Shoegazing

When we ask students to do revisions, we point them toward specific sections -- don't try to revise the whole thing in one go. pick a section. choose ONE thing to fix. the idea is that if you do this, you actually get substantive revisions --- whereas if you ask them to take the whole essay in one go, they get overwhelmed --- too much to process, and so you get conservative revisions (sentence level changes) against a backdrop that remains essentially the same. Revision is about time management -- you assume that the student is going to spend an hour, maybe two, focusing on this, and then redirecting attention elsewhere. The two major constraints are length and time -- each paper is usually 5-10 pages, they're writing 2-3 at any given time. There's only so much time you can spend focusing on one thing in order to get them all done -- so you do them all superficially.

How much time does it take to read and respond? I'm surprised at how much longer it takes me to read a novel when I don't have a deadline attached. Structuring your day around the work you're doing --- giving yourself a schedule. My new task for myself is to write a 5 page paper in response to everything interesting I read. Photographs in Austerlitz. The Weatherman bombing, and how the Thinker lost his legs. Not just measuring reading attention (this is pretty much cued to the length of time it takes to skim Metafilter's front page), but measuring the amount of time it's comfortable to spend thinking and working through a coherent thought. It's not that long! I keep forgetting to tell my students this. It's always just a little shorter than I would like.

When you are sad, everything becomes a vacuum, cold dead air pushing toward yourself. You register motion but can't focus on anything. Sounds register, but they are barely audible -- you hear conversation in the next room, and, in spite of being filled with a prescient desire to speak, you lie in bed, wondering where the voices are sitting, relative to the speaker, wondering what the room looks like. The room is filled with dead air --- there's so much space between you and them. It's important to keep the space clear to avoid contamination.

Yesterday: A thing I couldn't do. Sum up world systems analysis in two sentences or less. This was really frustrating.