Light and Momentary

Third time's the charm

I resubmitted the Heartbreak Paper today. 

Do you remember the sad tale of the Heartbreak Paper? Four years ago I gave an interdisciplinary conference talk that I wanted to turn into a paper. I emailed one of the leading lights in Discipline #2 and said, "Hey, would you like to write a paper with me?" To my surprise and delight she said, "Sure! You write the first draft and I'll write the second." 

In the spring of 2014 we submitted it to a Discipline #1 journal; in the summer, we received a cautious revise/resubmit decision. Oh, boy, did I revise. Hours and hours and hours and hours invested in making the changes that the reviewers requested. Almost exactly three years ago, I resubmitted it. In the winter of 2015 it was rejected. When I got the decision email I closed my office door and cried.

Because it's an interdisciplinary paper, it was hard to find a good alternate home for it. Also, I was crushed like a weeping bug who was paralyzed by impostor syndrome. One really sad bug is what I'm saying here. But I kept looking, and sent it off in 2016 to a lower-tier journal that had responded favorably to my initial query.

Rejected again.

In 2017 I got some outside feedback on the Heartbreak Paper. I thought about pitching it as a book chapter. I thought about self-publishing it on my university's online archive. I thought about interdisciplinary journals. But dernit, you guys, I wrote this paper for service providers in Discipline #1, and they won't read it if it's in some backwater interdisciplinary journal that wants to charge them $45 for the privilege. And do you know what? They need to read this paper. I am the most self-critical person you have never met, and yet every time I come back to this paper I think, "Wow, this is an excellent paper. This is the best damn thing I have ever written for an academic audience and it deserves to be published."

So. I reworked it for still another publication. This one has a much lower word limit, so I hacked away great chunks of the paper. "Killing my darlings," said my email to the writing challenge coordinator. "Still killing those darlings," said the next email. Today I extracted the remains of the paper from the bleeding wreckage of dead darlings scattered round about and sent it off into the ether.

And if it gets rejected again, I might have to set something on fire. Wish me luck. Or pass the matches. One of the two.

The Axe Report

Remember how I was feeling pessimistic about a manuscript I resubmitted at the beginning of June? I had labored over that sucker, but rejection seemed like the most likely outcome. I was trying to view it as an opportunity for spiritual growth, by which I mean I've been attempting not to react physically when I open my email, with flinching body, wincing grimace, and squinting eyes (so I could sort of see but not very well).

In the past few years I'd had two bruising rejections from journals published by my professional organization, one of them especially heartbreaking. I'd published elsewhere in the meantime; I'd also published in both of those journals with a different first author. Even so, I was still feeling gun-shy about submitting a first-author manuscript to the flagship journal, and the tone of our initial reviews did not help at all. I knew that I could find a home for it in a lower-tier journal, but I really did not want to rewrite it for another editor.

Then! Today! The email came! The subject line set off an immediate adrenaline response, so potent that it took me a minute to calm down and figure out what the decision actually was. It was...(hurray!)...minor revision!

Reviewer 1 is happy. Reviewer 2 is nitpicking. The editor even said, albeit more diplomatically, "Reviewer 2 is nitpicking." I can do some nitpicky revisions to get another first-author pub in the flagship journal. I won't even complain about them. I am so relieved. It's still not 100% certain that they'll accept it, but it's a whole lot more likely now that this paper will appear where I hoped it would appear. (It would be pretty weird if they rejected it at this point -- not impossible, but pretty unlikely.) Big thanks to Our Lady Untier of Knots for her intercession.

The Flagship and the Axe

I'm waiting to hear back about an R&R.

If you're not familiar with the academic publishing process, here's how it goes: papers almost never get accepted out of the gate. That might happen once in a person's career, but it might not either. The thing about peer review is that people will virtually always use the opportunity to say, "You need to cite this other paper and define your modeling strategy more clearly," or, "You're over-extrapolating in your discussion section, so rein it in, girlfriend." This is good; this is why peer review exists. Scholarly articles can almost always be improved. The reviewers will make their recommendations to the associate editor, or directly to the editor if it's a smaller journal, and the editor/AE will make a decision: accept (very unlikely), reject (frequency varies widely by journal), revise & resubmit.

You can get a friendly little R&R decision, where you just have to update the lit review and trim a superfluous section, or you can get a big hairy R&R in which the reviewers have set you 100 different editing tasks. And you can also get a lukewarm R&R: we don't have a whole ton of things for you to change, but we're not sure if we like your paper or not. I'm waiting on feedback from a revised version of one of those right now.

The flagship journal in my field ostensibly offers a publication option that they call a research note. Unfortunately, there seems to be a mismatch between the editorial board's vision for a research note and the everyday work done by reviewers and AEs in evaluating research note submissions. This is frustrating for those of us who submit research notes. Their instructions say that the purpose of a research note is to share findings that are preliminary, or extensions of previous research, or modest in scope. And yet the reviewers -- and more exasperatingly, the AE I'm currently dealing with -- didn't get that memo.

I had a full-length research article published in this journal in 2014, and I submitted a follow-up in January: here's what happened when we considered an additional explanatory variable, known to be relevant in this population. I got some reasonable comments, but I also got some condescension: this submission may not be suitable because of its modest scope. Some of the reviewer comments made clear that they hadn't registered the category; one of them was complaining about the lack of subheadings in my method section despite the fact that research notes don't require subheadings. Technically they don't even require a method section.

It's a ticklish business, writing a response in which you have to WELL ACTUALLY the people who are deciding whether or not you get published. My co-author kept saying, "Throw them a bone, Jamie. Just throw them a bone." So I have thrown them lots of bones, and reminded them with great delicacy of the ACTUAL REQUIREMENTS of the ACTUAL MANUSCRIPT TYPE that I have written here, and if there were any justice in the world they would have written back by now to say SO SORRY; this is an awesome paper.

But they have not done so, and every time I open my work email I do so with a pre-emptive flinch. I'll be pretty bummed if it gets rejected after this resubmission, but it seems like the most likely outcome. Harrumph.

The Emperor with Bionic Ears

I am typing from a quiet hotel room, sprawled across a bed in which I will sleep alone tonight and tomorrow. I'm at a conference. It took me longer to get here than I thought it would (construction + optimism, the twin foes of accurate travel time estimates), and I slipped right into the first session instead of eating lunch beforehand. I decided to get something to eat between the two afternoon sessions instead. One of the field's leading lights was going to be speaking, someone I've called The Emperor in this space before.

I missed the beginning of the second session, and the only person in the hallway outside the presentation room when I returned was a woman with a cute baby. I stopped to chat with them for a minute. "She was doing really well," said the woman, "and then she got fussy." 

"Maybe she was saying, 'I disagree with your theoretical perspective,'" I joked. "Maybe she was saying, 'Sorry, Mr. Emperor, but you are wrong.'"

The woman looked distressed. She spoke urgently to her baby. "Do not say that to his face," she told her 5-month-old.

Still stubborn after all these years

One of the things nobody tells you about academia is that it's really more about stubbornness than brains. You have to hold fast to your determination that you have a good idea, one worth getting into print. Or pixels, these days. Earlier this week I had a manuscript accepted after two previous rejections. I didn't find a very prestigious home for it, but I found it a peer-reviewed (and non-predatory!) home. Today I sent off a shiny new manuscript, the one I mentioned to you already this week. If it gets rejected, I have a backup plan. I'm stubborn like that.

Today I also sent off the Heartbreak Paper to get some input from a new set of eyes. It's been a while since I posted about the Heartbreak Paper-- much-needed topic, rock star co-author, mismanaged review, crushing rejection, followed by another rejection last summer. But do you know, my friends, it is a really good paper and by hook or by crook I am going to get it published. Here's hoping that this new contact has some good ideas for me.

I was lying next to sleepy Stella earlier this evening and thinking about how hard we work to teach our toddlers not to be stubborn. We do this even though 90% of what it takes to reach difficult goals in later life comes down to stubbornnesss.

That's a little weird, isn't it?

In which I rhapsodize about my job

This week I have nothing that needs grading and a paper that needs writing. It's a happy combination. I'm submitting a manuscript for a special issue of a journal in which I'd love to publish. Normally I'd think it was out of my league, but I have a dataset that's a good fit for this special issue.

I love writing papers, you guys. [she said geekily] The cadence of a scholarly paper is familiar to me now: here's what we know, and here's the question I am asking. Here's how I investigated the question, and here's what I found. Here's what it means to the wider world. I often start in the middle, because the method section is a way to establish momentum. I usually write up the results next, splashing around in my data like a pig in...Wilbur's buttermilk bath.*

*What is up with the buttermilk bath in Charlotte's Web? Doesn't that seem like a terrible idea, coating a pig in a dairy product in the heat of summer? What gives, Mrs. Fern's-aunt-whose-name-escapes-me?

My very favorite part to write is the discussion section, where I get to be Queen of the World with my Idea Scepter, telling my hypothetical subjects how it ought to be. I am only a temporary Queen of the World, because the reviewers are probably going to disagree with some of my vision. (Maybe I should biff them with my Idea Scepter next time. Who needs a scholarly community when you can have brute force instead? Concussion, not persuasion!) It always feels a little intimidating when I think about writing the discussion, where I have to spell out clearly why my paper matters without over-extrapolating from my data. But once I get the ball rolling it's a delight.

Tomorrow I have to finish the introduction, along with one last discussion paragraph that occurred to me right before I needed to leave today. It's maybe a little weird to write the beginning last, but it works for me. I have to add standard deviations to a table of descriptive statistics, and plunk in some references, and send it off to my GA for proofreading.

I am so lucky to have a job where I get paid to be curious. Wish me luck!

Crunchity crunchity crunch time

Remember when I told you about my nutty teaching load coupled with an unusually heavy service load? Remember when I mentioned that they were going to overlap briefly but I wasn't going to think about it until I had to? Well. Here we are in have-to-think-about-it territory.

I only have have one more week of teaching this grad class, after which I will hand it off to my co-instructor. I'll need to stay in the loop in a small way for the rest of the semester, but my part will be done. The following obstacles lie between me and doneness:

• an online quiz that goes live on Monday
• a lab that's roughed out but not written up (also Monday)
• two more lectures, in which I must wrap up a big complicated topic in a sensible way (hoo boy, feeling a little hyperventilate-y)
• an exam that goes live on Thursday
• grading last week's projects and the upcoming exam, plus dealing with any remediation for students who don't meet a minimum standard there

I also have a whopping enormous service commitment that must be completed by Wednesday. (Still fighting the urge to tell you more about the Situation I avoided discussing last night via haggis-blogging; prudence is winning for the moment. I will just say that it has siphoned away a substantial fraction of my willingness to meet that deadline.) And I'm on the search committee too, which means I have a bunch of stuff to do with a candidate on Tuesday. 

Blog posts that amount to to-do lists are dull to read, I know, but sometimes they are helpful to write. I am going to spend a chunk of my Saturday in the office, where I will need to write some essay questions for a different remediation task, and write up the quiz and the lab instructions and finish a draft of my T/W slides. Can I get 15 exam questions written? I bet I can. And then I'll need to work on the Big Ugly Committee Task for as long as I can stomach it.

Wish me luck, please. And what is something fun and un-taxing I can do after I finish tomorrow? Maybe something pretty I can cast on that requires 100g of semisolid fingering weight yarn? 

Good Enough Prof

Remember my new year's resolution about being a good enough professor? Perfectionism doesn't work very well for me at work. No matter how strenuously I try, I will never get a 100% approval rating from my students. No matter how feverishly I edit, I will never get a set of reviews back that say, "This manuscript is exactly right! Don't change a word!" But I can torch a lot of energy and willpower trying to achieve those impossible goals.

l keep thinking about the conversation with my chair in which she said, "More than 90% of your students [in the class I was fretting about over break] said you were either effective or highly effective in your role." And something clicked for me: I can live with a 92% approval rating. I can be okay with that particular A-. I hated the very idea of A-minuses when I was a student myself, but I am going to make my peace with them as a prof.

Have I told you about my load this semester? The first four weeks of the semester are going to be crazy intense from a teaching perspective, because I'm prepping 5 hours of content each week for a new grad class. [takes a deep breath; declines to hyperventilate; repeats "good enough prof good enough prof"]. The following four weeks are going to be crazy intense from a service perspective, because I've been assigned to the department's most time-consuming committee. (There's some overlap between those two commitments, but I'm not going to think about that right now.)

I'm teaching two undergrad classes, one right after the other. They run from 11 until 1, and at about 12:10 today I was feeling hungry and wired. I tripped over a sentence and thought to myself, "Oh, dear, that came out wrong." In my mind's eye I could see myself standing at a fork in the road: I could go down the path of self-flagellation and worry that it was going to get worse as I got hungrier, or I could say "good enough prof! no biggie!" I chose option B. 

Here is the weird part: my undergrads are always more reserved than my grad students. They're slower to ask questions, they're slower to answer questions, and they never laugh as loudly at my jokes. But today, after I chose option B, it was as if they relaxed with me. We had much more fun than I would have expected to have on the second day of class -- it usually takes longer for them to warm up.

This is strange to me, because I would never have guessed that my students could perceive my worried perfectionism. But maybe they can.

In my mailbox

From the committee: "Because of your excellent record in teaching, scholarship, and service, we believe that you are making satisfactory progress toward promotion and tenure."

Phew. Onward.

Under Review

This is the beginning of my fourth year on the tenure track, which means that it's time for my department to make a formal review of my progress toward tenure. Our departmental documents describe this process in a paragraph: tell us what you've done in terms of teaching, scholarship, and service. Give us a current CV; include copies of your papers; write up a self-evaluation. So back in June I wrote up my teaching philosophy and my research statement and sent them off to some peers for their comments. It was a little painful, but NBD. I had a brief talk with my chair, who told me (in language that made it seem optional) to go ahead and complete the formal application to the provost that I'll use when I apply for tenure in two more years. I have to go back to my teaching evals (joy!) and pull out some numbers, but it didn't seem onerous.

Yesterday I sat down with the colleagues who are also going up for review and two of the faculty who will be doing the review, and learned that my colleagues have spent HOURS and HOURS over the summer creating giant binders. One of them said that hers contains hundreds of artifacts. I don't even know what she means, exactly-- conference programs, I think? sample assignments from her classes? thank-you notes from students?

Sooooo I am suddenly feeling a bit behind. My binder is due in two weeks, and I had thought I could tie up my loose ends today, before the start of the semester. Part of me is worried that I have a lot more loose ends than I thought. But no: I am going to push back against the worry. I have more than enough publications by the standards of my institution, my teaching evals are fine (with the exception of my heartbreaking spring class, for which I can provide context), and my interim letters from the committee that reviews yearly productivity reports have all been fine as well. (Do you hear the panicky part of my brain attempting to spring free from the cave where I have put it in time out? It's howling, "But the thaaaaank-yooooouuu noooooootes from students!!!!!")

The committee members expressed a clear preference yesterday for streamlined binders. But I cannot quite shake the worry that mine will look too skimpy next to my Type A colleagues' submissions. I'm pretty sure that being ahead of the game on pubs will cover a multitude of sins -- but only pretty sure.

Accepted!

I just got an email: my paper was accepted! 

It describes research from my first funded grant and it's my first crack at a qualitative study. I was really expecting it to be rejected on its first outing, because this isn't my primary research area and peer review is a slow and painful process. But hey-- it was not!

There are many things I appreciate about being at a university that emphasizes teaching, and one of them is that I don't face the same pressure to publish that I would at a more research-intensive institution. This is my sixth publication since I started my tenure-track job, my eighth altogether. I'm expecting another acceptance in the next few weeks here, which will mean that my track record follows the Fibonacci sequence: 1 pub in 2013, 1 in 2014, 2 in 2015, and 3 in 2016. 

I can probably manage 5 in 2017 -- it's a good goal to shoot for, anyway. But 2020 is looking pretty tough.

Stick (most of a) fork in me--

--because I am mostly done. I taught my last evening class of the semester tonight. OH the relief I feel, just typing those words! I still have to give three lectures to my undergrads, and I have to write 1.67 final exams along with editing the one that's drafted, but still: phew!

Before I started teaching I had no idea how much creative energy I would pour into class preparation. I should have been able to predict it, I suppose, because I had prepped plenty of short talks and they always took me a long time to pull together. In my first year here I wondered if part of my problem was being new to the classroom. But I think it's just part of the deal: filling 45 contact hours with the right amount of useful information, presented in an appealing way, is a big task.

It is also, hallelujah, a task I have now finished for my grad class this semester. Tonight was not the best class of the semester (wireless hassles and Skype headaches -- we started late, which I HATE doing), but it is over. Over! Huzzah!

I have more thoughts about teaching within my specialty area for the first time this semester (nutshell: I did not foresee the difficulties), but they will have to wait for another day.

Stealth Dress Code

Earlier in the semester I got a postcard through campus mail. "You're invited," it said, "to a reception hosted by the campus office that supports grant applications." I've mentioned once or twice here that I applied for a grant last spring; it wasn't funded but I turned the application around just in time to get a smaller university grant instead. The invitation came because I applied for an external grant, which is something the university wants to encourage. I felt a bit like an impostor, showing up at a reception where the guests of honor had actual NIH and NSF funding, but I think that (a) it's always wise to push back against impostor syndrome and (b) hanging out with people who are writing grants keeps the grant-writing wheels cranking inside my own brain. So I RSVP'd: yes, thank you, I'd be happy to come.

I'd been to a casual meet-and-greet sponsored by this office, and I was guessing that the reception would be an even more casual affair. It was at the student union instead of an upscale restaurant; it started at 4:30 instead of being squarely in evening territory. I thought there would be lots of people who were just popping over from the office.

I think there might have been an invisible ink line on the invitation: dress up, everybody. I failed to hold my postcard over a candle flame in search of invisible ink messages, and so I did not get the memo. Alas.

Tuesday is my longest day. This morning I had an 8:30 meeting with a student and then my class ran until 9pm. I usually pop home in the late afternoon to say hi and eat dinner and change into teaching clothes, but I dress down for most of the day. This morning I pulled on a pair of moderately faded jeans, an NPR T-shirt, and a fleece. The laundry-folding train has gone off the rails, and so I didn't have any plain socks in my drawer. I pulled on a pair of screaming neon red socks under a pair of Birkenstock clogs, cut for maximum sock visibility.

...And then I walked into a room full of people who had actually read their invisible ink message and dressed accordingly.

I'm still trying to figure it out. The dean and the VPs and the president always dress up, but that's not the case at all for faculty. I guess if you've been to the reception before you know it's a dressy affair? I guess if you were teaching earlier in the day you might have been dressed for class? I guess maybe I missed a clue that should have been obvious and probably everybody was pointing at me behind my back and saying, "What does she think she's doing here? Her grant didn't even get funded!"

Maybe not that last part. 

Anyway. I had some pleasant conversations with people from another department, and I set up my dean to tell a crowd-pleasing story at my table (in a natural, non-sucking-up kind of way), and then I excused myself to go teach my evening class. But I tell you what: it is way more comfortable to be at the 40th percentile for dressiness than it is to be at the 4th.

Encouraged

When it goes well, teaching is the best feeling.

I was feeling discouraged about my grad class before spring break, as you might have noticed. But I think tonight's class went really well. I decided to try a new frame for the class, telling them at the beginning how we would break down the three hours and what questions I planned to address. At then end I went back to that slide full of questions and asked them to tell me about something they'd learned and something they still wanted to know more about. It was encouraging to skim through a pile of responses about things they'd learned, and the lingering questions are very reasonable.

We went through the exam, which can be a PR exercise in disguise. I was feeling particularly down two weeks ago because OH MY GOODNESS did I labor over that exam. I thought it was structured in such a sensible and helpful way; the students just thought it was hard. I have to keep telling myself that just because something is hard for students doesn't mean it's bad for students. They do not always share this opinion, but tonight was an opportunity to say, "Here's what I wanted you to learn from taking this test."

(That's always my goal: to write an exam where students learn from the process of taking it, where they are asked to synthesize information in ways that can spark an aha! moment right there in the classroom. Sometimes it works better than others.)

In preparing for this class I had a helpful realization: I'm not preparing for a doctoral seminar; I'm teaching MS students. I think I've been worrying needlessly about some aspects of preparing for class. So tonight we spent some time on breaking down a useful but slippery concept, and then a lot of time talking about examples and uses. I think it was a good mix of practical and theoretical information. They took lots of notes; they laughed out loud frequently; they talked energetically in small groups. (I did have an exercise lined up that didn't go according to plan at all because of unforeseen file management issues, but there's always next time.) From the front of the class, at any rate, the 3 hours zipped by.

I am posting this mostly for my future self, who will inevitably have moments of thinking, "Can't do it, don't want to do it, have to do it, UGH." (I know this because my 2:00pm self was saying that very thing about tonight's class.) It's a great gig, Future Self. And you can too do it.

Dysfunction Junction

Here's the thing, you guys: prepping a new class erodes my willpower. And did I mention? This semester I'm prepping two of them. I am going to bare my vulnerable underbelly here, and tell you about the way that my id has lately gone capering in stiletto heels across the more mature parts of me.

It's a little ridiculous for me to complain about this. Tonight I was reading to Stella about the men working on the railroad grade, covered in sweat and dirt. And I work in my comfortable office, where it's warm, and I have a big cheery window, with houseplants reaching for the sun. (I started to say that it is 100% free of horse manure, but I do occasionally hear some student stories that might deserve the label.)

But: teaching a class for the first time is a perfectionist minefield. The next time I cover this material, I will do it better. The next time I give these assignments, I will know where students will struggle. Practice makes perfect-- which means less practiced is imperfect. Uuuuuuggggghhhh, I wish I could make that not be true. But it is true.

And: my job is to push my students. Grad school, in particular, is supposed to be hard. I am teaching a class that many students expect to be easy: they've been children, they've learned a language, how hard can the study of child language be? Answer: very hard. There is SO much to cover, and they are not finding it easy.

The place where I run into trouble is where that "But:..." paragraph intersects with the "And:..." paragraph, creating a swirly millefiori sort of effect in my psyche: high expectations of my students collide with nutso expectations of myself. Are they grumpy because they have some catching up to do, or are they grumpy because I'm not prepared enough? Maybe I could disperse the grumpy with a little more preparation. But the preparation is so hard, and there is so much of it, and maybe I will just peek at Facebook to see what they are saying about tonight's GOP debate. (Side note: OH, AMERICA. People with the gravitas required to be president do not talk about the size of their genitals in public. Can't we send that man to an uninhabited Scottish island, where he can be the Führer of Seaweed and Maybe Sheep?) (But I suppose if "racist" and "xenophobic" and "wildly inconsistent" didn't turn his supporters off, "vulgar" is unlikely to do so either. What about "terrifying"? Can we not agree on "terrifying"?)

Grading is a task that stokes the crazy in a big way. The first-year grad students are not yet accustomed to grad school standards. Whenever I give them feedback, a subset of them will decide (again) that I am Dr. Stingy McMeanypants. Perhaps I need a little extra input to consider. Did I not notice that they worked really hard on that assignment? I keep thinking about sending an email that says, "When I give you a grade, it is not the opening salvo in a lengthy negotiation." Probably I won't send that email. But I think to myself, "This is going to be a ton of work and then they're just going to complain that I did the work. Wonder what's new on Ravelry?" My job has few hard deadlines, which makes procrastination all too easy. 

Have you seen this post on procrastination? I spent too much of my day in the Dark Playground today.

So. This is me, pulling my socks up and getting on with it. Tonight I have an exam and an assignment to edit. Tomorrow I will BY GOLLY grade that overdue assignment for my grad students as well as their group projects, and clear out the email and tidy the papers. And make a plan for spring break, in which I get stuff done instead of being increasingly miserable as I watch myself avoiding it.

FEEL FREE to share your own brand of crazy in the comments. I'm not the only one who struggles with this flavor of crazy, am I?

Adventures in teaching prep

I am teaching a class I am really excited about. I am rubbing my hands with glee about our first meeting, in which we will cover some of the topics I find the most interesting in a world filled with interesting things. 

Plagiarism and the future

I don't really say the word "plagiarism" with my students these days; I find that the label obscures the issue. In their minds plagiarism equates to really wicked transgressions like kicking puppies, and no one wants to be labeled a puppy-kicker. Even if, you know, the puppy just happened to wander past as you were practicing some of your best Zumba moves and WHOOPS suddenly it's an inadvertent exercise in puppy ballistics. I call it something else when I address it, which I do frequently.

In the 80s when I was in junior high and high school, it took a perverse act of will to plagiarize directly. You had to copy your material word for word out of the Encyclopedia Britannica, a hassle in itself. One reason why plagiarism is so widespread is that it's so very easy these days: Google sends you skipping out across the web, where CTRL-C CTRL-V captures an astonishing quantity of information on any subject you'd care to name, and Bob's your uncle. Topic researched! 

I suspect we're also seeing more plagiarism because we're relying more on underpaid adjunct faculty. The most painful, time-sucking aspect of my job? Plagiarism. I find that plagiarized writing is generally conspicuous, but tracking down its source and extent is v-e-r-y s-l-o-w -- we don't have software like Turnitin and the administration doesn't plan to change that. I love almost all of my job. I do not love grading, but I know that providing students with feedback is important. Dealing with plagiarism, though, I despise. I'd rather have a root canal and a colposcopy at the same time. (Full disclosure: have never had either and am not a patient patient. Perhaps a smidgin of exaggeration there.) If I were still being paid adjunct wages it would be sobering to think about the cost per hour of dealing with plagiarism vs. just giving the student the benefit of the doubt.

(I just tried to picture myself sliding on past one of those sudden dramatic voice shifts that tells me there's been some CTRL-C CTRL-V action and had a total failure of imagination. I'm like the phosphorescent-muzzled Hound of the Baskervilles, only I'm tracking down the spots where the student Half-Assed-Her-Skills.) (I am trying and failing to make that pun work better. Who's got a cleaner Baskervilles pun for me?)

It's not just about higher education, of course; primary and secondary schools that are required to emphasize standardized testing are necessarily schools that de-emphasize writing. There are only so many hours in a day. And the work of nailing your own words to the frame of someone else's ideas requires practice and informed feedback and rewriting, not just finger-wagging and unstructured "peer review" tasks.

Still another factor is grade inflation. I could, technically, have failed a lot of students for plagiarism. I could have given a lot of zeroes. But it's hard to explain to people who have been out of college for a while just how much the culture has changed. Students are not accustomed to getting Fs. If I start handing out Fs every time I see some CTRL-C CTRL-V footprints, the students are not going to say, "Don't you appreciate how Dr. Gladly upholds high standards?" What they're going to do instead is flip their lids. GPAs driven by grade inflation set the expectations for our program, which is why I ran my new sterner policy for final projects past my chair and the clinic director before I announced it in class. I don't want to create administrative hassles for them if student GPAs fall because of those final projects. And also? I announced it in class after my students had completed their course evals for the semester. Cowardice? prudence? -- you tell me.

I used to get really wrathful about plagiarism, but I went to a helpful workshop in the spring. Plagiarism is not so much a symptom of the Decline Of Western Civilization And Kids Needing To Get Off My Lawn Already; it's a behavior often seen in students who don't yet understand what they're writing about. Students are generally on board with the idea that they shouldn't use someone else's exact words, but they'll often change a word or two and call it good. [E.g., "students are typically in agreement with the concept that they shouldn't use someone else's precise words, but they'll often modify a phrase and call it satisfactory."]  This is called "patchwriting," and it reflects preliminary understanding. Part of the hassle is figuring out where that line falls and how to grade students who veer too near it. Part of the task is teaching students that the goal is not just to cross the assignment off the to-do list; the goal is to learn the material.

I am curious about what this will mean for academics ten years from now. I think the situation is likely to get worse rather than better. Does it become acceptable at some point? Some of my students think it already is.

Once I told my students that encountering plagiarism is like being handed a smoothie that didn't spend enough time in the blender. You take a big swig and UGH-- there's a slug-like hunk of half-frozen banana sitting on your tongue. You didn't want a slug salad; you wanted a smoothie, with everything all blended together. I told them that I didn't want to spot anyone else's words or ideas or essay structure sitting on my desk, waving its horns at me in loathsome slug-like fashion. I wanted them to blend it all up together into something new, made to their own recipe.

But I'm teaching some students who need a better blender.

Hitting my quota

I always said I'd never be a salesman. I dreaded rejection as a kid: selling Girl Scout cookies, wincing through school fundraisers, navigating new friendships -- all of it stressed me out. Lately, though, I have been thinking that salesmanship is a significant part of job; it's just that I'm selling ideas. 

I sell my students, mostly successfully, on the idea that the material in my classes is interesting and useful and manageable. I sell editors, somewhat less successfully, on the ideas in my papers. I just submitted my second sales pitch of the year to a grant funding committee, after the first proposal was rejected.

Rejection is part of sales, whether you're selling vacuum cleaners or ideas. But nobody in my world talks about it.

I could tell you a story in which I sound like a successful pre-tenure faculty member: I had two papers published in the spring semester, and I'm optimistic about getting two more published before the end of the year. I could tell you a different story, too: I had two other papers rejected in the spring semester, and I spent the summer afraid to write a third paper because I know it's likely to get rejected on its first airing. It's my first qualitative paper; it's in a subfield where I have more training as a clinician than an academic. It's probably going to take a couple of iterations to get it in shape.

People tend to treat that iterative process as a badge of shame. I resolved, when I got the letter from the grant funding committee, to be more transparent about it. 

Maybe the worst part of impostor syndrome is the certainty that everybody else has it together except you. Nobody else is so nervous pushing "submit"; nobody else ever flinches, remembering the joke that fell utterly flat. 

I know, on the one hand, that this is preposterous. At the same time, that sneering inner voice is persistent. 

This afternoon I was invited to the dean's office as part of a panel, to talk to a group of first-year faculty about the first-year experience. I said, "If I could give one piece of advice to my first-year self, I would tell her to be more patient with herself as a learner. To remember that there's a reason nobody goes up for tenure in her second year, just like nobody gets a PhD in a year." I talked about the anxiety that consumed me during my first year in the classroom-- how much it had gnawed at me initially, how completely it had receded. And then I felt like a DORK for the next three hours. It's all well and good to talk about being transparent, but maybe IN FRONT OF THE DEAN isn't the place, said my regretful self. I tried to tell myself to settle down, that they hadn't wanted panelists to talk about how effortlessly they'd sailed through the first year, but this attempt met with mixed success.

Two weeks ago my grant rejection letter came in the mail, just an hour before my friend K and I had our monthly meeting for coffee and goal-setting. "Do you ever feel like a rejection is a referendum?" I asked her.

"Like it means everything I'm doing is worthless and stupid and I should just resign before they deny me tenure? Oh, no," she said sarcastically, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

So. I think it's valuable to be transparent, to say, "I am going to hit my quota, but I am hearing a fair amount of NOPE along the way." But it's a lot easier to pretend otherwise.

A good day

Today on campus there was a festival of student research, in which more than 300 students presented their work. A team of 5 students had put together a poster based on data I collected last semester, so I was there offering moral support. They didn't need it, though: they knew what they were talking about, and their enthusiasm was contagious. A pregnant woman asked them what she needed to know about breastfeeding before her baby arrived, and they had lots and lots of ideas for her. "Wow!" she said. "This is so helpful!" 

That made my month, to see how well that conversation went for everyone involved.

It was also really cool to be in a university-wide conglomeration of presenters. The ag students had posters about nitrogen fixing and the CS students had posters about ethernet something-something vs. cloud something-something and the psych students had posters about ego depletion's impact on compassion. It reminded me what a tremendous gift it is to be part of an institution in which people are curious about so many diverse aspects of this vast and puzzling world.

When I went back to my office I found an email telling me a paper had been accepted. Huzzah!

Rejected

Remember a few posts ago, when I was waiting-waiting-waiting for a decision on a manuscript I'd revised and resubmitted?

Rejected.

At first I was sad -- so sad that I closed the door to my office and cried for a few minutes. But now I am annoyed. Because do you know what the editors said? I'll tell you what they said. For round 2 I added in three new sections based on the first round of comments. And this time? They said, "There might be too many things in this manuscript."

I am thinking about appealing the decision, because DUDE: don't tell me to add more things (things which, by the way, took hours upon hours of my life to add) and then say, "gee, what a lot of things there are in here." I think I will give myself a couple of days to settle down, and then a few more days to draft a polite query that does not say DUDE NO FAIR or suffer from a surfeit of exclamation points. (But in my heart I will be thinking "DUDE NO FAIR!!!!!!!")

I think an appeal is not very likely to succeed, though. And then...?

It is a clinically focused paper. (And may I tell you, just between you and me and oh yeah the internet, that I am really proud of it? May I tell you that two of the three sections I added at the reviewers' behest contain the best academic writing I have done so far? (Lest you think I might be suffering from a swelled head, the third one could use some work.)) So I would like to get it in clinicians' hands. The journal that rejected it is really the only one that is read by clinicians and academics both. If they'd accepted it, it would have been a significant step toward tenure and a way to advance the long-term career goal that is closest to my heart.

The best way to get it in clinicians' hands is to submit it to a publication aimed at professionals, not academics. It would be much less useful for tenure, and it would require a fair amount of revising now that it's so dang long. Clearly, that's not a perfect solution.

It could go pretty much as is to a different academic journal, but how many clinicians would ever see it there? Not very many, is what I'm thinking.

So: BUMMER. BUMMER BUMMER BUMMER. Not what I was hoping to hear. And I don't even have anything philosophical to say about moving onward or finding something better. BUMMER.