Bottom (Line) Feeders
August 23, 2010
By Philip G. Altbach
A specter is now haunting international higher education — the dramatic proliferation of third-party recruiters and agents. Their job is to recruit prospective students in countries that send large numbers of students abroad to study at specific institutions as well as to provide general information about studying abroad. Many officials are authorized by academic institutions in the receiving countries — specifically in the United States, Britain, and Australia — to offer admission to students and to help them enroll. (The agents and the colleges that hire them all say that the college still controls admissions, but effectively the reality is that the agents are making offers.)
While by no means a new trend, this phenomenon is growing in size, scope, and notoriety, as international enrollments have become a compelling part of some universities’ bottom lines. The operators, of course, do not work without any source of income. They are paid by the universities that utilize them, usually by providing a fee, based on how many students are enrolled. Sometimes, shockingly, they are also paid by prospective students.
Agents and recruiters are impairing academic standards and integrity — and it’s time for colleges and universities to stop using them. Providing information to prospective students is fine, but money should not change hands during the admissions process, and universities should not hand the power to admit — after all, a key academic responsibility — to agents or entities overseas.
Old Ways and a New Wave
Thirty years ago, most students interested in studying abroad would locate information, apply to their preferred institutions, and enroll. In the days prior to the Internet, information could be obtained directly by writing to overseas universities or in some cases by going to libraries sponsored by embassies and information centers in major cities in the developing world supported by the main host countries — the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and the United States. Internationally mobile students (those who enrolled for credit in another country) were relatively few in number. In 1981, there were 912,300 internationally mobile students — the total has grown by 3 times in the past 30 years. Many students came from relatively sophisticated families able to access information and make informed choices or were sponsored by governments or other agencies. Universities in host countries seldom placed internationalization at the top of their agendas, and few, if any, looked to make money from overseas students. Cold War politics and neocolonial ties stimulated the major powers to sponsor information centers overseas.
This environment has changed. Indeed, practices only a few decades old seem quaint in today’s globalized world, where higher education is big business for many and perhaps 3 million students study abroad — the large majority coming from Asia and going to the main English-speaking Western countries and Australia. The United States hosted 671,000 of these foreign students — or 21 percent of the global total. These students contributed more than $17.65 billion to the U.S. economy and many billions more to the other main host countries.
The key shifts include the rise of the Internet, the commercialization of international study, and the transformation of study abroad from an elite to a mass phenomenon. While formerly limited mainly to an elite few, participating students were often provided with scholarships from home or host countries. International study is now a mass phenomenon where funding comes overwhelmingly from individual overseas students or their families, and the students themselves come from much wider social-class backgrounds and from many more countries than was the case in the past.
The Internet permits easy access to information concerning higher education institutions everywhere, although even a cursory glance at the websites of many universities reveals a striking lack of transparency that even borders on false advertising. Even degree mills can be designed to look like Oxford — sometimes even stealing pictures of Oxford. But good information is available to individuals who have the ability to carefully separate fact from fiction — not an easy task.
The Cold War ended by 1990, and most host countries have eliminated or cut back their overseas information centers. Some, like Australia, have purposely commercialized international student recruiting. The Australian government established the IDP agency to build higher education as an export industry. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, have moved to commercialize international higher education.
At the same time, the United States has repeatedly cut the budgets for overseas libraries and information centers without thinking about the consequences and now faces the costly investment of reopening centers and libraries and rebranding and remarketing one of America’s most valuable "exports."
As the number of overseas students has grown, the level of sophistication of the applicants has declined. At one time, fewer applicants were in large part interested in top universities overseas, although some government-sponsored programs placed students in less prestigious institutions. However, many of today’s potential students have little knowledge about higher education prospects and may want to study abroad because they cannot find access at home. Moreover, they feel that somehow an overseas qualification will boost their job prospects or serve as a prelude to migration abroad.
Many more academic institutions have entered the competition for international students. Most of these new entrants are not top "name brand" universities but are rather lesser-known — and sometimes lower-quality — colleges and universities of all kinds. These schools turn to recruiters since they feel that they have no alternative way to attract students from other countries. It is surprising that some quite respectable American universities have turned to agents and recruiters—perhaps feeling insufficient confidence that their quality and brand could attract overseas students. Top-ranked universities remain preferred destinations for the best and brightest students, but they can accommodate only a tiny minority of those who apply.
Agents and Recruiters Enter
This new environment produced an information and access vacuum that needed to be filled. Unfortunately, this deficiency has been accommodated in the worst possible way. Many universities, especially those with no international profile, seeking to attract international students find that they cannot easily obtain access to the potential market. Students find it difficult to locate reliable information about possible places to study amidst the thicket of competing web sites and the myriad of advertisements that one can find in newspapers, train stations, and elsewhere in the developing world.
The Internet has not solved the problem in part because it does not distinguish quality and provides unevaluated and unfiltered information. There is no way to easily evaluate the quality or veracity of information. Agents and recruiters have stepped into this environment of information overload and claim to provide a road map to the plethora of “information” currently available on the Internet and elsewhere.
The Actual Practices
If agents and recruiters only provided information, today’s situation would not amount to a crisis. It would simply be problematic because the evaluation of the information would still be questionable. They are, of course, hired chiefly by potential host universities and other higher education providers to attract students to their institutions. Not information providers, the agents are salespeople. Their purpose is to sell a product, and they can use any required methods.
They do not present alternatives or provide objective guidance to the potential applicants. Many of these operators — although it is not known how many — have authorization to actually admit students, often based on murky qualifications. Some of the least-scrupulous agents accept payment from both sides — their employing school or schools in the host country, as well as from the applicants — a clear violation of ethical standards. Most agents and recruiters are independent operators who have contracts with one or more overseas institutions. The universities in the host countries that employ these personnel typically are the less-prestigious schools with little visibility overseas and often a tremendous financial need for foreign students to balance their own "bottom lines."
American federal law forbids payments to recruit domestic students. Thus, one wonders why it is appropriate, or even legal, for a university to pay agents to bring them international students whereas not domestic students.
Agents and recruiters have no stated qualifications, nor are they vetted by anyone. Efforts are now underway to create "standards" for this new "profession" but with no powers to either measure compliance or discipline violators. Organizations like NAFSA-Association of International Educators, the largest membership organization of international education professionals, accept these operators as members with no questions asked, thus giving an aura of respectability to them. Other groups, such as the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, have raised serious inquiries about their role. Current efforts to set standards and somehow “legitimize” agents and recruiters through a new organization called the American International Recruitment Council may be seen as too closely linked to them.
The Solution
The solution to this growing phenomenon with agents is simple: abolish them. Agents and recruiters have no legitimate role in international higher education. They are unnecessary and often less than honest practitioners who stand in the way of a good flow of information to prospective students and required data about these students to academic institutions in the host countries.
Objective and accurate information and guidance are needed for both institutions and students. These sources can be provided through the Internet, preferably through Web sites with some “seal of approval” from a group of respected universities or an international or regional organization that has universal credibility. It would be helpful if countries that eliminated or cut back on information centers and libraries overseas could restore them. The cost is not high and the yield in good will and reliable data would be immense. A significant role may exist for independent consultants who provide information and prepare students for the application process overseas but have no links and receive no money from the universities. Actually, a new organization, the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants, has been founded to establish and enforce appropriate standards relevant to this new role.
Universities in the host countries should immediately cease using agents and recruiters. Better and more useful information should be provided by universities themselves to more effectively inform prospective applicants. This goal may include visits by university admissions staff to potential students overseas for the purpose of information sharing.
The stain of commercialization in international higher education has been tremendously aided by agents and recruiters. It is high time that these operators are eliminated and replaced with open and transparent ways of providing information to prospective students. The admissions process should be put back where it belongs — students applying for study and colleges and universities choosing those best qualified — based on reliable individually submitted applications.
Philip G. Altbach is the Monan University Professor and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. He is also a co-editor and frequent contributor to "The World View," a blog at Inside Higher Ed.
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/08/23/altbach
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Saturday, August 07, 2010
35. WSJ: English Gets The Last Word In Japan
WSJ: English Gets The Last Word In Japan
By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI
Every Monday at 8 a.m., nearly 2,000 employees of Rakuten Inc., Japan's biggest online retailer by sales, gather for an asakai, or company meeting, at corporate headquarters along Tokyo's waterfront.
For the past few months the weekly meeting, like much of Rakuten's other in-house business, has been conducted in English, by order of its founder and chief executive. Not only must work documents be written in English, so must the menus in Rakuten's cafeteria and signs in its elevators.
By 2012, Rakuten's employees will be required to speak and correspond with one another in English, and executives have been told they will be fired if they aren't proficient in the language by then.
Rakuten, which has made recent acquisitions in the U.S. and Europe, says the English-only policy is crucial to its goal of becoming a global company. It says it needed a common language to communicate with its new operations, and English, as the chief language of international business, was the obvious choice. It expects the change, among other things, to help it hire and retain talented non-Japanese workers.
Most of the company's largely Japanese-speaking work force of 6,000 appears to be taking the new policy in stride, and many employees support it.
"To be honest, I was a little surprised at first," says Hideki Kamachi, who has worked at the company for about a year, as he studies English vocabulary words to prepare for the Monday morning meeting. "Sometimes I don't understand everything that is being said, but every week I understand more."
The policy was imposed by Rakuten's 45-year-old leader, Hiroshi Mikitani, a banker turned Internet billionaire, who speaks nearly flawless English. "Some people were a little hesitant, but they realized that we were going to do it whether they liked it or not," says Mr. Mikitani, a Harvard Business School graduate who left a prestigious job at the Industrial Bank of Japan to build a Japanese rival to Amazon.com Inc. His company has grown into a sprawling Internet mall with more than 35,000 merchants, an online bank and travel site and net sales of nearly 300 billion yen ($3.5 billion) in 2009.
Rakuten isn't the only Japanese company to have embraced English. It is widely used at some multinationals, including Sony Corp. and Nissan Motor Co., which both have non-Japanese CEOs. Fast Retailing Co., which operates Uniqlo, Japan's largest clothing chain, with stores in New York, London, Paris and Beijing, recently said it plans to hold meetings in English by 2012 if they include non-Japanese participants.
In the mid-1990s Japanese trading house Mitsubishi Corp. considered making English its standard language, but decided it was unnecessary. These days it says it uses English when it makes sense to do so, such as in dealings with foreign customers or its foreign units. Some lesser-known companies, including Nippon Sheet Glass Co. and electronics-components maker Sumida Corp., have used English for years as a common language for documents and meetings.
But few, if any, Japanese companies have gone as far as Rakuten.
The company's move comes as many businesses in Japan are expanding abroad at least partly because their home market, which has been sluggish for years, is expected to shrink as Japan's population declines. The trend has intensified the pressure many Japanese feel to learn English. Most of them have studied the language for six years by the time they graduate from high school, yet relatively few feel comfortable holding a conversation in it.
Partly as a result, Rakuten's so-called English-ization has stirred a frenzy of debate in Japan. On Twitter, blogs and mainstream media, pundits have weighed in on how Japanese schools teach English and whether Japan's language barrier is putting it at a global disadvantage. At a recent news conference, Takanobu Ito, chief executive of auto maker Honda Motor Co., called forcing Japanese workers to speak to one another in English "stupid." Rakuten's CEO has also taken jabs from Japanese nationalists, who say his policy is the first step toward the disappearance of Japanese and, ultimately, the collapse of Japan.
That argument doesn't sway Mr. Mikitani. "Japan is the only country with all these well-educated people who can't speak English," he says. "This is a huge issue for Japan."
Among the 34 countries designated as "advanced economies" by the International Monetary Fund, Japan had the lowest scores last year on the Test of English as a Foreign Language, a proficiency test given to foreign students who want to study in the U.S. It had the second-lowest score among Asian nations, outperforming only Laos.
Since April, when Rakuten announced its plan to convert to English, 220 employees have signed up for the discounted English conversation class the company offers at night. Others have formed impromptu English study groups after work.
Mr. Mikitani says comfort with English is especially important at Rakuten since its acquisition this year of U.S. online retailer Buy.com for $250 million and French Internet marketplace PriceMinister SA for EUR200 million ($264 million).
The company has compiled a vocabulary list of 5,000 words for its workers to learn, including terms like "monetize" and "functional." While executives will lose their jobs if their English isn't up to snuff by 2012, other workers will be passed over for promotions, Mr. Mikitani says.
The CEO freely admits "resistance doesn't mean anything to me." He presides over a company that has rules about almost everything, down to the number of napkins a worker can take from the company cafeteria -- "two pieces to each," says a sign in stilted English. Another sign in the cafeteria, where employees can get free breakfast and lunch, warns in similarly strained English that rice is limited to one portion: "Sorry another serving is not accepted."
A spokesman for Rakuten says the signs were made by a food-service company it hired, rather than its own employees.
Even the Japanese food options on the menu are listed in English. During a recent lunchtime, workers debated what they might get if they ordered "tofu hamburg steak curry" or "Chinese noodles with pork vegetables in miso-based soup spicy."
One woman paused for a few seconds in front of a sign that read "fried minced meat cutlet." She slowly sounded out the words, "min-ced-o meat-o katsu-retsu," and then stared down at a deep-fried cutlet sitting on top of a plate before moving on.
By contrast, a group of online grammar sticklers has emerged at Rakuten that enjoys correcting Mr. Mikitani's English. "Let's stop discussing about our policy to convert our main language to Eng. We are going to do this to become strong global company," Mr. Mikitani tweeted after his Twitter account was flooded for days with discussion of the company's language policy.
Someone replied in Japanese: "For your reference, one doesn't usually put 'about' after 'discuss.'"
Mr. Mikitani immediately wrote back: "Let's stop being picky."
He revisited the issue four days later, writing: "Well I think many native people use 'discuss about.' At least my friends at Harvard did. How good is your English??"
http://e.nikkei.com/e/fr/tnks/Nni20100807D06NY261.htm
Every Monday at 8 a.m., nearly 2,000 employees of Rakuten Inc., Japan's biggest online retailer by sales, gather for an asakai, or company meeting, at corporate headquarters along Tokyo's waterfront.
For the past few months the weekly meeting, like much of Rakuten's other in-house business, has been conducted in English, by order of its founder and chief executive. Not only must work documents be written in English, so must the menus in Rakuten's cafeteria and signs in its elevators.
By 2012, Rakuten's employees will be required to speak and correspond with one another in English, and executives have been told they will be fired if they aren't proficient in the language by then.
Rakuten, which has made recent acquisitions in the U.S. and Europe, says the English-only policy is crucial to its goal of becoming a global company. It says it needed a common language to communicate with its new operations, and English, as the chief language of international business, was the obvious choice. It expects the change, among other things, to help it hire and retain talented non-Japanese workers.
Most of the company's largely Japanese-speaking work force of 6,000 appears to be taking the new policy in stride, and many employees support it.
"To be honest, I was a little surprised at first," says Hideki Kamachi, who has worked at the company for about a year, as he studies English vocabulary words to prepare for the Monday morning meeting. "Sometimes I don't understand everything that is being said, but every week I understand more."
The policy was imposed by Rakuten's 45-year-old leader, Hiroshi Mikitani, a banker turned Internet billionaire, who speaks nearly flawless English. "Some people were a little hesitant, but they realized that we were going to do it whether they liked it or not," says Mr. Mikitani, a Harvard Business School graduate who left a prestigious job at the Industrial Bank of Japan to build a Japanese rival to Amazon.com Inc. His company has grown into a sprawling Internet mall with more than 35,000 merchants, an online bank and travel site and net sales of nearly 300 billion yen ($3.5 billion) in 2009.
Rakuten isn't the only Japanese company to have embraced English. It is widely used at some multinationals, including Sony Corp. and Nissan Motor Co., which both have non-Japanese CEOs. Fast Retailing Co., which operates Uniqlo, Japan's largest clothing chain, with stores in New York, London, Paris and Beijing, recently said it plans to hold meetings in English by 2012 if they include non-Japanese participants.
In the mid-1990s Japanese trading house Mitsubishi Corp. considered making English its standard language, but decided it was unnecessary. These days it says it uses English when it makes sense to do so, such as in dealings with foreign customers or its foreign units. Some lesser-known companies, including Nippon Sheet Glass Co. and electronics-components maker Sumida Corp., have used English for years as a common language for documents and meetings.
But few, if any, Japanese companies have gone as far as Rakuten.
The company's move comes as many businesses in Japan are expanding abroad at least partly because their home market, which has been sluggish for years, is expected to shrink as Japan's population declines. The trend has intensified the pressure many Japanese feel to learn English. Most of them have studied the language for six years by the time they graduate from high school, yet relatively few feel comfortable holding a conversation in it.
Partly as a result, Rakuten's so-called English-ization has stirred a frenzy of debate in Japan. On Twitter, blogs and mainstream media, pundits have weighed in on how Japanese schools teach English and whether Japan's language barrier is putting it at a global disadvantage. At a recent news conference, Takanobu Ito, chief executive of auto maker Honda Motor Co., called forcing Japanese workers to speak to one another in English "stupid." Rakuten's CEO has also taken jabs from Japanese nationalists, who say his policy is the first step toward the disappearance of Japanese and, ultimately, the collapse of Japan.
That argument doesn't sway Mr. Mikitani. "Japan is the only country with all these well-educated people who can't speak English," he says. "This is a huge issue for Japan."
Among the 34 countries designated as "advanced economies" by the International Monetary Fund, Japan had the lowest scores last year on the Test of English as a Foreign Language, a proficiency test given to foreign students who want to study in the U.S. It had the second-lowest score among Asian nations, outperforming only Laos.
Since April, when Rakuten announced its plan to convert to English, 220 employees have signed up for the discounted English conversation class the company offers at night. Others have formed impromptu English study groups after work.
Mr. Mikitani says comfort with English is especially important at Rakuten since its acquisition this year of U.S. online retailer Buy.com for $250 million and French Internet marketplace PriceMinister SA for EUR200 million ($264 million).
The company has compiled a vocabulary list of 5,000 words for its workers to learn, including terms like "monetize" and "functional." While executives will lose their jobs if their English isn't up to snuff by 2012, other workers will be passed over for promotions, Mr. Mikitani says.
The CEO freely admits "resistance doesn't mean anything to me." He presides over a company that has rules about almost everything, down to the number of napkins a worker can take from the company cafeteria -- "two pieces to each," says a sign in stilted English. Another sign in the cafeteria, where employees can get free breakfast and lunch, warns in similarly strained English that rice is limited to one portion: "Sorry another serving is not accepted."
A spokesman for Rakuten says the signs were made by a food-service company it hired, rather than its own employees.
Even the Japanese food options on the menu are listed in English. During a recent lunchtime, workers debated what they might get if they ordered "tofu hamburg steak curry" or "Chinese noodles with pork vegetables in miso-based soup spicy."
One woman paused for a few seconds in front of a sign that read "fried minced meat cutlet." She slowly sounded out the words, "min-ced-o meat-o katsu-retsu," and then stared down at a deep-fried cutlet sitting on top of a plate before moving on.
By contrast, a group of online grammar sticklers has emerged at Rakuten that enjoys correcting Mr. Mikitani's English. "Let's stop discussing about our policy to convert our main language to Eng. We are going to do this to become strong global company," Mr. Mikitani tweeted after his Twitter account was flooded for days with discussion of the company's language policy.
Someone replied in Japanese: "For your reference, one doesn't usually put 'about' after 'discuss.'"
Mr. Mikitani immediately wrote back: "Let's stop being picky."
He revisited the issue four days later, writing: "Well I think many native people use 'discuss about.' At least my friends at Harvard did. How good is your English??"
http://e.nikkei.com/e/fr/tnks/Nni20100807D06NY261.htm
Monday, August 02, 2010
34. Gabriel, “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age”
August 1, 2010
Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age
By TRIP GABRIEL
At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site's frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.
At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student's copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.
But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.
It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.
Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.
"Now we have a whole generation of students who've grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn't seem to have an author," said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. "It's possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take."
Professors who have studied plagiarism do not try to excuse it — many are champions of academic honesty on their campuses — but rather try to understand why it is so widespread.
In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a co-founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a business professor at Rutgers University, about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments.
Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes "serious cheating" is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.
Sarah Brookover, a senior at the Rutgers campus in Camden, N.J., said many of her classmates blithely cut and paste without attribution.
"This generation has always existed in a world where media and intellectual property don't have the same gravity," said Ms. Brookover, who at 31 is older than most undergraduates. "When you're sitting at your computer, it's the same machine you've downloaded music with, possibly illegally, the same machine you streamed videos for free that showed on HBO last night."
Ms. Brookover, who works at the campus library, has pondered the differences between researching in the stacks and online. "Because you're not walking into a library, you're not physically holding the article, which takes you closer to 'this doesn't belong to me,' " she said. Online, "everything can belong to you really easily."
A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, disturbed by the high rates of reported plagiarism, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word, or "texts" in Ms. Blum's academic language.
She conducted her ethnographic research among 234 Notre Dame undergraduates. "Today's students stand at the crossroads of a new way of conceiving texts and the people who create them and who quote them," she wrote last year in the book "My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture," published by Cornell University Press.
Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.
In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.
"Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning," Ms. Blum said.
She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.
"If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it's O.K. if you say other people's words, it's O.K. if you say things you don't believe, it's O.K. if you write papers you couldn't care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade," Ms. Blum said, voicing student attitudes. "And it's O.K. if you put words out there without getting any credit."
The notion that there might be a new model young person, who freely borrows from the vortex of information to mash up a new creative work, fueled a brief brouhaha earlier this year with Helene Hegemann, a German teenager whose best-selling novel about Berlin club life turned out to include passages lifted from others.
Instead of offering an abject apology, Ms. Hegemann insisted, "There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity." A few critics rose to her defense, and the book remained a finalist for a fiction prize (but did not win).
That theory does not wash with Sarah Wilensky, a senior at Indiana University, who said that relaxing plagiarism standards "does not foster creativity, it fosters laziness."
"You're not coming up with new ideas if you're grabbing and mixing and matching," said Ms. Wilensky, who took aim at Ms. Hegemann in a column in her student newspaper headlined "Generation Plagiarism."
"It may be increasingly accepted, but there are still plenty of creative people — authors and artists and scholars — who are doing original work," Ms. Wilensky said in an interview. "It's kind of an insult that that ideal is gone, and now we're left only to make collages of the work of previous generations."
In the view of Ms. Wilensky, whose writing skills earned her the role of informal editor of other students' papers in her freshman dorm, plagiarism has nothing to do with trendy academic theories.
The main reason it occurs, she said, is because students leave high school unprepared for the intellectual rigors of college writing.
"If you're taught how to closely read sources and synthesize them into your own original argument in middle and high school, you're not going to be tempted to plagiarize in college, and you certainly won't do so unknowingly," she said.
At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others.
Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were "unwilling to engage the writing process."
"Writing is difficult, and doing it well takes time and practice," he said.
And then there was a case that had nothing to do with a younger generation's evolving view of authorship. A student accused of plagiarism came to Mr. Dudley's office with her parents, and the father admitted that he was the one responsible for the plagiarism. The wife assured Mr. Dudley that it would not happen again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html?pagewanted=print
Saturday, July 31, 2010
33. Rubin, “Afghan Women Fear Loss of Modest Gains”
July 30, 2010
Afghan Women Fear Loss of Modest Gains
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
MAHMUD-E RAQI, Afghanistan — Women's precarious rights in Afghanistan have begun seeping away. Girls' schools are closing; working women are threatened; advocates are attacked; and terrified families are increasingly confining their daughters to home.
For women, instability, as much as the Taliban themselves, is the enemy. Women are casualties of the fighting, not only in the already conservative and embattled Pashtun south and east, but also in districts in the north and center of the country where other armed groups have sprung up.
As Afghan and Western governments explore reconciliation with the Taliban, women fear that the peace they long for may come at the price of rights that have improved since the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001.
"Women do not want war, but none of them want the Taliban of 1996 again; no one wants to be imprisoned in the yards of their houses," said Rahima Zarifi, the Women's Ministry representative from the northern Baghlan Province.
Interviews around the country with at least two dozen female members of Parliament, government officials, activists, teachers and young girls suggest a nuanced reality — fighting constricts women's freedoms nearly as much as a Taliban government, and conservative traditions already limit women's rights in many places.
Women, however, express a range of fears about a Taliban return, from political to domestic — that they will be shut out of negotiations about any deals with the insurgents and that the Taliban's return would drive up bride prices, making it more profitable for a family to force girls into marriage earlier.
For many women, the prospect of a resurgence of the Taliban or other conservative groups is stark. "It will ruin our life," said Shougoufa, 40, as she sorted through sequins and gold sparkles at the bazaar in the city of Pul-i-Khumri in Afghanistan's north.
"I am a tailor and I need to come to the bazaar to buy these things," she said. "But if the Taliban come, I will not be able to come. Already we are hearing some girls cannot go to their work anymore."
In teachers' tea-break rooms, beauty shop training sessions, bazaars and the privacy of their homes, young women worry that their parents will marry them off early, so they will not be forced to marry Taliban.
In the Pashtun-dominated district of Taghob, east of Kabul, girls' schools have been closed and any teaching is done at home, the provincial education director said.
That does not trouble some local officials.
"Look, our main priority is to feed our people, to provide rest and to protect their lives," said Haji Farid, a local member of Parliament. "Why are people focusing on education and sending girls to school? Boys walk three, four, five kilometers to their school. How can a girl walk two, three, four kilometers? During a war you cannot send a girl beyond her door. No one can guarantee her honor. So it is hard to send your daughter to school."
In Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul, all unstable southern provinces, there are girls' schools open in the provincial capitals, but in outlying districts there are few, if any. In Zabul Province, there are just six schools for girls, four in the capital and two outside, but few families send their girls to school because of the fighting, said Muhammad Alam, the acting head of the provincial education department.
In Baghlan Province, in northern Afghanistan, the situation for women has steadily worsened over the past year. Ms. Zarifi, the Women's Ministry representative, has endured assassination attempts and demonstrations against her work. Three months ago, a female member of the provincial council was paralyzed in an attack, and a woman was stabbed to death in the daytime in the middle of the provincial capital earlier in July.
By contrast, most of Kapisa Province, which lies northeast of Kabul, is peaceful. There is a mediation program in the capital to help women and girls when they face domestic violence. In the predominantly ethnically Tajik north there are large, lively schools for girls, where families even allow those who are married to complete high school.
Women's advocates are concerned that they are increasingly being shut out of political decisions. At an international conference in Kabul on July 20, which was meant to showcase the country's plans for the future, President Hamid Karzai said nothing about how women's rights might be protected in negotiations.
The very first meeting on negotiations, held by Mr. Karzai on July 22 with former leaders who had fought the Taliban, did not include a single woman, despite government pledges. When asked, government officials said that women would be included in later sessions.
Although Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has also pledged that she will not desert Afghan women and that any deal with the Taliban that traded peace for women's rights was "a red line," women remain wary.
"Right now it's a big challenge for women to go to school and work, but at least according to our Constitution and laws they have the right to do so," said Nargis Nehan, 31, an Afghan women's advocate.
"If the Taliban come back, by law women will be restricted and not allowed to leave their homes," she said, adding, "Maybe not everywhere, but in those districts where they are in power."
There is also the real possibility that a deal with the Taliban could stoke the anger of non-Pashtuns who once fought and still fear them, raising the prospect of renewed fighting.
Afghanistan's women have long led exceptionally constrained lives. The combination of a male-dominated tribal culture in which women have been often treated as little more than chattel, combined with a conservative practice of Islam and a nationwide lack of education, meant that long before the Taliban arrived in the mid-1990s, women had few opportunities beyond the home.
The mujahedeen leaders who forced out the Soviets in the late 1980s were as conservative as the Taliban in many places, keeping women at home in order to preserve family honor instead of educating them or integrating them into the government.
"Families want to send their daughters to school, but it is hard for them to decide to do so because of the fighting and insecurity," said Mr. Alam, the head of provincial education in Zabul Province.
The families of women who work in offices are threatened, said Rahima Jana, who heads the province's Department of Women's Affairs. And the group Human Rights Watch documented instances of night letters meant to scare women into staying at home.
"Security is a big challenge, and we cannot work when there is bad security," Ms. Jana said. "Last year was much better than this year."
In Mahmud-e Raqi, 12 teenage girls sat around a small trunk filled with beauticians' tools — combs, boxes of hair dye, scissors, nail polish, hair spray — and watched closely as the instructor sat one of the girls in a desk chair and demonstrated how to cut off split ends evenly.
In most places in the world this scene would hardly be a sign of women's liberation, but in this corner of Afghanistan, it meant a great deal. The girls, ages 15 to 17, had been allowed to come from their villages to the provincial capital; they will take home a trunk of beauty goods and can earn their own money in their homes by offering beauty services to women in their village.
This chance at determining a little of their future is what they fear will be threatened if the Taliban return through a negotiated peace settlement.
"They will beat us and forbid us from this freedom, the freedom to come here, to this class; they will stop us from doing things," said Biboli, 16, a girl with long brown hair barely covered by a thin white veil.
The greatest fear is that no one is really listening, said Habiba Shamim, one of the instructors.
"Please," she pleaded. "Carry our words to people."
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/world/asia/31women.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=print
32. HARTOCOLLIS, “Getting Into Med School Without Hard Sciences”
July 29, 2010
Getting Into Med School Without Hard Sciences
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
For generations of pre-med students, three things have been as certain as death and taxes: organic chemistry, physics and the Medical College Admission Test, known by its dread-inducing acronym, the MCAT.
So it came as a total shock to Elizabeth Adler when she discovered, through a singer in her favorite a cappella group at Brown University, that one of the nation's top medical schools admits a small number of students every year who have skipped all three requirements.
Until then, despite being the daughter of a physician, she said, "I was kind of thinking medical school was not the right track for me."
Ms. Adler became one of the lucky few in one of the best kept secrets in the cutthroat world of medical school admissions, the Humanities and Medicine Program at the Mount Sinai medical school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The program promises slots to about 35 undergraduates a year if they study humanities or social sciences instead of the traditional pre-medical school curriculum and maintain a 3.5 grade-point average.
For decades, the medical profession has debated whether pre-med courses and admission tests produce doctors who know their alkyl halides but lack the sense of mission and interpersonal skills to become well-rounded, caring, inquisitive healers.
That debate is being rekindled by a study published on Thursday in Academic Medicine, the journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Conducted by the Mount Sinai program's founder, Dr. Nathan Kase, and the medical school's dean for medical education, Dr. David Muller, the peer-reviewed study compared outcomes for 85 students in the Humanities and Medicine Program with those of 606 traditionally prepared classmates from the graduating classes of 2004 through 2009, and found that their academic performance in medical school was equivalent.
"There's no question," Dr. Kase said. "The default pathway is: Well, how did they do on the MCAT? How did they do on organic chemistry? What was their grade-point average?"
"That excludes a lot of kids," said Dr. Kase, who founded the Mount Sinai program in 1987 when he was dean of the medical school, and who is now dean emeritus and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology. "But it also diminishes; it makes science into an obstacle rather than something that is an insight into the biology of human disease."
Whether the study's findings will inspire other medical schools to change admissions requirements remains to be seen.
Because MCAT scores are used by U.S. News and World Report and others to rank schools, the most competitive ones fear dropping the test, admissions officials said. And at least two recent studies found that MCAT scores were better than grade-point averages at predicting performance in medical school and on the series of licensing exams that medical students and doctors must take.
"You have to have the proper amount of moral courage to say 'O.K., we're going to skip over a lot of the huge barriers to a lot of our students,' " said Dr. David Battinelli, senior associate dean for education at Hofstra University School of Medicine.
But, Dr. Battinelli added, "Now let's see how they're doing 5 and 10 years down the road." The Mount Sinai study did not answer the question.
There are a few other schools in the United States and Canada that admit students without MCAT scores, but Mount Sinai appears to have gone furthest in eschewing traditional science preparation, said Dr. Dan Hunt, co-secretary of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the medical school accrediting agency.
The students apply in their sophomore or junior years in college and agree to major in humanities or social science, rather than the hard sciences. If they are admitted, they are required to take only basic biology and chemistry, at a level many students accomplish through Advanced Placement courses in high school.
They forgo organic chemistry, physics and calculus — though they get abbreviated organic chemistry and physics courses during a summer boot camp run by Mount Sinai. They are exempt from the MCAT. Instead, they are admitted into the program based on their high school SAT scores, two personal essays, their high school and early college grades and interviews.
The study found that, by some measures, the humanities students made more sensitive doctors: they were more than twice as likely to train as psychiatrists (14 percent compared with 5.6 percent of their classmates) and somewhat more likely — though less so than Dr. Kase had expected — to go into primary care fields, like pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology (49 percent compared with 39 percent). Conversely, they avoid some fields, like surgical subspecialties and anesthesiology.
But what surprised the authors the most, they said, was that humanities students were significantly more likely than their peers to devote a year to scholarly research (28 percent compared with 14 percent). They scored lower on Step 1 of the Medical Licensing Examination, taken after the second year of medical school, which generally correlates with scientific knowledge. But over all, they ranked about the same in honors grades and in the percentage in the top quarter of the class.
Humanities students were also more likely to take a leave of absence for personal reasons, which could reflect some ambivalence about their choices, the study authors said.
Typically, 5 percent to 10 percent of the class drops out before getting to medical school. Those students cannot handle the science or they have changed their minds about their intention to be a doctor, said Miki Rifkin, the program director. One who dropped out was Jonathan Safran Foer, who became an acclaimed novelist.
Dr. Kase founded the Mount Sinai program shortly after a national report on physician preparation questioned the single-minded focus on hard science.
He began with a few students from five colleges and universities that did not have their own medical schools — Amherst, Brandeis, Princeton, Wesleyan and Williams — because, he said, "we did not want to poach."
It has been going full tilt for the past 10 years, and received nearly 300 applications last year from more than 80 colleges across the country, though admissions heavily favor elite schools.
Among undergraduates accepted in 2009, the mean SAT math and verbal score was 1444, and the mean freshman G.P.A. was 3.74. About a third of the class had at least one parent who was a physician; among all medical schools, about one in five has a parent who is a doctor.
Among the current crop is Ms. Adler, 21, a senior at Brown studying global political economy and majoring in development studies.
Ms. Adler said she was inspired by her freshman study abroad in Africa. "I didn't want to waste a class on physics, or waste a class on orgo," she said. "The social determinants of health are so much more pervasive than the immediate biology of it."
She added that her parents, however, were "thrilled when I decided to go the M.D. route, because they were worried about my job security."
A classmate in the program, Kathryn Friedman, 21, graduated from the Chapin School in New York City, before going to Williams, where she is a senior, majoring in political science. Her mother and uncle are doctors at Mount Sinai; her father, Robert Friedman, who works in the entertainment business, is on the Mount Sinai Medical Center board.
The humanities program has allowed her to pursue other interests, like playing varsity tennis and going abroad, she said. When her pre-med classmates hear about the program, she said, "a lot of them are jealous."
She added, "They are, like, 'Wow, I wish I had known about that.' "
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 31, 2010
Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about a program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine through which a limited number of students who did not take pre-med courses or the MCAT can gain admission to the school misstated the given name of its dean for medical education. He is Dr. David Muller, not Robert.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/nyregion/30medschools.html?_r=1&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print
31. Wayner, “Learning a Language From an Expert, on the Web”
July 28, 2010
Learning a Language From an Expert, on the Web
By PETER WAYNER
The message from the 14-year-old Tunisian skateboarder was curt. "Totally wrong," he said of my French. My conjugation was off and I should study spelling. On a scale of one to five, he said, my French practice essay was worth a one. Then he disappeared into the anonymity of the Internet.
If there is any truth to the old Russian proverb that enemies parrot yes while friends say no, then it is easy to form fast friendships on Livemocha.com, a Web site devoted to helping people learn languages by swapping messages over the Internet and then correcting each other's messages.
As my young Tunisian tutor was showing me, the Internet, with its unparalleled ability to connect people throughout the world, is changing the way that many people learn languages. There is no still way to avoid the hard slog through vocabulary lists and grammar rules, but the books, tapes and even CDs of yesteryear are being replaced by e-mail, video chats and social networks.
Livemocha, a Seattle company with $14 million in venture capital financing, mixes a social network with lessons for more than 38 of the world's more common languages.
The initial lessons are free, but unlocking some of the additional features requires a fee to Livemocha (starting at $10 for a set of lessons) or an agreement to correct the work of others, something my friend in Tunisia was doing for me. The lessons, whether they are flashcards, quizzes, audio recordings or written and spoken essays, are delivered through a Web browser. Michael Schutzler, Livemocha's chief executive, says the Web site's advantage is the ability to practice with a real person.
"The great irony is that even if you have years of classroom Spanish, you don't have a lot of confidence to go into a bar and have a conversation," he said.
The casual connections with real people throughout the world, however brief, are not just fun and surprising but reveal more about how the language is really used. The boy from Tunisia, while knocking my conjugation, passed along slang and attitude, something rarely found in textbooks.
I doubt that many traditional students of French find their way into conversations with so many diverse people. Maria, an older woman from Brazil who speaks French, was kinder and offered slightly different corrections. Melina, a woman from Southern France, used blue to emphasize her corrections to my work. It was a kind touch.
"What actually cements the ability really comes down to interacting with human beings." Mr. Schutzler said. He added, "My mom aced all of her English Lit before coming to the U.S., but when she came to the U.S., she couldn't get a cup of coffee at the diner."
Livemocha is experimenting with a variety of ways to motivate people that resemble the social games found on Facebook. The flashcard exercises, for instance, are scored, and the totals earned by studying and teaching appear on the front page. I earned a bronze medal, actually an icon of one, on my first day for helping many people with their English. The site even hopes to help its best contributors to sell their services to the more serious students.
Not every service is as well structured. MyLanguageExchange.com just maintains lists of people who know certain languages and want to learn others. Anyone can search the database, but only gold members, who pay $24 a year, can send e-mail easily to others.
Each person sets up a profile and includes a short description of age, location and what he or she would like to talk about. There is a big demand to practice English, and I found many possible pen pals.
Marie, 40, was born in Spain but lives in France near the Bordeaux region. She wants to improve her English and "perhaps find a job in sales export." Serge, a Parisian who is retired, studies genealogy and wants to improve his English, Spanish and Swedish.
MyLanguageExchange.com claims it has more than 1.5 million members studying 115 languages.
I find the right partner through what are essentially classified ads. If I wanted to study Luxembourgish, the Germanic tongue of Luxembourg, there were 11 people looking to study English. There are 32 willing people who are fluent in Tswana, a Bantu language generally spoken around Southern Africa, mainly in Botswana. An e-mail or two is all it takes to find a study partner.
Maria, one of 113 people ready to help with Uyghur, which is spoken in western China, says she is also fluent in Mandarin but wants to practice Russian, Hindi and English. It is a big database.
"Our site tends to attract more of the serious language learners," said Dan Yuen, who helped found MyLanguageExchange.com in 2000. "They are also more likely to be effective language partners. In turn, this helps to attract more language learners to our community."
Some of the other choices are more limited but still useful. RhinoSpike.com set up a market for recordings spoken by native speakers. Anyone can post a selection of text and anyone can post a recording.
"The problem for many people learning a language is that they can't hear what the text is supposed to sound like," said Peter Carroll, one of the founders. "We built RhinoSpike to get native speakers to read the text that we post, so that we can both see and hear what is being said." Almost 2,500 recordings have been posted since the site opened in March.
Companies like RosettaStone.com, GermanPod101.com, ChinesePod.com and a surprisingly large number of other Web sites are competing to offer lessons and tutoring to students throughout the world. I found dozens of others offering what was found only on PC software a few years ago.
There are even more casual approaches that come with even less infrastructure and fewer of the protections for consumers that it may offer. It is easy to find, for instance, people who want to practice languages with a free phone call through the forums run by Skype. One click and you can talk free with someone who wants to practice another language. The standard protocol is to spend half the time on one language and half the time with the other.
Some sites, like UsingEnglish.com, englishcafe.com and Englishbaby.com, are devoted to helping people practice English but add the elements of sharing photos and interests like a dating service.
The depth and quality of random conversations like these vary greatly, but they are generally easier and more free than meeting people in bars, stores or in public.
Orlando R. Kelm, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who uses Livemocha and other tools in his language classes, says he finds that working with a partner on written words is often easier than with spoken conversation.
"A lot of times people write better than they speak," he said.
Still, he finds it ultimately worthwhile to work with others on the Web and search for the better partners because that provides a real connection that cannot be found from a book or a simple computer program.
"When I have to do an exercise and submit it to the world, when I know that real people are going to look at it and comment on it, it really jacks up my brain," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/technology/personaltech/29basics.html?_r=1&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
30. Onishi, “As English Spreads, Indonesians Fear for Their Language”
July 25, 2010
As English Spreads, Indonesians Fear for Their Language
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Paulina Sugiarto's three children played together at a mall here the other day, chattering not in Indonesia's national language, but English. Their fluency often draws admiring questions from other Indonesian parents Ms. Sugiarto encounters in this city's upscale malls.
But the children's ability in English obscured the fact that, though born and raised in Indonesia, they were struggling with the Indonesian language, known as Bahasa Indonesia. Their parents, who grew up speaking the Indonesian language but went to college in the United States and Australia, talk to their children in English. And the children attend a private school where English is the main language of instruction.
"They know they're Indonesian," Ms. Sugiarto, 34, said. "They love Indonesia. They just can't speak Bahasa Indonesia. It's tragic."
Indonesia's linguistic legacy is increasingly under threat as growing numbers of wealthy and upper-middle-class families shun public schools where Indonesian remains the main language but English is often taught poorly. They are turning, instead, to private schools that focus on English and devote little time, if any, to Indonesian.
For some Indonesians, as mastery of English has become increasingly tied to social standing, Indonesian has been relegated to second-class status. In extreme cases, people take pride in speaking Indonesian poorly.
The global spread of English, with its sometimes corrosive effects on local languages, has caused much hand-wringing in many non-English-speaking corners of the world. But the implications may be more far-reaching in Indonesia, where generations of political leaders promoted Indonesian to unite the nation and forge a national identity out of countless ethnic groups, ancient cultures and disparate dialects.
The government recently announced that it would require all private schools to teach the nation's official language to its Indonesian students by 2013. Details remain sketchy, though.
"These schools operate here, but don't offer Bahasa to our citizens," said Suyanto, who oversees primary and secondary education at the Education Ministry.
"If we don't regulate them, in the long run this could be dangerous for the continuity of our language," said Mr. Suyanto, who like many Indonesians uses one name. "If this big country doesn't have a strong language to unite it, it could be dangerous."
The seemingly reflexive preference for English has begun to attract criticism in the popular culture. Last year, a woman, whose father is Indonesian and her mother American, was crowned Miss Indonesia despite her poor command of Indonesian. The judges were later denounced in the news media and in the blogosphere for being impressed by her English fluency and for disregarding the fact that, despite growing up here, she needed interpreters to translate the judges' questions.
In 1928, nationalists seeking independence from Dutch rule chose Indonesian, a form of Malay, as the language of civic unity. While a small percentage of educated Indonesians spoke Dutch, Indonesian became the preferred language of intellectuals.
Each language had a social rank, said Arief Rachman, an education expert. "If you spoke Javanese, you were below," he said, referring to the main language on the island of Java. "If you spoke Indonesian, you were a bit above. If you spoke Dutch, you were at the top."
Leaders, especially Suharto, the general who ruled Indonesia until 1998, enforced teaching of Indonesian and curbed use of English.
"During the Suharto era, Bahasa Indonesia was the only language that we could see or read. English was at the bottom of the rung," said Aimee Dawis, who teaches communications at Universitas Indonesia. "It was used to create a national identity, and it worked, because all of us spoke Bahasa Indonesia. Now the dilution of Bahasa Indonesia is not the result of a deliberate government policy. It's just occurring naturally."
With Indonesia's democratization in the past decade, experts say, English became the new Dutch. Regulations were loosened, allowing Indonesian children to attend private schools that did not follow the national curriculum, but offered English. The more expensive ones, with tuition costing several thousand dollars a year, usually employ native speakers of English, said Elena Racho, vice chairwoman of the Association of National Plus Schools, an umbrella organization for private schools.
But with the popularity of private schools booming, hundreds have opened in recent years, Ms. Racho said. The less expensive ones, unable to hire foreigners, are often staffed with Indonesians teaching all subjects in English, if often imperfect English, she added.
Many children attending those schools end up speaking Indonesian poorly, experts said. Uchu Riza — who owns a private school that teaches both languages and also owns the local franchise of Kidzania, an amusement park where children can try out different professions — said some Indonesians were willing to sacrifice Indonesian for a language with perceived higher status.
"Sometimes they look down on people who don't speak English," she said.
She added: "In some families, the grandchildren cannot speak with the grandmother because they don't speak Bahasa Indonesia. That's sad."
Anna Surti Ariani, a psychologist who provides counseling at private schools and in her own practice, said some parents even displayed "a negative pride" that their children spoke poor Indonesian. Schools typically advise the parents to speak to their children in English at home even though the parents may be far from fluent in the language.
"Sometimes the parents even ask the baby sitters not to speak in Indonesian but in English," Ms. Ariani said.
It is a sight often seen in this city's malls on weekends: Indonesian parents addressing their children in sometimes halting English, followed by nannies using what English words they know.
But Della Raymena Jovanka, 30, a mother of two preschoolers, has developed misgivings. Her son Fathiy, 4, attended an English play group and was enrolled in a kindergarten focusing on English; Ms. Jovanka allowed him to watch only English TV programs.
The result was that her son responded to his parents only in English and had difficulties with Indonesian. Ms. Jovanka was considering sending her son to a regular public school next year. But friends and relatives were pressing her to choose a private school so that her son could become fluent in English.
Asked whether she would rather have her son become fluent in English or Indonesian, Ms. Jovanka said, "To be honest, English. But this can become a big problem in his socialization. He's Indonesian. He lives in Indonesia. If he can't communicate with people, it'll be a big problem."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26indo.html?_r=2&ref=world&pagewanted=print
Thursday, July 22, 2010
29. Rockquemore, “Writing IS Thinking”
Given that perfectionism is just one of the demons that underlie resistance to writing, we should keep moving forward. This week, I want to describe a problem that is often experienced but rarely discussed: disempowerment when it comes to writing.
Many of us hold an incredibly limiting set of beliefs about the writing process, the relationship between our thoughts and the physical act of writing, and what it takes to sit down and write. When I ask people to describe their writing process, what often surfaces is the idea that writing is what happens AFTER they have read everything there is to read, clearly and thoroughly worked out an idea in their heads, and have large blocks of time to empty the fully-developed idea onto the page (or into the computer). In other words, "writing" is simply the physical act a scholar engages in after she's gotten everything figured out internally. Hand-in-hand with this exclusively mechanical understanding of writing is the sense that particular emotional states are a prerequisite for writing. In other words, people frequently tell me they need to FEEL _________ (inspired, excited, energized, confident, clear, etc.) before they can sit down and write. As you can imagine, people who need to feel perfectly inspired and have a fully formed article in their head before sitting down at their desk rarely write.
I'm describing this as problematic for three reasons. First and foremost, it's a highly inefficient way to write and often provokes anxiety. That's because you don't know when inspiration is going to strike and you can't control it. So if you're sitting around waiting to feel inspired to write, it's no surprise that you might experience some anxiety about writing. Secondly, if you're on the tenure track, the length of time between completing a manuscript and its publication is just too long for you to abstain from writing until you've figured everything out AND feel inspired. Finally, and most importantly, when we set a broad array of conditions that are beyond our control for what must occur before we can start generating pages, it reveals a deep sense of disempowerment, distrust, and confusion about what happens when you write. In other words it suggests that writing controls you when in reality, you control your writing.
"Writing IS Thinking!"
Last year I attended a conference for faculty developers that rocked my world! In part, it was exciting to learn about the newest research on faculty productivity and inspiring to meet the energetic, knowledgeable, and infinitely resourceful set of practitioners who work with faculty on campuses across the U.S. But what's directly relevant for this column is the workshop I took with Joanne Cooper and Dannelle Stevens. I remember Dannelle (a walking ball of energy) getting very animated when some of us described writing as what we do after our thinking is complete. In fact, I remember her exclaiming: "NO! Writing IS thinking!"
I'm a little slow in the presence of new ideas and I couldn't really get my head around the concept that writing IS thinking during the workshop. But I have come to believe that understanding the fundamental truth of this idea is the key to overcoming disempowerment. If writing is thinking, then you don't have to wait until you're done reading, analyzing data, or figuring everything out to get started. You can write before, during, and after the research process. In fact, it's the best justification for daily writing imaginable: writing every day enables you to think about your project, generate new insights, and move forward every single day! It's also the case that it eliminates the need to feel any particular way as a prerequisite to writing because you can think about your project if you're happy, sad, inspired, or flat-out cranky. Finally, it lowers the bar and puts you in the driver's seat. If writing is thinking, then it feels a lot less scary to sit down for 30-60 minutes every day. I don't have to produce a perfect first draft, I don't have to capture a sophisticated argument on the first try, and I don't have to generate elegant prose -- I only have to get my half-baked ideas onto paper and once they are the page, I can see them for what they are and proceed to question, massage, and play with them while remaining perpetually open to the surprises that occur when I'm actually engaged in the writing process.
Now that I've described the big picture, let me suggest some specific strategies that may allow you to release yourself from any flawed beliefs you have about writing, sneak around your resistance, and slowly but surely ease into daily productivity:
Commit to daily writing
I know I say this every week, but it bears repeating. If you're not writing, block out 30-60 minutes every day, Monday through Friday, for writing. Don't just say you'll do it, really try it for two weeks. And don't forget to build in some accountability because trying to start a new habit alone is a recipe for misery and isolation. Whenever I work with people whose resistance comes from feeling disempowered about writing, I ask them to write every day for 30-60 minutes. When they actually write every day consistently, they are astounded to learn that: 1) they can write no matter how they feel, 2) a lot can be accomplished in a short amount of time, and 3) it's deeply intellectually satisfying to be close to their work on a daily basis.
Expand your sense of what "counts" as writing
I get lots of questions about what types of writing are acceptable during your daily writing time. If the pen is moving on the page (or your fingers on the keyboard), then you're writing. Drafting a manuscript "counts," but so does freewriting, generating field-notes, editing and revising, outlining, mind-mapping, describing a new idea, preparing a bibliography, consolidating reviewer comments into a list for revision, etc. In other words, anything that helps move a manuscript out the door "counts" as writing. Expanding your notion of what constitutes writing should help you reduce your resistance by making daily writing feel like a normal part of your every day routine.
Freewriting
I think freewriting has a bad rap among academics. I often hear people demean and belittle freewriting as just "writing about nothing" and I have to admit that at first, I rolled my eyes in the workshop when we did a freewriting exercise. But, according to Dannelle Stevens, the reason it works is because the initial writing "clears the dust off the road" and bring our attention to writing. When we then shift to focused freewriting, we inevitably experience up all manner of surprises. Your job is to get your butt in the chair and the pen moving. Once the writing starts, that's when the thinking (and the creative magic) happens. If you would like to make a game of it, try Dr. Wicked's Write or Die. Ten minutes on "kamikaze" mode is how I started writing this column!
Switch it up
I'm not sure how to explain it, but there's something that shifts in your brain when you move from writing on the computer to good old-fashioned pencil and paper. Many people find it helpful to change the mode of writing when they get stuck. It's really quite simple, just push your keyboard off to the side, grab a pencil and paper, and start writing longhand through the problem. The changed format and tactile stimulation will help you to think differently. Personally, I keep a can of markers and a giant newsprint pad next to my desk. When I'm stuck, I just lay on the floor with my markers (kindergarten style) and start mind-mapping. This technique never fails to produce remarkable surprises and often generates a breakthrough in my thinking.
Don't stare at a blank screen
If sitting down to write feels scary because you get locked up when you see a blank file on your computer screen, then don't look at it. Turn off your monitor or throw something over it (a sweater, a towel, a pillowcase, or whatever is handy). Remember, you control it, not the other way around. Then just start typing. Sometimes, just blocking the debilitating image of the blank screen can help you get started, and once you get started the ideas begin to flow. This technique also will help you to separate drafting from editing (a toxic combination). You can't see what you're writing, so you'll be less tempted to edit it as soon as it hits the page. You can also record your voice talking through the issue and transcribe your chatter as a means of getting words onto the page.
Ultimately, the goal of each of these strategies is to disrupt and undermine the flawed beliefs that writing happens after thinking and that you must be inspired to write. Instead, I'm urging you to understand your writing and thinking as inextricably intertwined so that you can quickly begin moving on your summer writing project.
Weekly Challenge
This week I challenge you to:
- Write 30-60 minutes each day.
- If you experience resistance, ask yourself: What is stopping me from writing? As a first step, try some organizational tips and tricks.
- If your resistance continues, ask yourself: What's going on here?
- If the answer is that you just don't feel like writing, or that you can't write because you're still figuring out your argument in your head, try 10 minutes of freewriting as a way to get yourself started.
- If opening a new document and staring at a blank page intimidates you, turn off your screen or cover it up.
- If you find yourself stuck during your writing time, try turning away from the computer and writing longhand, recording your voice, or mind-mapping for a little while.
- Try joining some community of writers to support you as you establish new writing behaviors and beliefs.
- Get to know the faculty developers on your campus! They are a tremendous resource to help you teach effectively, publish prolifically, and find some balance in your academic career.
I hope that this week brings you a renewed commitment to your daily writing, a sense of clarity about the connection between writing and thinking, and the confidence to know that you have the power to write every single day this week. No matter how you feel or where you are in your project, you can choose to sit down and get started today!
Peace and Productivity,
Kerry Ann Rockquemore
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/summer/summer6
Friday, July 02, 2010
28. Lewin, International Program Catches On in U.S. Schools
International Program Catches On in U.S. Schools
By TAMAR LEWIN
CUMBERLAND, Me. — SAT, ACT, A.P. ... I.B.?
The alphabet soup of college admissions is getting more complicated, as the International Baccalaureate, or I.B., grows in popularity as an alternative to the better-known Advanced Placement program.
The College Board’s A.P. program, which offers a long menu of single-subject courses, is still by far the most common option for giving students a head start on college work — and a potential edge in admissions. But the lesser-known I.B., a rigorous two-year curriculum developed in the 1960s at an international school in Switzerland, is now offered in more than 700 American high schools.
To earn an I.B. diploma, students must devote their full junior and senior year to the program, which requires English and another language, math, science, social science and art, plus a course on theory of knowledge, a 4,000-word essay, oral presentations and community service.
Here in Cumberland, Greely High School adopted the I.B. this year to make students more aware of the world beyond the United States.
“When our grads would visit from college, they’d tell us that while Greely gave them great academic preparation, they’d had no idea there was a big wide world out there,” said David Galin, Greely’s I.B. coordinator.
To that end, Greely’s I.B. 11th graders read literature from India (“God of Small Things”), South Africa ( “Master Harold and the Boys” ), what is now the Czech Republic (“The Metamorphosis”), Chile ( “The House of the Spirits” ), Egypt ( “Midaq Alley” ) and Colombia ( “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” ).
“Our students don’t have as much diversity as people in some other areas, so this makes them open their eyes,” said Deb Pinkham, the program’s English teacher.
The I.B. is used in 139 countries, and its international focus has drawn criticism from some quarters.
Some parents charge that it is anti-American and too closely tied to both the United Nations and radical environmentalism. From its start in 1968 until 1976, the program was funded partly by the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It is now associated with the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council, and until recently, it endorsed the Earth Charter, a U.N.-originated declaration of principles of sustainability.
“When there is a program at the school with a specific agenda, which in this case is the United Nations agenda, I have a problem with it,” said Ann Marie Banfield, who unsuccessfully opposed the adoption of the I.B. program in Bedford, N.H.
Others object to its cost — $10,000 a year per school, 141 per student and $96 per exam — and say it is neither as effective as the A.P. program nor likely to reach as many students.
“We have 337 kids, and 80 of them take at least one of our 16 A.P. classes,” said John Eppolito, a parent who opposes the planned introduction of the I.B. in Incline Village, Nev. “If we switched to the I.B., the district estimates that 15 kids would get a I.B. diploma in two years.”
I.B. opponents have created a Web site, truthaboutib.com, to serve as a clearinghouse for their views.
Many schools, and many parents, see the I.B. partly as a way to show college admissions offices that students have chosen a rigorous program, with tests graded by I.B. examiners around the world.
“I don’t think there is anyone who does not respect the I.B.,” said Panetha Ott, an admissions officer at Brown.”
Fewer colleges give credit for the I.B. than for A.P., but dozens give students with an I.B. diploma sophomore standing and some offer special scholarships.
The I.B. first took hold in the United States in private schools, but now more than 90 percent of the American high schools using the program are public — including some struggling urban schools where educators say it helps put low-income students on par with their richer peers.
Last fall, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave the program a three-year, $2.4 million grant to prepare low-income and minority students to participate in the I.B.
California and Florida have the most I.B. schools, and New England the fewest.
In Cumberland, some parents questioned the I.B.’s cost, but none complained about the program’s content, according to Chris Mosca, Greely’s principal.
“No question, the people who founded the I.B. were sitting in Geneva, post-World War II, thinking about how to ensure world peace, so the clear philosophical bent is that by integrating learning and understanding issues from multiple perspectives, we can promote global thinking,” he said. “But what sold me on the program was that it’s good pedagogy, that it really shows kids how things go together.”
Still, Mr. Mosca has no plans to eliminate the school’s Advanced Placement offerings.
“A.P. is great for content-based traditional learning,” he said. “It’s great for kids who like to memorize. But for more creative kids, who want to make those connections, there’s nothing like the I.B..”
On a spring Tuesday recently, Greely’s I.B. history class was working in small groups, analyzing the Suez crisis with original source documents from Israel, Egypt, Russia, the United States and the United Nations.
Emily Hill, presenting a document from the Russian foreign office’s Middle East desk, reminded the group that it was a secret memo, translated several times.
Ms. Hill, who said she was bored with school last year, said the I.B. program had been more interesting and challenging.
Because it is so rigorous, the I.B. is not for everyone. At Greely, only 21 juniors started the full program this year, and three subsequently shifted to a mix of I.B. and regular classes.
But those who stayed with it seemed enthusiastic.
“It’s like a little club of scholars,” Maggie Bauer, a junior, said. “It seems more real-world than how we used to learn, and it’s changed how we look at the world.”
Down the coast, where Kennebunk High School just graduated its first group of I.B. students, Sue Cressey, the I.B. coordinator, said that most of the students in the program the first year had thought about dropping out.
“There was a bad period after everybody flunked a biology exam,” she said. “I had to send a letter home to parents, reassuring them. It’s a new way of thinking, but the kids grew into it. I feel better about sending these kids to college than any group I’ve ever sent.”
The graduates, too, say they feel well prepared.
“In our Theory of Knowledge class, when we debated health care, my role was to take Rush Limbaugh’s position, which couldn’t be further from my own,” said Michael Tahan, one of the graduates.
“I.B. taught us how to think through a position, and support it,” he added. “And while I understand why some parents might worry that the program is international-based, I think it’s good for America for students to learn how others nations think.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/education/03baccalaureate.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1278108013-Q1s2CeEFN8qTNpjcI0G8Xw&pagewanted=print
By TAMAR LEWIN
CUMBERLAND, Me. — SAT, ACT, A.P. ... I.B.?
The alphabet soup of college admissions is getting more complicated, as the International Baccalaureate, or I.B., grows in popularity as an alternative to the better-known Advanced Placement program.
The College Board’s A.P. program, which offers a long menu of single-subject courses, is still by far the most common option for giving students a head start on college work — and a potential edge in admissions. But the lesser-known I.B., a rigorous two-year curriculum developed in the 1960s at an international school in Switzerland, is now offered in more than 700 American high schools.
To earn an I.B. diploma, students must devote their full junior and senior year to the program, which requires English and another language, math, science, social science and art, plus a course on theory of knowledge, a 4,000-word essay, oral presentations and community service.
Here in Cumberland, Greely High School adopted the I.B. this year to make students more aware of the world beyond the United States.
“When our grads would visit from college, they’d tell us that while Greely gave them great academic preparation, they’d had no idea there was a big wide world out there,” said David Galin, Greely’s I.B. coordinator.
To that end, Greely’s I.B. 11th graders read literature from India (“God of Small Things”), South Africa ( “Master Harold and the Boys” ), what is now the Czech Republic (“The Metamorphosis”), Chile ( “The House of the Spirits” ), Egypt ( “Midaq Alley” ) and Colombia ( “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” ).
“Our students don’t have as much diversity as people in some other areas, so this makes them open their eyes,” said Deb Pinkham, the program’s English teacher.
The I.B. is used in 139 countries, and its international focus has drawn criticism from some quarters.
Some parents charge that it is anti-American and too closely tied to both the United Nations and radical environmentalism. From its start in 1968 until 1976, the program was funded partly by the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It is now associated with the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council, and until recently, it endorsed the Earth Charter, a U.N.-originated declaration of principles of sustainability.
“When there is a program at the school with a specific agenda, which in this case is the United Nations agenda, I have a problem with it,” said Ann Marie Banfield, who unsuccessfully opposed the adoption of the I.B. program in Bedford, N.H.
Others object to its cost — $10,000 a year per school, 141 per student and $96 per exam — and say it is neither as effective as the A.P. program nor likely to reach as many students.
“We have 337 kids, and 80 of them take at least one of our 16 A.P. classes,” said John Eppolito, a parent who opposes the planned introduction of the I.B. in Incline Village, Nev. “If we switched to the I.B., the district estimates that 15 kids would get a I.B. diploma in two years.”
I.B. opponents have created a Web site, truthaboutib.com, to serve as a clearinghouse for their views.
Many schools, and many parents, see the I.B. partly as a way to show college admissions offices that students have chosen a rigorous program, with tests graded by I.B. examiners around the world.
“I don’t think there is anyone who does not respect the I.B.,” said Panetha Ott, an admissions officer at Brown.”
Fewer colleges give credit for the I.B. than for A.P., but dozens give students with an I.B. diploma sophomore standing and some offer special scholarships.
The I.B. first took hold in the United States in private schools, but now more than 90 percent of the American high schools using the program are public — including some struggling urban schools where educators say it helps put low-income students on par with their richer peers.
Last fall, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave the program a three-year, $2.4 million grant to prepare low-income and minority students to participate in the I.B.
California and Florida have the most I.B. schools, and New England the fewest.
In Cumberland, some parents questioned the I.B.’s cost, but none complained about the program’s content, according to Chris Mosca, Greely’s principal.
“No question, the people who founded the I.B. were sitting in Geneva, post-World War II, thinking about how to ensure world peace, so the clear philosophical bent is that by integrating learning and understanding issues from multiple perspectives, we can promote global thinking,” he said. “But what sold me on the program was that it’s good pedagogy, that it really shows kids how things go together.”
Still, Mr. Mosca has no plans to eliminate the school’s Advanced Placement offerings.
“A.P. is great for content-based traditional learning,” he said. “It’s great for kids who like to memorize. But for more creative kids, who want to make those connections, there’s nothing like the I.B..”
On a spring Tuesday recently, Greely’s I.B. history class was working in small groups, analyzing the Suez crisis with original source documents from Israel, Egypt, Russia, the United States and the United Nations.
Emily Hill, presenting a document from the Russian foreign office’s Middle East desk, reminded the group that it was a secret memo, translated several times.
Ms. Hill, who said she was bored with school last year, said the I.B. program had been more interesting and challenging.
Because it is so rigorous, the I.B. is not for everyone. At Greely, only 21 juniors started the full program this year, and three subsequently shifted to a mix of I.B. and regular classes.
But those who stayed with it seemed enthusiastic.
“It’s like a little club of scholars,” Maggie Bauer, a junior, said. “It seems more real-world than how we used to learn, and it’s changed how we look at the world.”
Down the coast, where Kennebunk High School just graduated its first group of I.B. students, Sue Cressey, the I.B. coordinator, said that most of the students in the program the first year had thought about dropping out.
“There was a bad period after everybody flunked a biology exam,” she said. “I had to send a letter home to parents, reassuring them. It’s a new way of thinking, but the kids grew into it. I feel better about sending these kids to college than any group I’ve ever sent.”
The graduates, too, say they feel well prepared.
“In our Theory of Knowledge class, when we debated health care, my role was to take Rush Limbaugh’s position, which couldn’t be further from my own,” said Michael Tahan, one of the graduates.
“I.B. taught us how to think through a position, and support it,” he added. “And while I understand why some parents might worry that the program is international-based, I think it’s good for America for students to learn how others nations think.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/education/03baccalaureate.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1278108013-Q1s2CeEFN8qTNpjcI0G8Xw&pagewanted=print
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
27. Rockquemore, Meet Your Bodyguard
Support for Summer Writers
Meet Your Bodyguard
June 21, 2010
By Kerry Ann Rockquemore
This summer, I'm dedicated to walking alongside all of you who are tackling big writing projects, trying to establish new writing routines, and needing to experience explosive productivity. If you’ve been following this column so far, you have a clear summer plan that you’ve discussed with your mentors and you have created some form of writing support and accountability. By now, you’re very likely facing a new challenge: the intense difficulty of actually writing every day. Unlike the academic year, when we can attribute any lack of daily progress to teaching and service, summer lays bare the reality that daily writing brings up all of our stuff. This week, I want to describe what happens to many people when they engage in daily writing and give that "stuff" a name and a face.
Identify Your Resistance
It's an odd situation, isn’t it? You’ve been waiting all year for the summer so you can have the time, space and energy for your writing. You've been fantasizing and yearning for three months of quiet and solitude so you can finally finish your Big Unfinished Project. You planned to write every day and maybe even imagined losing track of time while immersed in your writing projects. And yet, when you actually sit down to write, all of a sudden you experience an unquenchable desire to ____________ (fold your laundry, check your e-mail, organize your pens), or you suddenly realize you need to read one more ______ (book, article, report) before you can start writing, or _________ (insert seemingly urgent crisis) appears and distracts you, or maybe you find yourself gazing out the window and realize that life is too __________ (short, painful, unpredictable) to spend a sunny day inside writing. In short, procrastination, avoidance, and denial arise to distract and derail you.
Why is it that we so often find ourselves wanting to write, but then end up not writing at all? Most academic writers I know genuinely want to share their ideas and findings, and also need to complete writing projects in order to finish their degree, get a job, and/or obtain tenure. And yet, whenever we put our butt in a chair to write, along comes our resistance! Barbara Sher describes resistance (when you want to do something, but you just can’t seem to do it) as an innately human defense mechanism that is uniquely designed to protect us from doing anything dangerous. In other words, our resistance is like an internal bodyguard that rises up to keep us from any risky situation.
Having an internal bodyguard is mostly a good thing! On one hand, it keeps us from engaging in potentially harmful activities. On the other hand, our inner-bodyguard can't tell the difference between physical danger and emotional danger so he gets activated whether we are standing at the edge of a cliff or sitting down to write a book. Both feel dangerous and raise anxiety. In response, our bodyguard leaps into action to stop us from engaging in this activity in the form of procrastination, avoidance, and/or denial. He will do whatever it takes to stop us from jumping off that cliff, or engaging in what feels (for many of us) like an equally dangerous act: the production of knowledge.
Fear Drives Resistance
Wherever there's resistance, there's fear underneath it. So it might be helpful to ask yourself: When I sit in front of the computer to write, what fears emerge? It may be fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being publicly judged, fear of not being good enough, fear of being revealed as an impostor, fear of speaking truth to power, or fear that writing about other people’s pain will trigger your own. There’s no need to analyze or judge these fears, just to identify them, because knowing what you’re afraid of will help you to design strategies to maneuver around them.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to go into greater depth about the different types of resistance that are common among academic writers for the purpose of suggesting a broad array of tips, tricks, and strategies you can use whenever your bodyguard shows up for duty. If you keep in mind that he can't quite tell the difference between real and perceived danger and that he genuinely wants to do his job of protecting you, then you will quickly realize that the trick to sneaking around your resistance is to keep your inner bodyguard in a nice, comfortable, and relaxed state. For this week, it’s enough to imagine your resistance as a big bodyguard that's always ready to protect you, identify when he’s present and what he’s up to, and then look him in the eye, shake hands, and get acquainted.
Personally, I love the idea that my resistance is really my very own built-in bodyguard at work! First of all, it brings me a sense of compassion and understanding towards the procrastination, avoidance, and denial I experience when I sit down to write every morning. Each time I feel an irresistible urge to check Facebook, a sense I can’t write until I color-code my sock drawer, or suddenly imagine my current writing would be better if I read someone else’s book first, I can recognize that resistance as my bodyguard at work. Secondly, it frees me from the debilitating idea that if I could just fix one of my many personal flaws, then I would be free of any resistance to writing. There’s no sense in believing that if only I were more disciplined, more motivated, and more focused, writing would be quick, easy and enjoyable. That’s just not how it works. And finally, it's helpful to me to understand that my resistance is ALWAYS going to be with me, because it's part of my human packaging.
Weekly Challenge
This week I challenge you to:
* Write every day (Monday through Friday) for 30-60 minutes.
* Notice what happens when you sit down to write.
* Consider what it would be like to understand your procrastination, avoidance and denial as protective impulses.
* If you can’t seem to start writing, gently ask yourself: What am I afraid of?
* Identify all the ways your resistance manifests this week without judgment, shame or self-recrimination.
I hope this week brings you the willingness to identify your resistance as it occurs, a spirit of openness toward new ways of understanding your procrastination and avoidance behaviors, and a sense of compassion toward yourself in the process.
Peace and Productivity,
Kerry Ann Rockquemore
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/summer/summer3
Meet Your Bodyguard
June 21, 2010
By Kerry Ann Rockquemore
This summer, I'm dedicated to walking alongside all of you who are tackling big writing projects, trying to establish new writing routines, and needing to experience explosive productivity. If you’ve been following this column so far, you have a clear summer plan that you’ve discussed with your mentors and you have created some form of writing support and accountability. By now, you’re very likely facing a new challenge: the intense difficulty of actually writing every day. Unlike the academic year, when we can attribute any lack of daily progress to teaching and service, summer lays bare the reality that daily writing brings up all of our stuff. This week, I want to describe what happens to many people when they engage in daily writing and give that "stuff" a name and a face.
Identify Your Resistance
It's an odd situation, isn’t it? You’ve been waiting all year for the summer so you can have the time, space and energy for your writing. You've been fantasizing and yearning for three months of quiet and solitude so you can finally finish your Big Unfinished Project. You planned to write every day and maybe even imagined losing track of time while immersed in your writing projects. And yet, when you actually sit down to write, all of a sudden you experience an unquenchable desire to ____________ (fold your laundry, check your e-mail, organize your pens), or you suddenly realize you need to read one more ______ (book, article, report) before you can start writing, or _________ (insert seemingly urgent crisis) appears and distracts you, or maybe you find yourself gazing out the window and realize that life is too __________ (short, painful, unpredictable) to spend a sunny day inside writing. In short, procrastination, avoidance, and denial arise to distract and derail you.
Why is it that we so often find ourselves wanting to write, but then end up not writing at all? Most academic writers I know genuinely want to share their ideas and findings, and also need to complete writing projects in order to finish their degree, get a job, and/or obtain tenure. And yet, whenever we put our butt in a chair to write, along comes our resistance! Barbara Sher describes resistance (when you want to do something, but you just can’t seem to do it) as an innately human defense mechanism that is uniquely designed to protect us from doing anything dangerous. In other words, our resistance is like an internal bodyguard that rises up to keep us from any risky situation.
Having an internal bodyguard is mostly a good thing! On one hand, it keeps us from engaging in potentially harmful activities. On the other hand, our inner-bodyguard can't tell the difference between physical danger and emotional danger so he gets activated whether we are standing at the edge of a cliff or sitting down to write a book. Both feel dangerous and raise anxiety. In response, our bodyguard leaps into action to stop us from engaging in this activity in the form of procrastination, avoidance, and/or denial. He will do whatever it takes to stop us from jumping off that cliff, or engaging in what feels (for many of us) like an equally dangerous act: the production of knowledge.
Fear Drives Resistance
Wherever there's resistance, there's fear underneath it. So it might be helpful to ask yourself: When I sit in front of the computer to write, what fears emerge? It may be fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being publicly judged, fear of not being good enough, fear of being revealed as an impostor, fear of speaking truth to power, or fear that writing about other people’s pain will trigger your own. There’s no need to analyze or judge these fears, just to identify them, because knowing what you’re afraid of will help you to design strategies to maneuver around them.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to go into greater depth about the different types of resistance that are common among academic writers for the purpose of suggesting a broad array of tips, tricks, and strategies you can use whenever your bodyguard shows up for duty. If you keep in mind that he can't quite tell the difference between real and perceived danger and that he genuinely wants to do his job of protecting you, then you will quickly realize that the trick to sneaking around your resistance is to keep your inner bodyguard in a nice, comfortable, and relaxed state. For this week, it’s enough to imagine your resistance as a big bodyguard that's always ready to protect you, identify when he’s present and what he’s up to, and then look him in the eye, shake hands, and get acquainted.
Personally, I love the idea that my resistance is really my very own built-in bodyguard at work! First of all, it brings me a sense of compassion and understanding towards the procrastination, avoidance, and denial I experience when I sit down to write every morning. Each time I feel an irresistible urge to check Facebook, a sense I can’t write until I color-code my sock drawer, or suddenly imagine my current writing would be better if I read someone else’s book first, I can recognize that resistance as my bodyguard at work. Secondly, it frees me from the debilitating idea that if I could just fix one of my many personal flaws, then I would be free of any resistance to writing. There’s no sense in believing that if only I were more disciplined, more motivated, and more focused, writing would be quick, easy and enjoyable. That’s just not how it works. And finally, it's helpful to me to understand that my resistance is ALWAYS going to be with me, because it's part of my human packaging.
Weekly Challenge
This week I challenge you to:
* Write every day (Monday through Friday) for 30-60 minutes.
* Notice what happens when you sit down to write.
* Consider what it would be like to understand your procrastination, avoidance and denial as protective impulses.
* If you can’t seem to start writing, gently ask yourself: What am I afraid of?
* Identify all the ways your resistance manifests this week without judgment, shame or self-recrimination.
I hope this week brings you the willingness to identify your resistance as it occurs, a spirit of openness toward new ways of understanding your procrastination and avoidance behaviors, and a sense of compassion toward yourself in the process.
Peace and Productivity,
Kerry Ann Rockquemore
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/summer/summer3
26. Rockquemore, Why Aren't You Writing?
Support for Summer Writers
Why Aren’t You Writing?
June 28, 2010
By Kerry Ann Rockquemore
Last month, I was contacted by a faculty member I had met several years ago at a conference (I’ll call her Claire). Our conversation began like many I’ve had recently, with tears in response to a negative and critical annual review. Claire is a brilliant social scientist, incredibly hard-working, and passionately committed to her scholarship, her institution and her students. While Claire is an award-winning teacher, and far exceeded her college’s service expectations, her publication record was significantly below her department’s standards. Her chair was clear that her lack of publications was problematic and she left the meeting feeling an almost desperate sense of urgency to move several manuscripts forward this summer.
Of course, I suggested she make a summer plan and join a writing group that would motivate and support her throughout the summer. Last week, when I was writing about resistance to writing I couldn’t help but think of Claire, so I decided to give her a call. Unfortunately, she had done very little writing: only three short sessions in the 30 days since we last spoke. When I asked Claire what was holding her back, she had difficulty identifying anything specific. She readily acknowledged having more free time and fewer responsibilities than she did during the academic year. But despite knowing that this was an important summer for her to be productive and having a general sense that she should try to write every day, somehow her days kept flying by without any progress on her manuscripts.
I think there are lots of Claires out there. For me, she typifies both the most common and the most basic type of resistance: when you have a vague sense that you SHOULD be writing and you NEED to write (in order to finish your dissertation, get a job, win tenure and promotion, etc.) but you’re not putting conscious, direct, and intense energy into the actual act of writing. As a result, lots of other work gets completed and other people’s needs get met, but at the end of the day your manuscript is left untouched. This type of resistance is grounded in relatively simple technical errors that writers frequently make in the early stages of their careers. The good news is that this type of resistance is the easiest to resolve because a few simple tips and tricks will get your fingers to your keyboard (or pen to page).
What’s Holding You Back?
If Claire’s story sounds familiar, then I want to encourage you to reflect on your writing habits and gently ask yourself: What’s holding me back from developing a daily writing routine? I like to start with people’s writing habits first, and then move down into the psychological blocks (I’ll be tackling those one by one for the rest of the summer). For this week, I want you to focus on your writing behaviors. Maybe you haven’t set aside a specific time for your research and writing, or you’ve set aside the wrong time to write, or maybe you just have no clue how much time particular writing tasks take so you consistently underestimate the amount of time that writing requires. Maybe you imagine you have to do everything yourself and therefore very little gets done. Maybe the tasks you’ve set out for your writing time are too complex, so when you sit down to write you’re spending all your energy trying to figure out what exactly you’re supposed to be doing (instead of actually doing it). Maybe you don’t know what you need to do, or you knew but you forgot because you think planning and list-making are for anal retentive people and you’re more of a creative type. Or maybe your space is just so disorganized that you keep spending your writing time looking for things you need on your hard drive, in your files, or in your office.
Claire was committing all of these technical errors! Like Claire, many early-career academic writers remain steeped in writing habits that were formed when they were undergraduates. Because student writing is largely driven by external deadlines, few of us developed consistent writing practices, and instead, we end up waiting until shortly before a deadline, engaging in multi-day writing binges, and then avoiding writing again until we face another external deadline. This week, I want to encourage you to observe your current writing behaviors for these common technical errors. If you identify one of them, consider trying one of the following strategies:
Error 1: You haven’t set aside a specific time for your research. Block out 30-60 minutes in your calendar each day, Monday through Friday, and show up at the appointed time. Treat it with the same level of respect you would a meeting with someone else (start on time, end on time, turn your phone off, and only reschedule for an emergency).
Error 2: You’ve set aside the wrong time for writing. Too many people treat their writing as an activity they "hope" to have time for at the end of the day, after everyone else's needs have been met. If writing is the most important factor to your long-term success as a scholar, it should be given your best time of your day. If you’re just starting to develop a daily writing routine, try writing first thing in the morning (even if you’re not a morning person).
Error 3: You have no idea how long writing tasks take. The most common complaint I hear from academic writers is that everything takes far longer than expected. Keep track of your time, particularly for repetitive tasks. This will not only give you an accurate assessment of how long writing a proposal, constructing a table, or reviewing the literature actually takes, but it will also help you to set realistic expectations for the future.
Error 4: You think you have to do everything yourself. Ask yourself what tasks must be done by you and what tasks can be delegated to other people. Often there are many writing and research related tasks that can be delegated or outsourced to others (checking citations, proof-reading, editing, etc.). Don’t use "I don’t have a research fund or research assistants" as a reason for doing everything yourself. Sites like ODesk.com and Elance.com can provide quick and incredibly inexpensive assistance on a wide variety of writing tasks.
Error 5: The tasks you have set out are too complex. Take a piece of paper and pencil and map out whatever it is you need to do. When I feel overwhelmed by a big task, I write the big-overwhelming-thing on the right side of the paper and a stick figure (me) on the left side. Then I work my way backwards from the overwhelming thing to myself by asking: What are the steps that need to be accomplished to complete this? I keep breaking it down into smaller and smaller steps until I’ve reached the tasks I can do today. It will also help you to uncover if there are aspects of a project that you don’t know how to do, so you can pinpoint areas where you will need to seek assistance.
Error 6: You can’t remember what you have to do. Make a list. Get all of the things you need to do out of your head and onto a piece of paper in one place. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, electronic, or synced with some gadget or gizmo. A note card, post-it note, or your paper planner will do fine to capture all of your to-do tasks. Start the week with a 30 minute planning meeting where you determine what needs to be done for the week and place each of those items in a specific time block in your calendar. If they don’t all fit (and they won’t), then figure it out how to delegate, delete, or renegotiate the deadlines on the least important items.
Error 7: Your space is disorganized. Set aside time to organize your writing space in a simple and easily maintainable manner. I recommend Julie Morgenstern’s Organizing from the Inside Out. It’s a quick read and will help you to develop a simple and sustainable way to organize your office. If you find yourself working on multiple computers and can’t keep your electronic files straight, consider ways that you can either access your other computers when you’re away from them (GoToMyPC) or keep all your computers automatically synced (Mobile Me).
Each of the strategies will be super-charged by attaching support and accountability. For example, daily writing is easier when you have a writing buddy or accountability partner. Organizing your office doesn’t have to be drudgery or a solitary task: partner up with another disorganized colleague and help each other. Or better yet, find a highly organized person (they often love to organize others) and offer to exchange their organizing skills with some skill that you have in abundance. And as always, there are tons of professionals who are happy to nag, coach, edit and/or organize you if you have more money than time. Once you learn and implement a few new writing strategies, you will either be off to the races with your writing, or your resistance will resurface in new and more frightening ways (more on that next week).
Weekly Challenge
This week I challenge you to:
* Write every day for 30-60 minutes.
* Identify what (if any) technical errors are holding you back from writing each day.
* Experiment by trying one new strategy this week.
* If you feel reactive to trying new strategies to increase your writing time, ask yourself: what beliefs are keeping you from experimentation?
* If additional resistance emerges, welcome it with curiosity, engage it in conversation, and identify the behaviors and the feelings associated with it (you may even want to keep a resistance log).
I hope this week brings you a spirit of curiosity about your writing habits, a willingness to try new techniques, and the increased engagement that comes with spending time each day with your summer writing project.
Peace and Productivity,
Kerry Ann Rockquemore
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/summer/summer4
Why Aren’t You Writing?
June 28, 2010
By Kerry Ann Rockquemore
Last month, I was contacted by a faculty member I had met several years ago at a conference (I’ll call her Claire). Our conversation began like many I’ve had recently, with tears in response to a negative and critical annual review. Claire is a brilliant social scientist, incredibly hard-working, and passionately committed to her scholarship, her institution and her students. While Claire is an award-winning teacher, and far exceeded her college’s service expectations, her publication record was significantly below her department’s standards. Her chair was clear that her lack of publications was problematic and she left the meeting feeling an almost desperate sense of urgency to move several manuscripts forward this summer.
Of course, I suggested she make a summer plan and join a writing group that would motivate and support her throughout the summer. Last week, when I was writing about resistance to writing I couldn’t help but think of Claire, so I decided to give her a call. Unfortunately, she had done very little writing: only three short sessions in the 30 days since we last spoke. When I asked Claire what was holding her back, she had difficulty identifying anything specific. She readily acknowledged having more free time and fewer responsibilities than she did during the academic year. But despite knowing that this was an important summer for her to be productive and having a general sense that she should try to write every day, somehow her days kept flying by without any progress on her manuscripts.
I think there are lots of Claires out there. For me, she typifies both the most common and the most basic type of resistance: when you have a vague sense that you SHOULD be writing and you NEED to write (in order to finish your dissertation, get a job, win tenure and promotion, etc.) but you’re not putting conscious, direct, and intense energy into the actual act of writing. As a result, lots of other work gets completed and other people’s needs get met, but at the end of the day your manuscript is left untouched. This type of resistance is grounded in relatively simple technical errors that writers frequently make in the early stages of their careers. The good news is that this type of resistance is the easiest to resolve because a few simple tips and tricks will get your fingers to your keyboard (or pen to page).
What’s Holding You Back?
If Claire’s story sounds familiar, then I want to encourage you to reflect on your writing habits and gently ask yourself: What’s holding me back from developing a daily writing routine? I like to start with people’s writing habits first, and then move down into the psychological blocks (I’ll be tackling those one by one for the rest of the summer). For this week, I want you to focus on your writing behaviors. Maybe you haven’t set aside a specific time for your research and writing, or you’ve set aside the wrong time to write, or maybe you just have no clue how much time particular writing tasks take so you consistently underestimate the amount of time that writing requires. Maybe you imagine you have to do everything yourself and therefore very little gets done. Maybe the tasks you’ve set out for your writing time are too complex, so when you sit down to write you’re spending all your energy trying to figure out what exactly you’re supposed to be doing (instead of actually doing it). Maybe you don’t know what you need to do, or you knew but you forgot because you think planning and list-making are for anal retentive people and you’re more of a creative type. Or maybe your space is just so disorganized that you keep spending your writing time looking for things you need on your hard drive, in your files, or in your office.
Claire was committing all of these technical errors! Like Claire, many early-career academic writers remain steeped in writing habits that were formed when they were undergraduates. Because student writing is largely driven by external deadlines, few of us developed consistent writing practices, and instead, we end up waiting until shortly before a deadline, engaging in multi-day writing binges, and then avoiding writing again until we face another external deadline. This week, I want to encourage you to observe your current writing behaviors for these common technical errors. If you identify one of them, consider trying one of the following strategies:
Error 1: You haven’t set aside a specific time for your research. Block out 30-60 minutes in your calendar each day, Monday through Friday, and show up at the appointed time. Treat it with the same level of respect you would a meeting with someone else (start on time, end on time, turn your phone off, and only reschedule for an emergency).
Error 2: You’ve set aside the wrong time for writing. Too many people treat their writing as an activity they "hope" to have time for at the end of the day, after everyone else's needs have been met. If writing is the most important factor to your long-term success as a scholar, it should be given your best time of your day. If you’re just starting to develop a daily writing routine, try writing first thing in the morning (even if you’re not a morning person).
Error 3: You have no idea how long writing tasks take. The most common complaint I hear from academic writers is that everything takes far longer than expected. Keep track of your time, particularly for repetitive tasks. This will not only give you an accurate assessment of how long writing a proposal, constructing a table, or reviewing the literature actually takes, but it will also help you to set realistic expectations for the future.
Error 4: You think you have to do everything yourself. Ask yourself what tasks must be done by you and what tasks can be delegated to other people. Often there are many writing and research related tasks that can be delegated or outsourced to others (checking citations, proof-reading, editing, etc.). Don’t use "I don’t have a research fund or research assistants" as a reason for doing everything yourself. Sites like ODesk.com and Elance.com can provide quick and incredibly inexpensive assistance on a wide variety of writing tasks.
Error 5: The tasks you have set out are too complex. Take a piece of paper and pencil and map out whatever it is you need to do. When I feel overwhelmed by a big task, I write the big-overwhelming-thing on the right side of the paper and a stick figure (me) on the left side. Then I work my way backwards from the overwhelming thing to myself by asking: What are the steps that need to be accomplished to complete this? I keep breaking it down into smaller and smaller steps until I’ve reached the tasks I can do today. It will also help you to uncover if there are aspects of a project that you don’t know how to do, so you can pinpoint areas where you will need to seek assistance.
Error 6: You can’t remember what you have to do. Make a list. Get all of the things you need to do out of your head and onto a piece of paper in one place. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, electronic, or synced with some gadget or gizmo. A note card, post-it note, or your paper planner will do fine to capture all of your to-do tasks. Start the week with a 30 minute planning meeting where you determine what needs to be done for the week and place each of those items in a specific time block in your calendar. If they don’t all fit (and they won’t), then figure it out how to delegate, delete, or renegotiate the deadlines on the least important items.
Error 7: Your space is disorganized. Set aside time to organize your writing space in a simple and easily maintainable manner. I recommend Julie Morgenstern’s Organizing from the Inside Out. It’s a quick read and will help you to develop a simple and sustainable way to organize your office. If you find yourself working on multiple computers and can’t keep your electronic files straight, consider ways that you can either access your other computers when you’re away from them (GoToMyPC) or keep all your computers automatically synced (Mobile Me).
Each of the strategies will be super-charged by attaching support and accountability. For example, daily writing is easier when you have a writing buddy or accountability partner. Organizing your office doesn’t have to be drudgery or a solitary task: partner up with another disorganized colleague and help each other. Or better yet, find a highly organized person (they often love to organize others) and offer to exchange their organizing skills with some skill that you have in abundance. And as always, there are tons of professionals who are happy to nag, coach, edit and/or organize you if you have more money than time. Once you learn and implement a few new writing strategies, you will either be off to the races with your writing, or your resistance will resurface in new and more frightening ways (more on that next week).
Weekly Challenge
This week I challenge you to:
* Write every day for 30-60 minutes.
* Identify what (if any) technical errors are holding you back from writing each day.
* Experiment by trying one new strategy this week.
* If you feel reactive to trying new strategies to increase your writing time, ask yourself: what beliefs are keeping you from experimentation?
* If additional resistance emerges, welcome it with curiosity, engage it in conversation, and identify the behaviors and the feelings associated with it (you may even want to keep a resistance log).
I hope this week brings you a spirit of curiosity about your writing habits, a willingness to try new techniques, and the increased engagement that comes with spending time each day with your summer writing project.
Peace and Productivity,
Kerry Ann Rockquemore
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/summer/summer4
25. Rockquemore, No More Post-Summer Regret
Support for Summer Writers
No More Post-Summer Regret
June 7, 2010
By Kerry Ann Rockquemore
Summer has finally arrived! Throughout the spring semester, I kept hearing from beleaguered faculty and graduate students who couldn’t wait for summer so they could "get some writing done." And yet, every August I hear from just as many folks lamenting about how another summer has passed by and, once again, they failed to make progress on their intellectual projects. As we begin the summer break, I’m feeling motivated to help eradicate end-of-summer regret among academic writers! To that end, I am dedicating this column as a week-by-week support system for your summer writing and productivity.
Summer Challenges for Writers
While we often fantasize about the freedom that summer represents, there are some important challenges to consider during the summer months. The most important challenge is the deception of unstructured time. Freedom from teaching, committee meetings, advising, and the day-to-day drama of campus life can create the delusion that we have lots of time. Imagining that we have infinite time can lead us to procrastinate and/or belabor tasks unnecessarily. Additionally, for those of you who aren’t daily writers during the academic year, you may experience the challenge of heightened expectations. In other words, putting off writing until the summer can create intense pressure (particularly for tenure-track faculty) that you must complete a year’s worth of writing in three short months.
Childcare poses yet another challenge to summer writing. Changed schedules for school-aged children, gaps between the end of school and beginning of summer camps, and the increased expense of additional childcare during the summer months can leave some parents struggling to manage additional childcare and a rigorous writing schedule. Finally, some of you are simply exhausted from the intensity of the academic year and, more than anything else, feel the need to address all the neglected areas of your physical health, social life, and personal relationships during the summer months.
While it’s important to understand the challenges academic writers face during summer breaks, they point to the keys for a productive summer. I believe those are: 1) knowing what you need as a human being and what you need to accomplish as a writer and researcher, 2) creating a realistic plan to meet all of your needs, and 3) connecting with the type of community, support and accountability that will sustain you through the summer months. I think each semester should start with a plan, so for this week I want to encourage you to set aside 30-60 minutes, grab your calendar and a piece of paper, and develop a clear and concrete plan.
How to Create A Summer Plan
If you have a plan for your writing and personal goals this summer, you automatically lower the possibility of experiencing end-of-summer regret because you will have proactively and consciously chosen activities that lead to specific endpoints. A summer plan allows you to define your goals, identify the activities that will help you achieve them, and provide you with the confidence that when August rolls around, you will have accomplished all the things that are important to you and your future success.
Step #1: Start with your goals
Start by writing down all of your personal and professional goals for the summer. I make sure all of my goals are SMART goals. In other words, I try to state my goals in Specific Measurable, Attractive, Realistic and Time-Framed statements. So, instead of listing "make progress on my book" and "learn how to cook" as goals, I write "complete the first ugly draft of chapter 2 by July 1st" and "take one cooking class each month." Listing your goals is the fun part, so enjoy it.
Step #2: Outline the tasks that are required to achieve your goals
For each of your end-of-summer writing goals, determine all the tasks necessary to achieve the goal. For example, if one of your goals is to submit that R & R that's been sitting on your desk all year, then ask yourself: what specific tasks do I need to complete in order to revise and resubmit my manuscript? Your list could look something like the following:
* Read the editor's and reviewer's comments.
* Cry a little.
* Create a list of necessary revisions.
* Read for revision.
* Re-analyze data.
* Revise the writing and update tables.
* Submit to a professional editor.
* Draft a cover letter explaining how you addressed the reviewers comments.
* Mail/upload the revised manuscript to the journal.
* Celebrate the submission.
Each of your goals will require specific tasks in order to be accomplished by August. If you’re a visual person (as opposed to a list-maker), than try mapping out a flow chart of each of your goals. Some will be simple and others will be complex, but the main point is that if all you're doing is setting goals without identifying all the small steps that are necessary to achieve them, you are unlikely to finish the summer with much progress or productivity.
Step #3: Map your tasks onto time
Here's where it always gets ugly. Take a long hard look at your calendar and make sure you have blocked out all of your summer commitments (vacation, moving, conference travel, childcare, summer teaching, etc...). What is left is the time you realistically have to complete all the tasks necessary to accomplish your goals. Use your best estimate as to how long each task will take and find specific weeks in your calendar when this work will get done. I estimate the tasks associated with the R&R example would take me four weeks. So I have to find FOUR WEEKS in my calendar to complete all the tasks in order to meet my goal.
I believe that this is where things get ugly because inevitably, you will have more tasks than will fit into 12 weeks. In fact, your summer break may suddenly seem shockingly short! Don't worry, this happens to everyone, and the point of this exercise is to force this realization in early June (as opposed to August) because now you can proactively make decisions about the work that doesn’t fit into your calendar by scaling back your goals, re-negotiating deadlines, requesting additional support, prioritizing, delegating, and/or letting some things go. Whatever you decide, you will feel far more empowered making your decisions in advance then simply hoping you'll meet all of your goals and then ending another summer disappointed and frustrated over all the work that didn't get done.
Step #4: Execute the plan on a daily basis
Once you have a plan for your summer activity, it's up to you to actually do it! I sit down at the beginning of each week to review what writing tasks I have planned for that week and figure out what specific day and time I will complete them (aka The Sunday Meeting). We are all motivated by different things, so try to figure out what motivates YOU and build it into your daily life. Personally, I am motivated by treats, so when I finish my writing each day, I get a treat. My treats don’t have to be expensive or extravagant, they’re just a little dose of personal pleasure for a job well done.
Step #5: Create support and accountability
Summer is a time when you will need extra support and accountability because the structured activities of the semester (events, classes, and meetings) cease. This is an ideal time to start a writing accountability group, create a write-on-site group, join the monthly writing challenges on my discussion forum, and/or try one of the Academic Ladder's Writing Clubs. Whatever you do, don't try to go it alone! There are many wonderful communities of support that already exist and you have the power to create them in your own local environment.
As always, adapt these steps to fit your life circumstances and personal needs. And once you have a plan, I encourage you to share it with your mentors to get their suggestions, feedback, and ideas. This way, no matter how your 2009-2010 academic year ended, you (and your departmental mentors) will know that this summer, you are a scholar with a clear plan.
The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to:
* Take 30-60 minutes to sit down and construct a plan that provides all the rest, fun, support, and community you need to be productive this summer.
* Find or create a community of support that will keep you motivated throughout the summer months.
* Share your summer plan with at least one of your mentors for feedback.
I hope that going through the process of making a summer plan will help you to identify your priorities, clarify how all of your personal and professional needs can get met, and energize you for the summer months.
Peace and Productivity,
Kerry Ann Rockquemore
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/summer/summer1
No More Post-Summer Regret
June 7, 2010
By Kerry Ann Rockquemore
Summer has finally arrived! Throughout the spring semester, I kept hearing from beleaguered faculty and graduate students who couldn’t wait for summer so they could "get some writing done." And yet, every August I hear from just as many folks lamenting about how another summer has passed by and, once again, they failed to make progress on their intellectual projects. As we begin the summer break, I’m feeling motivated to help eradicate end-of-summer regret among academic writers! To that end, I am dedicating this column as a week-by-week support system for your summer writing and productivity.
Summer Challenges for Writers
While we often fantasize about the freedom that summer represents, there are some important challenges to consider during the summer months. The most important challenge is the deception of unstructured time. Freedom from teaching, committee meetings, advising, and the day-to-day drama of campus life can create the delusion that we have lots of time. Imagining that we have infinite time can lead us to procrastinate and/or belabor tasks unnecessarily. Additionally, for those of you who aren’t daily writers during the academic year, you may experience the challenge of heightened expectations. In other words, putting off writing until the summer can create intense pressure (particularly for tenure-track faculty) that you must complete a year’s worth of writing in three short months.
Childcare poses yet another challenge to summer writing. Changed schedules for school-aged children, gaps between the end of school and beginning of summer camps, and the increased expense of additional childcare during the summer months can leave some parents struggling to manage additional childcare and a rigorous writing schedule. Finally, some of you are simply exhausted from the intensity of the academic year and, more than anything else, feel the need to address all the neglected areas of your physical health, social life, and personal relationships during the summer months.
While it’s important to understand the challenges academic writers face during summer breaks, they point to the keys for a productive summer. I believe those are: 1) knowing what you need as a human being and what you need to accomplish as a writer and researcher, 2) creating a realistic plan to meet all of your needs, and 3) connecting with the type of community, support and accountability that will sustain you through the summer months. I think each semester should start with a plan, so for this week I want to encourage you to set aside 30-60 minutes, grab your calendar and a piece of paper, and develop a clear and concrete plan.
How to Create A Summer Plan
If you have a plan for your writing and personal goals this summer, you automatically lower the possibility of experiencing end-of-summer regret because you will have proactively and consciously chosen activities that lead to specific endpoints. A summer plan allows you to define your goals, identify the activities that will help you achieve them, and provide you with the confidence that when August rolls around, you will have accomplished all the things that are important to you and your future success.
Step #1: Start with your goals
Start by writing down all of your personal and professional goals for the summer. I make sure all of my goals are SMART goals. In other words, I try to state my goals in Specific Measurable, Attractive, Realistic and Time-Framed statements. So, instead of listing "make progress on my book" and "learn how to cook" as goals, I write "complete the first ugly draft of chapter 2 by July 1st" and "take one cooking class each month." Listing your goals is the fun part, so enjoy it.
Step #2: Outline the tasks that are required to achieve your goals
For each of your end-of-summer writing goals, determine all the tasks necessary to achieve the goal. For example, if one of your goals is to submit that R & R that's been sitting on your desk all year, then ask yourself: what specific tasks do I need to complete in order to revise and resubmit my manuscript? Your list could look something like the following:
* Read the editor's and reviewer's comments.
* Cry a little.
* Create a list of necessary revisions.
* Read for revision.
* Re-analyze data.
* Revise the writing and update tables.
* Submit to a professional editor.
* Draft a cover letter explaining how you addressed the reviewers comments.
* Mail/upload the revised manuscript to the journal.
* Celebrate the submission.
Each of your goals will require specific tasks in order to be accomplished by August. If you’re a visual person (as opposed to a list-maker), than try mapping out a flow chart of each of your goals. Some will be simple and others will be complex, but the main point is that if all you're doing is setting goals without identifying all the small steps that are necessary to achieve them, you are unlikely to finish the summer with much progress or productivity.
Step #3: Map your tasks onto time
Here's where it always gets ugly. Take a long hard look at your calendar and make sure you have blocked out all of your summer commitments (vacation, moving, conference travel, childcare, summer teaching, etc...). What is left is the time you realistically have to complete all the tasks necessary to accomplish your goals. Use your best estimate as to how long each task will take and find specific weeks in your calendar when this work will get done. I estimate the tasks associated with the R&R example would take me four weeks. So I have to find FOUR WEEKS in my calendar to complete all the tasks in order to meet my goal.
I believe that this is where things get ugly because inevitably, you will have more tasks than will fit into 12 weeks. In fact, your summer break may suddenly seem shockingly short! Don't worry, this happens to everyone, and the point of this exercise is to force this realization in early June (as opposed to August) because now you can proactively make decisions about the work that doesn’t fit into your calendar by scaling back your goals, re-negotiating deadlines, requesting additional support, prioritizing, delegating, and/or letting some things go. Whatever you decide, you will feel far more empowered making your decisions in advance then simply hoping you'll meet all of your goals and then ending another summer disappointed and frustrated over all the work that didn't get done.
Step #4: Execute the plan on a daily basis
Once you have a plan for your summer activity, it's up to you to actually do it! I sit down at the beginning of each week to review what writing tasks I have planned for that week and figure out what specific day and time I will complete them (aka The Sunday Meeting). We are all motivated by different things, so try to figure out what motivates YOU and build it into your daily life. Personally, I am motivated by treats, so when I finish my writing each day, I get a treat. My treats don’t have to be expensive or extravagant, they’re just a little dose of personal pleasure for a job well done.
Step #5: Create support and accountability
Summer is a time when you will need extra support and accountability because the structured activities of the semester (events, classes, and meetings) cease. This is an ideal time to start a writing accountability group, create a write-on-site group, join the monthly writing challenges on my discussion forum, and/or try one of the Academic Ladder's Writing Clubs. Whatever you do, don't try to go it alone! There are many wonderful communities of support that already exist and you have the power to create them in your own local environment.
As always, adapt these steps to fit your life circumstances and personal needs. And once you have a plan, I encourage you to share it with your mentors to get their suggestions, feedback, and ideas. This way, no matter how your 2009-2010 academic year ended, you (and your departmental mentors) will know that this summer, you are a scholar with a clear plan.
The Weekly Challenge
This week, I challenge you to:
* Take 30-60 minutes to sit down and construct a plan that provides all the rest, fun, support, and community you need to be productive this summer.
* Find or create a community of support that will keep you motivated throughout the summer months.
* Share your summer plan with at least one of your mentors for feedback.
I hope that going through the process of making a summer plan will help you to identify your priorities, clarify how all of your personal and professional needs can get met, and energize you for the summer months.
Peace and Productivity,
Kerry Ann Rockquemore
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/summer/summer1
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