This week’s brilliant link from Dame Eleanor Hull.
I want to figure out how to implement this and I am stuck on #5 because my teaching assignment varies so much. I could also cut down on service but it is the optional service that keeps me interested and makes things work. During this week, when I was melting down, I nonetheless hosted a major speaker whom I had also gotten funded this semester and done publicity for, and for whom I became an ethnographic informant (seriously; I was recorded, and everything).
To streamline teaching I want sanity in the language program, first. I want my second survey to be the colonial Latin American one, not the Peninsular one. I want to limit the number of seminar topics I have to give. Ideally, the choices would be based on my research, as opposed to driven by student interest as has had to be the case up until now. These decisions, however, are not mine to make and that is part of my frustration.
Ultimately, though, I think I am against streamlining teaching, at least for me. Before I started trying to streamline it, it went well and I got my research projects finished, too, and took weekends off. Streamlining efforts seem to backfire, and to create extra, unexpected work. I actually think I need to plan more, not less time for teaching. It might be that I was already streamlined … or that I am just fast when I feel sufficiently autonomous.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 