Blogs

Why weren't more of you at #engchat?

Since I took last week off from blogging I’ve got several topics rattling around my head that are a bit unformed, and certainly disconnected from each other. Here they are, my short takes from the past few weeks. Stay tuned; I may develop these further in upcoming posts.

Let’s face it--a lot of us in graduate school are perfectionists. I could go a step farther and argue a lot of us made it into graduate school in part because of our perfectionism. Graduate school is exactly the kind of environment where perfectionism thrives. There’s a constant striving to tackle our significant workloads without error and folly. There's the pressure to publish well and often. There's the pressure to do something that's never been done before. We’ve got lots of people counting on us--students, colleagues, professors--and of course, those same people are constantly watching us and will know when we’ve screwed up. Comparing ourselves to others is, like biting nails, a bad and nervous habit that we could quit if we only could relax a little.

I ask students this all the time. If money and geography were no object, where would you go and what would you do? My job is to help their wildest dreams become reality. This week someone asked me what I would teach, if I could teach anything. I panicked.

The Razzie awards are given each year to movies and performances that truly, impressively, memorably stunk. Adam Sandler is up for several this year, which seems about right.

While options are advantageous for obvious reasons, there is a point at which too much choice might actually make life more difficult.

An invitation to a Twitter chat between high school English teachers and first-year composition teachers.

One of the problems with the whole Predictably Irrational oeuvre of behavioral economics / social psychology literature is that I've lost much of my confidence in my ability to hire well. Turns out, we systematically overestimate our own abilities - in everything from driving to teaching to blogging to (yes) interviewing. Like the children of Lake Wobegon, we are all above average.