Good With Names

Nothing could follow the adrenaline rush of leading a kick-ass workshop on teaching for doctoral students last week. So, why am I so surprised to find myself bored at work today? This is supposed to be the way of university administration. Intensity ebbs and flows, as does pleasure in the tasks.

But seriously? Address checking? Our database gobbled up eight solid hours of the precious and shrinking cache granted to me for walking this earth. The Commonwealth of Virginia paid a creative, educated woman a day's salary to cross-check the address every single student in our doctoral program against the university's records. What a numbing use of the gift of gray matter.

It has to be done, though, and I am the one who suffers if I leave this little house untidy. Doing this work is really not so different from folding the laundry, except that it's less stimulating and harder on the eyes. Every working person faces unsatisfying aspects of a job. Artists complain about having to deal with gallery owners. Camp directors have to swim through tedious HR protocols during multiple hiring cycles in a year. Name your dream job, and I can find you some piece of it someone wants to hire out to a peon.

Sometimes, though, you can't get around being your own peon.

Our PhD program houses 160 doctoral students. Staying on top of their progress and providing them with accurate and timely guidance helps them (I hope) keep that final dissertation defense in their sites. Being a resource for the students is the fun part of the position. As I get to know them, I can tailor my approach to their personalities. What could be better for a dyed-in-the-wool extrovert? This may not my avocation, but parts of it sure fit my groove.

Monitoring the construction of 160 people's careers (while also attending to the 60-odd faculty members and two dozen bureaucrats working the scaffolding) is about as complicated as you'd think. I have days when I am right on top of things. I can field a call from a student in Nigeria about a small payment detail that needs to be resolved within the hour, and the student's situation pops to the front of my brain. That one happens to be a permanent U.S. resident in the 1-credit-per-semester dissertation phase of his research, an international student living abroad but not on a visa. I know exactly how to give him the right answer in the blink of an eye. On such days, I feel like I have the best job in the world.

Then I have moments like the one last week. The workshop brought in a manageable 10 participants, and I knew every one of them. They introduced themselves at the beginning. I had an RSVP list on my desk. You can imagine my mortification when I drew a complete blank on one student's name halfway through the session. This would only be a big deal if I were calling on people and trying to engage the discussion.. . . There I was, trying to model active teaching skills, and I not only forgot the student's name, I called him the wrong name.

I have only flipped the calendar thirteen times since the university first saw fit to hand me this title. Anyone can be forgiven for slipping on the details from time to time. Heck, this position doesn't require me to perform surgery or land airplanes or anything. The slip is actually a good reminder that I serve the students best when I learn who they are. In that moment, I could not have answered any question _blankname_ had posed to me about his next step in the program, because in forgetting his name, I also forgot everything about his research interests and his progress. I may love schmoozing and teaching and advising, but I also simply need to know who the students are. Their names are the keys that unlock those heaps of information stored in the file cabinets and, increasingly, in my own memory.

Today, it is true I am not doing anything more compelling than cutting and pasting data from one two-dimensional page to another. As the afternoon drags to a close and I slog to the bottom of the spreadsheet, something dawns on me. I know their names. I can look at any list of names anywhere, any list of thousands upon thousands of names of humans pulled from the phone book or even just the random sky, and I can tell you which among them belongs to a student in my program.

As I cut, paste, search, and check these records, I am looking again and again at the names of these 160 students who comprise my professional universe. I am learning them, the way a person memorizes passages of poetry or elements from the periodic table. Repeated exposure cuts pathways into the mind. Mnemonics form between names and the larger human composition. Simply by gazing for a day at this list of students, I place them in the larger geography of the planet as well as in the storehouse of my own memory.

Might it be the case that sitting still and attending to nothing more than a tiny collection of details, I become a better advisor? In addition to the critical task of creating order when chaos threatens, housekeeping may actually build capacity for both service and leadership.

It is a surprise and a delight to learn, once again, that the parts of my work I consider most mind-numbing might be anything but.

Don't Know Much 'bout Science Books

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.   – John Dewey

This week, I took a crash course in Blackboard 9.1. For those of you unfamiliar with this product, Blackboard is an online course development and communication tool rumored to have been created by Satan himself. Most of its competitors have perished in the wake of its steady advance towards world domination. Blackboard’s unique format now determines the pedagogical landscape for instructors and students, much the same way Power Point shapes (and cripples) the presentation universe.

Whether evil or handy, this tool is necessary for my job. Every year, our incoming doctoral students take a statistics assessment to determine their quantitative starting points. Design and delivery of the test (though, thankfully, not content), fall to me.

The program coordinator in my department joined me for the training. In the computer lab, we found a small collection of faculty members from our campus. Everyone, it seems, uses Blackboard now, even the professors who have had tenure since the signing of the Magna Carta.

The objectives of the training seemed simple enough. We were expected to learn the basics of getting started with the latest version of Blackboard. The poor instructor from the Department of Instructional Technology had no idea how complicated “simple” becomes when training graduate faculty.  

“Now, we are going to upload a document.”

“All I want to do is post a syllabus!” The professor across from me had a bit of a volume control problem. “Can’t you just show me how to post a syllabus?”

“Yes, sir, that’s what we are doing. Now, go to ‘course content’. . . “

“To what?” He was just a decibel shy of shouting. “To course what?”

  

She walked around to his side of the room. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what happened here. You’ll need to close your browser and open a new one.”

“Close my what?”

“Click the red X. That will close. . .”

“The what? Click the what?”

“Just click the red X, sir, on the top right corner of your screen, sir, please. . . “

On and on this went, with almost every participant in the room. Ten faculty members needed constant guidance and reassurance. My co-worker and I bit our tongues through each agonizing stretch between tasks. Finally, I realized a course in the basics was not going to get me anywhere close to the level of skill necessary to design on online stats assessment. Instead of seething in poorly disguised frustration, I began exploring.

After discovering the FAQs and a few hidden drop-down menus in the control panel, I was on my way. I created two different tests along with several versions of syllabi and course descriptions. For a few head-scratching moments, I was stumped about making the quizzes live for my cohort of dummy students. I meandered through unfamiliar pages until I unlocked the right door. Meanwhile, my co-worker zipped through her own learning process, pausing every now and then to show me a trick she had picked up.

Twenty minutes before the scheduled end of the session, our dynamic duo was logging out and heading for the door. All around us, faculty members kvetched and interrupted and ran the instructor ragged.

“Why can’t I see it! I can’t see it!”

“You’ll have to turn the editing mode back on.”

“The what? The editing what?”

Learning anything new is a challenge, of course, but that room was filled with some of the brightest minds in their fields. One professor has published ten books. Another is an economist who advises the World Bank and USAID. Since landing this position at George Mason University, I have been in awe of the faculty and their high caliber research. Curiosity and investigative skill should lead the academic mind to explore any unknown subject with aplomb, shouldn’t it? On the contrary, these brilliant thinkers were out of their depth in an online training, needing someone to hold their hands and keep them afloat through what I considered a simple process.

Do we all become pigeonholed? Does our area of expertise so thoroughly define us that we forget our brains are always capable of adapting? Perhaps this is a generational dynamic, but that explanation is too limited. Many professors from across the age spectrum overcome much trickier changes in the academic terrain than a Blackboard upgrade. Outside the ivory tower, age does not correlate consistently with rigidity. My great-uncle decided in his 80s to communicate by email. He wanted to be in touch with far-off friends and family members. With limited mobility, electronic tools were his vehicle. If necessity is the mother of invention, perhaps hunger sires expansion.

It simply never occurred to me that I would not master Blackboard 9.1. I need to learn it to do my work well, and so I will learn it. Maybe the trick is to begin with full faith in the plasticity of the brain. This faith does not preclude toil and even a bit of pulse-popping anxiety about new endeavors. It does, however, set the mind on an inevitable course of expansion. When stagnation is the alternative, learning is the only real option.

Year Twenty

The artists have become investment fund managers. The jocks are consultants and physicians, the princesses are professors and engineers. The geeks are still geeks, having acquired picture-frame families and the easy smiles of the comfortably wealthy.

We all know a reunion is a self-selecting collection of success stories. The folks whose narrative arc veers toward the tragic choose not to tip a glass with their former classmates. Even so, it is surprising how gilded the edges of this group. This was a fine shaving off the top of an already elite population – graduates of a Montgomery County public high school. Perhaps these are not Sidwell or Georgetown Prep elite, and we are not quite captains of industry or cabinet members in training. But these are the federal lawyers, the policy-writers, the decision-makers, the architects (both literally and figuratively) of the public landscape.

I can hear my classmates poo-pooing now at these declarations. Inside each individual life is a series of struggles and unanswered questions. Talk to E, and she will tell you she only manages to work 12 hours a week as a CPA around raising her children. This story was told time and again by the women who were once the girls I knew. Some have pushed on through since becoming mothers, leaving their children in the care of others and their families with little time for togetherness. They pay the price for tenure or executive leadership positions.  But to a (married) woman, their husbands are as successful as they come. With a doctor or a CEO providing the ballast, the ship manages to surge on.

The single women of the group are kickboxers, musicians, art aficionados and world travelers in addition to whatever enviable title they hold. The decision to work, stay home or even to have a family at all occurs at the summit of a very high mountain, where only the select few breathe the rarified air. While uncertainties texture the individual stories, the group, taken as a whole, is a kaleidoscopic spectacle of accomplishment.

Strange to know I am of that culture. Probably strange, too, for the other three or four in the group whose recent stories have included divorce or single parenting or job loss.  Being adrift is a state in which many 30-somethings find themselves, to be sure. But being adrift in this milieu means something different. Our shared school system provided an early dose of overdrive. It kicks in higher than most, ratchets the bar up to the upmost notch, and demands forward motion. The few in the group (yours truly included) whose paths seem more circuitous than certain are still engaged in the pursuit. We find our way back to education, volunteerism, craft, challenge. It is in the water. It is in our blood.

I, for one, believed myself to have danced into a different land. Leaving for Vermont at 16 and meandering through the next decade in the company of farmers, musicians, and activists led me to believe I was fluent in the language of my adopted home. The long chapter set in forests on mountainsides as a camp wife was a heroic attempt to become a naturalized citizen.

In coming back, however, I find I never lost my mother tongue.

At one point, I was chatting with a still-single friend who has found himself on a new, untested career path. “What I notice,” I said, marveling at the assemblage, “is that everyone here seems to be both ambitious and thoughtful about their choices.”

He nodded. “We have to be, don’t we? We have to do something with all the privilege, growing up where we did. It’s important to give back.”

So it is.

Each and every decision is one to seek purpose and make a contribution. It takes great effort to rein in the breathless tendency measure how much good one has made with the opportunity provided.

At the thirty year reunion, the landscape will undoubtedly have shifted yet again. Sadly, a handful of divorces are in the cards, as more than one “happily” married man suggested over a shared a drink. Several careers will bomb and a few more will rise from the ashes. We smile, we hug, we make promises to get together for lunch, we tell each other how outstanding we all look.

Then each of us returns to home to take the private accounting. What will my contribution be? I hold this golden ticket. How will I pay it forward?

Subtraction Skills

The past couple months at work, I have had the feeling I was missing something important. My student services position requires attending to numerous levels of detail simultaneously. While I am responding to questions about registration from any one of my 170 doctoral students, I am also making preparations for a retreat five months out and following the progress of a student in Rwanda who needs to graduate by summer 2014. Is it any wonder I have the sense something is slipping through the cracks?

Like any moderately organized person, I keep several task lists handy. Twice a week, the latest incarnation of the to-do list lands, fresh and clean, on new paper. My calendar is detailed, my co-workers keep me on track, and the school's other administrators are very good about sending out reminders (we do work with teaching faculty, after all). Even with all these tools, my own work still seemed to be getting away from me.

The challenge is striking a balance between short-term and long-term projects. So many items demand immediate attention. Or, at least, they seem to. Inquiries from colleagues and students take up the bulk of my day. I spend a great deal of time clarifying program requirements and procedures in person, by email, and by phone. These responses come easily to me now that I've been soaking it up for the past eight months. However, anything reliant on a focused mind, like research, writing, and development of presentations, keeps returning to the bottom of the list. Unfinished.

Last week, I read an article in by Daniel Pink in The Telegraph about creating a To-Don't List. "It's only by taking away what doesn't matter, " he argues, "that allows us to reveal what does matter." Being busy is not the same as being disciplined. The first item on Pink's To-Don't list? This gem:

Don't answer email during peak morning writing hours.

This one hit home. My typical workday strategy is an outgrowth of habits I developed during my earliest professional experiences. When I staffed a shelter for homeless families sixteen years ago, I started each morning by checking the previous evening's notes, seeing what items lingered, checking voicemails to find out if any families out on the street needed an intake, and preparing the schedule for the next 24 hours. The shelter was my first workplace out of college, and I stayed in the position, repeating the same routine, for three and a half years. That approach to tackling a day at the office became my professional modus operandi. I have muddled along with it, with moderate success, in a variety of positions.

This means the prime, high-octane morning hours are dedicated to mundane tasks. The slogging, interrupted afternoon hours are left for the creative work. It makes no sense. Why use premium fuel for mowing the lawn?

Time to flip the day on its head.

On Thursday afternoon before leaving the office, I split the to-do list, creating two: one for the lingering administrative tasks and one for the long-term projects. I also carved out ten minutes to write in my work journal about the presentation project I would be tackling the next morning. When I arrived on Friday, I had a clean desk, a clear task, and notes to get me started.

I still scanned my email first thing. If anything urgent needed my attention, I could handle it and not be worrying about missing something. I only answered one email. Then I put on BBC classical stream, pulled out my notebook, and got cracking.

Ninety minutes later, I had flesh on the skeleton of a presentation I had been avoiding for weeks. Digging through articles, my mind was able to read with precision and notice connections I would usually have missed. During that time, the phone did not ring once and only one person popped into my office. I completed 75% of a project not due until May 25th. In my previous work style, I would have attended to this presentation for five or ten minutes every few afternoons, and still only been 25% done the day before I needed to deliver it.

By subtracting one task, I had tripled my productivity.

Every office has its own unique culture. It had not occurred to me to observe and reflect upon the dynamics at play here before choosing an approach to my position. This is a graduate school, which means most of the people I serve and with whom I collaborate are faculty members who teach at night, and doctoral students who work during the day and take classes at night. The place buzzes to life in the early afternoon. The hours after lunch are an ideal window for meetings, correspondence, phone calls, and drop-ins. The activity level during the low-energy time can keep a person awake and hopping.

In the morning hours, in contrast, the building is a quiet little den of contemplation. The few professors in the building during that time are holed up in their own offices, concentrating hard on research and writing. Why not plug into that power source and enhance my own performance?

It seems removing this one task from my list had done more than subtract a few emails and add one presentation. By Friday afternoon, that lingering sense of unease had vanished. Into the space remaining flowed satisfaction and even a little of pride. Now that's my kind of math.