Yo Soy Movando

(Note of oddness: I picked out the photo on top for my blog in early June, when I first started the blog. The phot directly above is taken from the patio of my condo, which we didn't get until July -- weird)

Many thanks to those of you who have inquired about my move! Mom and I have been very busy furnishing the condo, and thus I have not had much time to contact people. Still, your messages are much appreciated!

Two highlights from the last week:
We arrived at the property early Friday morning, wanting to get one good look around before buying furniture. I opened the front door with the key we got from the real estate agent, and proceeded to try the same key in the second door. It wouldn't budge. Mom tried. Still, it wouldn't move. We twisted and turned the key, threw our weight against the door, and still nothing. It was about 100 degrees (I'm not kidding), and I have technically been homeless since June 1 (special thanks to our summer sponsors, Juliette and Jennifer, for letting me stay at their place this summer). I am tired of moving. We call the real estate agent, who informs us that the lock on the second door is broken, and we just have to push on it and it will open. "Oh," we say. So I threw myself against the door, and burst into my home (and new life in Arizona, etc.) Through the patio, I could see the sun shining brightly on the mountains. It was a glorious moment.

Friday we bought furniture, so Saturday, Mom and I decided to go to Nogales, Mexico for home decor, approximately a 45-minute drive from Tucson. We point the car towards the Santa Catalinas and drive. About half an hour later, the road signs switch from miles to kilometers (that zany metric system!) and my mom becomes convinced that we will accidentally drive across the border and suddenly be in Mexico. We arrive in Nogales, park the car, and because we're white Americans, stroll freely through the metal turnstile into Mexico. We find a beautiful Spanish-style mirror and end tables for the living room. The man selling us the stuff offers to carry it across the border back to our car (did I mention it's at least a mile walk, plus time in customs, plus its 90 degrees, plus there's about a million people milling around?) My mother, the cheapest person I know, insists that we are fine and capable of carrying close to 70 lbs. (50 kg) of home furnishings ourselves. I am bruised and have ruined a pair of capris, but we have gotten a bargain.

I’ve also had a chance to get to know many great people here. I am currently keeping busy designing my syllabus for teaching this year (and watching So You Think You Can Dance – go Neil!) Looking forward to LaRue coming down on Sunday.

More pics are on Facebook!

What I Learned in Graduate School (besides stuff about books)

1. I learned that I have a tendency to stress out about things that end up not being a big deal in the end. Last summer I did some journaling because I was so stressed out about things that were going to happen this year. Reflecting on those writings, I realized that really none of it was anything I should have panicked about. This connects to Emily’s extremely well-noted quote on her Facebook page about how graduate school is a time for discovering your neuroses.
2. I am capable of doing many things. This past year I applied to nine PhD programs, was accepted to eight, visited three. I presented at three regional and one national conference. I conducted an intensive ethnography and wrote a master’s thesis about it. I took four graduate-level classes. I taught three classes, and conducted weekly tutorials. I made many new friends and contacts, and I think I had a pretty good social life. I can do more than I think I can. I think I sometimes sell myself short. I am capable of focusing on the Important things. (As a side note related to my earlier post about GTD, I also found that focusing on the important things does not mean that all the other Things go away.)
3. Teaching sustains me and energizes me. (In a similar vein, I learned the truth of Wendy Bishop’s statement that we must see students as “people trying to make sense of their lives.”)
4. I’m good at school. I like the schedule: the rhythm of the week and the cycle of the school year. I like papers and syllabi.
5. It’s important to learn everyone’s name and their story.
6. Questions are more important than answers. Questions lead you somewhere, energize you, and give you purpose and direction. Answers are finite, oversimplified, and stagnant. Seeking a better question is just as important as seeking a better answer. My whole thesis took off once I bothered to sit down and figure out what questions I was asking rather than what my thesis “said.” It’s okay to answer a question with another question.
7. TV is great. I never really watched TV until graduate school. I find TV to be relaxing but not enervating. It’s also a great way to talk to people. The best TV shows can be analyzed on a higher level or just enjoyed for the pleasure of watching.
8. Instead of trying to distinguish yourself by being smarter than everyone else, focus on working harder than everyone else. When I first came to grad school, I thought everyone was smarter than me, but it turns out they had just read more books. They were thus able to make more connections than I was. Being organized and dependable and on top of my game got me really far in grad school. I first learned this when I was tutoring my first semester. Students would say they didn’t like their comp teachers and I would ask why. I was expecting an answer like “She grades too hard” or “She’s boring” but a lot of the time they would say, “She’s really disorganized.” Somehow, being young and female is equated with being incompetent in our society. People don’t expect you to be creative and brilliant every day – they do expect you to be prepared and have a plan every day.
9. People’s writing tends to reflects who they are as a person.
10. Write early, write often, write about everything, even if it’s garbage. Having anything written is always better than having nothing written.
11. Things that might seem like stumbling blocks can actually be great challenges. There are aspects of the MU program that, at the outset, would have been unappealing to me, but in time turned out to be challenges that I am proud of meeting.
12. Never post to a listserve. Ever.
13. The best cure for my own anxiety is to sit down and make a plan for what I’m going to do about the issue for the next couple of months. Then I break it down into a manageable to-do lists. This does WONDERS for my sanity. It also helps to write down exactly what about the thing stresses me out. Typically when I reflect on this, I feel silly. The problem seems smaller.
14. Be here now. I’ve reflected on many times in my graduate school days and thought “Wow that was a fun day, but I was really stressed out about …” I wish that I’d just lived in the moment more.

Things I’m still learning
1. I’m still learning how to ask for help, and how to depend on other people.
2. I’m learning to not be envious of others’ success.
3. I’m learning to make it work, meaning that I’m learning to take things that are garbage and make them beautiful.
4. I’m trying to distinguish between things that need a lot of my time and attention and even stress and things that do not require anxiety.
5. I need to learn to balance teaching with my own work.

More Kinks in My GTD System

Getting Things Done recommends that you simplify, simplify, simplify by focusing on what your big goals are and only doing the tasks that help you accomplish those goals. I recently complained to Jennifer, my shiny new roommate that I had problems knowing what my goals were. Just like the GTD system seemed to be biased towards corporate types, it also seems to be biased towards people who know more than I do what they want out of life. For example:

Faith’s Goal #1: Be a professor. Okay, that sounds like a good goal, except if I really think about it, it’s pretty fuzzy. A professor where? A big university (such as those I’ve attended thus far)? A teaching college? (Jennifer recommends Truman – thanks Jennifer!) Do I want to teach graduate students or undergraduates? And what if I want to be a writing program administrator? Do I want to do administrative work? And maybe I don’t want to be a professor – I’ve also thought about teaching at a private high school or boarding school. What if I end up disenfranchised with the system of higher ed? Also, I was reading this article in Newsweek and it sounds like these schools could be cool places to work. And what is this “professor” identity anyway? What if my goal to be a professor conflicts with a goal to be a teacher or advisor or dean or chair? Or wife, mother, friend, humanitarian, pet owner, American Idol finalist ….

Another kink in the system is that little things don’t go away just because you don’t focus on them. For example, this semester I did a good job of saying to myself that my thesis was absolutely the number one most important thing (in GTD speak, that’s an MIT or Most Important Task). So when I had a free hour or two and I was trying to figure out what to do, I always went to the thesis. This meant that my thesis got done. But that did not, in fact, make other things go away. Papers did not grade themselves. So while it was great that the thesis went well, I was plagued with a lot of loose ends.