Walking along the jetty this morning I drafted a lovely post in my head about voice in university teaching – the loud and domineering voice of the lecturer, making room for other voices in course material, and supporting students to find their own voices.
By “voice”, I mean the way one shares what ones knows and also shares the way one understands and applies that knowledge, while taking up space and communicating other bits of oneself as one does it.
But, I have just finished a Zoom meeting with my marvellous and generous marking team and am still at work, way after dinner time.
So, here is a picture of the jetty this morning where I thought my thoughts before sunrise… and I hope to actually gel them together and .. find my voice.. soon..
Imagine coffee in mug, gloved hands, muffler, hat, snowboots, snow jacket, gym clothes underneath and shivvery knees to go with it….
So, I was missing a spot to think and read and write.
Because …. I live with an animal who responds to unfamiliarity and stress by marking soft furnishings in her environment. Preferably soft furnishings that smell like me. So they then smell like the worst smelling fluid a cat body can make.
This is what happened to the the big grey beanbag I bought as a thinking spot when I moved here.
On Friday I scoured a couple of local shops looking for a replacement…and ….my,oh,my… I found!
I ended up in a big shed piled high with furniture rejected from Kath ‘n’ Kim’s bungalow, other pieces that used to be in the Lesser Hall of a small country town, clocks and fripperies from my grandmother’s house, old tins, pews, birdcages, kitchenettes, pith helmets, dressmaker’s dolls, hat pins, horsehair rugs… all tangled up together in random aisles. It felt like the proprietor loves the thrill of the chase, finding the most unusual and quirky furniture possible, then loses interest in repairing them or polishing them up or putting like with like.
The Chesterfield wingback chair had come in the night before. It has a small hole in leather in the front. But … the legs have been replaced with coasters, making it the perfect height for me. When I read I usually slouch across the chair with my legs dangling over one arm, and in this chair the back wing cradles my head perfectly. It’s like sitting in a big, firm hug.
It cost me less than a single new cane chair at the furniture shop in the nearby high street.
When I got home, I worked out from the label that it is over 30 years old and was made by one of the last Chesterfield master craftsmen in Australia. And these things have specially bowed birch frames. And the metal studs are handcrafted through a ridiculously esoteric process. The leather specially processed … hand rubbed, whatever that is…
For some reason the proprietor, who I have no doubt knew exactly what he had sold me, had more or less given it to me as a gift. Maybe it has…a past….
It’s in my front room now, and I think I now have a happy spot that will travel with me wherever I live in the future.
It was a combination of an awful round of redundancies, really disorganised implementation of change by the university, work overload, impossible timetabling – and – it turned out, calculated understanding on the part of the employer that a number of us would crumble in the environment being created.
While on summer holiday I had been contacted and told to apply for my own job again, along with every other academic in my school, because the entire university academic workforce was in a process of – I kid you not – “re-shaping”. We knew something was about to happen, but no-one at my level was really prepared for what, when or the timeline.
When the axe finally fell, about 1/3 of academic staff finished up the Thursday before first semester started. Those of us left needed extra help for our teaching load, but by the third week of semester, all the contracts for extra staff were still “stuck on X’s desk”.
This was after weeks of people not knowing whether they had jobs, rumours of the excellent people who were being dumped, and the hunger-games competitions between academics vying for the single available position in the department where they were already employed. Those of us who had jobs by the end were slack-jawed with disbelief and survivor guilt, looking around at empty seats of excellent colleagues.
I was told the Friday before unit outlines were due that I was teaching an extra unit and had to prepare material for that, and work out how to balance it with my already over-capacity workload. I was away at an interstate conference at the time, and had to complete this in between attending sessions and meeting up with colleagues, even though I had double-checked with my head of department that there was nothing more I needed to do to prepare for the semester before I left Perth.
Timetabling refused to move my on campus teaching times, so every Tuesday morning I delivered a lecture in one unit at 10am, ran to another building to give a lecture in a unit scheduled immediately after that at 11am, then ran back to the first building to take a two hour tute at midday in the first subject.
By about Week 3, I stood in front of the second class and gave a well-researched, informative and structured lecture. At the end, one lovely and polite student raised their hand and told me that it was actually NEXT week’s material.
Then the newly-installed TurnItIn software stopped all students from checking their first assessment pre-submission and they were really, really upset and barraging me with email…. and the first marking deadline happened, with over 100 students and no marker contract approved yet… I just crumpled. I came into work one day, sat in my office, and kept crying. The more I tried to do anything, the harder I cried.
A lovely colleague walked me to the campus counselling service. There I was given a lot of useful advice and – THIS is the bit that still strikes me about the situation – a pre-prepared booklet for academics who had gone through the same process and had the same reaction. The university EXPECTED that some of us would end up in this state, and had a glossy brochure prepared.
The worst part was knowing that my colleagues, who were also under the same stress, would have to pick up for me when I dropped my bundle. I was unsure what to do, but knew I needed time out, so just went to my GP to get a sick note, made sure I had an appointment with a psychologist, and then headed home and gave myself timeout on the sofa, binge watching Downton Abbey for a week. The idea was just to circuit-break and stop thinking about work, and rest. I ended up taking a second week off because I was still too shaky to go back to work, and spent some time alone at a Bed and Breakfast in the hills, bushwalking and exploring the township.
I also had a lot happening in my family life that stretched my coping skills beyond what was in the tank anyhow, so part of my problem was that I knew I was already doing everything I could to deal with stress – good diet, sleep, exercise regime. There was no wriggle room to change or improve what I was doing, I just had to accept taking time out.
Since then, I have done my academic job differently, and been very, very careful about taking breaks and time out to recharge. I have always exercised most days. Without being so very physically active I think I would come undone far more easily when things get stressful. Academia comes with periods of intense engagement and workload that peaks during teaching, and there is little that can be done about that. It is not a 9-5 job, cannot be treated as one, but I learned that it is up to me to work out how to thrive within those parameters.
So – fast forward to 2021. I have just worked so hard for the last two study periods, settling in to a new academic job. The last study period ended on Friday. I have this weekend off, then a week to get three course sites and outlines set up before the next ten week study period teaching three courses.
I am working in a totally different academic culture. Despite the pandemic and an opportunistic government dumping the sector in the poo, at my new university I feel more supported, like there is more certainty and more transparency than I have in the other three universities I have worked for over the last 20 years.
I timed my vaccination because I could afford to be sick if I had a reaction, but I think a bit more is going on here. I think I have chosen to pre-emptively burrow down a bit and go dormant to re-group, sending myself to the resting couch for a weekend, to avoid being forced there because I simply will not slow down.
I cleared all decks for a couple of days in case I had a bit of a reaction to vaccination.
Yesterday I stayed on the couch and binge-watched all of Why Women Kill, which became better and better as it progressed and developed. I had a mild headache when I woke, so took paracetamol. No idea whether it would have become worse.
I also took up again my first-ever crochet project, a rainbow beanie that I started and paused in December last year. Since Winter began in Adelaide I have far more experience with beanies, and realised that I had not made my fabric wide enough.
So, yesterday I crocheted three quarters of a rainbow scarf.
Today I slept until 10am. I usually wake before 6am. After a bit of pottering about, I lay down for a 20 minute nap around 2pm. Three hours later I was woken by hungry animals demanding to be fed.
Last time I did anything like this was an enforced fortnight watching Downton Abbey while on stress leave, around eight years or so ago. Then, I was mentally and emotionally burnt out from some pretty serious job stress. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.
I am vaguely looking at the housing market in Adelaide. In some ways it makes more sense for me to buy than rent here.
I found a house where the street number is the same as my birth day, and the street name the same as my birth month. I really would love to have that as my address. It made me realise how very, very much the name and number combo sways me.
Is it just me, or does the street name really, really influence where you would be happy living? Does that mean I should TRY to find something that sounds a bit yukky, because people would be less likely to want to live there?
Top of my “no go” list are names that sound violent or have violent associations. I am sure that Kilburn is a lovely suburb, but I just could not bring myself to say I lived there. Likewise, Military Road, or Hunter Street or Pearce Street.
I gifted myself a year of living within walking distance to the beach, in a very comfy house. It’s my substitute for not being able to take some of my redundancy payment to travel for a month or so to work out where to next. A year of feeling like I am on holiday, even while I work hard.
Well, that and because in December’s overheated rental market, I had to persuade a landlord that even though I had not seen their property and even though I had two cats, I was the best tenant. I really had to accept whatever I could get. Coming from Perth, where rents were far higher, I applied for places far more upmarket than my usual frugal, make-do budgeting style would dictate. The week I arrived, the neighbour across the street described the long queue outside during the viewing, and I realised how lucky I had been.
If we had not spent the last year in rolling lockdowns, I would probably have chosen something tiny, smack-bang in the middle of the city, walking distance to the art gallery, museum, state library and so much green space. One of my selection criteria, however, was that I needed to be able to happily quarantine for a fortnight, and not be driven nutty because it was too small or surrounded by neighbours if everyone was home again.
I am loving the neighbourhood, and the process of working out just how much space I need and what is important in where I live. I had been in the house I built in Fremantle for 20 years, and chose the location and size to raise a family. Now, I am taking a year out to find out more about what type of house I need when I just please myself. Interesting times.
The main difference between Adelaide and Perth is the compactness here. It’s like Perth is a string bag opened as wide as it can be, while Adelaide has just as much going on, and just as much to it, but everything is easier to get to.
You can get to the equivalent of Margaret River for a weekday meal, without having to book overnight accommodation and drive for a couple of hours. I don’t have to look at Google maps to work out how long it will take to get anywhere from anywhere else, because the answer is always, magically, “under 20 minutes”.
And, Adelaide does Autumn a bit more noticeably:
With Enid Blyton-style woods, complete with wild strawberries:
Over several days, on Twitter and today on our blogs, a mob of us have been having an extended conversation about …. well… it meandered. Basically it is about the role blogging took in our professional practice/personal lives when many of us first started, the role it has now, how it is different and whether the same sort of conversation still happens.
“Perhaps the value is in the dedicated time to share one’s thoughts, rather than the medium.”
Well, it was sort of an addendum really. To a post which talked about the meandering, explorative and direct communication that blogging offers over publishing a journal article or writing a conference paper. An addendum whose existence beautifully illustrated the point he was making.
Found me! Writing a blog post. Here. Now.
I think it is not just about time. I think it is about space too.
When Con identified conversationalists in her post today, she listed them as “(Kathryn, snail, Trish, Clare, Megan, Sam, Alisa)”, noting that she chose to refer to people by their Twitter handles because the conversation was on Twitter and not everyone blogs these days.
This resonates with part of the conversation last night, where we were talking about the fiddliness of commenting on blogs, and that to continue the conversation if we make a comment we would have to keep coming back to the blog site to check.
It stops me from replying on my own blog too…Feel like someone very nicely left me a thoughtful note on my front door, but then when I reply I am pinning it back on my front door…
….we once did not care & just replied.
I think far fewer ppl playing then, so we hung out more?
If a conversation happened on Twitter, I tend to link to the Twitter handle. If it was a comment on a blogpost, or something said on a blog, then I link to the blog. It feels like a different place. No different really to my academic work where I will cite someone’s work from an academic journal, or from a blog, according to the location it was published. And, likewise, it signals the level of formality, rigour and humour one is likely to find there.
YET…. when I wanted to locate snail’s blog, I just searched for his URL, the one I have found him under for years, snail.ws. Same with Con at flexnib.com. I know that if I enter that rather short search string, I will get to their place. Their corner of the web. And it does feel locational. Like I could leave a friendly note on their front door.
They may not be there at the moment, but I am confident they will be back in time to see it. Because, unlike Twitter, where the conversation of the last couple of days will swirl down the plughole with whatever else roiled today and yesterday, it feels like there is a longer time for meaning and conversation to settle in and still be important.
Their place is the context, not 15 different tweets that they need to have also read in the last 24 hours for what I am saying to make an iota of sense. It feels like chatting on the porch or over the fence, rather than jogging down mainstreet on the way to do twenty different errands, trying to optimize time.. and if I look carefully I can see Ruth’s footprints and snail’s footprints in Con’s yard too..
When you know your work will involve re-traumatising already traumatised people, how do you create and hold a space of support and respect, without becoming so personally impacted that you stop being effective?
This last week of my foundations for information management course focuses on what it means to bring your whole self to work. It looks at work done by librarians, records managers and archivists where dealing well with emotions and personal histories (our own and others’) make a big difference to how well we do our job.
This morning my class was very lucky to have the generous Genevieve Weber deliver a Zoom session about gratitude in the archives, based on her 2019 discussion of the attitudes and practices she has adapted as Assistant Head of Archives at the Royal British Columbia Museum, working with Indigenous records. Rituals of thanksgiving.
Well, that is what we had planned for her to talk about.
Instead of working on the presentation to my class in the last couple of weeks, as she had planned, she had been working with other archivists across Canada. They were putting together an archival jigsaw, providing as much information as possible to descendants and survivors of the Kamloops Residential School in BC, where unmarked graves of over 200 children were confirmed about a fortnight ago. Genevieve had described working with these records as part of the 2019 pre-reading I had students do for her session.
I do not think my class missed out in any way. Genevieve brought her whole self. Embodying adaptability while acknowledging setback, she gave a presentation that she had given a couple of weeks previously at the Society of California Archivists AGM 2021. She was straightforward and respectful about the work she was doing, neither hiding the difficulty, nor describing it in heightened detail. She mentioned joyfulness, something certainly not taught in the classroom when I went through library school.
A picture of the research room with an engrossed family reading records of their ancestors. “See, see how many are at the table. Usually there is just one person allowed per table. And they have their backs to the staff member sitting at the desk, also not usually allowed. And that hat. There was a history of material being stolen across the country by people, taking it out in their hats and coats, so usually no hats… and that guy, that one there… he discovered a tape of his dad’s voice, headset on he shouted across the room “I can hear him, I can hear him””.
If you want to think more about Genevieve’s ideas of gratitude, I would recommend the article below.
Several mornings a week, at dawn, I walk the jetty.
Here’s what it looked like this morning.
Still warm from the gym. Coffee in gloved hands. Cold breeze, warm coat, totally surrounded by ocean, rhythmic sounds, birds, sunrise, horizon, dolphins, seals.
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