Heuristics for Lecturing

I found this lecture via BoingBoing, a fantastic site for absorbing all those extra minutes every day that you really didn’t need.

This, however, should count as professional development for anyone who lectures in front of a classroom.  It’s a “meta-lecture” in which MIT prof Patrick Winston outlines heuristics he uses in his lectures.  I think he’s spot on for most of his discussion, and I’m especially impressed that he doesn’t use Powerpoint (which I refer to as the “devil’s tool”).  One thing I love about his talk is that he gives it using the very heuristics he’s talking about.  It reminds me a bit of Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach.

Among the topics he covers are his four rules, “Cycle, Verbal Punctuation, The Near Miss, and Ask a Question,” graphics, and even tidbits like when a group is too large for a seminar (about 10), or for an ordinary lecture without a lot of “showmanship” (about 70).

Check out the lecture here.  If you teach, or even just do presentations in some other forum, it’s a well spent hour.

Renegotiating Time Sinks

This isn’t a dissertation specific thing, but it is great stuff and I think has its applications in academia. I’ve been into “lifehacks” for years, and one of the gurus of the subject is Merlin Mann. He spoke at this year’s Mac World Expo and just posted the speech he gave on “Time and Attention”. I’ll draw your attention to a few things:

• The concept of renegotiating time sinks.
• Firewalling your time.
• And, interesting from a different point of view, his slides are very clean and effective.

Check it out.

Freewriting

Before I started writing the dissertation, I spent a few weeks thinking about the mechanics of the project.  There are several very good books out there for students beginning a long writing project (best:  Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day; Zerubavel, Clockwork Muse), and one thing many of them suggested was “freewriting”.

The idea of freewriting is to sit down at the start of a work day and write for a short period of either time, such as 10 minutes, or length, like two pages.  Once you start writing, you can’t stop or even pause, until you reach the end.  The idea is that the exercise will overcome any start-of-the-day inertia you might have.  Although it’s possible to just write about anything that crosses your mind, I opted to structure the writing a bit.  I drafted up a couple of dozen questions related to my dissertation and randomly chose one to write on at the start of the day.

To my great surprise, I came up with a number of insights during the freewriting that ended up in the final dissertation.  It also pointed out gaps in my arguments and research.  And, as the books promised, it eased me into the day’s writing with much less stress than I’d had before.

Break, break

I’m not dead yet.

It’s been awhile and I suppose I owe you, my hypothetical reader, an update, if not an explanation.

Since last I wrote, I finished my dissertation, successfully defended it, and convocated from University. As my mother says, I’m a doctor, but not the kind that helps people. Still, two years and nine months from start to finish on a history PhD is something I’m rather proud (read that as smug) about.

I also moved from Calgary to Washington DC, where I presently work.

Academically, I’ve got a few projects. Naturally, I’m trying to publish the dissertation. With a bit of luck, Cambridge will bite. If they don’t work out, I’m almost positive that Kansas State will. I’ve definitely got my fingers crossed.

I had been working on a conference paper for May, but the conference has been pushed back 18 months. Needless to say, I shelved the paper. I’m casting around for ideas for the next project. I can go big and start a second book or be a little less ambitious and write an article or even a research note.

As for life outside academia, I’m in transition. Although I still hold a steady job, I see the end of it coming up comparatively soon. What I do now eats up too much of my life.

I’ve decided to change directions on the blog, and play to my strengths. Let’s face it…I’m a geek of outrageous proportions. I think I’ll focus on the intersection of technology and the profession of history (as opposed to the history of technology, an altogether different animal). Databases, outliners, note taking, time management, and so forth.

We’ll see.

Comprehensive Exams – One Method

As tough as the dissertation is, it beats comprehensive exams hands-down. Although the tests here are no doubt different in details than at other schools, the scale of the task is about the same. The history comprehensive exams at my University are three three hour written tests, taken one day apart. Each one is in a different field (for me, they were military history/strategic studies, US history since 1865, and international relations theory). The written exams allow the student to select two or three (depends on the test) questions to answer from a larger list. After the committee, composed of five professors, reviews the answers for a week, they preside over a (you guessed it) three hour oral exam. The questions here usually cover what was not answered on the written tests as well as the written answers. Although the committee isn’t supposed to go outside the questions, they do. They will even ask questions from fields outside the ones formally assigned. The entire process is pass/fail, with one retake possible.

How to prepare for this? Well, it’s a bit of a task, but the pain can be managed with organization. Here’s the process I used. I hope it might help some of you facing this task.

The first step is prepare the reading lists. Some profs will provide a ready-made list of books and articles. That’s the easy case. More likely, the student will be asked to prepare a list for the prof to review. In my case, I sat down with each adviser (one for each field) and figured out concentration areas (e.g. for strat studies – origins of World War I, Peloponessian War, etc.). Then I drafted a tentative list of books using a few resources:

• The best starting point, of course, were any books that I’d already reviewed in these subjects during earlier reading courses.
• The AHA Guide to Historical Literature is a great resource on a wide variety of topics. It should be in any university library.
• The bibliography of any standard recent book on the topic
• Historigraphic survey journal articles
• For US foreign relations, it’s hard to beat

  Hogan, Michael J., ed., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations. New York, 1995

  Hogan, Michael J. and Thomas Patterson, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. New York, 1991.

• As a last resort, the “Further Reading” section at the end of a chapter in a standard undergrad textbook may be a good place to start

For each section, I looked for any major historiographic debates and put those on the list. As an example, Fritz Fischer’s books are essential to any review of WW1 origins. Then, I added one or two good survey books on the period, which were useful mostly for setting the narrative. Then, any other books that represented major historigraphic schools of thought (e.g. for the Origins of the Cold War, I used a few from the 50s for the traditionalist school, a few revisionists from the 60s and 70s, and then the post-revisionists in the 80s). When the list of books was done, I added any relevant journal articles from the past decade.

Once I had a tentative list of books, I took it to each prof and we finalized them. For two of my three profs, that meant cutting unnecessary or redundant books off the list. For one, it meant adding a few. With that done, it was time to put together a schedule. I read the longest subtopic first and worked my way down from there.

Before I dove into the actual reading, I took a day and tried to sketch out an overall reading plan. I took a list of the readings for each subtopic and assigned a tentative number of days to each work. For the one or two in each section I was using to “establish the narrative” I gave myself a day for each 250 pages. The rest of the books, which I just wanted to “break” were a half day each. Articles were a quarter day. The end product of this was my reading list with a column of time estimates. I added it up for each subtopic and used that as the basis for planning by blocking the time in on a calendar. (I used MS Project which was*way* geeky overkill.) As I finished a section, I adjusted the succeeding topics on the calendar. That gave me a good idea of how I was doing relative to my original plan, and also let me order books from interlibrary loan three weeks before I estimated I’d need them.

The deadlines established this way were as firm as I could make them. Of course, some days it just didn’t work out, but I’d have pushed through and skimmed a book or two than get bogged down and start losing whole weeks. In that sense, the schedule became normative.

The actual process of reading was organized around the precis. (Thanks, Sharky!) The version of it that I used works like this. In a maximum of one page, fill out five things about a given book: thesis, method, strengths, weaknesses, and additional comments. For any given book, I’d download three or four reviews from JSTOR or H-Net, read them, and fill in as much as I could. Then, in the thesis section, I’d write a sentence or two (max) for each chapter of the book. When I finished the book, I’d add a little more as I thought appropriate, and then that was it.

A major point to take away from this is that you don’t have to read the whole book. I hope that by the time you’ve reached this part of your academic career, you’ve realized that, but if you haven’t it’s time to reconcile yourself to it. There are no special prizes for someone who takes three years to finish comps. Even the fastest reader risks bogging down and losing confidence in themselves. Oddly enough, I think trying to read every word is actually a form of procrastination in preparing for comprehensive exams. Just read enough to get the author’s point and understand where the book fits into the overall historiography. Anything beyond that should have a good justification.

The last major step in comps prep was memorization. For two weeks before the exams began, I put together flashcards. There were two sets for each subtopic. One had an author’s name on one side and a single sentence description of the book on the other. The other set was just major events, people, and other information (e.g. the names and dates of major laws). The flashcards were a great way to solidify the information in my memory. I used them together with all the precis (preceseses?) to review the topics. Read the summaries for a topic, then run through the flashcards. Repeat. (I’m not saying it was an exciting two weeks.)

[Here are links to two precis: a short one (LaFeber Precis), and one where I got a bit overenthusiastic (Wholstetter Precis). Note that both were stored in a program (Scholar's Aid) which automatically linked them to a bibliographic record.]

A few final thoughts I’d like to reiterate:

- plan out as far in advance as you can, it’s calming to know that you’re on schedule

- you don’t have to read every word of every book

- do a precis or something like it so that there’s a tangible record of your reading

Buenas Dias, Paola!

One Shot One Kill One Liner

The book review is your best friend. If you didn’t know that, you’re either not a grad student, or you aren’t paying attention.

Every so often, I’ll read a book or movie review so good that I’ll laugh out loud. Last week’s New York Times review of The Enemy at Home, by Dinesh D’Souza was the first I’d seen in quite a while. The review’s author, Alan Wolfe, didn’t like this book. That’s a bit like saying that Napoleon was sensitive about his height. He *really* didn’t like the book. Now, I’d seen D’Souza on The Colbert Report (part 1 and part 2) and thought he’d been a bit, well, odd. In a right-wing nut bar sort of way. Still, those can be tasty. (I may read the book anyway. It sounds like a car accident whose very horror is so attention-grabbing.) But Wolfe’s take really made me appreciate the power of a good (or bad) review:

At one point in “The Enemy at Home,” D’Souza appeals to “decent liberals and Democrats” to join him in rejecting the American left. Although he does not name me as one of them, I sense he is appealing to people like me because I write for the New Republic, a liberal magazine that distances itself from leftism. So let this “decent” liberal make perfectly clear how thoroughly indecent Dinesh D’Souza is. Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible.

I don’t think he liked it. I suppose in a way, that kind of vehemence is akin to D’Souza’s, but I have to say I enjoyed it. Sad schadenfreude, but a guilty pleasure all the same. In a similar vein, here’s a list of officer performance report statements supposedly from the British military. It’s been floating around the internet for years, but they still make me chuckle when I read them anyway:

– His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of curiosity.
– This young lady has delusions of adequacy.
– She sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them.
– He has the wisdom of youth, and the energy of old age.
– This officer should go far–and the sooner he starts, the better.
– I would not breed from this officer.
– This officer is really not so much of a has-been, but more of a definitely won’t-be.
– When she opens her mouth, it seems that this is only to change whichever foot was previously in there.
– He has carried out each and every one of his duties to his entire satisfaction.
– He would be out of his depth in a car-park puddle.
– Technically sound, but socially impossible.
– This officer reminds me very much of a gyroscope: always spinning around at a frantic pace, but not really going anywhere.
– When he joined my ship, this officer was something of a granny; since then he has aged considerably.
– This medical officer has used my ship to carry his genitals from port to port, and my officers to carry him from bar to bar.
– Since my last report he has reached rock bottom, and has started to dig.
– In my opinion this pilot should not be authorized to fly below 250 feet.
– Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.
– This man is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.

What does this have to do with a dissertation? Well, only this: I’d love to have a few one liners like this (not about me, though!). This sort of pith takes a lot of work and not a little talent.

Procrastination Hack

It shouldn’t have worked.

I’m a regular reader of a kind of blog known as “productivity pr0n”. It’s not actual porn, but appeals to the perverse side of me that admires clever and potentially effective ways to become just a little more efficient. Three blogs of this sort on my regular reading list are: 43 folders, lifehacker, and lifehack. Anyway, a while ago, the first of those sites talked about a “procrastination hack” or “(10+2) *5 hack“. The idea behind it is that its natural to procrastinate any large task, and that one way to move forward on it is to — oddly — plan ahead for procrastination. It works like this: Get a timer (watch, clock, downloadable timer if you’re working on a computer) and set it for 10 minutes. Then, ONLY work on the task at hand for 10 minutes. When the timer rings, reset it for 2 minutes, and ONLY do something other than work, such as surfing the web or answering e-mail. Repeat for 5 times and you’ve done 50 solid minutes of work.

I decided to give it a shot this week with the dissertation. Every day this week, I managed to write the five page quota by noon and pushed into the next day’s work. By the end of the week, I’d run through four to five days of extra work. One reason I think it worked is that I always write a very detailed outline before tackling the first draft. That means that the work is a bit more mechanical than a freer form of writing might be. Still, the two minute breaks not only let me surf the web a bit (ironically to read the productivity blogs), but they were also short enough that I didn’t lose my train of thought.

It seemed way too cheesy to work, but it did.

Digitizing Archival Documents

I’m working on a web page (actually, it’ll probably end up being a series of web pages) on how to digitize archival documents. I’ve sketched out a very preliminary one which you can find by clicking here. I’ll work on it over time, but I figured someone out there might find even the rough draft of use.

I’m trying to document the process by which I the bulk of my archival research over the past year. It took A LOT of trial and error to get to this, and I’m sure there are plenty of ideas and refinement that can be made. That said, I hope it’ll help someone out there.

Daily deadlines – time vs quantity

How much should I write today?

First, simply asking the question is good sign. It shows that the dissertation writer (I hate the word “dissertator”) is committed to making progress. But, there are two ways to answer it, and I found that only one works for me.

The fruitless way is to define progress as writing for a defined period of time. “I’m going to write for five hours” or “I’ll write until dinner” just doesn’t get the job done. It’s too easy to surf the web for 4 and a half hours, write three sentences, and call it a day. Sometimes that’s all the writer can do, but it would be counterproductive to then claim that as a productive day.

The only way that keeps me going is to have a defined quantity of writing per day — a quota. (Or, as I sometimes think of it, thanks to a reading kick I had a few years ago on the Gulag, a “work norm”.) Getting a defined number of pages done per day (in my case five) has done the trick to push me forward. An additional benefit is that if I finish the five pages before lunch, I’m free to use the rest of the day as I see fit. (Or, I can try to be a stakhanovite and push to seven pages.) The key point is that if I don’t make it to the assigned quota, its difficult to lie to myself and say that everything is rosy.

More importantly, when I’m laying awake at 3AM, worrying irrationally, if I reached 5 pages that day, I can tell myself that at least I’m making measurable progress. (If you’re doing an MA or PhD right now, you know exactly the kind of thoughts I mean.)