So here’s what I do, sometimes, while I’m working: I have Coursera on in the background. Well, and sometimes I just sit and listen to it. If you haven’t run across Coursera yet, it’s one of the online sites that offers university-level courses, on various topics. For free! Yes. For free. (Oh, I know, a…
Category: Academics
Chaucer’s Latest Poem: Herein We See the Difference Between Adaptation and Parody, In Case You Get Confused
Nice to know that Geoff is still working! We hadn’t heard from him since May, but last week, I see, on checking his blog, he posted his latest poem, which, in true Chaucerian fashion, is an reworking of a reworking of an original poem, though given the nature of how literature works, maybe Wallace Stevens…
Aventure and Falling in Love
In my online Taking the Aventure classes, we start off with “Remembering Your Aventures,” and there’s a guided meditation (which you can get for free if you sign up for my newsletter!), meant to help the listener remember some of the previous aventures he or she has had in his or her life. Because…
Deep Work
Cal Newport has recently posted a technique for setting up what he calls “deep work” sessions, a technique that seems very useful indeed. His picture of how he uses the technique isn’t very illuminating, though, at least to me; here’s my translation: He’s got a list of things he wants to work on. (In his…
Down Time and Deep Projects
It’s finals week in the university where I teach. All time changes. The papers that we knew were coming, all semester, get written, and get read. The finals which we knew were coming, all semester, get taken, and get graded. All the departmental work that has to get finished before the summer is getting shoved…
Passion for the Work
As I have said before, I admire Cal Newport’s Study Hacks blog very much; even when I don’t agree with his conclusions, I find his ideas useful. He is good to think on if a man would express himself neatly.* But yesterday one of my friends told me he was absolutely turned off by the…
Surviving (and Thriving) in the Academic Shame Culture
Recently I used the phrase “academic shame culture,” and a colleague, who’d recently been openly shamed at a faculty meeting and was therefore pretty interested, wanted to know where I had heard it. I have no idea. It seemed just pretty obvious to me that the academy uses shame as a method of keeping its…
On Writing Every Day
I admire greatly Cal Newport’s blog Study Hacks; he’s interested in examining myths about studying, and entrepreneurship, and achievement, stacking the myths up against data, and thinking about what really works and what doesn’t. And he’s usually got extremely good advice. So I was very amused to come across one of his posts with which,…
My Best PhD Exam Advice
For those of you getting ready to take such things as PhD exams (and you know who you are; I’ve got one of you in mind specially), my advice: (Now, this is not about the studying. Let’s assume that you had a plan, and you had a schedule, and you spent months going over your…