coldhearted scientist وداد

GOOD: The Emeritus Professor, back then. In elementary school when I wrote my first research paper he explained how to plan a project. How much time do you have, weeks to deadline? How long must the paper be, and how short can it be? How much time per day do you have to devote to it, very realistically? Take those things, add them together and average them out. Then think about the five stages the project will go through: research, writing, resting, revising, finishing. How much of the time you have do you want to spend on each one?

35%-30%-10%-15%-10% was the division of time I decided on with the provision I might change it somewhat, mostly by doing additional research during the next four stages. I decided I had two hours to spend on the project, five days a week. One of the hours would be a solid hour, after school, but the other hour would be during school and would have to be broken into segments: 30 minutes of designated time, and two other 15 minute segments to be carved out of time that was slow or empty.

With this plan it was easy to start on Day 1 with a trip to the library, and continue on Day 2 by starting to read, take notes, and arrange the books. I did not require further specifi help because the general instructions were so good. There was another part to them: how many subtopics will your paper cover? how much space do you want to devote to each? And there was some lore: do not cite encyclopedias, but read them. This advice from the Emeritus Professor worked throughout school and most of two assistant professorships.

Interestingly, there was no discussion of forming a thesis statement; it was implied that what one wanted to say would come to one as one read and thought; I discovered that what came to me was not a thesis statement but a title whose presence in my mind led to the appearance of the points to be made and the order in which they should be made. The only important, unspoken element in the advice was that you have to have faith in yourself and full control over your project design — things I had then, but lost later on.

BAD: Other graduate students and assistant professors, especially the ones from Ivy League institutions, and a psychotherapist without a Ph.D. whose poor logic was really only a ghastly exaggerration of what I was already hearing elsewhere. All of these people and some more senior faculty proposed really destructive ideas: projects were not yours but onerous burdens on you, and they either should have been done yesterday or be put off until tomorrow. None of this is true, and all actually successful and happy people think of their projects as their own and are interested in them now.

GOOD: The foreign graduate students in my freshman dorm. They had calendars and schedules and had figured out when, in each day and week, they would work but also relax. They were training like Olympic athletes, I see now. “I am taking these vitamins, spending the afternoon in the lab, going running at five o’clock, doing Tai Chi on the Golden Gate Bridge Sunday, and finding documents in the archives Monday, because later this quarter I am going up for a qualifying examination against five professors, some of whom have Nobel prizes. I am doing this in English, which is not my native or even my second language, and I am going to win this game!” That was why, later, I was able to do work over the long term and also remain healthy and engaged in other parts of life. I did not realize that other people did not know how to do this, but I see now that those graduate students imparted a very special skill.

GOOD: A Latin T.A. I always did poorly in Latin because I insisted upon translating into literate, idiomatic English and this was not allowed. You could not say “If he had been…” and had to say “If he would have been” because you had to prove you could distinguish the pluperfect subjunctive and indicative in Latin. I refused to write poor English so my grade was always B-. I was doing what I believed in and did not realize that the ragging of the T.A.s was getting to me until I got into the class of a British one who looked at my paper and said: “I see you have no trouble with Latin.”

I noticed myself feeling incredibly relieved and grateful to hear this and I remember it even now as some sort of watershed moment. I can remember what I was wearing, even, and how I kept wearing that combination of clothes afterwards, almost fetishistically, because these clothes had also heard the comment that made me feel competent. I wore them to the first day of my Ph.D exam. The meaning of this is, positive mentoring is what works on me and that is part of what I like to do for my students.

BAD: All the warnings of doom I heard from somewhere in mid-graduate school on, and in particular the strange projections of questionable judgment and motivations: you must just want to be a language teacher, you cannot live in the Midwest and you are naïve if you think you can, you do not want to conduct research, it is very difficult to publish, write but do not conduct research, you must be planning to procrastinate; in short: work is meaningless, life is terrible and so are you.

GOOD: My first ceramics instructor, giving advice on how to rescue failing pieces, or improve already good ones. She would give us some viable possibilites and would tell us what she would do. That is, she would reveal the options and her own preference, so she offered leadership, but she encouraged us to take our own paths, whether these were her own or not. In school and afterwards what has been poor mentoring for me is (a) being told what to do with no discussion and (b) not even being clued in to what the standard course of action was. I like to give students a full view of a situation and enough orientation so that they can make informed choices — not leave them at sea or set them on a course laid out by me and not them.

I think a topic to discuss should be bad advice we have received. The specific, bad advice and why it was bad.

Axé.