On Teaching Q&A

Nicole and I have written a Q&A on our first experiences teaching over at the NENC blog. Read it here if you're interested!

Productivity! In one form or another.

We've finally got clear, if not warm, weather after about two weeks straight of truly demoralising rain. It has been absolutely miserable, and I want spring/summer to come back posthaste. I have had quite enough of wearing flat boots! I wish to wear dresses and pumps now please, thank you.

I am slowly getting better at paperwork, which is quite an achievement, considering my dislike of it. My gripe is not so much the actual doing of it as the utter paranoia I'm struck with just before sending it out, which means that I have to reopen and check the file at least five times before either printing or emailing for fear that something has happened to it while I wasn't looking directly at it. My neuroses, they grow by the day.

Anyway, in addition to finishing my marking for last term, I assembled my first grant application, albeit with most of the work already done for me by the rest of the NENC. We've gotten money from the British Society for Literature and Science to hold a symposium in the fall, but needed just a bit more to make it feasible, so we've gotten some from Newcastle and I was in charge of applying to Durham. Hopefully Durham will come through as well, because then we will be flush to make it happen! I have never been on an organising committee before, 'tis very exciting.

I've also applied for teaching next year, and am very sad that they aren't running the Victorian module for second years. Thus, I'm hoping for a few groups of Intro to the Novel, and maybe a second-level module on the Romantics if I'm lucky. Department money is tight, as per usual, so fingers crossed.

In other news, I think I have finally solidified a system of research that works for me, which has taken more than long enough, thanks very much. Apparently, I really need to handwrite my notes, then type them up, then have a cut-and-paste extravaganza in order to form an outline, and then write a chapter. I'm sure this is just thrilling to hear about, but I'm kind of relieved to be able to say that I have a method now, so I figure I'd announce it. I was almost ready to resort to index cards for a while, it was getting so chaotic. This is far more compact. And I'm utilising Scrivener's split-screen mode so that I can reference my outline and my chapter all at the same time, all from the same document, woohoo! Technology, I like it.

And on the other end of the spectrum this method also means that I get to use my fountain pens a lot, which I appreciate.

So yes, I have to type like mad tomorrow and then Monday I'm assembling my outline to hand in, and then I'm taking a break from Shelley to write my paper for the 'Transforming Objects' conference, which should be fun. Far more general than the stuff I'm doing now, and a nice break from long-form work.

I think that's all! I must try and get to bed early tonight so I'm not shattered for choir tomorrow. I've been accidentally nocturnal the past week, so here's hoping for a hard reset.


P.S.: The Avengers movie is AMAZING! AHAHA the UK gets to see it a week before the US does and I saw it on opening night and I have so many feelings about it, oh my god. Oh superhero movies, you will always be my favourites, but this one especially is fantastic and just legitimately good as well as fun. I'm probably going to see it again...soon.

Easter vacation is not actually vacation

It is, in fact, an opportunity for me to spend lots of time in the postgrad study rooms when they are really empty. I have a stack of books to get through, and they must be gotten through by the end of the month! I've had a couple of skype meetings with Simon, so it looks like I can leave Goethe behind for a while, so now it's all Shelley all the time. Primarily, I'll be looking at Frankenstein, but Percy's Prometheus Unbound will probably play a significant role as well, once I actually read it and its surrounding material. Reading about the Shelleys is super entertaining, as well--so much scandalous living! The only drawback is that their letters and things aren't archived online, as far as I know, so it's a bit more work to have to read through massive compilations rather than search by key words. Clearly I was meant in this round of research to kick it old school, so that I can gain further appreciation for how much easier my life is with the help of the internet.

Speaking of more books, just before the end of Epiphany Term there was a massive book sale held at one of the college libraries, so I have managed to add to my personal library in unexpected and awesome ways. They were trying to get rid of a whole bunch of stuff, so every book was 50p, so my housemate and I spent a lot of time combing through the chaos to find interesting things. I now have some old editions of the first volume of Carlyle's The French Revolution, and H.G. Wells' The Dream, which I have never read, as well as critical books on industrial culture and structuralism and various other things. My best find was definitely Landes' The Unbound Prometheus, which is an well-respected commentary on technological change, and a must-read for me.

I am already dreading having to move house to wherever I'm going after finishing my degree.

In other news, I have been generously invited to be part of the central organising group of NENC, so I will be blogging there a bit more as well as helping out with organisation of events and things. I'll post here with links about my contributions when they appear. Nicole and I will be talking about our first tentative steps into teaching, and I'm going to do a short essay at some point on an aspect of my research that I haven't decided on yet.

So, many things afoot, though I have to get over my disappointment at the weather going back to rainy and cold after a glorious couple of weeks of nice weather. Grar, hazards of the northeast.

New layout!

Got bored on my enforced vacation. Solution? Photoshop and messing about with templates!

Goethe chapter is conquered!

That is, it is finished insofar as I can't look at it anymore without my brain hurting, and it has both an introduction and a conclusion in addition to all of the major things that I wanted to say smooshed in between. So I am well pleased, all told, and celebrating mostly by doing all of my laundry, sleeping a lot, and staring at my suddenly very empty calendar.

Choir has ended for the term, and I have picked up all but two of my students' essays (I will check my mailbox again for the last two, and if they are not there then I'm going to have to start haranguing by email), and thus my only responsibility for the next few weeks is some grading. I'm thinking I should maybe take a day trip somewhere interesting so that I can claim to have had a proper vacation over Easter. I haven't done any research into the possibility, but I'm willing to take a train somewhere and wander about at some point. In the interim, I have a new Temeraire book, The Hunger Games, and about the fifth copy of one of my favorite Dick Francis novels all downloaded onto my kindle, so I'm going to do some fun reading for once, and hopefully I won't backslide into analyzing thematic content and political implications as I do so. If all else fails, I have one more issue of Transmetropolitan and the graphic novel version of The Vesuvius Club to completely divorce me from my research brain, at least for a short time.

I'll have a couple of things to work on once I'm done playing at vacation time. My proposal for the 'Transforming Objects' conference got accepted, so I'll be working on that this spring as well as starting reading on Frankenstein, and it sounds like there's going to be a really good line-up of speakers for the whole event. I am full of admiration for Nicole who seems to be doing a fantastic job coordinating everything and dealing with the headache that is answering the barrage of emails from all of the participants. I have certainly not reached a point at which I feel responsible enough to undertake something like that, so more power to her.

In the meantime, we are just on the cusp of spring, which means that I am torn between stalwartly wearing dresses and leaving my window open, and accepting the fact that it is just a little too chilly still for anything but hot tea and sweaters. It is also slightly frustrating that it is genuinely warm and fantastic for about three hours each day, but if you go out dressed for that and then stay out past that sweet spot you will find yourself with chattering teeth and goosebumps as the sun disappears from view. I have still not mastered the art of layering that will remedy this, but I'm working on it. I now have an impressive collection of scarves, so I need to learn how to tie them in lots of fun and debonair ways.

Lastly, I am slowly transforming my life with an ipod app, which is just about the most ridiculous statement I've ever made, but whatever. I've started using 'Clear', which is a friendly and intuitive list-making app that organizes and categorizes everything from my research tasks to my grocery list to my daily list of things to do, and considering how much I adore lists, it's basically everything I could ever want in life. The mere fact that I now walk into Tesco's and actually leave with everything I need (and nothing more!) is the best. Project: Not Failing At Life progresses!

I have run out of clever post titles.

Clearly since I have a truly ridiculous amount of notes to sift through and carve a chapter from, the best thing to do is write a blog post instead. Logic!

The past month has been quite busy with a lot of choir performances and travel and such. The trips to Ripon and Great Ayton both went well, Great Ayton particularly, where we were also provided with a fantastic dinner and managed to make some money from tickets and CD sales that will go towards the tour in Rome. More recently we've been doing all of the Lent services and such, and then St. Chad's Day happened on Saturday. Obviously, its original purpose was to celebrate the life of the saint, which did in fact happen, and there was a festival service at the cathedral for it. On the other hand, however, it's also basically St. Chad's College's excuse to have a day of clowning around and boozing while wearing a lot of green. When I went to sing in the festival service, a lot of the choir had been awake since around 5 AM having champagne and running around the bailey. Good times!

On the academic front, I had some very good news from my last teaching session--I was observed for the final tutorial by one of the professors in the department, and his feedback was very positive. There were definitely a few moments where discussion faltered a bit, which I identified, and so he gave me some suggestions for how to remedy that, but overall it seems that I'm doing a good job, and he's assured me that he'll be recommending me for further teaching next year. So with any luck, I'll have a few more classes next year, possibly even an advanced course, which would be fun.

Additionally, I did a workshop on lecturing that will put me in the running to give a lecture next year during the students' study period, which could be fun/nerve-wracking, and definitely a nice addition to my CV. It will no doubt be infinitely more stressful than leading tutorials, but I might as well get used to it now. Ah, public speaking, I am bad at you.

In other news, I just sent off an abstract for a conference that Northumbria University is hosting, which I'll definitely be attending whether my paper gets in or not since it's so close by, and my friend from Leeds who helps run the NENC is organizing it. Its theme is 'Transforming Objects', so I thought I'd compile some of my earlier work on impressions of industry by various authors and industrialists into some observations about machines and how they're perceived. It'll be a nice change from the close biographical work I've been doing lately. There's also a giant Carlyle conference that's happening in Edinburgh this summer, but I'm not sure whether I want to go--it's a bit pricey, and I'm not sure whether I want to deal with finding accommodation and everything for a conference I'm not presenting at. I might just go for a day or something. We'll see.

And now I really must get back to finishing the Goethe chapter!

Life Update: Epiphany Term Edition

I have been terribly remiss, once again, about updating, so I shall try and piece together latest news in the order of what I remember first!

Holidays at home went splendidly, and were desperately needed after a hectic end of term. It was wonderful to see everyone, and meet the kitties! It's probably a good thing I don't live with them all the time though, because I would never get anything done; I'd be far too busy dangling ribbons in front of their faces.

This term has been going well so far--I was able to meet with all of my students about their essays, which seemed to go well, and then their tutorial on Bleak House was quite successful, it seemed to me. The novel itself was enjoyable, once again beating out Great Expectations, which I'm pretty sure I will never like, although Bleak House didn't grab me until about halfway through, which is a lot of pages to invest in. Nevertheless, I was hooked for the last four hundred pages, even when I couldn't keep all of the character names straight. Seriously, it's a cast of at least twenty secondary characters, let alone the central ones, and that is a lot to remember. I nearly brought a chart to class.

Choir is going well; I think I've finally hit a groove where I can learn music fast and keep track of the order of services so that I'm not always scrambling for different pieces of sheet music. We're going on a short field trip on Sunday to sing a service in Ripon, which is somewhere south of Durham. And then in a couple weeks were going to Great Ayton to sing a proper concert, so that should be fun as well.

I had another singing lesson, and hilariously have been informed that my American accent is getting in the way! It was the first time I'd sang something in English for my teacher, and my diphthongs are apparently not to be borne. I must learn to say "Lord" and "for" more poshly. I'd probably be told the same thing in the States, actually--I remember someone else telling me that I swallowed my vowels, so it's probably the same sort of problem. In any case, I was amused, and shall adjust my accent accordingly.

In other news, I have decided to put myself on a more consistent study schedule that will keep me motivated while not causing me to burn out. I'm aiming to spend full days in the library or the postgrad room ever Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, with a steady rotation of books getting covered each day. It will hopefully make me significantly more productive, and also save me from library late fees. So far it's been working well, but I'm only a week in, so we shall see. I have managed to cover a fair amount of reading, though, so I have high hopes.

I'm reading up on the life of Goethe as well as various critical readings of Faust in order to flesh out the writing I've already done on him, and it's been quite engaging. It's been particularly interesting to explore the background of the original myth and its variations during the medieval period, pre-Marlowe. The original guy who Faust was named for seems not to have been considered by anyone to be even close to a redeemable character, or even tragic. Epithets leveled at him by his contemporaries include devil-worshipper, braggart, rogue, and pederast. Fun times! Definitely needed those centuries in between of distortion and political turmoil to transform him into a tragic hero.

In any case, I'll get to talk about Goethe as well as begin to incorporate him into my work from previous chapters next week, when I'm leading discussion at NENC's monthly reading group. I'm definitely looking forward to it--I was sad to have missed the last couple of meetings due to being away and then jetlagged, so it will be good to see everyone in the group again and get some new perspectives on the stuff I've been buried in.

I think that basically covers everything. We finally got snow and it stuck around for about eight hours before melting, but it's remained cold and damp, as per usual. I shall remain shrouded in cardigans and tweed, feeling more and more like a woolly academic, until spring arrives.