Five Things My 18-Year-Old Self Would Never Have Guessed about Working in Academia

I was a freshman in college when I first realized that I might be able to get a job doing what I loved: reading and talking about books. I sat in my classes, stared up at my professors, and thought, “You read and write and talk about books all day for a living!? How can I do what you’re doing?” And then I asked them. Half of the professors in my department worked to dissuade me from applying to English literature PhD programs–the programs themselves can be long, isolating, and impoverishing, and your odds of landing a tenure-track job at a thriving school are very, very small. The other half of my undergraduate professors were more encouraging. I listened to those ones. Ten-ish years later, I ended up with a doctorate, and I won the lottery and landed a job as a teaching professor at a growing university in Tampa, Florida.

In my seven years at a flagship state school and going-on-four years at a mid-sized private institution, I have learned a lot about working in academia (at least in the US). Here are a handful of daily realities that my wide-eyed, eighteen-year-old self have been hard pressed to believe. 

1. A lot of professors who got their PhDs and jobs before 2008 (this is only sort of an arbitrary date) know a lot about their area of research–no surprise there–but may not know much about anything else. This includes teaching. My graduate program had pretty significant support for teaching, but a lot of it was opt-in (i.e. not required), and a lot of my colleagues who’d been teaching at the university for decades were just discovering things like rubrics. There seems to have been this widely-held idea that if you learned a lot about organic chemistry or 16th century Castilian literature, you would automatically be the best person to teach bright young minds about that subject. But teaching is, of course, a skill that requires ongoing learning itself (as anyone in an education department has always known). If you ever had a professor who was really good at teaching, they probably worked really hard at it. It almost certainly wasn’t the focus of their training.

2. Professors do a lot of what’s called “service” work. I had zero idea of what this was as an undergraduate–let me break it down. First of all, it includes a lot of committee work. We have committees to make decisions about curriculum, to advocate for good salaries and benefits, to run programs, to grow the number of students in our majors, and to write mission statements, among dozens of other things. I currently serve on a university-wide and department-level committee, and there are also college-level committees, and all of these committees sprout the occasional ad-hoc subcommittee. Second of all, it includes a lot of unpaid, unrecognized work to perpetuate basic academic functions. For example: letters of recommendation. Everyone needs letters of recommendation for everything in academia. Julie Schumacher wrote an entire novel about this called Dear Committee Members. (It’s satire.) Another example: peer reviews. Once you place an article in a peer-reviewed journal, you’ll also get asked to do peer reviews yourself. This often involves doing extra reading in and maybe beyond your field of research and writing up detailed comments and making tough decisions that might significantly impact people’s careers. Service work is incredibly important, but most of us are at least a little grouchy about it sometimes.

3. Professors often get tapped, are elected, or self-nominate for middle-management positions, like chairs of departments, committee chairs, or program directors. Remember what I said about professors only being guaranteed to have training in their super specialized field? Some professors are amazing middle-managers. Some are not. It’s not something we’re trained to do in the vast majority of cases. Honestly, it isn’t something that most of us want to do, because it means managing a bunch of people who also may or may not have had much work experience outside of academia, and they might not know how to be a good colleague. In fact, they might pride themselves on being a difficult colleague, and if they have tenure, no one can touch them–at least not just for being difficult.

4. The teaching can be rough. Even the tenured faculty in my department teach at least half of their load in the general education writing course sequence. My whole load defaults to gen ed writing courses, though I occasionally get to teach a gen ed literature course. It isn’t just English that offers a lot of lower level courses to less-than-eager students. Math departments have College Algebra. Communication has speech. Strictly based on my own experience, it seems to me much of the teaching in institutions of higher learning happens in courses most students would prefer not to take. The result is that much college-level teaching ends up being a sales job, at least if you want to convince your students to care. I show up three times a week and do a song and dance to try to get the guy in the back row to take at least one earbud out of his ear so he can half listen to me explain how the peer review process works while he watches sports highlights on YouTube. Okay, this is unfair. Most of my students are very pleasant and make a concerted effort to pay attention in class. But all the same, most of them aren’t exactly pumped for a required writing class, and I don’t blame them. Most of them have been at least mildly traumatized in a past literature or language arts class. In any case, it’s a far cry from my rosy vision of sitting in a solemn circle and marveling at W. H. Auden with a bunch of rapt undergraduates.

5. You cannot beat the schedule. I teach what is by most standards a pretty heavy load of courses, but even so, I am actually in a classroom 12-16 hours a week for 15-week semesters, including finals. Although I have lots of meetings, probably about half of my work hours in any given week are such that I can flexibly schedule them. I did the math of how many hours I spent grading last semester, and it was a lot. Those papers aren’t going to grade themselves! But once grades are submitted, they’re done and dusted. I could take on additional classes during my breaks if I wanted extra money, but so far, I haven’t needed to, so no thank you! I do work pretty much year round given my class prep, research, and service work, but the geographically tethered parts of the job are concentrated around those 30 weeks when I’m teaching. That leaves (count ‘em!) 22 weeks a year when I likely don’t have to go to campus to report for anything. It has left a lot of time to do things like be a foster parent and a bio parent, knit, travel, cook, read, write, and train for the occasional 5k.

For the most part, I really like my job, though it isn’t at all what I imagined being an English Professor to be. Since I got my full-time faculty job, I’m not sure that I’ve ever had the kind of conversation about a poem or a novel that my college-aged self imagined would be my daily fare if I made it this far. But the main thing that I’ve learned is that being a professor is a job, and just like any job, it’s work. But you cannot beat the breaks, so if you can get a PhD without debt and don’t mind getting a little weird from spending six years in graduate school, think about it!

When You Are So Angry with Your Child You Could Scream, or Worse

Three Steps to Greater Emotional Stability

When I was going through foster parent training, I nodded along to all of the sessions about how trauma impacts child development and behavior. Of course, kids who have experienced trauma have a harder time physically regulating themselves when they’re upset because of the way that the brain reacts to traumatic events–their emotional “platforms” are shakier than those of kids who haven’t had those hard experiences. Yes, kids who have experienced trauma are thus more likely to lash out in all kinds of ways and in different contexts. I had done so much training as a volunteer advocate in the legal system for foster kids and had read the books and talked to lots of foster parents in the years leading up to this moment, and I knew this stuff. I had soaked it all in, and I was ready. Or so I thought.

Now, a couple of years later, I’m a parent of a foster teen and a toddler (my biological child), and I also teach some more-or-less entitled college students. Despite knowing all of the things that provoke emotionally-motivated antisocial behaviors, I still find myself raging. I have a reputation for being “chill” and “calm,” and I’m not an angry person by nature. But when my kids push the right buttons, it’s like Mr. Hyde takes over from Dr. Jekyll: I get flushed, my heart rate spikes, and I marshall a half dozen cutting remarks and consequences to devastate my little opponents. Occasionally, I might storm out of a room and shut a door with a little extra oomph. Okay, slam the door. It isn’t a great look. I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I didn’t have the great support structures and resources that I do. 

As parents, we can’t control our kids. We can do our best to support, nurture, influence, guide, and lead, but ultimately, they make their own decisions. We all know this, perhaps especially if we parent kids with unique needs. It can be easy, though, in a difficult moment to forget that we do have a lot of power over something crucially important: our own responses. If we aren’t emotionally steady, we can’t expect to be able to help our kids stabilize. But remembering and practicing our power to regulate our own emotional storms can make all the difference in how we parent.

Before I get into the three steps, I want to emphasize that nothing I’m writing here is new. Most of these ideas are synthesized from things I’ve learned from the work of Bruce Perry, Karen Purvis, Dan Siegel, Tina Payne Bryson, Michaeleen Doucleff, and lots of other people who have done great academic research or investigative journalism looking at parenting and emotions. They’re also all things that have been corroborated by other parents. Although these steps are more likely reminders than revelations to the readers here, they’re offered in a spirit of encouragement that we can keep taking small steps toward growth. 

Step One: Don’t Add Fuel to the Fire.

If you are in a spot where your child is dysregulated and feel yourself getting emotionally unsteady, do your best to secure the situation so that everyone is safe, and then get out of there. It’s especially challenging to down-regulate your own strong feelings in a high energy situation, so if you can step into another room, go for a walk or do some other movement-based activity (see Siegel and Payne Bryson’s The Whole-Brain Child), or even just close your eyes, take some deep breaths, and picture yourself somewhere more calming (Doucleff has a great bit on this in Hunt, Gather, Parent), it will give your body and brain a chance to get out of fight, flight, or freeze mode so that you aren’t just reacting, but can act from a place of calm. If you have a prayer or meditation practice, this is a great time for it. 

If you can manage it, it can also be great to practice diffusion and redirection techniques. If you can use humor when confronted with an unsettled child, it can have an incredibly powerful deescalating effect on a tense situation. It also can backfire–practice and knowing yourself and the child(ren) in question is crucial to this approach’s success. For me, if I am too mad, the humor often ends up being mean, so I only use this technique when I am mildly annoyed—not when I’m furious. 

I have found that it is helpful to have a range of strategies for calming myself so that I can try to do things appropriate to the context. For example, if my toddler is screaming and not sleeping and it’s really starting to get to me, I will get into a child's pose or other relaxing yoga pose on her bedroom floor and practice breathing. I can’t do that at the grocery store, though I may still close my eyes and take a couple of breaths before intervening with a distraught child. I sometimes will also just not engage with a child if I’m afraid I might react in anger. I might say, “I’m not going to talk about that now,” and ignore the behavior that’s triggering a strong response in me while I collect myself.

Step Two: Call for Backup

Call a partner, family member, or friend for whatever support they can give you in the moment. The key is to try to ensure that anyone you ask for help will have a calming effect on you, as well as your child, if that’s relevant. And be specific with your ask. Will a phone call with a sympathetic listener help you to restabilize for whatever you need to do next? Can you get someone to watch the kid(s) while you go outside for a few minutes? 

If you have a spouse or partner parenting with you, it is great if you can get into a rhythm of noticing and helping to cover for each other when emotions are running high. My husband and I have had lots of conversations about what child behaviors trigger strong feelings in us and what the other person can do to help (for ex., give a hug, take over childcare while I take over dinner, do bedtime, make a joke, do NOT make a joke, etc.). We’ve gotten a lot better at tapping in or asking to tap out when we need that emotional break, and it’s helped both of us to stay more emotionally steady with the kids and with each other.

Step Three: Reflect and Practice

It is probably unfair to call this a step, because in reality, learning strategies for emotional regulation is more of an ongoing life project than a quick trick. 

For one thing, emotional disruptions can take a lot of forms, and they likely will change as kids grow. For example, while my eighteen-month-old has mostly stopped trying to stick her fork in the little vent above the oven (did you know that your oven door had a little vent? because I sure didn’t), she has started occasionally scratching and hitting me. It does not feel good.

So, the work of noticing things that trigger big feelings in you as a parent likely isn’t ever completely over. It might be helpful to have a therapist or friend periodically check in with you on this, or at least have someone who knows it’s something you’re working on and is willing to listen when you want to talk about it. 

Then, in the moments when you have some space to reflect, identify concrete things you can do to calm yourself when you’re upset, and practice them when you are calm. This will feel silly. Do it anyway. Identify a type of breathing that you want to do, and practice it so that the feeling of it is familiar. You might try a breath prayer or mantra. You could try Doucleff’s visualization exercise, imagining yourself in a place that calms you.

You might also work with your kids to set a protocol of sorts for when things get heated. You could designate a cool down spot in your home, or a word or phrase that signals to your children that you need a break. You can invite the child to come up with their own cool down spot and to use the phrase when they want to take a pause, too. Having some shared ownership of this strategy will hopefully promote buy-in. 

(Of course the child may very well follow you to your cool down spot and continue to be extremely provoking. If they do, I’d say, close your eyes, breathe, and try your best to ignore them while you take a minute to check in with yourself. If calming down is impossible with your kid there…maybe go lock yourself in the bathroom. And have a conversation again later when everyone’s calm about how you can make your system better.)

Rupture and Repair

As humans, we’re going to make mistakes along with our kids. But there is an opportunity in those mistakes, too: when we emotionally lose it and model inappropriate behavior, we can apologize, identify what we’ve done wrong, and ask for forgiveness and how we can make it better. As the psychologist Edward Tronik and many researchers and parents after him have found, the process of restoring a relationship after a break is crucial to developing secure attachment. Our growth in emotional stability may or may not directly lead to greater emotional stability in our kids. But exercising and focusing on our own power to calm ourselves has the double benefit of self-control and modeling the kinds of responses we’d like to see our kids imitate one day.

If you have additional strategies you use, or if you try any of these things out and have feedback, please leave a message! I’d love to hear from you.

Want to Do Well in College? Go to Office Hours.

If you attend college in the US, your professors are likely required to hold office hours. Office hours are pretty much what they sound like: a time when professors are available in their offices to talk with students. They typically happen at the same time every week and are listed in the syllabus. They tend to be pretty unstructured, so it can be helpful to know some of the things that professors and students use them for and why you should consider braving the initial awkwardness to just go.

Why You Should Go to Office Hours

Let’s start with what’s in it for you.

Going to office hours is a great way to help your professors get to know you. You might benefit from this in several ways:

• Most importantly, you may want to apply for opportunities for which you will need to list a professor as a reference or have a professor write you a letter of recommendation. It is not fun to be in a position where you need a letter but aren’t sure any of your professors know who you are. If you go to office hours, they’re more likely to remember you, especially if you talk about the specific things that you’re interested in doing with your life that their class might help you with. If you want to go to graduate school, you should definitely go to office hours with professors in your academic discipline. But it’s worth going even in your gen ed courses, too. I teach a lot of writing courses for freshmen and sophomores, and I often get asked to be a reference for opportunities that pop up early in their college careers.

• If you’ve made a decent impression, your professor might be more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if you need to ask for extra help (like for an extension on an assignment). Going to office hours demonstrates effort, and it doesn’t hurt to look like you’re trying. And professors like having students come to office hours (so long as they aren’t coming to argue about their grades–see below).

• They might be able to give you more tailored help on your work for the class, which might help you learn more and boost your grade. The students who see me during office hours early in the semester often get a jumpstart on their writing because we can identify problems specific to their projects and can work together toward finding good solutions.

Going to office hours can also help you get up to speed more quickly if you’ve missed some classes or assignments. I have found that when students fall behind in a class, they sometimes try to fade into the background rather than asking for help. But your professors have probably already noticed that you’re missing work, or if we haven’t yet, we will when grades come due. You will probably save yourself some headaches if you can push through the initial embarrassment, own up to the fact that you are behind, and ask for help to get caught up. And you know what? Your professors have probably also fallen behind on things on occasion. We might be sympathetic.

Advice for Making Office Hours Work for You

Now that you’ve been convinced to go to office hours, here are some tips for getting the most out of it.

First, look up what each professor says about office hours. Some have online sign-ups. Some are fine with drop-ins. Some might have specific things that they encourage you to talk about during office hours and others that they discourage. Look up what the syllabus or course website says, and act accordingly.

Once you’re in your prof’s office, start with questions about big picture things and work your way down to lower order ones. You can always hash out questions about punctuation or scheduling over email, but it’s harder to have an email conversation about whether your research topic is appropriate for a class assignment. When you go to office hours, prioritize the research topic question, or whatever the big-picture equivalent is for the class in question.

Office hours aren’t necessarily just to talk about coursework. Your professors likely know people in the community or at the university who might be good connections for you, or they might know about resources or opportunities on campus that you might benefit from. You might let your professor know if you’re looking for specific types of opportunities, even if it seems unlikely that they’d help. You never know.

If you are sick, it’s nice to offer to do a video call during office hours. I appreciate when students who are ill reach out to catch up, and I appreciate it even more when they ask about meeting over video. It’s so easy to do, and it’s nice to minimize viral exposure.

Never go to office hours just to argue about a grade. You might be frustrated about a grade, and that is totally fine. But if you go with the sole purpose of arguing to get points back and the professor hasn’t specifically invited you to, you likely will not make a great impression, and it may backfire. If you really are concerned about a grade and want to go to office hours to talk about it, here is what I recommend:

• Give yourself time to cool down. Though it may feel urgent to fix your grade immediately, it very rarely is. Give yourself a few hours or a day before having a conversation about a grade you’re unhappy with.

• Go in fully informed. Make sure that you have read the entire assignment prompt, any rubrics or other assessment criteria, and any feedback that you’ve been given on the assignment. You will be inclined to read with the eye toward making the best case for yourself, which is a good exercise, but I’d also encourage you to think through the worst case. If you come into the meeting being able to say, “I see how I missed the mark on this, this, and this,” that will go a long way toward establishing your credibility as a reasonable human who owns their mistakes, especially if you are asking for a grade to be reconsidered in some other specific regard.

• Go in genuinely wanting to learn two things: 1) what content or skills are being assessed that you need to work on (and how to work on them, if you aren’t sure), and 2) how the professor is evaluating the content or skills so you can better meet their expectations. Prioritize 1). I have yet to meet a college professor who likes grading, and most of the ones I know spend a lot of time on it and don’t love having to spend additional time adjudicating grades with hostile students. Most of us have been doing this long enough that we cannot be bullied into raising your grade. What we do care about is students learning what we’re teaching. If you can show that you care about learning the content for the class and not just getting an A, most professors will find it easier to work with you.

Finally, for whatever reason you decide to go to office hours, do be mindful of the time. You should totally go to office hours, but also know that you are one of dozens if not hundreds of students who might also be waiting in the hall or hoping for a quick response to an email. Keep things friendly, but also focused and professional.

Professors, what else do students need to know about office hours? And students, what other questions do you have? I’d love to hear from you!

Review: ‘Digital Minimalism’ by Cal Newport

An Overview

Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (2019) argues that 1) most of us have blithely sacrificed significant chunks of our wellbeing to social media and other digital tools that capitalize on our attention, and  2) we can use these digital tools against the grain of how they're designed to be used–which mostly is to get us spending as much time as possible clicking around and putting our eyeballs on more ads. Newport makes a powerful case for carefully evaluating what digital tools we actually want to let in our lives and being vigilant about how we use them, and he lays out a clear roadmap for how to do that. 

For those interested in regaining some control from Big Tech over their digital lives, Newport lays out a two part plan: a one month digital detox followed by an evaluation and reintroduction of digital tools that add real benefits to your life.

The rules for the digital detox are pretty simple: cut out all optional digital technologies for a month, and use that time to reinvest in other leisure activities. If you have to use a technology (like email for work or texting to coordinate picking up kids from school), then schedule time to use it and/or set up a do not disturb that only lets in the notifications you really need. Delete all social media and other unnecessary apps from your phone.

Through his blog, Newport found around 1600 people to pilot the digital detox, and he draws upon their  experiences as he gives advice about this process in the book. It is well worth reading in full to learn from some of those insights if you want to do the digital detox. Crucially, you must have some compelling leisure activities to replace phone and browser habits during the detox period. Newport shares examples of people reading books, going to plays, playing instruments, listening to records, doing house projects, and meeting up with family or friends.

After a month without compulsive browsing and refreshing, Newport argues, you will have more clarity about what you actually miss from social media and other digital tools. From that knowledge, you can strategically reincorporate the things that will actually add value to your life. It doesn’t really matter what choices you make here, according to Newport, so long as you are intentional: the process will lead to higher levels of satisfaction and meaning in your life, and may also reduce the anxiety and depression that our digital lives often seem to foster.

I will just note here that Newport seems to think that his suggestions can be more or less universally applied, and though he tries pretty hard to attend to limit cases, there are some that he doesn’t acknowledge or explore as fully as he could. That isn’t what the book is about, though. If you find yourself with a lot of space to reflect and have the wherewithal to attempt some pretty significant behavior change, though, I think this book has a lot to offer.

Digital Minimalism: Nicole’s Version

I’ve read Digital Minimalism twice, first in the summer of 2022 shortly after my daughter was born, and then again at the start of this new year. A family member introduced me to Newport’s work starting with Deep Work, which was hugely a helpful resource for me during graduate school, and then later gave me their copy of this book. I toggled between the print book and an audiobook from the library, and I enjoyed both. 

I did the digital detox during my first read. I didn’t think that I had a huge phone problem, but I did check Instagram pretty much first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and I was thinking a lot about what I would post next about the baby, and I was trying to read email while breastfeeding. As I read this book, I started looking at these habits and being uncomfortable with how they were distracting me from being present to my family, and I think were also contributing to a sense of general unease and sense of being public and on all the time which I didn’t love. As a part of the digital detox, I made several changes that stuck:

• Deleting Instagram from my phone and only checking it on my desktop if I’m trying to figure out the next time the Corner Club, our local coffee shop/bar, has karaoke.

• Deleting Goodreads and Letterboxd from my phone.

• Deleting email apps from my phone.

• Rearranging my phone so that the first window had the apps I could / should use regularly–like the Libby and Kindle apps–and hiding the ones I needed on there but found distracting–like Safari.

I also initially deleted Chrome from my phone, which I’ve added back now that I’m reselling because Google image search is clutch. But I broke the habit of searching for every little thing on my phone, and I generally don’t use Chrome to browse the Internet, so I am glad that I had the break.

The main thing that I tried to replace my unstructured phone time with was reading in my Kindle app. That and trying not to check my phone when watching movies (which had become embarrassingly difficult!!) were my only two, really. And I do think it majorly upped my reading game!

I wanted to reread it this year because I had been thinking about the Financial Independence community he writes about and wanted to revisit that, but it did also help me to reevaluate my systems for checking 1) email, texts, and What’s app (which is on my phone but doesn’t send me notifications, so sometimes I forget to check it for a loooong time), 2) reselling apps (which I look at too often), and 3) the status of my $10 worth of Yum China stock that I bought on Cash App, which has TANKED and is steadily dropping. I probably should go check that again right now…

But maybe the biggest surprised from this reread was a breakthrough with something I haven’t been able to figure out–the news.  

Too Minimal?

After deleting Instagram, I found that that was where I had been learning most of what I knew about what was going on in the world. As a teacher who theoretically models digital literacy as a part of good citizenship, I do feel like I have an ethical or moral obligation to read the news. It seems like a really important part of living in a democracy, at least in theory. At the same time, I just have very little intrinsic motivation and no good systems for checking the news. I find it tempting to use digital minimalism as an excuse to avoid things I just would rather not think about. I have all of my news-related newsletters skip my inbox and go to a folder, and I’m pretty sure that I haven’t checked that folder in at least four months and for sure am not going to wade through that backlog now. I feel so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things happening in the world and by how reductive my understanding is of the historical and political context of most news stories, so unless someone tells me to look something up, or I'm on the New York Times front page (on my way to the games) and notice an irresistible headline, I often miss what’s going on.

Newport is a huge advocate of scheduling the time we spend online or doing email. I had planned to spend the last half hour-ish of my workday on Friday going through the folder that I’d set up with local news outlets’ newsletters, but I almost always skipped it in favor of doing other things. 

My big insight was that I might be too attached to the idea of reading news articles or listening to long in-depth daily podcasts, and my resolution for 2024 is to try to not worry about them. Instead, I have a two-part plan: 1) Listening to our community radio station more consistently when I’m in the car. They feature a pretty good mix of national and regional news. Along with headlines, the station has a lot of call-in shows and interviews with people in the community involved with important issues, plus they carry some of the national NPR shows, so I suspect I can learn a lot there even though I don’t spend all that much time in the car. And the music shows are consistently good and satisfyingly eclectic in a way Spotify will never be. 2) Doing the NYT weekly news quiz. The couple of weeks that I’ve been doing these two things, I’ve been pretty surprised by how different the coverage is from these two spaces. It isn’t going to give me a comprehensive sense of what’s going on in the world, but I’m hoping it’ll be better than the extremely sparse diet of news media I’ve been living off of since I got off Instagram.

Thanks, Cal!

My favorite thing about Digital Minimalism is that it validates my disinclination to live online. I don’t like email, I don’t like texting, I don’t like the pressures of social media, and I really appreciate the permission that Newport gives to let go of feeling like I should make myself like them. I have gone so far as to copy Newport’s model from Deep Work of aspiring to a reputation of being slow at responding to texts and emails, and I think I’ve mostly succeeded at this. So far, no one has fired me, nor have any friends or family dumped me, and I don’t think I’ve missed out on anything I would have cared too much about. If you, too, hate the pressure of being always online, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you read it and do the detox, let me know how it goes!

Surviving Daycare Sick Days

We were blessed to have our baby at home with us and our part-time nanny for her first year, and we were blessed again shortly after her first birthday to get her into a great neighborhood preschool that we all love and that’s about a mile from our house. The first couple of weeks of daycare were phenomenal. We love our nanny, but as our daughter was napping less and getting into things more, we needed more hours of care. That need felt increasingly pressing as her first day of school approached, and I was so relieved to have a longer-than-four-hour chunk of time to get a bunch of teaching and research work done.

With these blissful hours of focused work, though, comes what I call the illness quota. Over the first six months of daycare, the toddler has contracted a couple of ear infections, hand foot and mouth disease, and a half dozen fever-inducing viruses. The sickness wasn’t a surprise, exactly. It’s no secret that kids starting school or daycare contract pretty much everything. We’d been warned. Our friends told us about this study that suggests that couples with multiple children will have at least one person in the household carrying a virus at least half the time. (It was a pretty small study, but seems right.) But as with most things with parenting (and life, I guess), knowing about something is (emphatically!) not the same as experiencing it.

Since August of 2023, all of the members of our four-person family have been sick at least one week of every month. At one point, I started tracking how many days we had to change plans due to someone being ill, but I stopped after a month because it was too depressing. It’s disruptive when any of the four of us are sick, but it’s especially disruptive when the toddler has a fever on a weekday and either my husband or I need to cancel work. I find myself thrown into despondency when we’re ill and wanted to explore what it is, exactly, about missing daycare that I find so challenging.

The Psychological Purgatory of Sick Days

My experience of toddler sick days involves a complex mess of pressures that I think all add up to pretty significant stress. Now, my husband and I have a lot of flexibility in our jobs, good insurance, and financial capacity that give us a lot of margin that most people don’t have. Even so, these days feel hard. Here are some things that I think contribute to the mental load:

1. Holding the anxiety of managing a small child’s illness. For the most part, when our toddler has been sent home, her symptoms haven’t been that bad, but a couple of times, she has registered pretty high fevers and gotten pretty listless, to the degree that I’ve considered taking her to the ER. I am not typically anxious about her wellbeing, but the moments when I see how small and vulnerable she is can be really scary. 

2. Deciding which parent takes time off. The metrics here can be complex. For example, as a professor, I get paid whether I cancel office hours or not, but my husband is a therapist and does not get paid if he doesn’t see his clients. If my husband cancels his sessions, there might be anywhere from 1-5 people who are impacted in a way that can be really significant to their mental health, whereas if I cancel classes, that’s 84 students who are impacted, and that can really impact the quality of the course at some points in the semester, but most if not all of those 84 students will be thrilled. And if we’re honest, both of us mostly like our jobs and would rather work than be home with a sick baby, especially when we are fatigued ourselves. (Jennifer Senior’s excellent book All Joy and No Fun cites a study that suggests that we are far from the exception in this preference.)

3. Figuring out what to do during a sick day. I find this one extremely hard because I am such a planner. I will work during her nap assuming I don’t fall asleep myself (no guarantees) but should I try to get work done at other times when I can, like while the baby is occupied with stickers or Ms Rachel? Or should I let work go entirely? I find it difficult to decide and stressful to be in between. And then there is the challenge of trying to set up the toddler with enriching activities so she isn’t watching TV all day. 

4. Living with the uncertainty of how long she’ll be sick, and whether and how long the rest of us will be sick. This requires lots of contingency planning. If she goes back tomorrow, then I’ll be able to do x and y, but if she wakes up with a fever and can’t go back, then my husband will have to do a, which means I’ll have to do b, and x might get done on the weekend but I think I’ll just have to stay up late tonight to finish y… This gets more complex the more days we’re home with her, and it makes my brain so tired.

5. Mourning the loss of leisure and solitude. After working all day at childcare and maybe also my job, I reconvene with the rest of the family (assuming everyone isn’t already home sick), and we have to do the normal stuff PLUS contingency planning (is she going to need a lunch packed for tomorrow, or will she be home again?) and have to try to restore order from a day in which someone pulled at least 200 things out of drawers or off shelves. And then I often have to get any teaching work done after bedtime, which means no precious evening hours of knitting or novel reading.

6. Recognizing my selfishness. After a few sick days, I consider doing ethically objectionable things such as not taking her temperature so that I don’t know that she has a fever, not technically, or dosing her with fever-reducer at 6:30 AM so she’d at least make it through part of the day before being sent home, maybe even through nap time if we’re lucky. And then I feel bad about myself for contemplating risking getting all of the teachers and other kids and their families sick so that I can have a few quiet hours to do work, which makes me worried about what kind of person I’d be in ethical situations with higher stakes requiring greater sacrifice for the good of others. Then again, the other kids are probably what got her sick in the first place….

Ways to Cope with the Mental Load

I have Googled “what to do when my kid is home sick from daycare” pretty much every time our daughter has been fevered, and what I’ve wanted is a list of mental reframes and suggested activities to help me get through it. I haven’t been able to find one yet, so I wrote my own. These are things that I’ve tried to get through the sick days with as much grace and the least amount of stress as I can manage.

1. As much as possible, my husband and I eliminate uncertainty about who will be with the toddler on a sick day in advance. I took a page from a colleague’s book (thanks, Steve!) and requested all of my classes to be scheduled MWF so that during the semester, my husband can plan to take those days off to care for a sick kid, and I plan to take T/TH and any sick days that fall during my breaks. We can make adjustments if we need to, but it’s really nice to have a default plan so we don’t feel like we are negotiating for scarce resources when we’re already stressed out.

2. I try to cut out as much work as I can without sacrificing the quality of my teaching. Sometimes this means cutting a small assignment from the syllabus or giving fewer individual comments on homework, and sometimes it means not doing a grand redesign of a lesson plan and teaching something that I’ve taught before and that I know works fine. If I am doing childcare when I wasn’t expecting to, I am going to be doing less work one way or another, so I might as well accept it and try to make it work for me and my students instead of stressing about not doing as much as I’d hoped.

3. If people offer to help or we know they would help us if we asked, we accept or ask for help. We don’t live in the same town as my parents, but they will gift us money for take out to help us feed ourselves on the especially hard days. When margins are thin, not having to think about or prepare food can make a huge difference. Our foster parent licensing agency will also send us food delivery on occasion when we are sick. For a while, I would turn them down when they would offer a meal, thinking some other family could probably use it more, but now we ALWAYS say yes. Some of our local friends will happily bring us groceries or soup or medicine–things that are practically helpful and remind us that we have support, we have friends, and we will see them again some day. If our teenager isn’t sick, this is also a great time to call on him to help share the load, too, and he seems especially to appreciate opportunities to be helpful when we obviously benefit from it.

4. I make games for myself to try to make incremental progress on chores while caring for a stir-crazy child. She wants to go outside? We go, and I start picking up leaves off the ground or pulling weeds and putting them in the yard waste bin. She often joins in (win!). She wants “food?! Food?!”? I try to bake something like banana bread while she snacks on something in the kitchen. My baseline puttering activity is the put away game, where I see something that needs to be put away, put it away, look for the first thing I see to put away wherever I end up, put that away, and follow the trail of things around the house. (I think I may be playing one unending round of this game until I die–I have yet to put all the things away.) If the toddler is feeling really clingy, the put away game doesn’t work very well. If she isn’t clingy, then it sometimes backfires, because if I open a cupboard to put something away, suddenly the contents of that cupboard may become utterly fascinating and require being individually taken out, examined, and strewn across the floor. And so the put away game continues.

5. We get outside as much as possible. If the weather isn’t too bad and the toddler isn’t too sick, it is so good to get out of the house. We’ll go for a walk or hang out in the yard (probably collecting yard waste; see above). A little jaunt outside can be a huge mood booster, especially if it lets us get a little more mental or physical space from each other than we have in the house.

6. When we’re consuming media together, we mostly watch and play the stuff we both genuinely want to watch and play. We both like live action musicals, so I’ll put on Hello Dolly or The Young Girls of Rochefort, and we’re both happy campers for at least 15 minutes (which is longer than Bluey holds her attention). She also LOVES holding the Nintendo Switch joycons, and again, if she and I both aren’t too sick, we’ll play a few songs on Just Dance. I don’t worry about screen time very much on sick days, so long as it isn’t keeping her from sleeping when she needs to,

7. I hydrate, hydrate, hydrate! I feel better, and maybe the modeling inspires her to get more fluids, too.

8. Enjoy the sick cuddles and the bonus time with my baby. My daughter isn’t a big snuggler, except when she’s sick, has an owie, or is especially tired. I try to soak up the time when she wants to be physically close and enjoy the excuse to sing along with Julie Andrews while the toddler spins slow circles around the living room with a goofy grin.

When we tell friends we have to miss something again because someone is ill, they tell us that it gets better. At some point they have to develop those immune systems, right? In the meantime, I think the best thing I can do for myself is to assume and accept that sick days will happen and to try to roll with them, be intentional about the time to connect with my baby, and also to be grateful for every day when we are all healthy.

2024 Writing Resolutions

I love making space at the turning of the year to reflect on what the past year afforded and to set some intentions for the next. I’ll write briefly about tools that I used to set my goals for 2024, and then I’ll run through some writing goals with the hopes that announcing them in a public space will help me to stay accountable!

Tools

I recently posted about the Year in Review, which is an annual check-in with my husband’s family that I find grounding and meaningful. (You can find a link to a free template of the table that we use in that post.) That document is a key place where I think holistically about life, the year, things I want to keep on with, and ways I want to redirect, including with my writing.

At some point this year, I discovered Ninja Writers. I’m guessing that I first found them in the summer when I was starting to practice more narrative nonfiction and fiction writing. I’ve been on their email list for a while, and if my experience says anything, they do an incredibly effective job of promoting engagement through calls-to-action to engage with their free and paid services. I am following along with their free Fresh Start Workshop that they hold every year between Christmas and New Year’s Day. They have some helpful worksheets that they’ve circulated along with daily calls for thinking through goals and making plans for the year. I especially liked the day focused on creating an editorial calendar for the year. 

Writing Goals

• Continue Morning Pages. I’ve dabbled in morning pages since my college roommate introduced me to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way sometime in the early 2010s, and I’ve been writing them pretty consistently since I first made it all the way through The Artist’s Way in the summer of 2022. I find this practice to be so useful for forcing me to confront things I’m avoiding. This has a practical benefit, because when I am avoiding thinking about or doing something I need to do, I often engage in self-destructive habits like procrastination-eating or doing all of the NYT Games. (Literally all of them.) I don’t care that much about being productive all of the time and do enjoy a crossword now and then, but I want to be intentional and mindful about it. The morning pages help a lot with that.

• Review my Morning Pages. I was good about this for a while, but then I picked up a journal with skinny lines and had to write a LOT to fill the pages, and it was taking so long to read once I finished it that I gave up. I want to start reviewing these regularly again and am going to try to schedule time for it whenever I finish a notebook. I’m also going to try to be smarter with my notebook selection.

• Submit an article to a peer reviewed journal. I got a grant from my university to support work on a journal article this academic year. I have made good progress but probably have another forty hours of work to do on it before I can submit it. I want to get this out by the end of April.

• Present a version of said journal article at a conference. The paper was accepted to a conference in March, so I just need to put together a shorter, tighter version of the article. And I want to make a decent slideshow to go with it.

• Write a book proposal for my academic book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Leftist. I have done a lot of bits and pieces of work on a proposal over the past couple of years, mainly relying on Laura Portwood-Stacer’s The Book Proposal Book. I did her Find a Perfect-Fit Publisher workshop a year or two (or so?) ago, and as a part of making my editorial plan for the year with the folks at Ninja Writers, I reviewed the proposal requirements for the publisher I’m most interested in. It doesn’t require as much work as I had thought, so I am going to try to get a completed proposal submitted by the end of the summer.

• Publish a blog post to my website + Medium at least once a week. I am bursting with ideas for blog posts, so I may exceed this goal by a lot. Or, I may get tired of it. I want to try it for a year, though, and see what happens.

• Contribute to the film section of the Counter Arts publication on Medium at least once a month. I did not watch many movies last year, and when I did watch good ones, I found them so rich. Since the baseline viewing in our household at the moment is Ms. Rachel and random Roblox videos from YouTube, watching Showing Up or Poor Things was like getting a deep tissue massage. I want to watch a movie a week–like, actually fully paying attention to it–and I want to write about at least one film a month for Counter Arts, which has a great film writing community.

• Do ten minutes of writing practice toward my satirical campus novel a day. I have been joking about writing a satirical campus novel pretty much since I first read Jane Smiley’s Moo in 2017. I kid no longer: I am writing a satirical campus novel! In fact, it might be a series of novels, because there is so much grist for the mill. I read Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones recently, and it helped take the pressure off what writing practice can look like. I’m going through the exercises in Robert Ray’s The Weekend Novelist, which I picked up used at our local Indie and love so far. So I have mashed up the Ninja Writers’ 10-minutes-a-day practice, Goldberg’s fast and loose (but Zen) approach to writing practice, and exercises from Ray’s book into short guided writing time. It’s been fun so far, and at this rate, maybe I’ll have drafted a novel within five years. :) 

• Make back the $50 I spent in order to be able to make money on Medium. Hey, I’m already $1.19 of the way there, folks! At this rate, I maaaayyy need to write way more than one post a week in order to achieve this goal. We’ll call it a stretch goal.

Last Thoughts

I really like writing. As I’ve heard is the case for many people in the humanities, I had terrible grad-school-induced writing anxiety, and it’s taken a long time to work through. For the past ten-ish years, I’ve pretty much only done morning pages and academic writing. Blogging this month has been extremely fun, and I am excited to incorporate more avocational writing and to experiment with more genres in 2024. 

Good luck to everyone with their writing this year!

The Year in Review: A Family Reflection Practice

When my husband was growing up, his family moved a lot. His parents are missionaries, and his dad is also an academic, and in the course of their work, they lived in several countries in central Africa, in France, and in a handful of US cities. Their lives could look very different from year to year, and sometime around when my husband was in high school, they started a family practice called the Year in Review.

It’s pretty much just what it sounds like. The family gets together, either on squishy couches in the same living room or on Zoom, reviews the year, and reflects on hopes for the upcoming year. Part of what I love about the Year in Review is that it combines individual reflection with a collective check-in on how things are going within the family. Given our geographical distance–at one point, we had people participating from Washington state, Texas, New Jersey, and Florida–it’s meaningful to hear what’s been going on in everyone’s life and to set some intentions for the family to stay connected over the upcoming year.

I’m not sure if they started this way, but by the time I joined the Schrag family, the reviews lived in a series of Google docs. Each year, someone would set up a table with rows for each person to review their hopes, plans, and/or goals from the past year’s document, to make a list of other significant events from that year, and to share some hopes, plans, and goals for the following year.

This is more-or-less what a new Year in Review table looks like. We copy the right-most column with goals from the previous year’s document into the first column for the current year, then annotate those with some brief self-evaluations.

You can find a template Google doc like the one in the image above here.

Over the past eight years, the number of family members has doubled. The cozy, contemplative, child-free hour of communal, silent Google doc editing over New Years–my first experience of the Year in Review, or close enough–has given way to predictable chaos. I’m one of the new arrivals, along with my brother-in-law and five grandkids, so the Year in Review has gotten logistically complicated. Now everyone fills out their personal row ahead of time, and then over a couple of Zoom calls, each person shares highlights from their reflections and goals for ten or fifteen minutes. Once we’ve gotten through the individuals, together we fill out rows with the same three columns for the family as a whole and for the world (this last is always…aspirational). Usually we pray at the end, offering our hopes up to God and trying to be open-handed with them.

My in-laws have modeled the Year in Review as a Christian spiritual practice. Though Christian commitment looks different among family members and individual’s faith practices have changed over time, I think it’s fair to say that we all more or less share a desire to live more like Jesus and with Jesus. You’d have to ask each of us what that looks like for us as individuals, but the values of loving God and loving our neighbors motivate our Year in Review reflection and goal-setting. If other families or groups wanted to do a similar practice, having a shared set of values–however broadly defined, Christian or not–could offer some meaningful cohesion.

The Year in Review has added many layers of significance to my relationships with my husband’s family, and there are three I want to mention here.

The first is a unique form of accountability. Because we go pretty deep with the Year in Review, we have a lot to talk about and keep up with as the year unfolds, either when we see each other in person or catch up at a distance. And occasionally, we have surprising moments of synergy. One of my sisters-in-law did The Artist’s Way with me this past summer, and it was a really cool way to stay connected that I doubt would have happened without the Year in Review.

The second is a space to celebrate and grieve together. The family has experienced a lot of tough things over the past several years–the passing of all four of my parents-in-law’s parents, my husband, kids and I getting covid and missing my sister-in-law’s wedding, hard diagnoses. There has also been so much joy–graduations and weddings and babies and long-cherished dreams coming to fruition and time with each other and extended family. It feels therapeutic to have a space where we mark those things together.

The third is a deep family archive. Especially in a season where I have a hard time remembering last week, let alone five years ago, it feels like a great reality check to have these annual core samples we’ve taken that reveal layers of individual and family history. It’s not a perfect record, of course, but it captures where we have been in a way that pictures can’t. Since I started participating eight or nine years ago, my parents-in-law have started a fund to promote the incorporation of local arts within ongoing Bible translation projects, and my sister- and brother-in-law went from doing campus ministry to starting a beautiful farm and market with the hope of facilitating the health and healing of the earth and their local community. Would those huge life projects have happened without the Year in Review? Probably. But because of the Year in Review, I have been able to walk with them through their processes in a way that has allowed me to learn a lot and have closer relationships to them. And the archive helps us to remember that those processes have often been messy and painful. My father-in-law wrote this moving poem with the refrain, “Do hard things that take a long time.” The Year in Review dignifies those hard things by giving them the space and time they need to blossom into something meaningful, something that no prediction or goal at the beginning of a new year can fully capture.

I feel really blessed to have close relationships with both my family and my husband’s family. This kind of practice would not work for everyone. If you have family members that you can’t safely be vulnerable with, this practice could be extremely hurtful. But if you have a group of family members or friends that could use a moment to reflect and check in with each other, especially who are committed to each other for the long haul, it’s a practice I can’t recommend highly enough.

Closing Duties

A pre-bedtime routine to set Future You up for success.

On one of my thrifting runs this year, I picked up KC Davis’s How to Keep House While Drowning. I don’t think that I’d heard of this book beforehand, but I loved the title and love the learn-in-intense-detail-about-other-people’s-weird-routines genre*, so it was a must-buy. (*The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is the classic, of course, and I also love Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artist’s Work.)

I wrote in my 2023 in Books post about some of the things I enjoyed from this book, but one practice that I totally love is closing duties. Davis adapts this staple of the service industry–a checklist of tasks that need to be done before closing up shop so that whoever opens in the morning is prepped to go–and applies it to life in her household. She encourages thinking about your and any other household members’ future selves and creating a checklist of things that you (individually or collectively) do to set Future You up for success.

It’s really just an evening routine, but the key is that it’s a routine that is forward thinking. I have done bedtime routines for a long time, and those are great for winding down and getting ready for sleep. “Closing duties” though, are a pre-bedtime routine.

The first step, Davis suggests, is to frame closing duties as a kindness to Future You. Does Future You NEED coffee right away in the morning? Then set out those supplies for your pour over or pre-program the coffee maker. Will Future You only eat a granola bar if lunch isn’t ready to grab on your way out the door? Then make that sandwich.

Future You is different from Future Me, and closing duties should be tailored to the business of your life. My closing duties are set up to address a few specific problems in my household:

–having to work to clear the counter so I have space to make coffee in the morning, and then having to wait another 10-15 minutes for the coffee to brew

–waking up my husband because I’m rummaging in the closet late at night trying to find whatever I just sold on eBay

–resenting finding dirty things scattered around the house (see my post on The Tidying Song)

–not being able to find my journal in the morning

–waking up to no clean cups to pack to daycare

–waking up and having no idea what to put in the toddler’s lunch

–eating granola bars for lunch

–not knowing what to wear

–the dog waking me up in the middle of the night because we forgot to let her out before bed

So here is my current list of closing duties, which I keep on the side of the fridge:

I try to start on the list pretty much as soon as I get home with my daughter from daycare. She LOVES to eat, so I can park her at the table with half a slice of bread while my husband is prepping dinner and I get tomorrow’s lunch together and start on the dishes. The baby is still pretty into doing whatever we’re doing, and with the exception of packing things to ship, she likes being around while I’m getting a start on these closing duties. And then, more often than not, I have some time to chill after she has gone to bed. YES. 

I/We don’t do all of the closing duties every night. Sometimes we are just too tired. But I’m generally not too bothered if it doesn’t all happen. Usually we get to most of them, and because the practice is framed as a kindness to Future Me, I can be retrospectively grateful for whatever we’ve done. Thanks to KC Davis for the compassionate take on household management!

The Tidying Song

We have a foster son who has been with us for over two years, who, since he joined our family, has grown from a child to a teenager. When we first met him, he had a lot of strong foundational life skills, like how to clean a bathroom and how to chop vegetables safely. He is really capable, and he can also be very considerate of others. But he is also a teenager who REALLY doesn’t like being told what to do and isn’t very aware of the mess that trails behind him. I like to wake up early to have some quiet space to read, pray, and write, and I would get SO annoyed when, in order to get my quiet corner set up, I’d have to shuttle gigantic BBQ restaurant cups to the sink, excavate the coffee pot from behind a stack of dishes, and relocate slightly stinky blankets and very stinky socks. This puttering would eat into my minutes of precious silence and make me very, very grouchy.

In an effort to get the teen to tidy, we tried:

• lots of specific verbal reminders (but see above: the teen does not like to be told what to do)

• fines for specific offenses (for example, -25 cents for dirty socks left in the den) 

We had some limited success with these tactics, but they set up conflict, and my mornings still felt cluttered and chaotic.

This morning resentment was one of the problems I had in mind when I first read Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff, a parenting book I've written about before that looks at some of the most ancient approaches to raising kids who are thoughtful and helpful. One of Doucleff’s huge insights from the people she features in the book is that kids are highly motivated by “togetherness,” and that one of the most effective ways to get them to grow in being more helpful is to invite them into tasks that we are already doing.

The value of togetherness immediately clicked for me. I was taught to do chores pretty independently as a kid. I was not a fan of cleaning then, and though I learned the skills, as an adult, I don’t have a whole lot of internal motivation to dust, vacuum, or scrub the grout, especially if things aren’t visibly dirty, and sometimes even if they are. When I clean now, it’s mostly from the social pressure I feel to look like I have a clean house.

I recognized that I was taking the same divide and conquer approach to chores that had worked with my family growing up, but because my husband and I weren’t leading the charge very consistently, it wasn’t going very far toward keeping an orderly house. I got my husband on board to try some other approaches, and we added a less-than-five-minute step to our evening routine that has dramatically improved my mornings: the Tidying Song.

We had a pretty good evening set-up with our teen already: screen time ends at 8pm and he showers before 8:30ish. We read aloud for about half an hour before he brushes his teeth and then gets himself to bed. The window between brushing teeth and making it into his room, which often featured some lollygagging anyhow, would be a perfect time to introduce some tidying.

For the last year or so, as soon as he finishes brushing his teeth in the evenings, one of us will tell Google to play “Get on Your Feet.” For the length of a Gloria Estefan song, we channel Leslie Knope, getting up and making some tidying happen. Because we all participate, it means that we collectively get ~10 minutes of work done, which is usually enough to eliminate the worst and most visible of the mess. Dishes are moved to the sink, toys are put back in their bins, the trash or a broken down Amazon box gets taken out. Laundry gets moved along, the dishwasher gets started, the thermometer that’s been sitting out since someone had the flu a week and a half ago gets sanitized and put away.

We often still have to prompt the teen to participate in the tidying song. (And who can blame him? It’s just a half step away from “Clean up, clean up” with Barney and friends.) But because we are all working together to make the space nicer for everyone, the request to put the Pokémon cards away please seems to be better received.

Not all of the chores get done every night. In fact, we usually only do the full bedtime routine 4-5 times a week. But when we do get to it, each of us accomplishes a couple of smallish tasks. In the morning, even if there is still some clutter, I’m not as resentful of it, because I know we’re working together to keep the house nice. And the major offenders like the hoodie that never got washed last week or the sticky ice cream bowl have been mostly banished from the morning quiet space. Ahh.

Experiments in Reselling

Around this time last year, I got an itch to try reselling things online. I had done The Artist’s Way all the way through in 12 weeks for the first time in summer 2022, and I had a lot of personal breakthroughs. One of those was that I started thrifting regularly.

I love thrifting. I love slightly worn-in, new-to-me sweaters and random self help books or notebooks or puzzles. I also generally hate buying new stuff because the endless consumption of stuff is so bad for the environment, and I almost always feel guilty when I click that order button on Amazon. Also, I live in Florida, so it’s hard to justify spending money on sweaters. And I LOVE the lottery that is the thrift store. Exhibit A, look at this great painting:

It perfectly matches the pillows in our living room. As I was gazing at it hanging on the wall at the Salvation Army thrift store, an employee appeared next to me and confided, “I dream about this painting.You’ll regret it if you don’t get it.” And then she sighed and walked away. So I had to buy it.

We have a for-profit, cash-only thrift store with no fitting rooms about a five minutes drive from my house. It is fantastic. I think that they sell liquidated merchandise, because they always have AG jeans, Banana Republic work pants, and lots of other mall brands that I’ve worn over the years. I had a baby in 2022, and my pants size has been inconsistent. I started buying pants from the cash-only thrift store, but I was never sure if they would fit, and even if they did, there wasn’t a guarantee they would fit for long. I had consigned through Thread Up a couple of times, but they weren’t taking new inventory at the end of last year, so I took to adjacent corners of the Internet to see if there was a good alternative for rehousing my growing collection of just-a-little-too-[fill in the blank] pants that would let me make back the money I’d spent on them.

I ended up reading a bunch of blog posts and Reddit threads about reselling, and I got fired up. I started listing things wherever and however. I sold $60 worth of children’s clothes to a guy from Offer Up whom I met at a 7-11 across town. (I did not get murdered.) I sent a confused lady from Mercari two pretty nice sweaters for $6 plus shipping. I dusted off my old eBay account that I had used to buy a bunch of overpriced old books and pried some novels and textbooks out of our own over-crammed shelves to list.

As I tried different things and started to make sales, I got a little more systematic about things. I now have a pretty well-oiled machine that I’m hoping keeps chugging along through 2024. I’ve sold over 150 items and net over $1000 in profit this year and hoping to at least keep or maybe exceed that pace a little bit in the next year. Here are some takeaways:

Where I list.

• Vendoo. Vendoo is a very cool product that helps you to pretty easily crosslist things on multiple reselling websites. I think they support eleven platforms. It has a bunch of subscription options based on the number of platforms you share to and the number of new items you list in a given month. I have done different things, but the plan that works for me most months includes:

• Three platforms (eBay, Mercari, and Poshmark)

• Twenty-five new items a month

• The importing add-on, which lets me build the listings in eBay and then import them into Vendoo’s form, which then partially populates some of the forms for the other platforms.

• The delist and relist add-on, which will let you really easily delete and relist an item on your platforms. People say that this can matter a lot on platforms like Poshmark that lets people sort items by new listings. It also makes managing listings easier within Vendoo, because it will automatically delist a sold item from other platforms.

• Offer Up and Facebook Marketplace. People can be pretty flakey, but I find it SO gratifying to sell things locally because of the reduced carbon footprint. I pretty much only do this with things that can’t easily ship, like a desk chair, or an enormous Finding Nemo-themed baby bouncer, or a bunch of extra rolls of Ikea shelf liner.

What I list.

You can read a lot of posts by people who are a lot more strategic and experienced than myself about what the hot ticket items are. But here are some categories of things I’ve sold, mostly out of stuff that we already owned:

• Pretty much any clothes, shoes, or accessories in decent shape from a brand people recognize. Mens, womens, childrens–I’ve sold a lot. Anecdotally, it seems that the men’s clothes and shoes that I’ve sold have all sold pretty quickly.

• Pretty much any books or puzzles.

• Random small appliances (like an essential oils diffuser we never ended up using) or home decor.

• Stuff that friends and relatives and neighbors and coworkers are getting rid of and are okay with you profiting from. My mom passes on clothes to resell pretty frequently. (Thanks, mom!)

• VERY rarely, like less than five times, I bought something at a thrift store to flip. But I just knew that little Hannah Anderson dress would sell for more than $2.50…

I’m hoping to get into selling more toys this year, because we have WAY too many of them lying around.

How I list.

You don’t need the whole step-by-step. But here are a couple of things.

• I have a patch of wood-patterned vinyl floor that I regularly clean for a space to take photographs. I photograph as many things as I can as a time, as this is nearly impossible when my toddler is around.

• I use image searching on eBay and Google to try to find existing listings that I can duplicate. I finding pre-existing listings for items that are functionally the same something like 80-90% of the time, which is wild to me, but extremely cool—and it saves so much time. EBay has a ‘Sell one like this’ button on every listing. Super handy.

What I learned (about reselling and about myself).

• It takes a while to build momentum.

• The more you list, the more you sell. I’m sure that there are things that you could list that no one would ever buy, but it is shocking to me some of the things that people are interested in. I read some blog post about how to increase sales that said to list ten new items a day, which I thought was kind of silly, but it really is a good strategy. I shoot for ~1 new listing a day, and if I keep to that, I usually make at least a couple of sales a week and am happy with that.

• I like fixing things. I have accidentally bought clothes with rips at the seams or missing buttons, and I’ve learned how to repair things. This isn’t just for reselling, but it feels great to extend the life of objects. (I always note in an item description if I’ve had to do this, of course.)

• My hourly rate is ABYSMAL for a job. If I were trying to do this full time, I would have to work much more strategically, and I probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much. The little dopamine hits from likes and sales and the satisfaction of giving objects new places to live are enough.

• I care more about things moving out of the house than about getting the best price for them. I try to keep track of what I paid for things I’ve thrifted so that I don’t lose money on them if I decide not to keep them or the kids never wear them, but then I’m good with letting things go.

It feels so magical how random strangers from the Internet will find my paltry offerings and give me money for them, and often they are so nice and so grateful. I love thinking about these things in their new homes. I imagine the Alaskans doing the 1000-piece puzzle of Florida birds on a long winter night; the lady from Devils Lake, North Dakota, near where my grandma is from, dressing her baby in a navy lace dress and floral headband for a summer wedding; and the dude who bought the Vans khaki pants skating around southern California and working an IT job. 

I hope, anyway, that these things aren’t just ending up in a landfill across the country and that contributing in small ways to a culture of reuse does some good in the world. I am sure that there are ethical downsides–for example, I am still facilitating hyper-specialized consumption of things that people probably don’t strictly need in most cases. But I hope I am growing in loving and caring for a few of the objects in our world for more than their exchange value. 

2023 Reading Highlights

Some of my favorite reads from the year, in no particular order.

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki.

One of my good friends from grad school launched a book club a year or so ago to help us recover our love of reading, and this was one of her picks. There were so many things to love about this book. It is one of the most thoughtful, loving treatments of North Americans’ relationships to their stuff that I’ve ever read. There is a Marie Kondo-esque character who is absolutely fantastic, a scene with a character buying a snow globe on eBay that was so gutting and several incredibly beautiful descriptions of kitschy snow globes, amazing descriptions of how parents think about their children, some really moving depictions of how trauma and stuff can be connected–I am not doing it justice, but I really enjoyed reading it. The cartoonish characters reminded me of White Teeth, but it is way more compassionate toward them than the early-20s-Zadie Smith was to hers.

Tenth of December by George Saunders.

It took me a while to figure out why this was on my TBR list, but I eventually realized that this was the book our dear friend Matt Vermaire (who blogs here) brought to a book exchange party. I listened to it on audio. It was painful in how it captures self-aggrandizing illusions, and yet it maintains some hope for something like love. “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” is one of the best stories I have ever read. I’m keeping this vague because if you are reading this, you should go find it and read it so I can talk with you about it.

Margaret Drabble Trilogy: The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, The Gates of Ivory.

This trilogy about three female friends who are middle-ish-class intellectuals living in London from the late seventies to the early nineties filled a hole in my dissertation project that I didn’t know was there. I’m about five years too late to get them in that project, but I think they’ll make it into a book I’m working on. Probably very few other people would be interested in these, but I was so delighted to read them.

The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr.

This is probably the most important book that I read all year. Barr is a historian, and the work that she does to unpack the patriarchal shaping of church history and theology is so needed. Reading this book was a bit like having someone peek at a long-festering wound in my heart, clean it out, and apply a salve. There is a chapter near the end on how common it is for evangelical churches to use heresy to justify the subjugation of women that was so clear and persuasive. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

She Deserves Better by Joanna Sawatsky, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Sheila Wray Gregoire.

This was probably the most important book I read this year as a parent of a girl. It helped me to clarify for myself and our family some church deal breakers–like, we can’t go to a church where women don’t regularly preach. This book has some incredible research behind it, too, about things that women believe about themselves and how those beliefs correlate to different life experiences (like the likelihood to stay in an abusive relationship). 

Multitude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

This is a book of political theory that I found absolutely compelling. It has problems, but it’s one of the first Marxist-ish books that I’ve read that has offered a hopeful reframing for how I think about politics, especially in relation to the production of art. There is so much here that I found engaging, and I’ll probably be writing about it for years, but I read this when I was thinking a lot about the politics of church structures (and reading the previous two books on this list). I was learning more about the Tampa Underground, which calls itself a network of microchurches and is a whole bunch of people empowering each other to nimbly address a huge and diverse range of needs in the community, and it sort of clicked for me why I like this model of church so much. It also clicked for me how a politics undergirded by unconditional love (which is, incredibly, what Multitude ends reflecting on) simply cannot be too concerned with trying to fix all of the enormous institutional problems. If there is no on-the-ground care for others, no thinking about how to help the people around us survive here and now, no networking within our community to give and take and figure out how to live together better on a small scale, then we’re only resounding gongs, clanging symbols.

All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior.

I get a lot of my parent book recs from another grad school friend who has impeccable taste, and this was a fantastic exploration of what it means to be a parent. I found this so deeply validating. One of the studies that Senior writes about is how, when given a list of household tasks to rank in order of preference, childcare comes in something like seventeenth, after laundry and dishes and all kinds of things. I think about this book every time that I play peekaboo with my toddler for the sake of trying to make progress on a chore–dishes, cooking, laundry. Now that we have more childcare, I feel like a much happier person, and I enjoy the time with my toddler a lot more, but this book captured the work of parenting so well. In relation to Multitude, I think that this book really helps to capture what is intolerable about the contexts in which people parent today, the most central being the isolation of everyday life for nuclear families. It captures some of the beauty and meaning of parenting, too, but it’s the other stuff that will stick with me.

How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis.

Apparently this is a TikTok book. I liked it anyway. The first big takeaway was a mental shift for thinking about the division of labor between partners as being about equal rest instead of equal work. After reading this book, I do less work in the evening and instead hang out on the couch with my husband and teenager, and I think my quality of life has dramatically improved. The second takeaway is her idea of closing duties, or having a list of things that you do before turning in for the night so that your next day is better. Maybe I’ll write about mine sometime, but again, great for my quality of life.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.

I read this and was so moved and also could not believe that in 2021 someone published such an earnest story about someone wanting to help someone else. I listened to it, and the narration was fantastic, which helped, I’m sure. (What follows gets spoilery.) But I absolutely loved this and might read it every year at Christmastime because it is all about cracking open the hard shell that 21st century capitalist society forms around nuclear families to keep neighbors from helping neighbors and people from engaging with others’ suffering. I personally think that is one of the core evils of our time and loved how this book undermined that. This story is about radical love in a way that resonated with Multitude and Saunders’s stories. I don’t think that Keegan is holding up the protagonist as some sort of uncomplicated savior–there are clearly stakes to choices that this guy is making that will unevenly affect his wife and daughters, and there is a lot to unpack about that. But I also think that he made the right choice.

Writing Microgoals: One Sentence a Day

Most of the structured writing I’ve done has been for academic writing projects, and in recent years, that has meant writing articles for peer-reviewed journals. A year or two ago, I wanted to make space to write more. I’d like to write a book about art and politics in contemporary British literature and film, and my leisurely article-a-year pace would probably have me finishing this book in, like, ten years. I dug through what records I had–just counting the days when I had written at all, and not looking at the amount–and I was really surprised by what I found.

I expected that I would write the most during breaks. I teach 28 credit hours of writing a year to recalcitrant college students. I spend a lot of time giving feedback on writing when we’re in session, and I daydream about doing my own writing during the breaks. I was shocked to find that the time of year when I wrote the most consistently was in the first five weeks of the semester, before the first major assignments get submitted. I was very inconsistent during both winter and summer breaks. 

Once I had the data in front of me, it made perfect sense. I thrive with routine. I am a slow and steady writer. When I don’t have the structure of the semester and teaching to anchor me, it’s easy to skip a day of writing. I am terrible at getting any writing done when I am traveling, and we tend to travel a lot in the summer since most of our family and old friends are scattered to the far reaches of the states and the globe.

So I tried to curb my expectations that I would get a bunch of writing done during summer break this year. Instead, I tried to get a bunch of research done, so that when the semester started, I would have the raw material to work with. When we were home and I could work in my office, I read monographs. I made a point of watching some movies that I needed for background. When I was traveling, I read peer reviewed articles, film reviews, and other short online pieces on the Reader app on my phone. (Aside: I learned about Reader this summer, and it is THE BEST. It integrates with Evernote, and ah! It’s making my life so much better.)

This fall, I did hardly any writing in the first half of the semester, not even in the first five weeks. I had a new course prep and some other things that ate up all of my margin. When I checked in with one of my writing buddies in late October, I was secretly dreaming about NaNoWriMo and also realized I had only touched my article draft about three times since the semester had started. Horrors. I decided to channel that NaNoWriMo energy into writing one sentence of my article first thing every day in November.

I started early, on October 26, because I was so excited to try this out, and it went so well that I’ve kept it up well into December. On at least forty of the days, I have written at least one sentence in my article draft. In my books, I am counting this as a massive success. 

Some things that made this work particularly well this time around:

• This isn’t my first journal article. I have not published a lot, but I have published enough to feel comfortable with the genre. My first journal article was a mess for a loooong time, and the sentence-a-day thing would not have worked. 

• Like I said above, I had already done a lot of the research. I didn’t have to spend much time looking things up or reading new material, so I could usually get at least one sentence written in 5-to-15 minutes.

• I already had done a bunch of freewriting toward the article in the spring and summer as I was figuring the project out, so I had several thousand words. On the days when I REALLY didn’t want to write a sentence, I went to my zero-draft material (my understanding of zero-drafts is taken from this fantastic book on dissertation writing by Joan Bolker) and just copied something over, maybe editing it a little bit. 

• I hadn’t totally figured out the argument. I am working with a new theoretical text that I am really interested in but haven’t completely digested yet, and I think it’s going to be pretty central to the piece I am working on. I have been focused on writing the introduction and literature review, and the sentence-a-day pace has given me so much time to sit with the meatier stuff. I am hoping that the result is well marinated and fully cooked.

For the first week of my winter break, I have a handful of virtual writing dates set up with a writing buddy. Because I have been checking in with the project most days for the past two months, I am hopeful that I am going to be able to jump in and make good progress. And I am going to keep the one-sentence-a-day tool in my back pocket for the really busy seasons.

The Process Journal: My Attempt to Get My College Students to Not Entirely Farm Out Their Thinking to Chatbots.

I teach lots of sections of general education research writing courses at a medium-sized private college. It’s a great job, in a lot of ways. But I, like many other writing teachers, had a bit of a crisis of faith this year as I grappled with how to address generative AI. Chatbots are revolutionizing the writing process for my students. I had seen some of my students in the spring ‘23 semester in near-constant conversation with ChatGPT: it just sat open on their laptops, and they would use it to help them take notes, to brainstorm interview questions, and, of course, to draft papers. 

I spent the weeks leading up to the fall semester agonizing over what policy to put in place around the use of generative AI and also dreading a year full of hand wringing in department and writing program meetings. I am in an English department with a strong contingent of faculty who are very opposed to any use of generative AI technology in our classes. There are plenty of good reasons for that. I feel pretty ambivalent about letting students use it, partly because it is a lot of work to police it, so an outright ban isn’t practical. I also worry that a really strict policy would encourage deception, and I want my students to think through the ethics of the technology and make their own decisions about how to use it. I am an Enneagram 6 and really like to be in alignment with the institutions I work with, and I carried a lot of anxiety about feeling like I didn’t know what was going to be the best approach for my program, my students, or myself.

But I was really pleasantly surprised in conversations with my colleagues to see a shift in our collective thinking away from the problems of the technology and toward our students: what is it that we really want students to learn? And do our assessments actually reflect the things that we value?

After a couple of inspiring pre-semester meetings, I got the green light from our director to play around a bit with assessment, and I immediately got to work redesigning my research writing course to value process over product. At the University of Texas, I had briefly used the Learning Record, which is a fantastic, complex assessment tool geared toward having students track and reflect on their own learning in relation to course goals. Because the semester was going to start in less than two weeks, I didn’t want to go all-in on the portfolio work the Learning Record requires. I did, though, want to emphasize learning over the end product of a final research essay. And so the Process Journal was born.

Piloting the Process Journal

For each unit, I set up template Process Journal Google docs that students copied and filled in on their own with work samples and observations about their writing process. The journals included everything from notes on readings to peer review feedback to a repository of sources they might use in their projects. Their task was to use the material from each unit’s journal to write short reflection showing what they learned in relation to specific course learning outcomes (CLOs) by going through the steps to complete the assignment.

I made the Process Journal worth 50% of the final grade, and I evaluated it in two different ways:

1. Daily(ish) class points. There was generally a pretty low bar for this. So long as students weren’t sleeping or detracting from others’ experiences of the class, they’d probably get the point. They usually did some sort of in-class writing in their journal, which I occasionally checked as an indicator of whether or not they were mentally present.

2. Overall unit assessments of the Process Journal. Students added work samples and/or observations about their writing process to the Process Journal pretty much every class period, and I encouraged them to add anything from outside of class that was significant to their process–phone calls with parents, conversations with roommates, and emails or office hours with me all featured. They were tasked with tracking how they were practicing the (CLOs) in our daily work. I didn’t want to evaluate it super regularly on top of the writing assignments they were submitting. At the end of the unit, they wrote a 3-to-5-page reflection essay to make a case for their learning in regard to CLOs. 

The major assignments–a Research Proposal, Annotated Bibliography, and Final Research Essay–were collectively worth 20% of the final grade. I’ve taken a line from a colleague who tells her students at the beginning of every semester that she doesn’t personally feel a need for a big stack of research papers at the end of the course. There are plenty of research papers out there in the world, and it’s the students who are the end product—it’s their ability to find good information and organize it to answer a meaningful question that we care about. In that spirit, the Process Journal would require that students complete the major assignments, but if they didn’t show their work along the way, they would fail the course. They needed to demonstrate some metacognitive awareness of their learning and not just churn out different components of the assignments like little grade-earning automatons. 

Polishing the Process

During the semester, I made a couple of changes based on student feedback to try to make the Process Journal a little more purposeful and user-friendly.

• I had these beautifully formatted template Process Journals, but after I got a bunch of bizarrely formatted submissions after the first unit, I taught them how to use heading styles in word processors.

• I added the course learning outcomes at the top of the template with some sample color coding. I found that students had a very difficult time matching CLOs to the tasks they completed to offer a coherent account of their learning, even with them having an example reflection essay. A lot of students really seemed to like color coding class activities as contributing to different CLOs, and I think the visual organization made writing the reflection essays a lot easier.

Feedback from Students

In our class postmortem discussions, I gathered four really significant pieces of feedback on the Process Journal:

• That I should make the Process Journal even more central to my course organization. Students did have to juggle a lot of websites and documents: some things were in the Learning Management System (LMS–my institution uses Canvas), or linked to through the LMS (like slides), some things were in the Process Journals, and other things were in their working documents or on other websites. They recommended updating the template with more detail about what we worked on each class day, encouraging students more emphatically to use it to take notes, and to link to the slides there (rather than in the LMS calendar, which is what I’ve been doing).

• That I should make the Process Journal more of an ongoing repository for feedback. They suggested that I leave my own comments on their writing in the docs rather than in our LMS (though of course I couldn’t post anything about grades), and to have students share their Process Journals with other students so that they can leave each other peer review feedback more easily.

• That I could be clearer about assessment. A shocking amount of students didn’t realize until the last week of class that I used a rubric to evaluate the Reflection Essays and Process Journals, even though I had showed them the rubric at the beginning of the semester, used it in the first two units, and posted completed rubrics along with my comments to the LMS when I graded the assignments. One student suggested I link to the rubric at the top of the templates, which I thought was a great idea. 

• That I should keep using it. I didn’t have a single student out of sixty say they thought it was a waste of time or that I shouldn’t use it again. They were helpfully critical of other things about the course, so I think they would have told me if they weren’t getting something meaningful from it. They liked how the Process Journal kept them organized and gave them a tangible sense of the progress they made and the sheer amount of work that they’d done. They also did almost all of the work for it in class, so it didn’t feel like much of a lift for them.

I’m sure that some of my students still use Generative AI in ways I’ve deemed inappropriate for my class, but I suspect that they are not doing as good of a job of showing their work. There are some final essays I’ve received with suspiciously well-written paragraphs that are vapid and lack any references, for example. If they don’t show me that they have had thoughts about sources they’ve found (and documented how) and read (and documented how), their process grade will suffer. But it isn’t (just) about punishing students for using AI–it’s not rewarding students for a kind of work that is meaningless within the framework of my class.

And conversely, through the Process Journal, I think I’m making the experience of the class more meaningful for the students who want to challenge themselves and learn something. They have *so* much pressure on them to get good grades, and although I don’t think that they should have to feel that pressure, that isn’t something I can fix. I *can*, though, rework my assessment so that students get rewarded for really pressing into their learning. And they do have to convince me that they learned something. If their research essay shows me that they don’t know what a peer-reviewed source is, then that lack of learning is going to be reflected in the Process Journal grade. And of course, the students who put in a lot of work and come up with an amazing final product that reflects a bunch of knowledge and skills that they put into practice will do really well, so long as they can explain how their work got them to that point. 

So far, I’m a fan of the Process Journal, and my students seem to be, too. I am pumped to try the new and improved version next semester.

How a Parenting Book Reminded Me That I Already Know How to Get My Dog to Stop Stealing Food from the Table

I first listened to the Hunt, Gather, Parent audiobook (read by the author, Michaeleen Doucleff) when my daughter was an itty baby and absolutely loved it. Doucleff took her feisty young child along on her stays with Maya, Inuit, and Hadzabe communities to learn from their time-honored parenting techniques, and the resulting book is chock-full of stories and action-oriented ideas that I think about all the time. It helped to radically reshape my approach to parenting our teenaged foster son–another story for another day. But now that my baby is a full-fledged toddler, I wanted to listen again to bolster my attempts to be patient with her as we slowly invite her to help with, say, loading her spoon in the dishwasher or putting her stinky socks in her laundry bag.

This reread of Doucleff’s book has shored up my intentions to invite our daughter into real, helpful work. But it also gave me some painfully glaring insights into the escalating transgressions of our worst-behaved family member: the dog. 

Since my partner and I became parents a couple of years ago, our already sassy Panda has grown bolder about things she knows are wrong, like stealing human food and sauntering out open doors. We invested a lot of time into training her when she was a puppy, and she has some good foundational skills, but we’ve gotten lax about reinforcing them. Last week, we found her on top of the dinner table sniffing around for scraps. Twice. We’ve all, from the toddler up, gotten very shouty and self-righteous with her about trying to steal our food, to no avail.

In this reread of Hunt, Gather, Parent, two things stood out that made me cringe at our dinnertime yell-at-the-dog routine:

1. Doucleff’s observes that middle class parenting involves a LOT of talking, and that all of that talking probably contributes to the high levels of conflict between parents and children because of the way that it invites negotiation and debate. Modeling and physically communicating about the behavior you want to see is often more effective. 

2. High energy, dysregulated emotional responses to undesirable behaviors often just inject more bad energy into high-stress situations. Keeping control of your emotions and being non-reactive should be the parenting baseline. They emphasized the importance of staying emotionally steady in our foster parent training, too, and we’ve grown a lot in this as a family. Except not so much with the dog.

If these things are true for human children, which I think they are, then it seems even more far-fetched that talking at the dog, especially when we’re frustrated, will ever get her to stop sneaking bites of tortilla from the toddler. And our angry energy only seems to invigorate her. 

I’ve so far spent two meals working on reestablishing the “go-to-bed” command, where the dog is supposed to go to her bed and wait to be released from when the toddler gets in her chair until she gets down. I got up at least a dozen times–silently and calmly–to direct her back to her bed. And then there have also been a couple of meals when I was tired and just didn’t want to get up twenty times…and that’s how we got here in the first place, I’m sure. So we humans are the work in progress at this point.

It’s beautiful and humbling to be reminded of my creaturely similarities to my pup–thank you, Michaeleen Doucleff, for that. Maybe that compassion can help me sustain the will to retrain Panda.

Add Some Joy to Your Paper-Grading Grind This Holiday Season

We writing teachers all have our tools to help us get the grading done, but most of them don’t exactly conjure the holiday spirit. Here are some ideas for ways to stay cozy and at least a little merry in the midst of what can feel like interminable drudgery.

• Do something fun with sticky notes. If you don’t find sticky notes inherently pleasurable, skip this one. If you do, stick a sticky note to the wall for every paper you grade. I like doing this with several colors of the little flag sticky notes to make a design. You could do little doodles on your stickies when you have strong feelings about particular papers. Enjoy your increasingly colorful wall (or door or desk or whatever surface you have handy) as a tangible sign of your progress.

• Snack rewards. Give yourself a handful of cashews or grapes or whatever your snack of choice is. This one can be dangerous, especially if you have a huge pile of leftover Halloween candy and tend to eat your feelings. But it can be nice, especially if you would otherwise forget to eat because you’re so busy trying to get grades in.

• Beverage rewards. Indulge in a pomegranate bubbly water or a mug of Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice tea (please sponsor me). No alcohol until after ALL the grading is done. At least for the day.

• Stacking / accelerating rewards: maybe you start with grapes, but once you only have one more section of papers left to grade, you get to break out the Snyder’s Hot Buffalo Pretzels (again, please sponsor me).

• Build a spreadsheet where you monetize your grading. Pay yourself a tiny amount of money to spend at the thrift store for every assignment you finish grading, and actually go to the thrift store and buy yourself a sweater after grades are submitted. Make it your office sweater and wear it during next semester’s grading slog to remind yourself of past achievements.

• If you can take a laptop to a coffee shop and grade, get some good-spirited fellow teachers to meet you for peppermint mochas and an extended grading time. Be strategic with the invites.

• Find an accountability buddy on Reddit. I admit this is kind of weird and is probably not for everyone. But during a particularly desperate semester, I found a random accountability buddy through a Reddit thread designed for this purpose, and my new buddy Tony and I did daily-ish check-ins on Discord for a few weeks while trying to make progress on a few time-limited goals (like meeting minimum quotas for daily grading). There are accountability apps you can pay for, too, but if you plan ahead a little bit and are comfortable messaging strangers from Reddit, you can probably find some other human out there on the Internet who could use the help and will be your buddy for free.

• Take crafting breaks. I’m a knitter, and I love to step away from my screen every 4-5 papers to sit somewhere more comfortable (if possible) and work on my knitting project for the length of a Sufjan Stevens song. Bliss. 

• Take reading breaks. Let yourself read a chapter of a Louise Penny novel after every hour or two of marking papers. This is also dangerous if you don’t have a lot of self-discipline around reading genre fiction.

• Pretend you are Dumbledore in The Half-Blood Prince, drinking that horrible potion so that Harry can find a fake horcrux or Michael Jordan playing a Very Important Basketball Game while he has the flu. If they can do it, we can, too. Drag yourself to that finish line.

The throughlines here (except for the last one) are, first, to have something off-screen that reminds you that you have a body, second, to indulge strategically in whatever holiday vibes make you happy as a means of enticing you through the thicket of term papers to the wide open spaces of winter break. Good luck, godspeed, and please let me know if you have ideas for zhuzhing up holiday grading that I can try next year!