in front of my co-instructor. (Who is, BTW, on the committee that's searching for someone to do this job next year. Nooooo stupid, please. Stay far away, stupid. Dr. Gladly hopes to stay employed.)

Too Many Words

On Monday I met up with a couple of friends for coffee, a welcome oasis of grown-up conversation in a season that has been mostly packed with mom tasks and work tasks. My friend Jenny and I were talking about writing in books: she never does it, while I do it a lot. How else would I remember my favorite quotes? Or those sudden flashes of insight? (Of course I only write in my own books. If you lend me a book I will do my recording in a little notebook of my own.) Jenny and I agree on a lot of things, but as I was explaining the joys of returning to the copy of Paradise Lost that I bought when I was eighteen, knowing that the black ink is from intro to Western lit and the green ink is from my survey course on 17th- and 18th-century lit and the blue ink is from the upper-level Milton class -- well, Jenny looked at me as if I were telling her she ought to get an eyelid tattoo.

But the delights of this habit of mine were reinforced a few days later, when I was skimming through my copy of Motor Speech Disorders (a frequent companion these days) and came across this note from 2007 in the margin: "some of us have deficits there!" It was in reference to a sentence I would have overlooked otherwise: "Linguistic planning requires...the ability to discard from active processing utterances that have already been formulated and executed."

A quirk of mine is that I love public speaking: I get a huge charge out of it. But after I give a talk, I always hear it playing back in my head again and again. Was that phrasing all right? Should I have cracked that joke in another spot? Lecturing twice a week means that I have my own words running through my head all the time-- practicing beforehand, and the involuntary replay afterward. I'm not very good at discarding from active processing, and the effect is that I'm tired of the sound of my own voice.

So this is just a quick post to say hi. Teaching this class is taking more time and mental energy than I would have imagined. I think it's a good sign that I'm feeling worried about the lecture I'll give ten days from now instead of the lecture I'll give Monday. I'm being summoned to read Pippi Longstocking right now. I don't think there are notes in its margin yet. Do you take notes in your books? And do your own words ever keep playing in your head? I could use a mute button.

Update

The first day of class was so much fun. I walked home on a puffy cloud, thinking, "I was born to do this."

I'd been feeling pretty nervous about the next two lectures, the one for today and the one for Monday of next week, because they cover a lot of material that I hadn't looked at in a while -- 1994 was the last time I studied some of it. I'd say today was a qualified success. I finished up my slides and answered their questions more quickly than planned; I kept them for 65 minutes instead of 75. They probably weren't complaining about that.

Today I walked home feeling discouraged about how crazy-much time I put into that lecture, wondering how I could possibly sustain that -- expand it, really, since it didn't get me all the way through my allotted time. Part of the problem was that I got excited 40 minutes in when it looked like my pacing was right on target. And what did I do because I was excited? I sped up.

It's going to take me some time to find my voice. Left to my own devices, I speak quickly and quietly. If I'm going to give a talk, I like to pack in lots of food for thought. For lectures, though, slower and louder will be a must. It feels unnatural. It feels like I'm trying to be Garrison Keillor when I'm usually the anti-Garrison Keillor. But hey, a lot of people like to listen to Garrison Keillor.

My husband took three of the kids to the bookstore while two of them were at another activity, so I had a quiet house in which to work this evening. (Huzzah for Elwood! Much appreciated.)

I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to answer all of their questions. I'd been thinking about graceful responses to questions I couldn't answer, ways to say "I'll get back to you" without saying "....uuummmmmm...." as a panicked look spread across my face. I have a couple of minor points to clarify on Monday (I should have said that the diencephalon includes instead of consists of, since I was only talking about a couple of its structures and not giving an exhaustive list).

Anyway, I survived the first week -- the fun lecture and the scary lecture. I like my students. I'm excited. I'm nervous. I'm exhausted. See you later.

Guide my going in

I am teaching my first class this afternoon.

I have guest-lectured a slew of times; I have TA'ed and set assignments and gone over exams with students who wanted my head, platter optional. But this is the first time I've had a class of my own.

They will call me Dr. Gladly. They will expect me to teach them what they need to know to go out into clinical practice. Right this minute it feels like a big responsibility. I'd appreciate your prayers.

Wait

I've been in a funk, my friends. I've been trying to find a part-time academic job for next year with no success and it's been weighing on me. I've been thinking, "Maybe it wasn't a calling to go get a PhD. Maybe it was a hallucination. Maybe I should have kept right on homeschooling but instead I've subjected my children to five years of public school and intermittently distracted mothering and whatever is wrong with them in the future will be all my fault."

I kept going into the Adoration chapel on Thursday mornings and saying, "I need a job for next year." And I kept hearing the same thing: "Wait."

"Wait" is not my favorite thing to hear. I am bad at waiting. I like strategies, and Plans A/B/C. Ask me to choose between action and waiting and I'll pick action, hands down.

"Wait" leaves you vulnerable. Noah built an ark on dry land and waited for the rain -- can you imagine what his neighbors said? Jesus left the planet and kept the apostles waiting for ten days before the mysterious Comforter put in an appearance -- did they have moments of wondering what he could have been talking about?

Last night my phone rang in the middle of the kids' section at Barnes & Noble, a number I didn't recognize. The caller identified herself over the background of my noisy daughter: the chair of the department here in town. She asked if it would be better to talk the next day. Mercifully, providentially, I didn't try to have a conversation then, because Stella lost her mind, wailing and shrieking in the floor, about two minutes later. (She likes to rearrange the merchandise. She wanted to take some children's books over to the fitness section, and a children's backpack to the rack of adult bags. I said no because she hates it when I return things to the kids' section and I'm not going to leave stuff in random places for employees to deal with later; drama ensued.)

This Thursday my Adoration hour fell right before our schedule phone call. This Thursday I knelt down to pray and I heard something different: "It's for you." I hesitate even to tell you that, because people do ALL KINDS of wacky things based on what they think the Lord told them. But listen to what happened next--

You might remember that I knew one of the faculty here in town had applied for an administrative job, and that if she got it there would be some gaps in the teaching lineup for fall. I had begun to assume this hadn't happened, though, since it's getting pretty late in the summer. That's what I was expecting to hear about when I talked to the chair this morning, but it turns out a completely different faculty member is making a surprise move and giving her just a few week's notice to get things sorted out.

She asked if I could teach a class outside my area of expertise and I assured her I could. She asked if the scheduled time could work for me and I assured her it could.

She offered me the position over the phone: one class in the fall and one in the spring.

A part-time academic position, that elusive beast, in the department that's less than a ten-minute walk from my house.

It's exactly the thing I've spent five years hoping for, dropped into my lap just as I was beginning to think gloomily that I'd need to find a part-time clinical job.

I am so overwhelmingly grateful it brings tears to my eyes.

Copious grace in speaking

Guest lecture tomorrow morning for the associate chair of the department in town where I'd love to work someday. Prayers appreciated.

All Work and Not Much Play

I have been a busy bee lately, my friends. It's been the busiest six weeks or so of the 9+ months that I've had this job. My revised article was due last month, and I've been analyzing data for a conference presentation this weekend, and I'm trying to get my dissertation manuscript submitted by June 24. Next week I'm guest-lecturing for the associate head of the department in town where I hope to get a job someday, so I'd love to knock it out of the park.

I'm not complaining -- it's all stuff I've chosen to do, projects I'm excited about. Still, I'll be glad when the 24th rolls around and life quiets down again. I have a half-dozen partially written posts kicking around in my head, and I know that sometimes the best way to get blogging again is to toss off a hasty post.

This is a picture that's been puzzling me: it shows kids' use of perfect aspect (log-transformed density values on the x axis, proportion of the sample on the y axis). What it's saying is that kids either like perfect or they hate it -- either they sprinkle their language samples with "I'd been wondering" and "she's been grumpy lately" or else they never use those structures at all. I've been trying to figure out why. Perfect aspect is more common in books than in spoken language, so I've been poking around in the database to get a fix on family reading culture -- nothing there. I've been looking at parental education, which is weakly predictive but not significantly so. And I've been looking separately at the kids with language troubles, thinking they might prefer simpler forms. Even there, the distribution is bimodal: they use fewer perfect forms, but some of them have a few and some have zero. I'm scratching my head, but it's a fun kind of puzzle. Any ideas?

Peer Review

More than ten years ago an idea came to me in a flash. I was reading about the long-term effects of breastfeeding and I gasped. What if breastfeeding played a role in a mysterious disorder (we'll call it MD for short) in my own field?

I emailed the professor who researched MD at the school where I got my master's degree, along with his research associate. I said, "You guys should check this out!" They were unenthusiastic. It turns out that their lack of enthusiasm was a good thing, because that out-of-nowhere idea became my early research project when I returned to grad school to get my PhD.

It also turns out that their lack of enthusiasm was widespread. Again and again people said, "You're researching what??" It was as if I had proposed astrological predictors for MD: no one, but no one in my field, found it plausible.

But do you know what? My data show a significant inverse relationship between MD and breastfeeding duration. In other words, the longer a child nursed, the less likely he was to have MD.

(It was a little funny, going through this project with so many friends in the breastfeeding support community. For them, it was obvious that breastfeeding would protect against MD. Doesn't breastfeeding protect against everything? Studies that conclude otherwise must have been funded by formula companies! Covariate control, schmovariate control! I was a little worried they'd ride me out of town on a rail if I tried to report a null finding.)

One of my big tasks for the fall semester was writing up my findings for publication. I submitted the manuscript in December and got a decision a few weeks ago. (Fact #1 about peer review: it is usually slow.)

I was aiming for the flagship journal of my professional organization, half-expecting to be rejected outright. I had heard so many times from people in the field that this was an implausible association -- I wasn't sure if my data would be enough to overcome the bias. Victory #1: I did not get rejected. I got a revise/resubmit decision, which means I am welcome to send it back when I incorporate the reviewers' feedback. Even better, I got a personalized note from the editor encouraging me to keep plugging.

Victory #2: there was not even a murmur of skepticism -- in any of the reviews (two reviewers, one associate editor, and one subject editor) -- about the rationale for investigating this association. Hurray!

Victory #3: the reviews themselves were mostly very encouraging. My mentor told me that it's unusual for reviewers to be complimentary; usually, she says, they just dive right into the list of concerns. So I'm delighted to have received this feedback: "I've reviewed a number of papers on [MD] in recent years, and this one stands out for the clarity in writing, the engaging writing style, and careful attention to editing details. The authors are to be commended for this."

(I've been dithering since I got the email about whether that's too braggy to post on my blog. I hope it doesn't rub you the wrong way. It was such a pleasant surprise to get a comment like that in what can be a bruising and ego-deflating process.)

The negative feedback was pretty narrowly focused, centering mostly on one paragraph -- and to be honest, that paragraph warranted some criticism. They also are suggesting that I throw a little metaphorical napalm on the mama wars by raising questions about how breastfeeding mothers might interact differently with their children than formula-feeding mothers, but I am going to exercise my authorial judgment and decline to speculate. I've proposed two perfectly plausible mechanisms already, and I'll tell them the best evidence points in that direction. We'll see if they buy it.

The biggest changes I'll be making are to the length of the paper. I am resubmitting it as a different manuscript type, and so it needs to be shorter. It's not my favorite thing, taking a document that I labored and sweated to expand and hacking out a sizable fraction of its guts. But I can do it anyway. That's what I'm up to this week. Wish me luck!

"We would love to meet you!"

That's the subject of an email I got today, from the associate chair of the department that's a six-minute walk from my house. She and the chair have reviewed my CV and want to take me out to lunch in two weeks.

I'm trying to be calm and measured but do you know what I'm really saying inside? I'm saying SQUEEEEEEEEEEE!!

Career Angst Unpacked

I am a postdoc, if you are new here, which means I get paid to do research. It is a half-time position, which is unusual for research jobs, and when I started out I thought it would be ideal.

I guess nothing is ever ideal.

One of the big advantages of the job is its flexibility. I work from home about two-thirds of the time, which means my commuting time is limited (a big plus, since the campus is an hour away).

The single biggest problem I am having, I think, is that it is a lonely job. It would be possible for me to connect with postdocs from other departments who are doing similar work, but I'm not quite sure how to get that ball rolling -- or if it's a good use of my time.

Time is an issue, because it turns out that 20 hours is a few too many given the childcare arrangements that I currently have. (Fifteen would be perfect, but that's not what I agreed to. I could put in more post-bedtime hours now that my dissertation burnout has diminished, but I haven't been doing that.) This year is clarifying something important: I don't want a full-time job in the immediate future. I want to pick up the kids from school most of the time, and hear about what happened that day while it's fresh in their minds and they're eager to tell me about it. I want to spend plenty of time with my toddler. (Two is one of my very favorite ages and I do not understand why it gets such a bad rap.) I want to stay on top of household responsibilities, instead of feeling like the laundry juggernaut is always at my heels.

There are no part-time tenure-track jobs.

When I was writing my statement of purpose in 2006, I did not write what I really believed my purpose to be, because I knew that the admissions committee would frown on a statement that said, "I want to be an adjunct faculty member." That was my goal: a part-time teaching job without the push to get grant funding and serve on committees and all the rest of the tenure-track package.

After four years of immersion in the doctoral program, I was hopeful that I could find a way to make a more permanent faculty position work. Now I'm not so sure.

I am kicking around a bunch of ideas for next year. There are six months left in my contract, so it's not as if the wolf is at the door. But this is the time when people are making decisions about adjunct positions for the fall. This is the end of the interview season for tenure-track jobs, and I am not entirely at peace with my decision not to apply for out-of-town jobs. At this point there's no way I'd pick up the family and move so that I could take on a demanding full-time job. Part of me, though, wonders how I'd fare in the interview process.

Listen to me: angst angst angst. A roof over my head, a husband who's on board with a whole range of possibilities, a marketable set of qualifications, and still I am wringing my hands. It's mostly because I'm bad at uncertainty. And right now, what comes next is uncertain.

Good news, bad news

Good news: After a long and frustrating slog I have finally seen some light at the end of the tunnel on a paper I've been writing.

Bad news: The solution to the problem I'd been having is so complicated that I don't know if anyone else will want to use my strategy. (But it works! Really truly, it works! It's a completely new and useful measure that correlates beautifully with established measures. It's just kind of a time suck.)

Good news: I have a team of four students helping me to do morphosyntactic analysis on a batch of 72 transcripts. (Remember Vlad? It's the return of Vlad.)

Bad news: I listened to my officemate when she airily asserted that they always extended a certain deadline for conference submissions, and didn't submit my draft proposal before the deadline. This year they had so many applicants that they're completely overwhelmed.

Good news: I sort of know the coordinator and I think if I send her an apologetic email I'll still have a chance.

Bad news: But I bet I blew my chance to get funding from them.

Good news: I think I can get a comparable amount of money from the grant that funds me, though.

Further good news: My mentor sends me long encouraging emails at 5:00 on Friday afternoons when she can tell I'm feeling gloomy about my research.

And more good news. Or is it bad news? This inspires me to work until 10:30 on Friday night. But I'm calling it a night, folks.

Seven Quick Takes: Seven Weeks In

I realized today that I've been working at my job for seven weeks now. Time flies when you're having fun, I guess. Here are seven quick(ish) thoughts about those first seven weeks:

1. Kids are adjusting fine. I am here to send off the elementary boys three or four mornings a week, depending on the week, and I pick them up from school four or five days a week. Stella stays with my husband for my  half-day out of town, which is fine by her if exhausting for him, and with a college student who comes to our house for the morning on the days that I work from home, and with a family in the town where I work on my long day over there. I go and nurse her down at lunchtime and she seems to be happy with the arrangement. She was excited to go back today after a week away. "Teessa! Zaa!" she exclaimed when I told her where we were going. (That's "Theresa! Sarah!" for all y'all who are not fluent in Stellish.) She's having a lot of fun with their princess costumes and sparkly shoes, because sparkly shoes are thin on the ground at our house.

2. The work is really fun. I have a manuscript almost ready to hand off to some readers before I submit it to a journal, which is exciting if nervous-making. I am expanding one of my dissertation analyses to see what it looks like in a different sample of kids, and I'm jazzed about that too. I was invited to participate in a qualitative study, which is a new methodology for me. I have two postdoc mentors and they have been so SO helpful and encouraging. Today I was talking with one of them about a slightly obscure interest of mine (okay, it's probably fairly high on the obscure scale: I want to take a crack at writing code to evaluate the emergence of pluperfect in school-aged children). When I got home there were two articles in my inbox from her about emergence of present perfect in slightly younger children. So there's lots of support and enthusiasm for my work, which is invaluable.

3. A small part of the job is admin stuff, which is not my favorite thing to do but I can't complain. I have to track down the previously funded people to make sure they're fulfilling their service obligations, for instance, but most of them are friends of mine and I am looking forward to checking in with them. If the yuckiest part of your job is still something to look forward to, that's a pretty good job.

4. I got a nasty letter from a publisher last week. Remember when I wrote a grant in the spring? I've been planning a study that looks at the reliability of an instrument widely used by clinicians. I wrote to the publisher requesting permission to use part of the instrument in an online study and got a response that blew my hair back. (Addressed, infuriatingly, to Dr. Moist Gladly -- come on, guys, you can spell my name correctly when you make veiled threats in my direction.) I am talking to the university legal office about the situation, because I think (a) the "fair use" clause covers me and (b) the publishers are mostly trying to cover up the author's dearth of reliability data. I don't have my heart set on doing the study -- this started as a way for me to get some practice writing a grant and getting IRB approval for a project -- so I'm mostly interested to see how it unfolds. How will copyright law and academic freedom intersect, especially given the university's desire to cover its figurative butt? Stay tuned.

5. Occasionally I wish I were a little more involved on campus. There are a million cool ways to be plugged in and I keep reading about them on the email list for postdocs affiliated with the neuroscience program. There are lectures to attend and well-known speakers to take out to pre-lecture breakfasts and research chats and neuroscience-oriented outreach to kids in the community and lots more. There are also, however, five kids in our community an hour away from campus, five kids who need their mom. So.

6. I am thinking uncertainly about next year already. I can probably renew my contract for a second year. There's some expectation that I'll be applying for faculty jobs for next year, but [whispers] I don't think I want a faculty job for next year. I am very happy with my low-stress no-tenure-clock no-teaching-responsibilities job.

7. One of the bits of Laura Vanderkam's book that I liked was they way she writes about finding your dream job: what kind of work would you do even if you didn't get paid for it? Academics get flak from many different quarters: commentators on Fox News say academics are a bunch of godless liberals; pragmatists say academics are ivory tower denizens who couldn't hack it in the business world. This week I am all filled up with a happy vision of my purpose at work: I get to investigate my ideas about how kids learn to communicate, one of the things I am most passionate about. I get to solve the puzzles involved in getting computers to do the stats and the boring bits of my language sample analyses. (I should revisit this post the next time I am exasperated with my stats program. I will not be saying "I get to solve the puzzles" at that point.) I get to write about my ideas so other people who are passionate about children's communication can keep nudging our understanding of human language forward.

And I get paid for it. It doesn't get much better than that.

More quick takes.