Other signs have included….

I hardly participated in Donors’ Choose even though it is a really worthwhile organization. (By the way, today I donated $377 as a 10% contribution of our final donation number. Thanks so much to everyone who donated anything at all!!)

I hardly even read blogs anymore, let alone write. And this wasn’t making me feel very good.

I have been feeling for a long time like I was letting SciWo down by not meeting my blogging commitment, and by not finding time to comment on her posts.

I have been feeling like I was letting down my other blogging colleagues at Scienceblogs, and elsewhere, especially Zuska (my first blogging friend), Isis, Maria, Jane, Abel, Scicurious, Janet, the doods at DrugMonkey, Pal, Jenny F. Scientist, Dr. Shellie, Lab Cat, and lots of other folks I’m overlooking here (sorry! ).

Like Jane, when she signed off in May, I had hoped to be able to keep blogging through all the “critical points” in an academic’s career, maybe try to make transparent (or visible? interesting how those are opposites) some of the process of being an academic.

But if my job is (as I wrote here)

My job is to think creatively about gender and engineering education, and to think about, write, and teach in ways that result in a change in how engineering education is done in the US

then I haven’t really been doing a good job at this, still. And part of the problem is, I realized a few weeks ago, that I have no internal conversation at the moment. None. All my thinking over this semester feels as though it has been for other people — for my students, for readers of my articles, for colleagues…. and none of it really has been for me. I didn’t appreciate how much this would matter to an introverted person.

When I’ve been able to gather some mental quiet around me, it has pretty much been to simply hear silence — to have some of the both physical and mental noise around me cease. No students complaining about their lives or problems or how my course isn’t living up to their expectations. No colleagues or students needing things from me. No “advice” from senior folks about how I should focus on research then followed up with a complete absence of help from them running interference on my behalf so I could focus on my research. When I heard this silence, I was loathe to fill it with even my own thoughts.

I need to stop. I need to refocus on how to do this job in a way that is balanced — and I don’t mean research vs. teaching, or work vs. home. Those are dichotomies that are too simplistic. I mean in a way that makes me feel as though I am focusing on a balance of important and urgent, that I have been able to do at least some of the things in life that are important and matter, whether at work or at home, whether in the classroom or out of it, instead of always feeling like I’m fighting fires wherever I am.

And part of this, I think, means acknowledging that blogging — for the moment, in this way, at least — doesn’t have a place in me anymore.

I hope my blogging groove will come back sometime. After all, I started blogging to find community, and I found it. I hope to keep some of it (through Twitter and email and such). I started blogging at Scienceblogs to have a bigger microphone to talk about being a feminist and an engineer and I used although really very occasionally. For the short term, I’ll still roll-over the hosting for Scientiae, although if you’re interested in being the uberhost and carrying it onwards through 2010, do give me a shout-out. (And I might be thinking of a way to turn Scientiae posts into a book… what do you think? Send me an email too…)

But maybe the actual act of blogging has helped me all it can for now. I have good community, and I am starting to develop my voice in other fora. So, perhaps for now, I think I need to start refocusing on important, rather than urgent.

So, for your reading, comments, emails, posts, and support over the almost 2 years I’ve been co-blogging here, and over my 3.5 years total blogging, a very grateful thank you.

And to SciWo: for your generosity in sharing your blog and turning it into our blog, for your support online and off, for your blogging the good fight, and for your continued friendship, I am even more grateful. Thank you so much. *Hugs to you and Minnow.*

See you all ’round the interwebz. Thanks again.

Anyway, her new blog is STEM Equity, and you should also totally read her first book, Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of the American Building which is similarly brilliant even though it has rather the most boring title ever (sorry, Amy). You should go read all of them.

January
To Detroit to look at the SWE Archives

To RTP for ScienceOnline2009

February
To Arizona, invited to a workshop on engineering and ethics education

To Washington DC for a panel on research in engineering education

March
To Kentucky, to do some intense PEER mentoring in engineering education

April
I think nowhere

May
To Madison for my dad’s retirement

To a room at Purdue for a week’s development of a overhauled course

June
To Washington DC for JAM

To Amsterdam and Delft for a workshop on gender and engineering

July
To Detroit again to work in the SWE archives

To Grafton, New York for a workshop on engineering and identity

To British Columbia via Colorado and 5 national parks by car for our vacation

August
Back to Indiana from BC via Minnesota and the Minnesota Science Museum

September
Nowhere

October
To Long Beach for the SWE National Conference

To San Antonio for the Frontiers of Education Conference

November
To Atlanta for the National Women’s Studies Association conference

December
Nowhere, thank god.

No wonder I’m tired. I think doing this much travel is not normal (or is it, for assistant professors?) After sending this list to my dad, I promised myself that I would not travel so much next year. For realz. And I have a whole bunch of carbon offsets to buy.

He had killed 14 women all together, and injured 9 more women and 4 men.

The women who died could have been anyone. They could have been your friends, your mothers, your sisters, your lovers, your daughters, your neighbors, your students, your teachers, maybe even you.

They were killed because they were women.

Remember those who died in the Montreal Massacre:

Genevieve Bergeron, 21, was a 2nd year scholarship student in civil engineering.
Helene Colgan, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and planned to take her master’s degree.
Nathalie Croteau, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering.
Barbara Daigneault, 22, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and held a teaching assistantship.
Anne-Marie Edward, 21, was a first year student in chemical engineering.
Maud Haviernick, 29, was a 2nd year student in engineering materials, and a graduate in environmental design.
Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31, was a 2nd year engineering student specializing in engineering materials.
Maryse Laganiere, 25, worked in the budget department of the Polytechnique.
Maryse Leclair, 23, was a 4th year student in engineering materials.
Anne-Marie Lemay, 27, was a 4th year student in mechanical engineering.
Sonia Pelletier, 28, was to graduate the next day in mechanical engineering. She was awarded a degree posthumously.
Michele Richard, 21, was a 2nd year student in engineering materials.
Annie St-Arneault, 23, was a mechanical engineering student.
Annie Turcotte, 21, was a first year student in engineering materials.

Please honour the white ribbon as a symbol of the fight against violence against women.

So here, I’m acknowledging to you that I’m out here, regretting not blogging, but having no interest really in blogging for the moment. Just trying to get through my days in RL. And kind of warning you that I probably won’t be blogging for quite a bit still. And a little bit hoping that admission that will help me feel not guilty any maybe I’ll feel like blogging again then.

Here’s hoping. Hope all is well with you out there, and that you’re sending in good posts to Cherish for the November Scientiae…

So…. 24 Sciencewomen blog readers have already donated $1517 to needy projects, and if you can help us make it a little farther, I will donate 10% of our final tally on top.

The criteria:
1) That we make it to $1750 before the challenge closes on Oct 31; OR (that’s right, OR!)
2) That 10 more people make donations, no matter how small.

So either a generous person can give ~$230 on their own, or a whole bunch of people give $5 or whatever you can afford. Even better if 10 people give $25, because then we’d meet both criteria and even more!

Remember our other cool prizes too. Thanks for your consideration.

I have so many people who need to meet with me (I know! Lowly me!) that my days are filled with meetings, or getting to meetings, or class. This means there is really not enough time to get any work done, such as prep for such meetings or such class time. So I end up working in the evenings prepping for meetings and class, which means all the other requests that come in amongst the 100+ email messages I get every day get ignored.

The only way I can get myself out of this mess is by dumping stuff on grad assistants or post-docs, and I don’t even have time to prep them properly, or give them the tools they need to be able to handle the work. So the result is that they are forced “sink or swim” and it looks like I don’t care enough to help them.

I know; guilt again. I’m really good at that.

Then there’s the problem where I think I have given some task to my research staff, and they need me to sign off on something, whereas I would rather they take the ball and run with it, only talking to me when they really need help. Instead, I have this sense they need reassuring, which again makes me feel like they need more of me than I have time to give.

At the end of the day, I feel torn between the need to educate my research staff in various research practices, in helping them learn to be self-sufficient, in developing the skills to work in groups together, and the need to have them just get the work done.

It’s not a pretty place. I have significantly more sympathy for junior faculty advisors of grad students than I used to.

But those senior people… they should really know better, right?

Things have been busy over the last couple of weeks – even more than usual. I started listing out the stuff I’ve been doing, but rather than making me feel like I had gotten a lot done, it was just making me tired, so I deleted it.

Instead, I’m going to share a thought with you that I had yesterday. Well, maybe more than one.

Some of you may know (or remember) that I’ve been seeing a therapist off and on over the last 3 years. I started going for reasons other than why I kept going – when I moved to West Lafayette from Illinois, my visits went on hiatus because I couldn’t rationalize the long drive to Normal IL (yes, ironic that my therapist was there, right?) and back, let alone find the time during the week. And I felt guilty that I wasn’t going to therapy anymore because I felt like I must be avoiding it, and all that made me feel worse.

This semester, I actually made a commitment to myself to start going again, if only because I knew I was in some unhealthy work patterns and I knew I needed some help. So I started seeing this therapist my doctor recommended. I go Mondays at 1.

Yesterday was Monday at 1, so I had my appointment. And I don’t remember how we started talking about this, but we were talking about how I get into these patterns at night where I say I’m just going to do some small work-related thing, and then all of a sudden it’s 2 hours later and I still haven’t done that one small thing, but a whole bunch of other work instead.

The therapist started off asking me why I thought I did this. I was thinking about a particular case on Sunday night where I said I would write this student’s letter of recommendation and then call it a night. 10:15 pm rolls around and I still haven’t done that letter. Instead, I had sent off a lot of emails and uploaded a lot of files associated with our graduate recruitment efforts — we have delegated various tasks across the committee members and I needed to send out the information I had from the last chair so they could get their work done. I felt I was being a bottleneck. And maybe I was procrastinating a little on the letter of recommendation because I wasn’t too sure what I should write.

The therapist immediately started trying to “solve” my problem for me – that I should get this student to write his own letter for me and I would review it and edit it and send it back to him for his review, because I shouldn’t be spending more time thinking about his career than he does. (Or something similar.) I felt like this was not actually helpful to me – I have my graduate students write the letters they wish I could write for them when we’re done working together as a device to have a conversation about priorities and goals. I in fact already have a pattern of letters I write for undergrad students who I meet in my large 120-person course. I said I wasn’t finding this direction of questioning helpful, as this was only just one instance of the “I’m just going to do one thing and then do a whole bunch of other stuff but not that one thing” problem. I felt the problem was in this pattern, rather than in the letter of recommendation per se.

Then she hooked onto the “procrastination” word I had used, and asked me why I was procrastinating. I corrected myself, and said what I had a hard time doing was ordering work in a useful way — both of these tasks needed to get done, but was the order in which I did them the most efficient or productive way? I wasn’t sure, and I feel I need help in organizing these tasks.

That led her into telling me about the difference between “important” and “urgent” and she wanted to draw that square where some things are important but not urgent, and some things are urgent but not important. You know the one – like this.

I also objected to this “simple” distinction – I don’t think it’s always that easy to determine which things are “important.” Important to whom? If this student is a first-generation college student and this scholarship is critical to his being able to stay in school and become a role model engineer, maybe my letter of recommendation is the most “important.” If I’m holding my colleagues back from doing their work to recruit students to the department, and the result is that key colleagues don’t have any students to work with next year, maybe *that* is the most important.

I feel like I don’t have any problems knowing in my life what is “important.” Important to me is spending time with my husband and now Maggie, is gardening and cooking food for others made from what we have grown, is video chatting with my mom, is reading books that will help me think differently about my research.

What I have a hard time doing is keeping those things in mind over the day, when there are a million fires to put out for other people, or I’ve gotten so behind in my 700+ items in my inbox that people are now coming to my office door to ask for things (no wonder I prefer to work at home). I need some skillz to separate out the wheat from the chaff, and then some help from senior colleagues who can run interference for me.

Then the conversation took a weird turn, and started in on my problems with guilt. I confess excessive guilt is something I wrestle with, and I have a very catch-22 cycle where I don’t let myself escape my guilt. The therapist kept pointing out how much guilt I was laying on myself, which just made me feel more and more guilty. As in, “this shitty situation you find yourself in? It’s your fault, and you’re keeping yourself in it.” Then she started saying things like, “When you’re on your deathbed, you want to look at your life and see the things that really matter to you, your values” which I heard as “when you’re on your deathbed, no one ever wishes they had spent more time at work, and if you’re not careful, you’re going to be one of those people.” Also another gem: “It hurts your husband to see you beating up on yourself like this.” Great — guilt to get me to recognize my guilt. Thanks for helping me beat up on myself.

So pause this story for a moment, while I tell the second thread of the tale.

Mondays are also yoga nights. An hour and a quarter of ass-kicking yoga is really good for me, and I wish I could go more often. I missed last week because I had a 4-day migraine, and the week before that I can’t remember why I missed. Anyway, yesterday I went. The term is broken up into 2 courses, and the yoga instructor tends to apply themes to the courses, probably so it is not so dull for her to teach. Last spring we “did” chakras; this course we’re doing various “rules of yoga” that she’s reading from a book. Yesterday was the fifth rule, about intentionality and desire, and linked to the solar plexus chakra. I confess I hold little faith in all this spirituality stuff but I find it interesting to think about, especially in contrast with my usual techno-rational days.

So yesterday was about intentionality and desire. And in the middle of the session, it suddenly hit me how useful this idea was in my current predicament. What I was allowing myself to do was be directed by others’ intentions, rather than by my own intentionality. Maybe I could think about changes I need to make in how I do my job not as “change your patterns or you will hurt others as well as yourself” but “be more intentional in how you do your job” with no consequences. It may seem like a small switch, and yes, I suspect I could connect guilt with failure of intentionality (I’m gifted like that) but so far, I’m actually finding the distinction helpful.

So. Bringing the two stories together…. Rather than beating myself up over how I do things wrong, I can praise myself for successfully being more intentional in how I spend my time. So my mantra for the week will be, “I am grateful for doing my work in intentional ways.” We’ll see how that goes, but already I don’t feel the heavy weight of guilt sitting in my chest the way I usually do.

Maybe I should tell my therapist to go visit with my yoga instructor.

———–
S3A: Workshop: Feminist Engineering Education: Building a Community of Practice
Sunday October 18 from 6-9 pm in El Mirador East
(requires advance registration)

Abstract: As a result of a series of papers and special sessions held at FIE between 2004 and 2008, a community of CSET educators interested in exploring feminist pedagogies has formed at FIE. Past participants in these sessions have expressed a desire to learn more about what makes a set of pedagogies “feminist.” At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of research papers at FIE that draw on feminist research methods or topics. This workshop is designed to meet the needs of members of the FIE community who have some experience with feminist pedagogies or research methods, and who are looking to develop intellectual relationships with others also working in engineering educational research. We will discuss the history of feminist education and feminist research methods in the US, including a connection to science and engineering education; participants will then work in small groups focusing on a sub-topic (feminist pedagogies, feminist research methods, and feminist research topics/content). We invite participants to bring part of a project (such as a syllabus or course plan, assignment, class or research project, research question or protocol) to this workshop; some time will be dedicated to the guided design/redesign of this project.

Presenters: Donna Riley, Susan Lord, Trevor Harding, Alice Pawley
Paper: http://fie-conference.org/fie2009/papers/1236.pdf

M2B: Special Session — From Active Learning to Liberative Pedagogies: Alternative Teaching Philosophies in CSET Education
Monday October 19 from 10-11:30 pm in El Mirador West

Frontiers in Education has a history of special sessions focused on alternative and/or feminist pedagogies, and they have tended to attract a wide range of participants with varying levels of experience with such pedagogies. This special session is designed as an introduction to various alternative teaching philosophies and pedagogies, building on the past interest in such sessions and on the increasing interest in exploring philosophies of education in the context of engineering education. We will introduce participants to various theoretical frameworks of alternative pedagogies through a summary model, and facilitate small group discussions of three cases where alternative pedagogies have been or could be implemented. It is hoped that this introductory session will make such alternative pedagogical ideas more accessible to a larger number of CSET educators, allowing them to better participate in the rich and thriving conversation developing at FIE on using philosophies of engineering and education to envision new models for CSET education.

Presenters: Donna Riley, Susan Lord, Trevor Harding, Cindy Finelli, Alice Pawley.
Paper: http://fie-conference.org/fie2009/papers/1231.pdf

Little did I know that, later that week, I would actually *eat* those fungi. And I haven’t died yet.

My friend and colleague Donna Riley is visiting our department on sabbatical this semester, and turns out to be a marvelous cook, knitter, and, apparently mushroom hunter. She has already come across some chantrelles in the forest, and it was she who noted that the pretty fungi were not only startling to look at, but good to eat.

They’re apparently “chicken of the woods” fungi, also known as “sulfur shelf,” and if you aren’t allergic to them (so far we think we’re not), you can eat them.

So we launched forth ~ 5 pm and drew some curious stares from folks standing at the bus stop while we reached off and broke off a large chunk.

Donna came back to our house with us, and whipped up a vegetarian pasta with “chicken of the woods” chunks.

Verdict: they were a little dry and crumbly, but did indeed taste like chicken. And came with the added bonus of having involved foraging mushrooms on campus. However, we probably didn’t need the size of chunk we broke off — I think it was fun to try some of, but now we’re not sure what to do with the rest of it. Make broth? I’m a little afraid of that prospect.

There’s more still on that tree by physics… anyone have any good recipes out there? Figured out how to deal with the dry/crumbly texture?

In general, the whole experience was very cool. Except that people who thought we ate weird food before are sure to be more steadfast in their convictions from now on.