Zen Sabbaticals

I've just finished reading Natalie Goldberg's 1993 memoir "Long Quiet Highway".  It focuses on her intertwined paths into writing and Zen, exploring the idea of writing as a form of practice (in contrast to traditional seated meditation).  Natalie's writing turns me inward, and perhaps not surprisingly, it brought my attention to sabbatical.

Fundamentally, sabbatical is about focus.  More importantly, the practice of focus.  Throwing oneself into just a single project isn't necessary (though the time to do that is nice).  Sabbatical is a logistical clearing of the clutter: no committee work, meetings, appointments, or grading.  It's a great justification for postponing reviewing work and other forms of service that slice and dice the days and weeks.  Your time becomes your own, and you're expected to do something significant with it.

And it can all go to waste if you see it more as losing others' demands on you without confronting your own time-wasting demands on yourself.  For the moment, I'm thinking mostly of distraction.

A true, internalized embrace of sabbatical would see me deeply exploiting my right to push the world away.  I'd read the university mailing list much less frequently, hugely slow down my response to email, and really reflect on (rather than simply check-off) things I was reading.  Then, the work would start. I'd pay attention, let distracting thoughts bubble up and float away, and look for the deeper insights that lead to great research and learning.  In other words, I'd approach academics as a form of Zen practice.

"Long Quiet Highway" brought this point back home: the real practice is in how you work and live.  If you can't practice focused attention when given the institutional sanction and support, how can you expect to do so once sabbatical is over and the flurry resumes?  Sabbatical is a sesshin (long sitting period) in disguise.  Make the desk a cushion.

Time to close the email.  Gassho, Natalie.

When does sabbatical start (and what is it, really)?

I'm bemused by how my thinking about sabbatical has evolved over the last several months.  (I am on sabbatical for the entire upcoming academic year):

• Having front-loaded my entire teaching load to the fall semester last academic year, I gave my last pre-sabbatical lecture in December.  I was conscious of it being my last lecture for over 18 months. Under the "sabbatical-as-concentrated-research-time" view, part me believe sabbatical started as soon as my final grades went in.  That wasn't a great interpretation, as my spring semester was so deadline-driven (proposals, papers, committee/university service, etc) that I got little new research done compared to my teaching-intensive semesters, and I was frustrated.
• The day of my last committee meeting on campus, I went home giddy, convinced that sabbatical had finally started.  This took the "sabbatical as freedom from meetings" view, as well as the "sabbatical-as-freedom-from-commuting-to-campus" view (I live an hour's drive from campus).  These views discounted the wave of "I'm really tired and need some rest before I can usefully think again" that characterized the start of summer.
• July 1st was my official first day of sabbatical, after which I could reasonably tell anyone who asked me to do any university work that I was unavailable (not that anyone did, but I still sensed power in the date).  This was the "sabbatical-as-owning-my-own-time" view.
• Solid progress on new research projects in new areas in the second half of this summer have been personally rewarding.  This is the "sabbatical-as-time-to-do-new-big-stuff" view.
• This weekend, I am conscious that the incoming freshmen are moving in today, classes start on Thursday, and I'm not responsible for a dang thing.  I'm gloating internally at all the university and department emails that I'm not bothering to open.  I've reconnected with the idea that August can actually be a relaxing and enjoyable part of summer; I could get used to that.  This is a "sabbatical-as-freedom-from-death-by-a-thousand-time-cuts" view.

Reflecting from my calm August deck chair, I see how much of my early view of sabbatical has been framed around the idea of "freedom".  That's somewhat sad, as it encouraged me to focus on the aggrevating parts of faculty life (which I do actually enjoy on the whole).  It also had me thinking about the end of sabbatical--the time when I would lose that freedom--from the time it started. Focusing on the looming end of freedom made me a outright basket case for the first several weeks, when I felt a responsibility to make the most of every single minute of freedom I had, like grabbing a precious breadth when coming above water.

Those early weeks of sabbatical actually weren't much fun emotionally.

With a summer of rest and reading behind me, my perspective is healthier.  Sabbatical now feels like the "responsibility-to-push-myself-in-new-intellectual-directions".  Yeah, that's what the official memos on how to apply for sabbatical said, but I didn't feel it in my bones before now.  Finally, in the week when classes are about to resume, I finally feel sufficiently rested and initially rejuvenated mentally to start the real work of sabbatical.  I'm just thankful to have gotten to this point with a full year still to go, and with enough productive work done over the summer that I know what to do in the times that I won't be lecturing, orienting, or otherwise sitting in meetings this week.  There's no more academic baggage to lose, so the true freedom of sabbatical can begin (apologies to Janis Joplin).

Good enough for MOOCs?

As a computer science professor who is interested in learning, it's natural that I've been thinking about and following the whole MOOC-mania.  I'm partly interested from a research/tech perspective (just how much is online learning capable of, given time to develop?), and partly from a job-survival one (what's the likelihood of my line of work disappearing before I retire?).

A friend's blog post lead me to a Forbes article from this week on why online ed is a bubble: summary---students go to college as much as for social/experience reasons as for education, and online can't reproduce the networking and fun aspects of college.  Certainly not a new argument.  Certainly an argument that makes sense for some segments of colleges and of the population.  But I'm not ready to dismiss the MOOC paranoia just yet.

MOOCS aren't going to wipe many colleges off the map in 5 years like an asteroid (though I'm thinking this would make a good 48-hour film project premise).  The college experience is going to wither by a thousand cuts (budget cuts, staffing, time, etc).  A pending case of academic frog-boiling.  College doesn't have to be great--it has to be good enough.  On the educational side, MOOCs just might prove good enough for many students.  What's good enough on the social side?  Could an innovative entity create a social space with a bit of exclusivity (part of the college draw), clout, alumni, and many other things that together create a "good enough" social experience?  Membership driven, like a fitness club?

To claim that colleges will retain their stranglehold on the young-adult social experience bets against innovation.  There will always be a place for elite schools, but they don't serve the majority of students.  It'll take time, but there's a lot colleges could lose and still be "good enough".  Colleges need to innovate to figure out how to lower costs and still be "good enough". Other organizations will figure out how to grow to be "good enough" socially, by which time online education will have matured a lot.

Should we bet against good enough?

Resurrecting a blog, a professor, and a course

I'm now on sabbatical, next due in the office in August 2014.  Been thinking this would be a good excuse/motivation to resurrect the blog (quiet for the last 5 years), but hadn't yet found something I felt like writing about.

So much for leaving the classroom: my inaugural sabbatical post is about class sizes.

The NYTimes has an op-ed on whether class size counts.  The article is about pre-college, not college classes.  Roughly, the piece discusses a proposal under which high performing teachers get additional pay in exchange for taking on larger classes.   The piece doesn't discuss how much larger, but does cite a national survey that asked teachers about taking on 3 additional students in exchange for $10K.  Interestingly, only 42% of teachers wanted this deal, while 47% would turn down the raise in exchange for 3 fewer students.  The piece also discusses the lack of actual research on the effect of class sizes, noting that the effect may be quite different for different kinds of students.

This struck me in part because my department is potentially facing an increase in students interested in taking Computer Science next year.  For the past three years, I've taught the second course in our CS sequence (OO program design and data structures), last year topping out at 235 students across two lecture sessions and 9 lab sections.  And honestly, trying to find ways to give the support associated with smaller classes to that many students burned me out enough that I'm only now really figuring out what I want to do with my sabbatical.

But it has left me thinking a lot about what we associate with "small classes", what parts of that actually matter, and how we can provide it as class sizes outstrip resources.

Access to help is perhaps the biggest issue.  In practice, though, help needs are not directly proportional to class sizes.  How many times have I taught smaller (40ish) person classes and not had a single student come to office hours or request appointments?   Out of my 235 students, I'd estimate that there were roughly 25-30 students who actually came to my office or asked for help with any regularity (I know many more used the teaching assistants).  The point is that a class of 200+ students who don't need help is a very different beast than a class of students who do need help.  The op-ed raises this distinction, but at the college level, we seem to make our allocations more on simple student/staff ratios.

Quality feedback on student work follows close behind.  Good teaching involves showing students who don't think they need help that they still have things to learn.  Unless someone is actually reading student work, we miss those opportunities for deep education.  I still insist on having my staff actually read all the code that gets submitted (rather than just auto-grading against test suites), but we're losing the scale battle there.

Avoiding anonymity is another issue I worry about: even if a student never expects to seek help, large classes feel impersonal.  At a time when students are trying to work out who they are and what they care about, this is problematic.  Not problematic enough, however, to justify additional resources.

I will be spending at least part of my sabbatical better understanding how cognitive tutors and other computer-based learning aids could help with these problems.  I don't want to fully automate my class.   Being honest with myself, I'm looking for ways to mitigate the guilt of not being able to support each and every student in line with my values as a teacher.  Having that support come entirely from a human teacher isn't feasible, nor do I suspect necessary, or even optimal.  There are interesting blended human-computer instructional systems waiting to be built for teaching in large classes (lots of progress exists on the systems side, but the teacher/tool interaction seems less developed).  If I can come off sabbatical more comfortable with the level of support I can provide, and rested enough to hold up my end of the bargain, I'd call it a success.

Work/life balance

A number of separate incidents left me thinking a lot about work/life balance these last couple of weeks: research deadlines near the start of term had me working a lot on weekends, bouts of sleeplessness had me up at my desk before 5am for several days running, multiple students came by to talk about academic career issues, and I heard yet another discussion on the oft-heard wisdom that older people nearing the end of life are more reflective/proud/wistful/etc of encounters they had with people than with long hours spent at work. It was enough to induce frenzied angst about overwork even in my calmest moments.

Yet, it didn't, and not because I was too stressed to think about it. I'm actually bemused by how calm I've been these last 3 weeks, especially in contrast to how uncalm I was under similar workloads in the fall. When I consider working less, part of me stops and wonders "to replace it with what?" And this just after having one of those moments with a dear friend that I will recall for the rest of my life as one that truly mattered.

Driving to work after a wet snowfall earlier this month, I was struck by how blindingly beautiful the highway was surrounded by bare trees coated with strong clean snow as thick as the branches themselves. Immersed in that powerful image, I suddenly knew that what stays with me over the years are powerful emotional and sensory moments. If I aim to live a life that I won't regret in the end, amassing powerful moments like these seems critical. And some of my most vivid memories of being human and real have come from work. I have both emotional and muscular recall of certain seconds when I saw specific research problems in a new way. I can replay segments of lectures given ages ago that were on song. These remind me that I am human and alive as much as the analogous treasured moments with friends, family, or nature.

Of course, it's often far too easy to get lost in the aspects of work that won't lead to moments like this. There's a lot of seemingly pointless work even in the unfettered academic life. But this insight gives me a metric: if I'm going to spend hours at the desk, do it to work on something hard and interesting enough to create those moments of a lifetime. At that point, it's not work. It's living.

What I've Meant by Mentoring

One day in grad school (early 1990s), several of us were talking about the lack of women on the dept faculty. When a male student asked why this was important, one woman remarked that she "wanted someone who looks like me" as a mentor. I pondered that remark for years, not concurring with it but lacking a compelling alternative. Mid-postdoc, I wanted a mentor who talked like me: someone for whom gadgets weren't the ultimate conversation topic and who might admit to frustrations or challenges as a researcher and person. Now as faculty, I seek "someone who relates like me", in relationships with research, colleagues, and career overall.

I blogged earlier about professional friendships, which fall largely under the "talk like me" view. Here, I'm after something more substantial. I've learned that the environment of research matters as much (if not more) to me than the topic of research. I'd gladly choose a research problem based on the people I would get to work with on it, rather than first picking the problem. I'm not sure how to structure a career around this metric though; the search for compatible research colleagues is time and energy consuming for all involved, certainly more so than just picking a problem. As a mentoree, I'm still looking for role models on structuring a career this way.

Reflecting on my role as a mentor (to both students and junior faculty), I think of the standard advice we give to young researchers: "find something you are truly passionate about and work on that". Gosh knows I've said it to others. And after 15 years of trying, I can honestly say that this advice simply hasn't worked for me, because my passion flies within groups working together on problems, not from the problems in and of themselves. I've almost talked myself out of computer science many times on the grounds that lacking passion for any particular problem must mean I'm in the wrong career. And then I turn back because I get short-term consumed by a modeling or programming problem and realize that I do love this work. I just need a different model for structuring those fragments of work into a satisfying long-term career.

Where does this leave me as a mentor, though? Do I pass along the "get passionate about a problem" advice, since it clearly works for many in the self-selected group who become researchers? What advice would I give if I _didn't_ say that? Perhaps mentoring isn't about "giving advice", but about being a sounding board, sharing experiences and asking questions as someone tries to form their own career path. The mentor in me likes that view: it frees me from the responsibility of having the answers. But as a mentoree, I want someone who can give advice, who does have "the answers" and is willing to share them.

I remind myself that the questions I wanted answers to as a student and new professor are different from the ones I'm facing now, and I can suggest views into those earlier questions. Maybe someone who "looked like me" was all I really wanted earlier in my career. But there's this ever-nagging sense that I could make someone else's career path easier if only I could guide them now on the issues that will confront them later, even though I know they may not even see those issues yet. And if they do, I'm just not the right mentor for them. Mentoring is about a fit between people, not an exam for the mentor. Remind me of that next time my mentoree asks a question for which I fail to have an answer.

[Side note: I'm thinking about these questions a lot in the context of reading Christina Robb's recent book "This Changes Everything: The Relational Revolution in Psychology", an account of the relational psychology work by Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, Judith Lewis Herman, and others, from the late 70s onward. Opens a lot of questions about relationships between people and between people and their work, both of which bear on questions concerning mentoring.]

[This post written for the scientiae-carnival on mentoring.]

Getting unorganized

Every new academic year brings a "new year's resolution" from many faculty: the intent to get "more organized". Even highly prolific colleagues have been quoted as wishing they were more organized, and one of the career mentoring programs I've been to had a nice session centered around the topic. Blogs and books abound to the extent that you could guarantee you got nothing done just by trying to read them all. Who wouldn't benefit from being more organized in our fast-paced world?

Me, for one. I am resolved to get unorganized this year.

Sabbatical felt very productive, but I always sensed that it was for reasons beyond having more time and fewer distractions from not teaching. Now that I am back in the throes of (two) classes and barely afloat, I'm realizing that my being organized is a problem. I have an insanely good memory for to-do lists (including the shopping list, household errand list, course prep list, and the list of lists). Every evening, I write down the tasks that have to get done the next day; every morning, I spent lots of time "getting things done" before realizing that several weren't even on the paper lists. By the list measure, I'm quite productive.

Unfortunately, the victim here is the spontaneous creativity that fosters research. When an idea pops into my head and needs a little cultivating through thought or code experiments, my organized mind immediately relegates it to a position on a carefully prioritized list. By the time I get to it, the snuffed ember that remains doesn't have enough traction to go anywhere. I'd be better off if I could ditch organization and chase the sparks without my internal task management system always reminding me of those blasted lists. In other words, I have to get unorganized.

Clearly, the trick is to find the right balance between organization and disorganization: some organization is essential to run an effective course or career. Most of the writing out there is aimed at those with too little organization though. I haven't yet found a blog aimed at those of us with too much. There are lots of little related pieces of advice: the standard 80/20 rule veteran faculty give to newbies (students rarely notice that last 20% of effort that takes you at least 80% of the time), articles on improving creativity, living a meaningful life, etc. These dance around the real issue: if you are very organized, you have to work hard at overriding that if you want to let yourself do the work that needs less structure. What are the best practices for introducing more chaos into your life? Yes, I know, that's another list ...

Blogging, on Balance

I had intended this post for the last Scientiae Carnival (topic: balance), but got tied up in work for a computer science curriculum workshop I ran at the end of July and never finished the post. That delay is, however, related to what I had planned to write about balance.

I began blogging this spring in response to perceived lack of balance in my professional career. Lack-of-balance is easier to recognize than balance, because it manifests as something concrete that captures our attention. I noticed I wasn't devoting enough energy to observing my surroundings for how computing really fits into society (something I wanted to do more of as a result of sabbatical). Blogging was meant to force me into finding observations to write about, on the oft-proposed strategy of announcing intentions to motivate action. That strategy hasn't worked nearly as well for the blog as it has in other areas of my life. Do I not actually want balance, or is something else afoot?

The term "balance" raises a visual metaphor of a scale with equal weights on all sides. Taken too far, "balance" in the context of my original desire to generate more observations misses the nature of research: it can take years to develop the results underlying a single idea. Several weeks is a minimum (once you include evaluation, which may include implementation). Aiming to post once or twice a week means that I'll be generating far more observations than I'll ever act on. Which in itself is fine, given the percentage of ideas that end up being worth pursuing.
Even given that, though, the question remains of where you want your attention to go. Yes, I want to be better at making observations that lead to interesting projects. But as someone who prefers to only juggle 2-3 big efforts at a time, I also need long stretches of downtime to work through observations. Observations in spurts followed by a weed-out phase is better-suited to my style of thinking.

The visual metaphor of balance still feels broken, though. Balance requires a reference weight. When I say "life-work balance", I don't (personally) mean that my life and work should take equal portions of my time. I simply mean that I should feel satisfied with the proportions. The "reference weight", such as it is, contains my available time or energy. The pieces of my life must balance out to that reference, but the devil is in the proportions. The scale metaphor is misleading. Far better is the one I heard on a mailing list some years ago about life being a large jar into which you must place your biggest items first, letting the little things fit in as they may.

For me, blogging is a small-to-medium item to fit into the jar. I still like how it forces me to articulate ideas, how it encourages me to make observations that I'd be willing to put my name on without having carried them through to research results. I'll continue to blog occasionally, when mood and ideas strike. But I don't expect to try to keep this up on a twice-weekly basis as I initially thought. Other items are just more important, especially with classes starting again in 10 days. I do want to make sure that "observing" stays sufficiently visible in my jar that I don't lose sight of it completely. But on balance, balance need not be balanced for my life or career to feel in proportion.

What Not to Bear

True confessions time. I've gotten oddly addicted to What Not to Wear (American version), a tv makeover show in which the victim of the week (usually female) has her wardrobe mocked and thrown away before getting fashion rules and being sent off to buy a new wardrobe, hair style and makeup routine (financed by the sponsors). I'd have expected to hate a show like this -- too much focus on consumerism, appearances, and body image. Like many tech/science people, I place higher value on internal than external qualities. Yet I keep watching this show. Why?

Time and time again, the victim emerges from the week sporting a whole new level of confidence and more positive self-image (including body image). The external transformation produces some nontrivial internal transformation. The internal transformation gets me every time, probably because as a professor I'm always on the lookout for ways to help students gain confidence and develop their potential (no fear to my students: we're not about to add fashion interventions to intro programming). I'm always on the lookout for ways to achieve these same ends in myself.

Tenure and sabbatical were a big surprise on this front. When I got tenure, I didn't feel relief. The call hit about as hard as one from the mechanic saying the car was ready for pickup (glad to have it done, call my husband to pass along the news). I tried replaying the call in my head several times to see if I'd get excited or relieved. No go. Instead, I fell under an overwhelming sense of responsibility: I had been given lifetime job security, and now it was time to actually live up to it.

Enter sabbatical: a year to figure out how to live up to the incredible job benefit that is tenure. A year ago, I headed off into that year firmly resolved to come back with an exciting new research program focused on some important problem, complete with vision statement and corresponding web page. And I've largely gotten there, minus the web page.

But something deeper comes back with me: an enhanced respect for myself and more importantly, my time. Being given a year of control over my time made me realize how much of it I give away to issues I don't care about, to activities that don't work towards personal goals, to other people who are happy to waste it on my behalf. I return resolved to fight for time, both my own and others (the latter in speaking out against things we do that waste collective faculty time). Behind the unfinished web page lies a researcher who doesn't want to waste time on problems that don't matter, a professor who wants to squeeze more learning out of every assignment, a committee member who wants to make meetings worth their while (especially as I'm on bigger service tasks post-tenure). And someone happy to idle away a bit of time writing a blog.

Like the show participants, I return renewed, revised, and with a stronger sense of self. I don't yet have the papers, grants, and talks that dress an academic career, but I have my fashion guidelines through my newly identified research area. The sabbatical year has been a fabulous experience, and I look forward to seeing how the next year plays out. Tune in for updates!

How We Are Hungry

Just this morning, I stumbled across the scientiae carnival of women bloggers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Their current topic (the subject line) took over my thoughts like a mid-afternoon sugar craving. Sabbatical has helped me understand my deepest career hunger: to interact regularly with a small network of friends with common professional interests. I love teaching, being a professor, and working in academia. The emotional isolation wears me down though, and threatens to renew itself as I prepare to return in the fall.

This isn't meant to insult my closest friends at work. They are wonderful people who I confide in, enjoy talking to, and respect. They are also men closer to my parents' ages than to mine. I have close friendships with some women academics (in other fields) and writers of my own age that follow the interaction style I love: a seamless blend of work and non-work discussions that last for hours or days yet feel unfinished. I had one off-and-on work-based friendship as a postdoc 8 years ago, and another with a visiting researcher for a few months while I was faculty. The rarity of these relationships the last 12 years, whether with males or females, makes this my greatest hunger.

Watching my thoughts on this though, I noticed that I was answering the question "what are we hungry for", rather than "how we are hungry". How did I end up in this situation? I work in a reasonable department in a good school, my colleagues are collegial, with an above-average percentage of female faculty, and plenty of faculty near my age. I have some good friends in other departments on campus, but working in different buildings on campus, we manage to meet only once or twice a semester, never spontaneously (and we all live far enough from campus in different directions that after-hours gathering don't happen). I've met a couple of people (mostly women) at conferences with whom I expect I'd have such a friendship if we worked at the same institutions, but none of us make time to develop these long distance, given our other demands. Some days, I feel like my academic upbringing socialized me to not expect my style of friendships in professional circles, until I woke up and realized how much I missed them, and--worse still--how much I feel I stagnate intellectually by not having them. The latter is where this issue really irks.

Perhaps I shouldn't feel hungry over this at all. Perhaps I asking too much to want close professional friends with whom I can interact regularly and easily. Perhaps I am still mourning having graduated from college, where the dorms were a continuous feast of interactions academic and not. I know I'm not an academic in hopes of reliving college, but I did expect more from the promise of the academic environment as an adult.

Do others experience the disconnect between professional and other friendships? Do you feel it holds you back? Do you feel less productive having to have professional conversations in a style that doesn't come naturally to you? Suggestions on how to address it?

In the end, the question is simply how to get fed. Perhaps being involved in an online community, rather than trying to main electronic one-on-one conversations would help, simply because there's more chance of finding someone with free time to e-chat in the same day or week in a larger group. It would certainly be better than my current approach to the situation, which seems to entail too many cookies and chocolates.