the babies are growing up...

The 'part 1' of Internal Imperatives is gone, because I don't think the part 2 is necessary. Well, at least a long part two isn't necessary. I made a pretty Venn diagram illustrating the point of part 2, but until I can figure out the expandable post thing, I'm not going to have a dorky Venn diagram hanging out on my front page. The summary of part 2 is this: Our field is Rhetoric and Composition for a reason. We need to research and theorize in the separate areas in order to make the space where we overlap better. Conversely, we need to understand that the space where we overlap is just as important to each field as the work that is done separately.

See. It only took three sentences, not a whole post.

If there is one universal that graduate school teaches, it is the need for a good party. Here in Middletown we probably take that a little too far at times, but this weekend we actually had a valid reason for throwing a party. Two of our ranks are leaving town for jobs. Not just any job...good tenure track jobs one in Lit and the other in Rhet/Comp. (I know it's amazing isn't it!) Actually, one of the things MU likes to tout is its job placement rate. Anyway, there was just cause for celebration and celebration ensued.

Because this celebration was in honor of her friend Dr. Pib came back to MU to help with the festivites. Dr. P and I always moved in tangential circles, but she is actually an important part of my experience here at MU. She was there in my "Very First Graduate Class EVER" when I began the MA. I wanted to be smart and funny like her. Saturday night we stood in our friend's apartment chatting about my dissertation topic. (She's very nice like that...letting drunk people talk about academic things for a while.) She looked back at Ms. Gossip, who took comps at the same time I did, and said, "It's so fun to see the babies grow up." Now, you might think that I would be offended by that, especially since Dr. Pib is younger than me, but I wasn't.

We are growing up. Intellectually, professionally, even personally throughout this process we are learning how to become independent -- how to leave the comfortable nest that school has become for us. So, it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that this process is as confusing, exhausting, and painful as it is. Growing up is never easy.

Internal Imperatives

Since I seem to be on a writing binge today I wanted to tangentially join a discussion happening at some of the places I read. Over at Culture Cat, Clancy is participating in a carnival about Karen Kopelson's recent CCC article "Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition" I’m still pretty unsure of what a carnival is or whether it is considered rude to pick up the topic elsewhere, but here I go anyway.

Clancy's posts made me think about how I came to Rhet/Comp, the pedagogical imperative, and sent me to the bookshelf to dig out the most recent CCC with the article. Since this was the first time I'd heard the term "pedagogical imperative" I was impressed without exactly it fit the way I felt (and sometimes still feel) about trying to find a dissertation project. During an advising meeting with Dr. Helpful in the spring of 2007 she asked what I thought my dissertation would be about. I told her I had no idea. In fact what I really said was something pretty close to:
"I don't know because I'm having a hard time relating any of the stuff I'm really interested in to the classroom. I don't know what my 'comp' aspect would be."

Dr. Helpful just looked at me and said, "You don't have to have a comp aspect. You can write a rhetoric dissertation."

My incredibly intelligent response was, "Really?"

It didn't even occur to me that my dissertation didn't have to have a composition/classroom aspect to it. So, while I don't recall any overt pressure to conform to a pedagogical imperative, I had clearly internalized it somewhere during my course work.

Actually my sense of the pedagogical imperative stems mostly from my understanding of the job market. Like Paul in Kopelson's article there is a sense that my ability to get a job "[depends] upon [my] ability to articulate [my] work's connections to pedagogy."(755) Kopelson says that job market pressures shouldn't be dismissed, but those pressures are clearly not the focus of her article. As nebulous as my dissertation topic is at the moment, I can guarantee there is not going to be a pedagogical aspect to it. And, frankly, that scares me a little. Growing up through grad school at Dr. Snarky's severely jaded knee I heard plenty of stories about how choosing to focus on rhetoric, and particularly on rhetorical theory, made it difficult for her to get a job. One result of those stories are the ways I've taken on positions in the department that will speak to my more practical/sell-able skills. Graduate Assistant Director of the Writing Center, Co-Editor of the in-house Composition Manual, Assistant to the Director of Composition all of these positions, all of the skills I've learned in these positions represent an attempt to ensure that future employers look past my theory-based dissertation to see that I also do the work of composition. Because, while the overall theory that I use could have applications to the classroom, that is not what interests me about the theory. I could easily have set out to create a dissertation that was "A Rhetoric of ___________: Issues in the Composition Classroom," but that is not what I want to do. At least not now. As Clancy points out, "Sometimes it takes TIME to figure out the connections of research and theory to pedagogy." And, frankly, I don't have that time in this program.

Motivating Accountability

How do you motivate yourself to get things done?

Me...I'm not so good at that, hence what I want to do gets done and what I don't gets put off until it cannot be put off anymore. Honestly, there isn't a time I can remember when I haven't functioned in this way, but clearly I need to develop a different work habit. Well, really it needs to be a different life habit, because my approach to scrubbing the kitchen floor is about the same as my approach to exercising and my approach to writing a dissertation. You get the idea. It usually doesn't help when I check Profgrrrrl's page and she's managed to accomplish almost everything she's set out to do...and then some. I marvel at (and aspire to) her determination and focus. I have no idea how she does it. Since I am too afraid to ask, it's fortunate that we have our own mistress of accomplishment in the department, Dr. Helpful.

Dr. Helpful is a great professor, an amazing administrator, and a tireless advocate for graduate students. She has accomplished more in the last two years as our DGS than anyone would have thought possible; and, this summer, instead of taking a much needed break from it all, she's been working closely with at least three students helping them prepare for their comprehensive exams. Yes, she is on their committees, but I'm pretty sure she is not the chair of any of them. The Cajun Princess has been working with her since January and they are still reading through her special topics list together. Dr. H showed CP one way she motivates herself to get things done. Well, motivates might not be the right word...maybe rewards. Dr. H has a sticker system.
The sticker system is pretty much how it sounds. When you do something during the day you get a sticker. Now, I know several people who have tried to create a list everyday and then give themselves a gold or silver star when they get the whole list done, but that isn't how this sticker system works. This system requires stickers for different kinds of activities. A gold star for writing a blog entry, a turtle sticker for getting outside (taking a walk, gardening, etc), a martini sticker for making time for friends, a heart sticker for crocheting, it can be anything. The point is that when you place your stickers on your calendar you see that you have done a variety of things throughout the day. More importantly, the sticker system incorporates rewards for the things you like to do. It makes the enjoyable things you do visible so when you look back at your calendar it's not just a list of exam readings or writings you were supposed to do (but probably didn't get all of them done), but a variety of things you really accomplished.

Yesterday, I bought stickers and made a little key in the back of my calendar (an idea stolen from CP). I put in my first sticker for administrative work. Looking at my calendar for today, I think that one sticker looks awfully lonely and I will do my best to make sure I get more than one sticker for today. I am notorious for starting these kinds of programs and lasting about three days with them. We'll see how long the sticker system can last.

Changing perceptions

It's amazing what a total of six days in a car and five with the in-laws can do to a person's brain. The Dear Husband (DH) and I just returned from seeing his family. We went for his sister's wedding. It was beautiful and more fun than any wedding has a right to be. The best part was that since everyone was focused on the wedding I didn't get the usual interrogation. "When will you be done?" "When are you moving back here?" or the more subtle version "Do you think you'll stay in Middletown when you are done?" The questions were asked here and there, but no one was really paying attention, so it was okay.

Actually, this time I got more questions about what I do and what I plan to write about. Trying to put my work into everyday terms was a good exercise. It seemed to be going pretty well, except the DH kept swooping in to "rescue" people from my boring conversation. (Yes, that was as irritating as you can imagine.) As my brother-in-law Bull (pseudonymed because he looks just like Micheal Cudlitz in Band of Brothers) and I talked about the project, I realized he wasn't quite getting it. Something about the way I explained things didn't really make sense to him. My frame of reference contained an assumption he didn't share. About that time the DH stepped in and I lost my train of thought about it for a few days.

It wasn't until a couple of days later as I drove through the third state of the day that I realized what hadn't worked in our conversation. At the very core of my project and how I think about the world around me is the assumption that language is powerful. Language not only shapes the world around us, it acts upon us. The missing step in my discussion with Bull was the very first one. I needed to say, "I start with the idea that language is powerful." It is because language has this power that the way we use it requires constant critique. Bull, and almost everyone else who is not in this profession, doesn't necessarily start from that assumption. He doesn't think about language in the same way.

Great. So, now I have a place to start when talking about my work. But, that was not the revelation for me. The revelation was about how naturalized my academic life has become. It is often something I think of as separate from myself. At the very least I think of it as a separate aspect of myself, not really a part of the core of who I am. But how I see the world, how I engage with the world, is absolutely influenced by my academic life. "Duh!" is an appropriate response to this revelation. It is a revelation I needed to have because much of my grad school experience has been spent trying to maintain a distance between my "real" life and my academic life. The fear that my life would begin to revolve solely around work and the academy, which would alienate me from my friends and family, was so great I tried to completely compartmentalize these two aspects of myself. Realizing how naturally my academic life fits in with the rest of my life helps me to see that it can compliment the rest of my life without taking it over.