Whatever happened to...?

Okay, I'm still here. It's just that I've been having a lot of trouble with PhD school recently--namely staying in it. My friend Susan (who is caught up with her assignments, unlike me) tells me I'm just trying too hard to learn something. She feels it isn't possible to do both the reading and the assignments. She appears to be correct in that she has actually done the work I can't get to. My other two friends from PhD school seem to be about as on top of things as I am. Lisa says, "This is starting to get ugly."
'Ugly' doesn't half describe it. One of the papers I just turned in began with a comparison of my course work to cutting the head off a dead dog with a pruning saw. (Don't ask.) I'm supposed to be leaving for Kenya in a few days (during which time three out of four professors have scheduled a conference call) and I still have a twelve page paper to write and to complete Frau Library Research's course. Then there are the girls.
However behind I may be in graduate school, my granddaughter/roommate has me beat by a mile. I met with her adviser this afternoon (instead of working on my homework) who told me she is flunking three of her four classes. She could attempt to make up for lost time but tonight she has a headache. The apparent best cure for this is to watch some television with Jersey in the title which she indicated will prepare her for her career plan of becoming homeless person.
Our exchange student is also downstairs (in a different room) making something that sounds like Onday-Onday for her big presentation on Indonesia tomorrow at school. I don't know what Onday-Onday is but I will tell you it has peanuts, tuna fish, ground soy beans, green food color, coconut milk and is deep-fried. It will be the first green stuff I've seen her eat since she got here. The sauce of ground peanuts, red chili peppers and corn starch looks inviting. Unfortunately, I won't be there to try it. I'll be taking Jim back to University Hospital for his post-surgical, pre-safari check up. Unlike the rest of us, he says he's feeling better than he has in years. He seems to have finally gotten all the repairs out of the way and will be good for another hundred thousand miles.
I was hoping to use tomorrow for the library course, but why ruin my record. It will give my granddaughter some competition for who can do the least homework in a single week.
So ugly is as ugly does--or doesn't, in my case. I am trying to look at the bright side. At least I'm catching up on the blog.

Procrastination tips for the weak willed.

It's eight o'clock on Sunday night and I have less than four hours to post my research homework before I am officially late. There's a half-finished PowerPoint blinking at me from the bottom of the screen reminding me that ready or not, on Friday I have a date to interpret Art Chickering's student identity development theory to a group of people who may or may not find it interesting, depending on the presentation. That particular presentation will occur after I show the movie I haven't finished editing and for which I have not yet found an emotional connection. Across the hall, Adel, the Indonesian exchange student is having a melt-down. It's been coming on for almost a week. Naturally, it seems the perfect time to blog.
Of all of these challenges, Adel's is the most compelling. She doesn't want to go backpacking. No, that isn't strong enough. Of all the things in the world the school might ask her to do that go against every fiber of her being, backpacking currently heads the list. She asks me, "Is this a military school for which marching up and down hills carrying your house on your back is necessary for protection of the government?"
"Why can't I stay home and do something useful?" she asks ten minutes later after I explain the value of long encounters with nature, group challenge, facing your fears and defecating with bears. She just keeps shaking her head. She's a very bright and articulate girl and I am not fooling her with this rehashed rhetoric from the school website.
Earlier this afternoon I called in the liaison person from the exchange organization. After two hours of attempted persuasion, we both agreed to meet with her teachers and the head of school to provide support for her arguments. I'm not hopeful, but I'll be there for her. And a lot of what she says makes sense to me.
In the first place, the school doesn't do tent camping. This is unfortunate in the land of endless rain, but it's downright unacceptable for a Muslim girl on a co-ed trip who is afraid of the dark and never lived anywhere where it gets colder than eighty degrees. Second, see my last blog on progressive education and as Adel says, "Where is my voice? Why must I blindly obey what I know I do not like." Yes, Adel already went camping for the school orientation and as she puts it, "Why eat more bugs when I already tried the first plate and know I do not like? How does taking more change this?"
Just now I went to help her pack. She showed me her day pack. "No, you must take everything on the list," I explain. She doesn't argue. I get her an almost big enough back pack, pull out her sleeping bag and pad, begin to ask about the long underwear, rain suit, fleece that we bought two weeks ago. She disintegrates into tears. That's why I'm across the hall, unable to study, powerless to know what to do next.
So here's a tip if you can't find any other way to avoid doing homework. Get yourself a couple of litters of small kittens to foster, a deaf and blind terrier who doesn't prefer to go outside in the rain, a husband with a hernia, a granddaughter who is omniscient and a sweet agoraphobic Indonesian exchange student sponsored by a school that prides itself on its outdoor education program. You may never get around to productive activity but you may have a craving to start a blog.

'Progressing' into fall

This is, no doubt, on my mind because the girls and I are now deep into the new term of school. The girls and I are also living that experiment named "progressive education"--and I'm in the middle of deep thought about organizational systems at my progressive school that I believe is spawned right from that same historical stream. The girls and I are also pondering why there doesn't seem to be anything very progressive happening in the real world that relates to the ideals of either management theory or so-called progressive education.
What's interesting is that in the way my world seems to work, it's also on the minds of the guy who started Facebook and Oprah (although it was on my mind first, I'm sure of it). I don't have big money to throw at it --or to get somebody to do my research so I have more time to think before I write these papers that will soon be past due. But I do have plenty of thoughts.
Why pay anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000 a year so your kid or grandkid can get something you theoretically already paid for in taxes? My best answer is, "hope." Most of us live where the public school system is at best harmless and at worst broken. A 'harmless' education is never what I hoped for for my kids. I hoped, and am still hoping, for a dangerous education, something that lights them up, heats them up, and sends them out in the world inspired to make it better. With that thought in mind, I enrolled Sydney in what seemed like a pretty progressive place. They had Alfie Kohn as the fall speaker! They said they did a lot of learning outside the classroom. They said there would be no homework. After last year I knew our road to hell was paved with their good intentions. There was too much homework, too many lectures, too many tests and not a whole lot of flexibility for individual learning styles, abilities or even a nod to the more universal tasks of intellectual development. Sidney wanted to return anyway. She loves her friends. And I volunteered for the school program council in hope that I might light some fires.
Adel arrived from Indonesia this year full of hope for her new school. We're only in the second week and her hope is diminishing. She's not a complainer. She's somebody who has always loved school. Her experience at her new school has so far been sitting in classrooms where the teachers assign too much homework, don't give enough feedback, seem unwilling to explain the "how and why" of things and prepare poorly.
Then there's my school. I haven't given up hope, but I miss sincere interaction. Despite good intentions, ("You don't have to post just so we know you are there") that is exactly what we seem to be doing--when the system works. It doesn't seem very reliable so far. We are excited to learn the skills for sustained organizational change, but I get the idea, like at Sydney's school, that under pressure we revert to Theory X "because I said so."
But I didn't get up to blog on a Saturday morning just to confirm hopelessness in America. After all there's a new documentary out and Oprah wants me to see it. (And I'm hopeful that I will find the time.) My own new documentary about the Mudd engineering students' second trip to Kenya will be shown next week. It's hard not to be hopeful when you see what these talented kids accomplished and the impact that experience made on them. And Sidney, Adel and I are proposing some independent studies for this year in hopes that if we do it well enough it may ignite a spark in a sagging curriculum. I hope so.

Let the head bashing and teeth gnashing begin

One of my friends is a member of A.A. and when she first started going to meetings, she told me about something called "share despair." Basically, it's that terrible feeling you get after you say something out loud--that sense that you have just made a complete idiot of yourself. Sharing one's thoughts can sometimes lead to remorse and often times for me, downright shame.
Why share this revelation today?
Three reasons. First, I just submitted my first "response"to on-line PhD school and wouldn't you know, it's to the research methodology class. After re-reading it, I remembered why I am known as Captain Random on my pub trivia team. Most people don't equate Shroedinger's thought experiment to qualitative research design or find Douglas Adams the most scholarly person to quote. Never mind how I deduced that the two of them strung together were the right answer to my "thoughtful response to the reading."
Just a few hours previous I had a telephone chat with one of my favorite board members on methods to make boards more relevant. Fortunately, Adams and/or Schrodinger hadn't yet crossed my mind. Unfortunately, I had Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y management models pinging in my frontal lobe. Here's a tip. Do not attempt to influence governing boards of the ineffectiveness of top-down management systems. Even if it is the most enlightened person on the planet, board membership trumps new graduate student acquisition of knowledge every time. I haven't had so much 'share despair' since I took my first poetry seminar and intimated that Rilke was a Spanish lesbian.
Finally, just to assure I may never leave my house again, I sent off the trailer to the Gulf oil-spill piece. I showed it to my husband Jim, first, who having just had surgery is on some pain-killers. I figured it couldn't hurt him. It didn't, but he did ask why the camera was focused on the lady's bust during the interview instead of her face. I sent it off anyway. What was I thinking?
Of course, someone who blogs ought to be way past share despair Not only do I keep blogging, but continue to blab my darkest fears and silliest thoughts. Yesterday I sent the link to my brother Jack under the theory that the family that shares together despairs together. Jack, my dear brother who responded "I am not the blog-type" but to whom I persisted and insisted, can now share the shame. For the rest of you, thanks for any awkward silences you can send my way while I await comments from professors, film critics and board members.

High Anxiety and other night terrors

It's a reoccurring dream that I'm told lots of people have in one form or another. I have a final and show up having forgotten to put on any clothes. Or I suddenly realize I have enrolled in a class that I forgot about and it's the end of the term. Or I am late to take the final for an important class and no matter how much I rush, I never get any closer to the building. Usually I wake up in a sweat then get back to sleep relieved that the bad old days are behind me. Only now they are not. And this is no dream.
It's a week into school and I am a month behind. How can this be? As if in a dream, I read and read but I get no closer to being caught up. There are questions to which I should have already responded. I read them. I read pages to which they refer. I read them again. Nothing. Nada. Not a single light in the darkness of my brain. There are plenty of thoughts though, like "I am the stupidest person in the entire program" or "I am so far behind I should quit now and stop torturing myself." These are generally followed by rationalizations such as, "Even if I am the stupidest person, there are plenty of stupid people with PhD's and/or "I can't be irrevocably and hopelessly behind. It's only a week into the semester."
My panic stems in part not from being behind, but from what's ahead. My husband has surgery in the morning. Although we seem to be working as fast as we can, the film projects are getting log jammed again--one due now, another due at the end of the month, a third due in October and let's not even consider the pig piece. The newspaper is coming to do a story on the house (intended to spark some business for some of the local craftspeople)--yes, the house that hasn't been cleaned since July. There's too much junk to hide by Wednesday. The animal shelter is still overrun with cats. There are five of them in one of the bathrooms--also too many to hide by Wednesday. And the assignments get bigger and bigger by the week. Okay, so my life is actually no different than anybody else's. Blog-whining is so tasteless.
One idea might be to go to the drug store and buy a case of those 5-hour energy drinks, drink at least one, speed read the research assignment and this time stay awake past page five of the first article--then jump on line and write something, anything, no matter how inane. This will give the professor a sense of real accomplishment at the end of the term (assuming I have a clue by then). Drink the second energy drink, finish the reading for the next class and respond to those introspective questions regarding "self and organization." Sleep deprivation could be just the ticket for thwarting anxiety.
On the other hand, I should probably be conscious when I take the girls to school and drive Jim to the hospital in the morning. I'll need a steady hand for the camera work later. Kittens need love,too. And somebody has to be the last to turn in the assignment. At least one of my fellow students will feel better thinking, "At least I'm ahead of her."

Getting "Organizationalized"

The other day my son Pete and I went for a little ride. We're partners in two supposedly for-profit businesses that have been steadily losing money and these rides give us a chance to complain to each other about our failures. Pete also remembers when I used to be a consultant that helped businesses solve exactly the same problems we're struggling with. (Yes, I do seem to have lost my touch. Good thing I'm in PhD school to learn a thing or two.)
"Mom, I can't get the employees to solve their own problems. They either do the wrong thing or wait for me to come find a fix."
"Maybe we need to invest more time in training." (Reoccurring mom answer for everything.)
Fortunately before we got too far down that road, both literally and metaphorically, I remembered that I have been diligently reading my Humanistic Foundations text, Productive Workplaces Revisited. I would have thought of it sooner, but I am still in Part 1 reading about this person Taylor, who despite my being known as the-book-of-the-month manager, I had somehow failed to study earlier in my career. Taylor, according to the author, is the father of all these management ideas from which we consultants have been making a living. (He also the first known workplace consultant and from what I've read, experienced the same positive results/negative reviews I've had a few times. People always seemed happier to pay my fees when my work didn't actually do anything--the negative results/positive reviews effect.)
While I was mulling over what Taylor might have done if he ran a car dealership, we passed a car purchased from my nearest competitor with the bumper sticker, "Change is good. You go first." At least he wasn't an employee, but he obviously hadn't been moved to take his business across the street by my unchanging but ever revolving team members. Back to the book.
Taylor applied his creative genius in the early part of the last century at places like Bethlehem Steel with astonishing increases in productivity and profitability. His idea was to have the flexibility to put the people who were best at something to work in that job and move those who weren't so great somewhere where they could be. He believed that managers weren't there to be the boss but there to support workers to higher productivity. It was a big change for industry at that time just as it probably would be if we did it at my business today. Despite his track record, few people went for it and some of those reverted back because change, as we all know, is both unpleasant and easily sabotaged. Hence, the bumper stick.
A hundred and twenty years later, most of us are still waiting for somebody else to do it first. And despite my also never-changing mantra, I am beginning to understand that training is not the answer. It doesn't hurt, but if that were all it took, my granddaughter would now be a straight A student and my husband could use the microwave.
What is the answer? Apparently not Taylorism, God rest his soul. He died at fifty-nine feeling pretty discouraged about people's ability to understand what he meant and why it worked. His ideas got bastardized and he was vilified as the kind of guy that worked his people to death and never paid fairly for the increase in productivity. (Another thing I can relate to.)
Pete says he just wants everybody to care about the customer. This may be one place where Taylor's ideas could apply. He knew that people operated more out of self-interest than altruism. I'll have to read the next four chapters to enlighten you further on how that works and why it doesn't seem to be solving any problems for Pete and I, either. As I am only behind about six hundred pages, my next blog should be a real eye-opener.

How to remain wide-awake while reading The Oxford Guide to Library Research

There are books so engaging that I have accidentally stayed up all night unable to stop reading. It is possible that The Oxford guide to library research: How to find reliable information online and offline is one of those books for you. However, chances are if you are reading my blog, it isn't your kind of thing. (There are more appropriate blogs on the subject so why waste you time here, right?) Just in case you find yourself required to read the above book and are having any trouble getting through more than five pages without feeling you you just took 10mg. of Ambien, here is how I managed to be absolutely wide awake for a full three chapters including, Preface, Initial Overviews, and the very compelling, Subject Headings and Library Catalogue.

To assure complete alertness, begin with a sixteen year-old kid. Either gender will do, but the effect will be better if he/she is relatively self-involved and hasn't had much supervision. He/she should have recently acquired a driver's license and have at least one new best friend with a felony record.

Leave your keys in the car. Leave the house with your significant other to prepare for some major family event like a wedding/Christmas/funeral. (This will assure you are sufficiently preoccupied when the teen asked if felonious friend can come over.) When you return home you will notice that your car is missing. Text your teen to ask that he/she return. If you have followed these instructions sufficiently, the teen will text back something to the effect of, "I will but I am an hour and a half away in another town (undocumented subtext: with people you don't know and wouldn't approve of who are drunk.) Respond by insisting the teen return home immediately.

At this point you can begin reading the Oxford Guide. Minutes will seem like hours as you hyper-focus on every scintillating word in order to distract yourself from thoughts of murdered and mutilated teen (not by you, at this point). Interrupt your reading every fifteen minutes to call the teen (who will not answer, hopefully because they are driving) and check her Facebook page. If you are lucky like me, after a couple of hours you will see a news post on Facebook from your teen talking about what an AWESOME night it has been. At this point you can assume she is home and you may begin to search the house to find out where she has put herself in order to avoid the "serious conversation" you have been promising by phone and text. When you find her, do not hit her on the legs with a pillow to wake her up no matter how relieved you are that she is home and safe. (I can tell you from experience she will tell all friends you beat her.) Do not yell. (Also creates drama and sympathy from friends). Quietly and sanely send her to her room. Pick up your copy of the Oxford Guide. You will be impressed with how alert you are. In fact, the Oxford Guide may be your only hope of ever sleeping again.

Having successfully discovered the secret of completing the reading for Rsch 1006, my new hope is that this isn't an experiment in state-dependent learning. In any event, I'm hoping that the Foundations reading requires a little less high blood pressure and a lot more peace of mind.