So, yes; I’ve been quiet at these pages for several weeks because I’ve been pregnant, and working under a twofold limitation: the physical self-obsession that this generates and the shadow of our July loss. The first shrank my usual range of narrative topics and the second meant that what remained could not be written about anyway. This may not have been such a bad thing, interest-wise, since I’ve been exhausted, emotional and, as Grinderman has it, “so thin and sick“. You may imagine me as a shadow of my bridal self, waking up with groaning and panic attacks, eating desultory handfuls of dry crackers and lacking, in every way, a sense of perspective or humour. I am grateful for the online honesty of others, particularly Brenda, in this regard; their forerunning of my own experience has offered, if not hope, then something like solidarity.
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My employment in my current position began in June, eight years ago, when I was grateful to have a job, a salary and a desk to call my own. Indeed, I still am. Since then I have taught continuously for anywhere between thirty-six and forty-five weeks a year, running parallel to, but not in sync with, the wider university’s teaching schedule. In the early start-up days, this included teaching from April to October with no non-teaching time, thanks to two overlapping twenty-four week programmes. In October there was one week’s break and then straight on until Christmas. In 2002, my first year full-time on the job, I went more-or-less mad. I had an office to myself behind the covered bike-stands, which was a fairly grim view but offered privacy for when I needed to cry between classes. You get the idea.
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While the commonplace belief that not much ever happens in this city may at times be true, on other occasions the social whirl picks up. The latest of these eddies has had a bittersweet quality. My exchange students completed their internships and yesterday graduated their programme. Some are staying on for skiing and travel, others are returning home to the last of the humid Kanagawa summer immediately.
These young women are modest and tend, I think, to measure themselves by a deficit rather than a credit model. One explained in her farewell speech how she had aimed in coming here to overcome her “weak points”, one of which she identified as speaking in public. I don’t think their teachers see them in the fashion: we notice instead their persistence and resilience, their willingness to take hard knocks and refuse to give up. I hope in their studies and work to come they have time to reflect more hopefully on what they’ve experienced and accomplished here.
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The inky salutation of Mrs. Russell’s sketchbook sweetie, at right, does not know the world of taxonomic confusion in which he and I live. Permit me to elucidate my obscure statement.
Last Saturday, Nanette and I made a cheerful sojourn to Craft 2.0 here in Christchurch, where we met the lovely Ms. Tyler and browsed the many crafty delights. The event, held here, was as densely packed as Shinagawa Station, with rather more pushing and shoving (albeit discreet pushing and shoving). As a result, I decided to take the business cards of the sellers whose work I particularly liked, and browse their online spaces at leisure, later.
A small spanner in the works was the number of sellers whose sites indicated a reduction in the amount of available stock as a result of preparing for Craft 2.0. Not particularly thwarted, I browsed further through the Felt shops, looking for necklaces (my jewellery of choice these days). Eventually I found three lovely pieces to my taste and budget, ordered them and waited.
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My exchange students and I had our last class together today, although they will be around town on internships until the end of August. We watched Eagle vs. Shark
.
I suspect my end to the session was a bit perfunctory (pretty much “thank you and goodbye”) but I did not want any emotions to run too high. This is the fourth year in which I have contributed to this programme and regular readers know a little of what it means to me, particularly in terms of the friendships and experiences it has brought me abroad.
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Simon at South America Bidsta has an interesting post on the relationship between the positioned individual and the ethnographic research they produce, noting drily that in “any other science, you might just call this ‘being transparent about one’s methods’”.
The post contains the challenge to reproduce the researcher’s exercise: to “write down ten things about ourselves–personal, political, demographic, academic or philosophical, that give an idea of who we are and where we come from, and that could influence how we carry out our research”. This challenge catches my attention for a number of reasons at present. The main one of these is that I am involved in a group research project at work to which I am not contributing in the way I anticipated I would be able to contribute. Tasks which I complete with ease in literary and cultural studies I find myself almost paralysed by in educational research. Furthermore, a misconceived sense of responsibility towards my research partners also seems to retard the pace of my work. (This is not to say that a sense of responsibility is in itself a bad idea, but rather that there’s something about the way in which I’m experiencing it that’s askew.)
So I’m up for completing Simon’s exercise with the slant that it’s a good time to reflect a little on how my own positioning as a researcher is affecting my contribution to this research project: I’m completing tasks quite different from those I thought I would when the project began.
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Cultural Learnings for Make Benefit
16 January, 2010
in commentatrix, teaching & learning, writing & research
I honed my essay writing and editing skills on Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare and Katharine Susannah Pritchard at a time when I didn’t expect to use them for anything except the most esoteric of pursuits. My explanation to my students of these skills’ value has never pushed much beyond these boundaries, except to say that if you are well-trained in writing and editing, you can turn your hand to most writing tasks, including those of future employers that you can’t imagine yet. The primary function for me, however, of the ability to write and edit has been for my own enjoyment, with the latter, more recently, also for sale in the service of others’ work. [Hustler's aside: my business welcomes your recommendations and referrals].
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