This Thus

I’m staring down the barrel of an end of semester shotgun and find myself the least prepared for the work I have yet to do in all my varied and long career in academia. For some reason, I just have not been able to get a solid grasp on any of my paper topics for my classes and now is the time I need to be writing, not researching or reading but that’s about all I can do since my brain doesn’t seem able to fix upon a singular, solid thesis to pursue in any of my classes.

It’s a frustrating feeling. And frightening as all hell. We are talking about single digit days before I have to turn in an 8-10 page proposal for an article length article, and only a week after that, I need to have my Shakespeare paper in good shape, followed by my Formation of the America’s paper. It’s not so much that I haven’t started writing that’s the problem (although I really wanted to be in a position to begin writing this weekend), its that I am still flailing around and don’t feel like I have anything of interest or import to say in the areas I’m working in.

Have you ever come up against the end of the semester and felt utterly lost in terms of your seminar work? If so, please let me know because I’m hitting my head against a wall these days . . . and that’s not helping all that much.

Sometimes I regret starting this blog in my own name and wonder if I might be more productive with it if I’d chosen to be anonymous and felt safer talking about certain aspects of my experience in graduate school. For example, I don’t feel like I can really address some of my feelings on the theatre produced by the department, or certain dynamics between professors and students, or even students and other students. Not that I would want to turn this into a gossip fest, but it might be nice to tease out some of the complications of working toward a PhD with an eye to the actuality of working in a specific department.

On the other hand, as I care about theatre, theatre pedagogy, and how theatre departments operate within the larger field of academia, these are issues that I will always grapple with and probably now is as good a time as any to develop strategies that are respectful to my colleagues while allowing me to be as honest as possible. This is a challenge for me because bad theatre and poor teaching are among the things in this world that make me get angry and very, very riled up. Again, however, now seems as good a time as any to start learning how to handle this challenge.

Any tips?

There are days when being a graduate student seems like the stupidest decision in the world. Then there are days when you find yourself reading a book about the relationship between politics, plague, and Shakespeare and come across a lengthy section dedicated to the life cycle of rat fleas and the bubonic plague and you think to yourself, “this is why I am where I am: so I can spend afternoons reading this kind of thing.”

Of course there are bad days, but this day? This day was a good day.

"Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years" (Leeds Barroll)

ProfHacker has a great rundown on various ideas for taking a break and recharging. From physical exercise to simply taking some time to breathe.

Check it out here

I did not put my Intro to Performance courses up on the web at all this semester but plan on doing so in the spring. I want to mostly have a place to put assignment guides, calendar, sections of play scripts, and occasional announcements. Given the nature of the course, I don’t need to have my students do a whole lot in a digital fashion.

I’m currently trying to decide if I’m going to roll my own solution using WordPress (a platform I’m rather comfortable with) and Google Calendar or go through the university’s Blackboard installation which will probably have lots of tools that I don’t end up using and which is closed, proprietary, and not the best in terms of user experience. However, I haven’t used it in a number of years, so I don’t have a good handle on how BB has changed over the past decade. Part of me wonders, however, if a lot of other classes use it, the irksome elements might be worth it so that the students can have a centralized experience with their coursework.

Anyone have thoughts on the matter? I’d like to work on putting everything together over the winter break, so I want to make a choice soon.