Education
May 12, 2008
Habits vs. Routines vs. Accomplishments, and the Overriding Significance of Goals
Last week someone emailed me a story from the NY Times, and when I read it, I happened to look at the list of "most popular emailed stories." Near the top was something titled Unboxed: Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? Which was a question I wanted to read about and have answered.
One of the reasons I continue to value my Mormon upbringing was the whole goal program I grew up with. There was this official church curriculum for teenagers, which presented them with six specific areas of well-rounded humanity--physical health, spiritual development, social interactions, personal ethics, I don't remember them all--and we were expected to set and complete two goals in each area every year while we were in junior high and high school. If young women completed the program satisfactorily, they got a really ugly necklace. I don't remember what young men got. Maybe a merit badge; their version of the program might have been tied up in scouting, which the church has sort of commandeered.
I used the goal program to great advantage, collecting a slew of virtuous habits such as thrift and punctuality. I made running three miles every school-day morning a habit--albeit one I hated--and the fact that I managed to do that for a full year helped me acquire that necklace I never wore once. I wasn't in it for the necklace, you see: I was in it for the habits and the accomplishments themselves.
And yes, I didn't just focus on habits; I also set goals for specific accomplishments: prepare a bassoon solo for regional Solo & Ensemble competition. Be valedictorian of my crappy high school, just like my big sister--which included all sorts of habits for how I dealt with school work: listen in class, take good notes, attend to assignments promptly, complete them thoroughly, keep them organized so I could find things when I needed them, etc.
I still have all those habits--or rather, their equivalents in the adult world--and I don't want to relinquish them; they've served me well. I can find stuff when I need it. I don't bounce checks or get parking tickets or library fines or any sort of late fees. If I'm given a specific project to complete, I pretty much get it done on time.
And yet, I can feel a laxness and laziness and tiredness in the way I approach my habits. Now that I'm in my 40s and have been keeping an elaborate to-do list since I started grad school (my to-do list as an undergrad wasn't so elaborate, but I certainly had one), it's not really a habit; it's more an element of my character.
My goals these days are almost always about accomplishments, rarely about habits. I think this is a problem. Because while some of the habits I worked hard to cultivate have become an integral part of my personality, other habits I've acquired are more like the absence of intentional habits--just lazy routines.
One the thing I like about academia is that on the days I don't teach--and if I'm lucky enough to get a schedule were I don't have to be in a classroom until after noon, even on the days I do--I don't have to set an alarm clock. This means I habitually go to bed and get up whenever. Admittedly, I have sleep issues, and having to set an alarm is sort of anxiety-inducing for me; and yet, given that I usually wake up around 8, I would hope I'd be able to create a more structured, although still not rigid, approach to retiring and getting up.
Then there's what I do when I get up: I habitually sit down at my computer and read the news until I A) run out of news or B) get bored. I could devise a schedule; I could also say that other things would take precedent over reading on-line newspapers every morning. But it's a morning-appropriate task, and my brain isn't always ready for something for strenuous first thing in the morning....
I don't entirely know where I'm going with this, and that's part of the problem--not for this entry, but for my life. I want some new habits, but the thought of pursuing them seems vaguely uncomfortable--which is precisely what I should be seeking. I found the NY Time article really compelling for statements like this:
brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try the more we step outside our comfort zone the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.
I have been trying to step outside my comfort zone in the last few days, in small ways. Friday I spent a good deal of time in the car, and I forced myself to listen to my least favorite of the radio stations I can tolerate: NPR. (I know I seem like the kind of person who should love NPR, but prefer music to talk on the radio.) I've been setting my alarm clock for 8 a.m. and making sure I'm in bed by 11:30 p.m. I even did yoga yesterday! Now there's a habit I'm sorry I lost: poses I used to be able to hold for a good long while I couldn't even get into in the first place when I tried them last night. I lost that habit--which I loved, which sustained and enriched me--for a variety of reasons: I moved away from Iowa City, where I had a house with a big expanse of bare floor perfect for plopping down a yoga mat at a moment's notice, plus a yoga teacher I adored who would teach me new stuff every week; and I got cable.
But I don't just want to do something new and different, once or twice--or something old abandoned so long ago that it feels awkward and difficult. Yes, I would love to take a ceramics class--I've wanted to do that for a long time. But I don't know if throwing pots would become a habit for me, and I want some new habits.
But what? I guess I could start crocheting more and knit less. I could follow Benjamin Franklin's template, provided in his autobiography, for "the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection":
1. Temperance
Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence
Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order
Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution
Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality
Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself, i.e., waste nothing.
6. Industry
Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity
Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice
Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation
Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness
Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
11. Tranquillity
Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. Chastity
Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
13. Humility
Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
But to be honest, that was part of my model back when I was a teenager, so even though I'm not as successful in some of the areas as I once was, they all seem pretty familiar....
I could resolve to blog every morning, or every other morning.... I could resolve to be a more faithful, regular commenter on my favorite dozen blogs or so. (That means your blog.)
Is anyone willing to help me out with this? Having had a few posts lately that garnered a lot of comments, I am reminded again that there's just no predicting what people will feel like responding to, and I also think that asking for comments is sometimes the surest way not to get them. But I'm taking the risk. Gentle readers, what are the habits you find most useful and or/enjoyable in your own lives? What are the habits you would most like to cultivate?
Posted by Holly at 8:23 AM | Comments (10)
November 6, 2006
Teaching Carnival
OK, I don't read EVERY blog I enjoy and respect every single day (or even, sometimes, every single week), because like everyone else I know, I'm busy. But sometimes I find myself with a few unclaimed hours, and I go through my list of bookmarked favorites, and realize, "Hey, I haven't visited that blog in a shamefully long time!"
And I visit and I find something really cool, like Teaching Carnival 15 on New Kid on the Hallway.
Posted by Holly at 8:27 AM | Comments (1)
September 24, 2006
Appropriately Instructive Movies about the Power of Art
A friend recently emailed me and asked me for suggestions for movies he might show in his composition course, which includes some essays on art--from what I know of the reader our composition department uses, I'm guessing Aristotle's Poetics and the like. He didn't ask me specifically for movies that are about the power of art--rather, he specified that he wanted movies "the artistic powers of which are slightly better than what the students are used to. Yet I don't want to bore them either."
But that didn't matter because I read the message wrong at first--it was first thing in the morning and I was tired--and spent a couple of hours trying to think up movies about the power of art which would please an audience of 18-year-olds.
Two of my favorite movies about the topic--actually, two of my favorite movies, period--are Babette's Feast (in Danish with English subtitles, rated G) and Cinema Paradiso (in Italian with English subtitles, and only a little bit sexy), and it is my unfortunate experience that 18-year-olds don't tend to love subtitles.
There are plenty of movies--particularly of a certain era--about the power of movies and performance: Singin' in the Rain, perhaps, or All About Eve, or Sunset Boulevard. SitR is also one of my favorite movies but I realize not everyone likes musicals (although I also realize that not liking musicals is both a character flaw and a moral failing). I adore All About Eve but some people dismiss it as a chick movie. Sunset Boulevard might be a good choice.... I let students make up missed quizzes and such by watching movies and they consistently remark that SB knocks them out, and they also like knowing where the line "I'm ready for my close-up" comes from.
Another really great movie about the power of movies All About My Mother but it's got that subtitle thing again. And it's really good, but it's a downer--it's one of the few Almodovar movies I really don't want to see again.
In the right mood I might argue that Strictly Ballroom is a movie about the power of art.... but it might also be a movie a fair number of them have seen, since its director, Baz Luhrmann, also directed that nasty business Moulin Rouge.
Then there are always biopics of artists, Frida and the like--there are dozens of those. I can't think of any good biopics of writers at the moment except for Wilde, and the focus of that is the destruction wrought in his life by Bosie. Though that does remind me of a very old black and white version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is about the power of art....
So anyway, I don't very often poll my readers, but I'm asking for your help. I realize I'm framing this question in a way my friend didn't, but I figure, why not illustrate more than one point with the film he shows? So if you can think of a good movie about the power of art--or if you can remember seeing a movie when you were 18 that really knocked you out--please share.
Posted by Holly at 6:46 PM | Comments (15)
September 16, 2006
What I'm Busy with Right Now
As I've mentioned, I'm really busy right now. But what is it I'm busy doing? Well, for one thing, I'm teaching a bunch of very full classes--I have more students this semester than I've ever had before.
One of the primary duties listed in my job description is teaching creative writing in general to undergraduates, and literary nonfiction writing in specific. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, literary nonfiction is an umbrella phrase typically encompassing autobiography, memoir and the personal essay. Some people call it creative nonfiction. My department calls it "literary" nonfiction instead of "creative" nonfiction because essentially all writing involves acts of creation but not all writing is literary, and we want to stress that we're striving for a certain quality of writing. I don't get my knickers in a twist when I hear the phrase creative nonfiction, but I HATE the acronym CNF.
A book I often teach in both literature and writing courses (though I'm not teaching it this semester) is A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, a memoir about the deaths of his parents less than a month apart from different types of cancer, and his subsequent experiences as the appointed guardian of his younger brother Toph, who is orphaned at age nine. It has its problems, but students generally like it, and I like it for its preface, where Eggers lays out some of the theoretical and critical issues involved in the writing and reading of literary nonfiction. For instance, he suggests that readers who are bugged by the fact that he claims to be telling the truth do what readers have been doing for centuries: pretend it's fiction. He also appraises the quality of his book, and gives suggestions for reading and enjoy it. He suggests that his readers skip pages 239-35, noting that those pages concern "the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time."
Given that my students are typically in their early twenties if not their late teens, this statement has dire implications for their efforts as writers of nonfiction.
However, one of the classic genres of fictions is the bildungsroman, (from German bildung, "building" and French roman, "novel"), or the coming-of-age novel. In fact, many venerated first "novels" are essentially coming-of-age memoirs disguised as novels by the changing of a few names and the fudging of a few facts.
What makes literature about people in their early twenties "interesting"? Is it really so hard to make these lives interesting? And what are the implications of these questions for young writers in creative writing classes--who are sometimes not merely in their early twenties, but their late teens? How do young writers acquire the wisdom, the vision, the craft, the perspective, the insight to make accounts of their early lives not merely interesting, but works of art?
Trying to find answers to that question that satisfy me and my students is part of what I'm so busy with right now. Oh, and explaining when and where to use commas.
Posted by Holly at 1:48 PM | Comments (5)
September 6, 2006
One Down, a Whole Bunch More to Go
Well, I survived the first day of the semester. It was a bit iffy there for a while--for one thing, I couldn't decide what to wear, and you must find the right outfit on the first day, because the wrong one can set a miserable tone you'll never recover from. In the end I wore what is almost my uniform: a long skirt (albeit a very cool one I made at the beginning of the summer and had never taught in before), a nice top, with my hair down but pulled off my face by a scarf.
The classes themselves were reasonably successful (except for the one where I tried to lecture the first day--won't do that again any time soon). I have high hopes that it will be a decent semester, although it's clear that it will be a busy one. So if I'm not as prolific in the next few months as I have been at times in the past, well, you'll know why.
Posted by Holly at 9:56 AM | Comments (9)
August 31, 2006
Good to Go
Classes start Tuesday. Yesterday I turned in my syllabi to be copied, so as far as clerical preparations for the first day are concerned, I'm good to go. I've also figured what I'm going to discuss the first day (I've been here too long and have too many repeat students to just read the syllabus for the first 75-minute period) and acquired any necessary materials. I have no clue what's going to happen on Thursday, the second day I teach, but at least the first day is accounted for.
Thought you'd want to know.
Posted by Holly at 9:09 AM | Comments (8)
June 20, 2006
The Power Ness of the Adam Bomb
People sometimes act like the fact that I don’t teach during the summer is due to some amazing con job on my part. Or they think that the fact that I only have to go into campus a few days a week means that I only work a few days a week. I probably work 50 to 60 hours a week during the semester, and while some of my work is highly enjoyable, a lot of it majorly, majorly sucks.
An example of that is grading. Reading good work by good students can be pleasant if not painless, but reading--and being obligated to comment on--bad work by bad students is an excruciating form of torture. As evidence, I offer you a couple of excerpts from what just might be the worst paper I ever received--I saved a copy because I knew, from the very first sentence, that this paper was special. It was written several years ago by a junior majoring in communications and minoring in English, which she insisted meant her work couldn’t possibly be unsatisfactory since OF COURSE anyone who majors in communications and minors in English MUST know how to write. I leave it to you to decide whether or not the prose below--which I transcribe just as I received it (I must note that my spell checker questions nothing but the last name of the author of the essay the student chose to critique)--is the work of someone competent at stringing together intelligible sentences.
Critique of “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” by Paul Fussell
Paul Fussell’s “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” is a bold and daring piece that intrigues readers to listen to the voice of the storyteller while reading. The voice in the story is conversational, and this conversationalist in the story sparks the attention span of the reader. The technique holds the reader on edge while whisking through the piece. This not only makes the story enjoyable for the reader but sets an atmosphere and makes the author more creditable....
He does a great job changing people’s attitudes, feelings, beliefs and actions about the Adam Bomb by presenting new information and reasons that the reader may have never known elsewhere. By stating how the Japanese felt.
He used different opinions to stir up different reactions in different sets of readers. Some one who opposes the use of the bomb may not agree with the fact that, “on the twelfth of August, eight captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the fifty-first United States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk (all aboard drowned).” They would probably still look down upon the bombing while someone who does believe in the effectiveness may not believe in the effectiveness of the atom bomb by reading all of the tortures of war.
But this works because both the different types of readers can learn more information on the different views and may think differently about the bomb after being introduced to the different opinions.
The subject is already personal to the American public, since there are supporters of war, anti-supporters of war, those for guns and anti-gun, all around the world and especially on the home front.
His strong examples of different persuasion techniques work because it gives the readers different opinions to lead on....
Although this is a controversial subject to touch upon, the just of his material presented are true and or opinions of other people. His title was the first sign of persuasion, “Thank God for the Adam Bomb.” So anyone who first picks up the book can tell that the book is going to be about how to support war. Which is a way could be a downside if someone is against war they may not pick it up, but on the other hand they may just pick it up because they may wonder why someone would want to praise the atom bomb. Then once they start reading they will not be able to stop because by reading the different opinions they will anticipate what the conclusion of the book will outcome....
With more interesting facts on war being brought up everyday, the use of the atom bomb may come up one day or another means of a highly destructible force. Society seems to have become more sensitive to the subject of war methods. The way the world is going today, more facts on the use and the power ness and meaning of the use of the atom bomb just may be needed to be brought to attention. With more and more countries bringing out and developing huge masses of machines capable of destroying large areas and high amounts of people, America may be faced with challenge of using a highly destructible means of force in order to save fellow Americans against another country. Without the knowledge of what happens to a country after the use of the Atom bomb is dangerous. Not to know may hurt instead of help. This book is well documented by stating the pros and cons of the bomb although it stirred to one side at the end, the government could use this information and conduct research on their own to know when to use the destructible forces and when not to.
Posted by Holly at 1:02 PM | Comments (14)