First Day of School! So Hit Snooze Again, Already

Everyone brush your hair, hang your name cards around your necks, and gather outside with your best neighborhood friends while your family takes pictures: it's the first day of school!

My summer session begins today. It's on online class, six weeks in length (therefore "intensive"). The course is "Introduction to the Old Testament," essentially an introduction to historical-critical and literary-critical biblical studies. There's a separate course focusing on Bible content.

Of course, "first day" is a relative term. The learners have already accomplished some minor tasks in the last weeks: logging on, doing a one-question "Choice" about whether they plan to pre-read the textbook, and taking a diagnostic quiz called "Is Online Learning for You?"

For my part, the "first day" is--quite intentionally--a bit of an anti-climax. For one thing, I haven't slept well. I never sleep well the night before the first day. It doesn't matter whether it's a face-to-face course or online. First-day jitters, I got 'em. For another, an online course is largely asynchronous: there's no three-hour block during which we've all got to be "on" for one another. Instead, we're all "on" for one another off-and-on throughout the week.

So, I've developed strategies for the "first day":

• No hunting trips: Undoubtedly there are a few students who have not accomplished all of the pre-course activities, or whose registration is in some kind of limbo. I have been in contact with them regularly in the weeks and days before the term. It's tempting (especially to us tightly-wound types) to want to get all that buttoned down. (OMG!! It's the first day!!) Forget that. Unless they reach out to me (and it's great if they do), it can wait until the second day. Or the third. Hey, it's their course.
• Get a late start: As surprising as this is to me, most of the learners have not taken a vacation day from their employer to celebrate the first day by jumping onto the LMS at dawn. Or even at nine. A few of them will bang out their Introduction before work or on lunch, but if the earliest deadline isn't until Wednesday, why shouldn't I plan to get some additional exercise on Monday morning? Eat a hot breakfast for once? Pet the dog and catch up on my Instapaper?
• Smile before Christmas: I get the thinking behind "don't smile before Christmas." I just don't accept the costs in trust, good will, and positive reinforcement. The first day is a great time to catch students doing things right and, as publicly as possible, pasting a gold star on that and posting it to the refrigerator. A new course is like any other fear-inducing new environment (say, prison, or an alcoholic home, or the Internet): noobs will have their radar up for "cues" about what will be punished and what will be rewarded. Reward is more motivating and cleaner in its outcomes, so I try to catch good behavior early on.

What have you learned about yourself and "first days"? How do your routines reflect that?

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[First Day of School! So Hit Snooze Again, Already was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/06/25. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Blog Discovery: "Academic Workflow for Mac"

I don't know why I haven't seen this blog already: Academic Workflow on Mac. For me, this blog fits nicely in the gap between the "productivity on the Mac" resources (like Mac Power Users) and the "academic productivity" resources (like Prof Hacker). "Academic Workflow for Mac" looks at familiar critical issues in productivity—note taking, task management, emailing—from the perspective of an academic in higher education…using the Mac OS/iOS.

The blog now has a long-overdue place in my blogroll, and I am sure I will be linking to it often.

The blog author is Aleh Cherp, professor of environmental sciences at Central European University.

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[Blog Discovery: "Academic Workflow for Mac" was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/04/11. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Use Verbal Phrases in Bullets, Lists, and Outlines

Wherever my students have needed to write bulleted lists or other short phrases, I have found myself urging them to use verbal phrases rather than just nouns or noun phrases. This has led me to review and change the way I write outlines, lists, presentation slides, and other works calling for short, undeveloped prose.

Student work

Most of the written projects I assign call for paragraphs of developed prose, rather than outlines or bullet points. But sometimes an outline is unavoidable; our institution requires an outline as part of a student's Masters thesis proposal, for instance. And occasionally, I will offer an assignment that asks for short phrases rather that developed sentences. For example:

• a presentation whose slides follow the 1/1/5 rule of "no more than five words per slide";
• a worksheet to be filled in with short phrases;
• a list of "critical issues" regarding a particular biblical text.

So for example, if the student is writing a Venn diagram comparing the birth narratives in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2, I may see items like these. My proposed improvements follow in parentheses.

• the angel Gabriel (> angel Gabriel appears to Mary)
• the star (> star guides three wise men)
• shepherds (> shepherds receive a revelation)

Look how much more content comes to the fore by the inclusion of a verb (often with its object). Similarly, a list of critical issues surrounding a biblical text may look like this:

• redaction (> vocab changes suggest redaction)
• genre (> formal elements point to novella genre)
• the word "virgin/young woman" (> meaning of alma is disputed)

(Note that, in the last example, I offer a passive verbal phrase. This is still verbal! Don't make me go all Pullum on you about the misunderstood and maligned passive verbal construction.)

Again, in the list of critical issues, the inclusion of a verb forces the student to actually articulate the critical issue, rather than merely evoke it with a noun or noun phrase.

I began asking students to incorporate verbal phrases into their bullets and outlines simply so that I could better understand what in the world they believed they were doing. The results have been excellent: often a piece that looked shoddy in its first draft proved to be really well and carefully conceived once I could see the "verbs behind the nouns."

Professional work and productivity

Only as a result of all this have I found myself looking at the outlines and bulleted lists that I produce in my own work, whether for others or, more often, for my own consumption. I find it much easier now to "keep the thread" from one stage of a written piece to the next, instead of staring dumbly at my pre-writing and wondering what the heck my ideas had been.

Some of my readers will know of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology, or will use a task-management tool like OmniFocus. When creating Projects and Tasks in a productivity scheme or tool, it is essential to give them names that have verbs: not "Jill's thesis" but rather "Read Jill's thesis" or "Annotate Jill's thesis" or "Return Jill's thesis"; not "Presentation" but rather "Brainstorm presentation," "Outline presentation," "Collect graphics for presentation," and so on. A noun phrase just sits there and stares vacantly at you. A verbal phrase pokes you with a stick and issues a command.

What is your experience with short phrases in outlines, presentation slides, task management, or wherever you read and use them? Do you do okay with noun phrases alone, or have you also found that you need a verb to bring things into focus, whether in others' writing or in your own?

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[Use Verbal Phrases in Bullets, Lists, and Outlines was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/04/09. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]

Alone or Collaborating: How Do You Like to Work?

A day or two back, New Kid was writing about working with others and working alone. (This is only a partial quote: I recommend you read her whole post if you’re interested.)

Something valuable I realized, I think, was that I do like working with people, more than I realized. I think I used to underestimate how social teaching really is; academia values research more highly, and research (in the humanities) is a relatively isolated endeavor, and so I always thought of academics (and myself) preferring to work independently.…[B]ut [my history internship] became much MORE interesting when there were other interns around and I started to be able to discuss it with them.

Finishing my masters work (Master of Theological Studies), I was one of only two MTS students in a school full of M.Divs, and I was the only student working in Bible. I cross-registered at three other schools in order to meet my requirements and get with other Bible people, but around my own campus, I was alone in my endeavors.

So when I began looking over Ph.D. programs, having classmates was high on my list of priorities. Visiting one prestigious campus, I met a young man who was the only biblical-studies Ph.D. student in residence. For his part, he was as happy as could be: he had the profs to himself, and they had quickly begun to act toward him as toward a junior colleague. But for my part, I had been lone-wolfing it for a couple of years already. When I began at Princeton Theological Seminary, I entered with a class of eight (four each in OT and NT), and was happy almost to hysterical giggling to have colleagues in my field.

PTS had an exceedingly collegial student culture during my years, and I enjoyed a level of collegiality in my coursework that I think I pretty rare. This meant, too, that the shift to dissertation work, while not unanticipated, was fairly stark. My diss years were entirely post-student-housing, and (for me) pre-Facebook. So I finished my graduate work in Bible as I had begun, a lone combatant.

In all this back-and-forth, I’ve learned that my default preference is not to work alone, but rather with friends and peers. “Collegiality” is that space into which I can drop a half-baked idea to be hammered and exercised until it swims on its own or get sent back to the drawing board. If my colleagues are my PTS classmates, it’s great because we all share the same “shorthand” and can get down to business quickly. If my colleagues are not my PTS classmates, it’s great because we don’t share the same shorthand and I have to re-examine all my usual ways of talking about things.

Occasionally my work is briefly interrupted by an email from a colleague, saying, “I have to learn about X right away. Can you explain X, or tell me where I can find out about X quickly?” This is, hands down, one of my favorite experiences. I get briefly distracted from whatever is vexing me at the moment; I get a short, manageable research project to feel good about; and I get to do something for a friend. Seriously, it’s like a two-hour Christmas.

Sure, we have all had some ugly experiences with “group projects”: I myself have often muttered that a group moves at a rate inversely proportional to its size (Brooke’s Law of Movement). But, among graduate students and professionals you don’t have many slackers, just occasionally folks who are regrettably over-committed, and anyway the rest of the group have acquired the skills to work around such blockage.

What are your experiences with working alone or working with others? Do you prefer the long, solitary stretches of single-handed mental combat with your projects in research, writing, or teaching? How early or how late do you seek the input of your colleagues?